A little info on the upcoming game, Glitch, from Stewart Butterfield’s (ex-Game Neverending & then Flickr) new company.
i just kicked ass at jeopardy! this never happens. it probably had to due with the ridiculously easy categories; the 7 dwarfs, punctuation, & this old house.
i always cringe when it comes time for the contestants to tell their stories. there’s always someone with a really boring story and i feel so bad for them (because that would probably be me) unless alex makes fun of them, then it’s awesome.
so, if you were on jeopardy, what story would you tell?
Maybe I would tell the story about how I ended up delivering a pizza right in the middle of a turf war in “hardcore” Lansing, Michigan. The person buying the pizza had most of the lights off in the house, but when I got inside enough where there was light, I could see broken glass ALL over the floors. When he saw me noticing the glass, he said “this probably isn’t the best time for you to have shown up.”
When I stepped outside after he took the pizzas and paid me, there was a shirtless man crouched outside the house with a long knife in one hand. About 10 yards behind him was a group of maybe 15 other guys (some with pipes or bats). I sort of froze at that point, but what was happening still didn’t really sink into my brain. The pizza guy behind me on the porch said “don’t worry, he just wants me. He won’t bother you.”
For some reason I believed the guy and walked past the knife wielding guy and into the car. As I pulled out, about five cop cars came racing up from both sides of the street and the alleyway, screeching to a halt. The knife guy and his buddies all took off running with the police chasing them on foot. After pulling away with all the flashing lights in my mirrors it really, and finally hit me what had just happened and I sort of freaked out.
But, at least the guy gave me a pretty good tip.
Last week I finished re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces and I had really forgotten how wonderful the book was. It’s probably been 15 years since the last time I read the book and there are huge swaths of narrative that I just didn’t remember at all. I even forgot how the book ended.
I was pissed that I couldn’t find my own copy (like the paperback shown above) and had to buy it at one of the big box stores, but it’s definitely worth it. The characters are still just as fantastic as they were when I was reading it back in college: Ignatius and his mother; Patrolman Mancuso and his aunt Santa; Jones; Miss Trixie and “Gomez”; the Levys; and Ignatius’s valve. Confederacy is still one of the very few books that can get me laughing out loud.
It’s a shame that John Kennedy Toole took his own life so young; who knows what other characters he could have introduced us to. Last time I was in New Orleans I made sure to stop by the Ignatius J. Reilly statue on Canal Street, where he starts the book waiting for his mother outside of D.H. Holmes. It’s a fitting tribute, I think.
Whoa!
