The Police Confiscate Rock Band

Today's release of Truth Hits Everbody (an early Police single from Outlandos), brings the total number of Police songs available on Rock Band to five. Awesome. Next month, when Message In A Bottle is available for download, that number will be six, more than any other act in the game! (Metallica's count by the end of March will be five). And the Police songs so far - including one of my favorites, Synchronicity II, are of varying degrees of difficulty, which is nice.

I'm also going to have to take issue with some of the "Tier" difficulty rankings, according to this Wikipedia page. I'm not sure what the source is, but some of these seem way off to me. The Boston song that's included in the game is easier on guitar and bass than Tier 8 (out of 9), while the bass line for the Beastie Boys' Sabotage is really tough - no way it's a Tier 3. Other rankings seem entirely appropriate though; Enter Sandman and Highway Star are both brutal.

Borat as Art, Geekiest Credit Card Ever?

A Canadian artist is producing a series of Borat portraits. Cool? I think so, but what do I know. Strange? Well, he's producing 999 of them in the series, that's kinda weird.

Meanwhile, in consumerland, World of Warcraft obsessives finally have their own credit card. If I were still playing....sorry, still wouldn't sign up. I'm already enough of a geek, in my own manner, without broadcasting it to cashiers everywhere.

Western Excursion

This past weekend, Jenny and I were in Florissant, Colorado for a family reunion of her mom's side of the family. Not what I would call a relaxing trip - our bed in the lodge that we stayed as was less than comfortable, plus we were hanging out with seven kids, all under the age of twelve, and most under the age of six, so that can certainly wear one down after a while - but a good time nonetheless, with gorgeous weather most of the time too. I'll have to post or link to the photos from our Sunday hike at a later date (still need to download and sort through the pics).

Amongst the plethora of entertainment options at this place - pool table, ping pong, foosball, air hockey, swimming pool - was something I had never seen before. An outdoor horseshoes-like game, we didn't even know what it was called, but Jenny's cousin Rob had played it before so at least we knew how to play. Turns out it goes by several different names (at least according to this morning's web search) - Monkey Bar Golf, Ladder Golf, and Bolo Ball are three names that I found. Bolo Ball seems to make the most sense, because this game's sole relation to golf is that golf balls are used to construct the bolos; you could easily use another type of ball.

Famous Comedians are WoW Geeks Too!

Dave Chapelle admits it in a stand-up appearance - he plays World of Warcraft.

WarCrack

Given that I've taken to blogging - not that I've promoted it much, and to those few in my family that I have made aware of its existence, I hardly expect regular readership, but rather that I simply enjoy the process - I figured I could combine it with my other pursuit as of late, that being World of Warcraft. It's quite an addictive game, much more so by far than any other game I have had the pleasure of playing over the years.

I planned to create a new blog, calling it - ever so wittily - World of WarCrack, and use it to reflect on the game and its addictive nature, social aspects, and what a generally kick-ass playing experience it offers. It would use the address warcrack.blogspot.com. I suppose that I should've posited the existence of such a blog already, but I didn't. I was actually surprised to find that someone had beaten me to the punch. Thinking about it, though, with well over 1 million characters already playing across the world (I don't assume 1 million players because a player can create multiple characters), one player was bound to come up with the idea before me.

So now I'm toying with the idea of a Warcraft-related blog from a different angle; it would be a journal narrated by one of my characters! Brilliant! Of course, creative writing was never a strength of mine back in my school days, but this project would be different - the stories would practically write themselves as the character moved through the game, I would simply need to take dictation, and occasionally add a few embellishments. I'll have to think it over...