Worldwide Ace

“Besides, it’s not like there will be any girls around to make them fell embarrassed,” he told me, as if the presence of girls were the only possible reason they wouldn’t want to play a game aimed at younger children.

“What makes you assume their interest is in girls?” I asked.

He could’ve told me that his cousins had expressed interest in girls before and the conversation would’ve ended there, his answer directly addressing my question. He could’ve explained that he was making an assumption and he didn’t actually know or care about their sexuality. He could’ve explained that the event was just going to be family so it didn’t matter who they might be interested in, they wouldn’t be there regardless.

He did none of those.

“Are you calling my cousins gay? Cause if you are, that’s kind of low.”

“Are you calling them straight?”

—

It was the beginning of the end of our evening, my questions clearly eliciting what could have been a homophobic rage.

My second question was clearly argumentative and unnecessarily pointed, but the implications of my first question were honest. Each and every one of us makes assumptions about others. We must in order to function as a social entity. We assume that a uniform denotes a job, that the sex someone presents in their appearance is their sex (or at least the one they choose to present). I certainly don’t hold that against my friend as there’s not a person alive not guilty of it.

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The Muppet Learning Keys were a child’s ultimate indoctrination to computers in a world before the Wii.

I feel as though I was born wired in. I had my first computer at age 4, complete with the Muppet Learning Keys to teach me how to navigate a computer more effectively than Fozzie Bear. My parents gave me a pager before they went out of vogue, and thanks to that Mountain Dew offer, I was only a buzz–and walk to a pay phone–away from letting them know where I was and what was going on. I spent much of my free time in high school chatting online, both on AIM and IRC, sending emails, playing games. In many ways, my social life was virtual.

As cell phones become de riguer for most, I avoided any more digital tethers for as long as possible. A job in college finally made me feel as though having one were necessary. At first, I couldn’t stand losing signal. I would walk out of class and check for messages as soon as bars began to appear. They were rarely there, but I felt obligated to check anyway. My cell, combined with my graveyard shift job and free long distance, allowed me to while away the witching hour chatting with friends half way across the continent.

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Landon Donovan celebrates his game winning goal against Algeria.

Our arrival meant that there were six of us sliding into our seats, waves of anxiety and excitement shivering down our spines. It was almost a matter of pride arriving when the bistro was empty save for a smattering of staff and a handful of bleary-eyed fans huddling at the bar.

“Good work, boys,” the hostess said with a smirk. “You made it just in time.”

Perfectly on cue, the ball leapt from the pitch and the game was on.

The crowd slowly grew, tables sliding and chairs twirling to accommodate the late-comers. Passers-by with a moment to spare appeared in doorways and at windows, craning their necks and succumbing to the tension.

We watched, rapt, our eyes straining and hearts pounding. Every glance away, every sip and bite, was nervously timed, fear mounting that the moment everyone awaited with hope and trepidation would slip past unseen.

We waited, idle conversation flecked with nervous laughter. Children and parents cupped their glasses, knuckles white and brows furrowed. Some prayed, all yearned, our collective desire emitting into the ether in waves, as if it could cross the vast physical distance and bring us the outcome we desired.

Somewhere else, others were doing the same, hoping for an opposing end.

With the clock ticking away, the opportunity waning, it happened.

We clamored. We cheered. We cried. Hands slapped in a cacophonous roar, the potential becoming kinetic so fast that we virtually collapsed, our reserves emptied.

As the final whistle blew, we numbered perhaps fifty, our faces smiling, relieved.

For a moment, we were united. Not just the fifty of us together there, but the tens of thousands of us tucked into every corner of every bar, huddled around crackling radios and TVs, and entrenched in the stands a hemisphere away.

This was our hour.

This was the World Cup.

Image taken from Walyou.com

“You,” she said, a wry smile slipping slyly across her face, “are a logistical nightmare.”

I can’t deny it. I’m rarely prepared and I like it that way. Though I may learn from my game-changing mistakes, I often choose to ignore the little ones that add just a touch of challenge. And while I don’t like being late, last minute is a very comfortable place for me.

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’ve made some calls. I’ll know when and where the wedding is before it happens.”

“It’s in two days,” she reminded me, skepticism dripping from my mother’s lips with the acidity of a poisoned dagger.

“Don’t worry,” I repeated, my cock-sure delivery belying my ever pressing fears.

—

Today marks the unions of two of my close friends to their respective significant others. Sadly, the logistics prevented me from being in two states at the same time, so I had to choose between attending the wedding of Dana (pronounced “dah-nah”), one of my good friends from high school, to her quiet and kind fiance Doug and attending the wedding of Josh, one of my good friends post-college, to his demure and lovely fiance Laura. I can’t stress enough how difficult a decision that was to make. In the back of my mind, I had hoped that one wedding would be on Saturday and the other on Sunday so I could schedule a red-eye flight between Boston and Boulder to attend both. Alas, it was not to be.

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Donkey Kong’s Last Supper by Misha.

Roger Ebert is an asshole. His self-aggrandizing appearances at the University of Colorado’s Conference on World Affairs every year cemented this in my mind during my stint there. He’s also, to his credit, a brilliant film reviewer who grasps all the technical qualities of a film in addition to the common draws that appeal to the average viewer.

While my personal beliefs about Ebert are not relevant to the discussion, the latter trait of brilliance as a critic unfortunately does nothing to flavor his close-minded and poorly formed pedantry in regards to video games.

It’s already been several weeks since Ebert published his second argument claiming video games can never be art, a piece that essentially started a veritable flame war with the internet. Everyone from Tom Goldman of the Escapist, an excellent video game webzine, to Robert Brockway of Cracked.com, a website known more for its frivolous time wasters than great writing,  have published impassioned responses defending the medium. Not surprisingly, the best response seems to be from Kellee Santiago, whose TED talk spurred Ebert to attempt to defend his position.

As much as I’d like to defend video games from Ebert’s lackluster and foolhardy attack, there are already too many voices pooling around the issue, spouting venom and rhetoric and poorly formed arguments attempting to define art. No one, however, seems to have notice that Ebert’s article calls into question not only video games as art, but blatantly attacks gaming as a whole.

Nearing the midway point of his article, Ebert attempts to address the game Braid, which might be the best game I’ve played in years:

Her next example is a game named “Braid” (above). This is a game “that explores our own relationship with our past…you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there’s one key difference…you can’t die.” You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game.

Chess is one of the oldest and most revered games, but it’s hardly the only game out there. Board games which play with temporal veracity and allow players to shift their reality are myriad and plentiful. The classic Axis & Allies, in which players reenact World War II with differing outcomes, relies on changing history to allow every player a chance at winning. After all, who would play Germany if they knew they’d lose every time? Chrononauts, while a much more frivolous and silly pursuit, allows players to change the course of history and watch the outcome shift, the end goal being to restore the time line to match the reality you remember (and were assigned at the start).

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“Ethics” by political cartoonist Clay Bennett.

For several years now, journalism has been slowly decaying into a ghostly semblance of its former self. Some claim the internet is to blame, providing instant access to information faster and more effectively than the media ever did. Others claim that the wealth of air time has watered down the news into puff pieces and tidbits of useless information. A third theory is that the people simply don’t care enough anymore. All are valid to an extent, but there’s one thing that has degraded the power of the media more than any of these: ethics.

Last week, Time magazine published an article about a French journalist who turned over his sources after writing an article about pedophilia. While it’s true that his sources were despicable people who preyed on children, there simply is no excuse for taking a tradition that allows reporters entry into very secretive arenas and dashing it for a small moral victory.

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It was a stretch, I know. Not simply a long shot, but a long time.

Twenty days.

Straight.

In a row.

Without a break.

Twenty days on snow.

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At work, it’s been declared March Mustache Madness. This means that, due to peer pressure, I have cleared my chin of whiskers. I feel like a tool and probably look like one, but there are worse things.

In honor of this event, I went through and developed the following guide to facial hair, since our “grooming standard” specifically forbids handlebar mustaches. Several of my coworkers who are sporting biker staches (sometimes improperly called handlebar) have been chewed out, thereby warranted this guide:

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Larry of Larry’s Boot Fitting.

“Ma’am, if you’re patient, Larry will see you,” Mike said calmly into the phone, the knuckles gripping the handset white with aggravation.

“Ma’am, please. Larry has a busy day and will be trying to help every–ma’am, if you’d just–” He held the receiver away from his face, took a breath and sighed. The warbling chatter of a Charlie Brown adult wahed out of the microphone.

I felt for Mike. How many times had I been trapped on a phone line with an irate customer who simply couldn’t understand why they weren’t treated with more import than every other customer. “The customer is always right,” they would shout at me, my patience wearing thin. “It’s a service industry, so provide a fucking service,” one man once barked. I could feel their echoes slowly emanating outward from the phone, the woman’s voice shrill and tinny.

“Ma’am, Larry has appointments all day. We’re going to do our best to fix the problem, but I can’t promise a one on one with him.”

I turned my attention away from the conversation in an attempt to not eavesdrop or pry any more than I already had.

—

Larry’s Boot Fitting has an excellent reputation among serious skiers. Larry himself is almost a mythical figure, though you’d hardly be able to tell from looking at him. He carries himself with a sly ease, his unkempt good looks belying a youthful exuberance for the art of skiing. Rumors say that if you show up at his store on a slow afternoon with a six pack of a good local microbrew, Larry will crack a couple cold ones and regale you with tales of awe-inspiring snow dreams and powdered daring-do.

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Beard Poster by Michael Buchino of the Beard Revue.

Sometimes,
just when I think I’m used to it being gone,
I feel my beard tingle and tickle,
happiness in a fuzzy guise.

But when I reach up to stroke it, it suddenly become clear:
my beard is gone.

I could regrow it,
let the wilderness reform on the wild mountains of my face,
but it would be a different beard,
one which hadn’t journeyed with me through a decade of my life.

My beard disappeared against my will,
as a matter of necessity
and a matter of importance.

And now,
despite the ethereal tickle of its stubbly antecedents,
I’ve come to realize
my beard is simply a ghost limb.