As I do most years around this time, I shall present the following quote from the U.S. Constitution:

He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.
-Article II, section 3

Tonight is this year’s State of the Union Address, during which the President addresses Congress, discussing priorities, accomplishments, and recommendations for the coming year in government. It’s varied a bit in timing and venue over the couse of history (though Washington gave a short speech, Jefferson sent a note, which was the practice until Wilson revived the address in ’31), but for the last half-century or so, it’s been fairly consistent as a speech given to a joint session of Congress on an evening in late January.

Especially since the advent of national media, it’s also been directed toward the American people as well, and involves quite a bit of political theater and pomp. It’s one of those times where the President gets to be particularly “Presidential”, and an opportunity for direct national communication few have…um…wasted.

As I also do most years, I present my favorite set of rules for The State of the Union Drinking Game. In part, I do this because in my short time as a public school Social Studies teacher, this sort of prurient and slightly scandalous angle on American government caught the attention of students in a way few other things did. The State of the Union also works well for this sort of thing because there are so many traditional hallmarks that one can easily make a game of it (which for public school teachers is usually, for propriety’s sake,”BINGO”, but unofficially, everyone knows better), which has the pleasant benefit of making people pay attention, and maybe actually learn something.

Because I’m all about education, after all…<hic>

So, enjoy responsibly, and maybe learn a little something as you take part in this long-standing American tradition.

Cheers!

Zig a Kwisatz Haderach Ahh!

As is my family’s habit on a particular weekend in mid-January, we packed up and hauled ourselves to Williamsburg VA for Marscon, perhaps the premiere fan convention in the general Mid-Atlantic region, and rapidly becoming my favorite con that I get to each year.

It’s a great chance to share an experience with like-minded people, meet artists and authors, play games, and make and meet friends, and it’s something that, even being the introvert I am (see my friend Liz’s take on this – she totally gets it), I look forward to. For the mundane among you, I imagine it’s something like taking your vacation the same weekend every year at the same timeshare in generic beach town USA, and seeing the same people each time because they all do the same thing you do. Except, instead of sitting around on the beach and eating dinner at the same overpriced seafood restaurant every year, you always end up finding something new, thanks to the ever-changing mix of interesting things on display in the form of guests, programming, gaming, film, craft, etc. There’s almost always something new to discover. If you have the means, I highly recommend finding one near you and trying one out.

Now, admittedly, I didn’t really delve into the “new” this year so much as go deeper into stuff I’d already waded into, but all the same, I ventured out of my comfort zone a bit, and didn’t fail or die. While I didn’t come home with a stack of new books to read and swag to devour, I came out of this year with a certain sense of accomplishment, having taken some baby steps into the realm of contributor rather than just consumer.

Put me in your mouth! I’m refeshing and delicious! – Mikey Mason

Friday night at the con is generally a lot about catching up with folks you haven’t seen in a while, perusing programming options and wishing you had some sort of time travel or cloning device in order to be able to be several places at once (for example – I’m a big fan of Jim C. Hines this year’s author Guest of Honor, but I totally missed all his events due to other commitments, managing only to trip over him briefly in the hallway), and easing into the experience. I did a lot of that (interrupted occasionally by children wandering off by themselves – thankfully, so many people at this event know my kids, so that if they get misplaced, they are easily returned), spending most of the early evening hanging out in the “big room”, enjoying the Friday night opening entertainment, mostly in the form of short sets by the entertainment guests. This year was laid out like a bit of a variety show, with tables scattered about and a cash bar in the corner. Much entertainment value was derived from one particular guest finding he had a drink named after him on the special convention menu, which I didn’t partake of, mostly because a friendly convention attendee kept putting free homebrewed Rye IPA in my hand (thanks, Marcus!).

The Corn Palace is bullshit. – Jonah Knight

The other big Friday night event (at least for me) at Marscon is “Filk and Cookies”, combining the filk circle concept with a cookie baking competition. Essentially, everybody sits around for several hours loading up on delicious snacks while some of us play music to entertain each other and the assembled throng. After a couple of years largely just observing and playing a long a little bit, this year I jumped in and took the virtual mic, so to speak, having come up with some material to share (after being gently yet publicly encouraged on a certain Pegasus Award nominated podcast last year), which I thought went over well. I sang a little bit. In public. About Pacific Rim. I didn’t die. There may be video, somewhere, but I haven’t seen it. And, since I didn’t have room to haul ALL THE INSTRUMENTS (more on that in a bit) along, I had the privilege to borrow and play Jonah’s beautiful and haunted 1947 Gibson guitar a little bit when the uke just wouldn’t cut it, and it was awesome. We stayed late into the night, singing and playing geeky songs, 80s hair metal, and making up quarter-hour long songs about a certain maize-based building in Mitchell, South Dakota until the hotel finally kicked us out at some point after 2am.

♫ Rock out, with me and CHUCK!♫ – Scott Vaughn

Saturday started out relatively early, as we roused ourselves from our hotel room slumber, hit the Best Con Suite in the universe for breakfast, and prepared for the day. The big event of the morning for me came during the 11am hour, when I had the privilege of being an honorary Blibbering Humdinger for a couple of tunes. Scott and Kirsten have been con friends for a number of years now, and a couple of months back, we hatched something of a plan at a house concert. A few months and emails later, and BOOM! I’m kicking off 2014 playing bass in wizard rock band. I think we all had a good time doing it (I know I did), and those in attendance seemed to appreciate it. Maybe we’ll do it again sometime. I hope so.

Your will is not your own. Roll “pistol” skill – The Pope of France

While my wizard rock debut was the big event of the day, Once I got that out of the way, I managed to do some other things as well, including sitting in on an excellent musical performance from the always entertaining Danny Birt (who is Catherine’s favorite, even if she was a little shy about joining Danny for a duet like she did last year). The rest of the day was taken up largely with kid watching duty, punctuated by a couple of very enteraining gaming sessions. In the first, we were FBI agents on a missing persons case, which soon evolved into a confrontation with alien invaders and some of us possibly earning real-world NSA flags for looking up the street value of 450 pounds of marajuana on our smartphones, leading to our being mind-controlled, forced to murder some of our own, and assimilated. The second session was a Traveller adventure, where I played an ex-space cop working on a free trader vessel, ferrying a semi-sentient carnivorous plant to an interstellar flower show, and fighting off space ninjas. We survived that one, after which we spent a while just hanging out in the hotel lobby with friends, chatting amiably until we all decided we were too tired.

Sunday, as expected, was kind of mellow – everyone’s kind of worn out from the weekend, and dealing with the imending return to polite society. We slept in a little later, packed up our gear, and handled breakfast and checkout. Then, we wandered the dealer’s room, picking up a couple of game accoutrements, a couple of hand-made trinkets, and some neat stuff from Darkfire Design, who I was happy to see present after getting some of their decals at the VA comicon back in November. Otherwise, I sat in on a panel featuring a live recording of the Pros and Cons podcast, spent some time hanging out with a very mellow Savannah Monitor lizard wearing dragon wings, and settled into the con-ending concert, featuring a round-robin performance from all the musical performers mentioned above. Lots of fun, with everyone playing along on everyone else’s stuff, cracking wise, and generally being entertaining. Twas a nice way to wind down the convention before heading home.

As you can see, it was a good time. The con staff does a great job keeping this one going – I can’t wait for next year. I would also be remiss without mentioning all the great friends who make the experience so much fun – KT, Kevin, Ora, Liz, Bert, James, Dan, Jamie, Ozma, Mikey, Jonah, Scott and Kirsten, Danny, and all those other people whose names I can’t remember (because I’m terrible like that). See you all at the next one!

…or maybe it is, I don’t know. Its sort of classed in with minivans according to certain standards, but just as easily gets dropped in with “wagons” or whatever. In Europe, where actual statistically significant numbers of people buy this sort of thing, it’s known as a compact MPV.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself: I’m talking about this:

It’s a 2013 Mazda 5 Touring edition, and I now own it.

I wasn’t necessarily planning on buying a car this week, but after some conversation this weekend, I started doing some research into replacing our venerable 2005 Pontiac G6, as it was beginning it’s final approach toward 100k on the odometer, which, in the parlance of turn-of-the-century American automobiles, means it would soon be due to start becoming a set of niggling mechanical and electrical issues before long.

My beloved spouse, the primary driver of said Pontiac, was growing weary with it anyway, in part, due to its large rear blind spots, the fact that it’s not particularly efficient or interesting, and frankly, we’ve had it quite a while. Since we went shopping for my current car this past summer, she’s had her eye on neat little foreign hatches, but, given the fact that our kids are not getting any smaller, having two cars you could fit in a hip pocket would threaten to make us a permanent two-cars-to-go-anywhere family. Her thought was that if we’re not going to go small, let’s go big enough to haul the kids plus an extra or two – our kids have friends, and occasionally, we need to haul them around as well. The options, for doing that, though, aren’t very attractive.

Our problem, in a nutshell, is that we really don’t like minivans. We had one once. We hated it. Our obtaining it was largely a compromise decision that neither of us were really ever satisfied with (as we couldn’t find a quality station wagon we could afford). There’s a little bit of “minivans aren’t cool or fun” in there, admittedly, but there are also a lot of more practical reasons for not wanting such a thing: again, we both prefer small, nimble, efficient cars, and the market segment known as “minivans” (which ought to drop the descriptor “mini” from the word) are none of those things: they’re huge, lumbering, inefficient, and expensive behemoths (not unlike their SUV bretheren). And, while they can carry a lot, it’s a constant compromise between people or stuff – you can’t really haul both, as we know from experience.

This thing, however, based on its size (its built on the same platform as the sporty compact, and reliable Mazda 3), is much closer in size to the neat little euro-style hatches we like than to the big giant vans we don’t. It runs on a reasonably efficient four cylinder engine, and is actually 9 inches shorter than the Pontiac sedan we traded in for it (she wants a smaller car? she gets one), and seats six. I think I’ll still end up dealing with some headaches in balancing the people-or-stuff conundrum, but it’s got that nice Mazda handling and cornering, and I can park it in small spaces and won’t have to worry about scraping the ceiling in a parking garage. It’s also available with a six-speed manual transmission, but of course, I couldn’t find one of those in town (though a couple of them did play a part in my price negotiations), and this one has a couple of extra bells and whistles the stickshifts don’t; so, while it’s still a compromise (like pretty much all vehicle purchases are), it’s a bit less of one than we’d be making if we bought a traditional “minivan”.

The thing is, barely anybody else buys these things. there were only four or five of them for sale across the three Mazda dealerships in the metro area. Mazda moves less than 20,000 of these things a year in North America.* It’s barely advertised here. I’d never seen one in the wild until I went to the dealership. However, it’s pretty much the best solution for our particular needs (and oddly, like my little Yaris, is a big seller in Europe), and Mazda’s inability or unwillingness to sell them in this country (most American van buyers go bigger at the Dodge dealer down the street – this one had been on the lot since August without a bite), was helful in securing a very good deal (as was the fact that I had a really good offer on a couple of stickshift versions from an out of town dealership I could play with) that it didn’t make sense to refuse.

Sometimes, my counter-cultural tendencies work to my benefit, especially when it comes to procuring niche-market hipstermobiles, having purchased two of them in the last six months. I’m sure the “oh crap, I have two (rather low) car payments again” nervous breakdown will hit in earnest soon, but I’ll get over it.

I’m still going to call it a wagon*, though. A guy’s gotta have standards.

___________________________

* – Compare roughly 18k M5s in the US and Canada in 2013, to over 140,000 Honda Odysseys, 132,000 Toyota Siennas of 160,000 Dodge Grand Caravans for the same period. A tiny drop in the bucket.

**- It’s hard to judge scale in the picture above – it looks rather van-like there. However, I parked it briefly next to a late model Honda Oddessey last night, which made the 5 look miniscule, and made the van classification seem, at least momentarily, laughable.

For a clever but innocently comic slice-o-teenage-life tune written by Leiber and Stoller, the cover image that Amazon uses for this digital download of the Coasters’ 1958 hit “Yakety Yak” invites some interesting reinterpretations:

♫ You ain’t gonna rock and roll no more ♫ …

…not after I smash your head in with this pipe wrench, your Corvette crashes, and you and your girl die a firey death! You’ll think twice about not taking out that trash next time, right? RIGHT?!?!

So, we all wandered back to the grind this week after a couple of weeks; off, and in most cases, off the grid. The smartphone spent a lot of time in a drawer, and I largely ignored the telephone and the email and the internet (except to grind a bit on Marvel Heroes and pick up the free holiday goodies) in favor of mostly uninterrupted rest and relaxation.We had a couple of enjoyable evenings out playing tabletop games with friends where we fed pandas, figured out who would be the Betrayer at the House on the Hill (SPOILER: it was Dan), and building superheroes for future four-color adventure. I read a couple of books, built a drum, welcomed some really pretty baby fish into the world, rehearsed some bass lines, made some tasty Indian food, and wrote some music. All told, it was not a bad break.

But now we’re back to work/school, and I’m sure my lovely spouse is happy to have the house to herself again, so she’s able to attend to tasks like super-secret committee responsibilities and kitten snuggling.

Today, the phrase of the day is Polar Vortex, which is a fancy meteorological way of saying that it’s a little colder than usual – not excessively cold – it was 14°F when I left the house this morning, cold, but not crazy cold. The schools had a delayed opening, as apparently did my workplace, but it didn’t make the news, and it wasn’t mentioned by either of the guards at either of the checkpoints I passed coming in – the place just looked like a ghost town once I got settled, so I called the status hotline from my desk. Wasn’t the first time, won’t be the last.

So, yeah. Welcome to 2014. Hope it’s a good one. Seems okay so far from this end.

If you’ve been following me this year, or talked to me, or lived with me, or saw me at all until perhaps late September, the story of the year has been “Don’t you think he looks tired?”. Odds are it was true – because I was totally knackered. But I survived, and found a more than slightly better situation for myself, and things are looking up.

I also have some amazing friends and acquaintances from across the planet who were always there with a kind word, some patient tolerance, a book to lend, a game to play, or a drink to share. I wouldn’t have made it through the whirlwind year without them.

I’m not going to belabor that point, I did that all year – in fact, so much of the year’s blogging was bitching and complaining about my situation that I honestly don’t think I have a “best of the year” aggregator post in me – there’s just nothing there.

However, as I always do, I’m going to run down the year in numbers, because I think it’s interesting, and I have programs that keep statistics, and I’m going to use them dammit.

So, 2013 by the numbers:

• web site hits received – 5228
• posts written – 107
• books read – 117
• miles biked – 1515
• miles driven – 30,000 give or take
• fan conventions attended – 4
• professional sporting events attended – 5
• live theatrical productions attended – 10
• musical performances attended – 10ish
• live musical performances by me – 20ish
• most instruments played in one performance – 3
• podcasts mentioned on – 1 (that I know of)
• costume contests won – 1
• instruments procured for me – 2
• instruments disposed of – 2
• instruments built – 1
• cars totalled out from under me – 1
• new cars purchased – 1
• new jobs started – 1
• instances of office workspace changes – 3
• RPG characters killed out from under me – none!
• games played – not enough
• bands performed with – 3 (for certain definitions of band)
• minutes spent trying to come up with clever numbers to report – roughly 15
• entries on this list – 24 (so far)
• number of revisions it took to get these lists formatted right – 6

There you go. A year in the life.

And fine – the top five posts I like from the past year (because I’m probably going to have trouble coming up with five):

1. …friendly courteous kind
2. my own worst enemy
3. neon hypercolored memories
4. metaphysical redneck – buddhist country
5. found art

Yep, coming up with five was tough. As I said, it wasn’t the best year for writing output. I’ll try to do better next year.

…If you’re so inclined. If you are, I hope you enjoyed your holiday, whether it was celebratory or sacred for you.

‘Round these parts, it was a relatively sedate affair; some gifts exchanged in the morning (though we tried things a bit differently this year, doing a bit of gift exchange on the Solstice -December 21- as well), then a bit of cooking and cleaning, before having a few friends over for the afternoon to share a meal and socialize. Nice and low key, and I totally got my behind handed to me in rousing sessions of both Settlers of Catan and King of Tokyo, the latter by a six year old – board game victory was not to be mine this day, though I had a nice time being soundly beaten while in the company of some truly excellent people.

After the place cleared out, I did some dishes, watched the Doctor Who Xmas special (not bad, really) and logged a little video game time, because I could, and it’s my end-of-year vacation. Pfft.

Not sure what’s up tomorrow – won’t be cooking, though – lots of leftovers to work through, by design. Might as well stretch today’s culinary efforts out a few days. Otherwise, I think it’ll be more games, reading, and maybe out to the hardware store to buy some clamps – I have a cajón to build (from a gift kit this time, but if it goes well, I may dig up some plans on the internet and build a larger one).

As of 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I’m done working for the rest of the year. Had a really nice holiday luncheon with my co-workers yesterday where we all ate way too much delicious Italian food, then spent the afternoon putting a bunch of things to bed and setting up my out-of-office autoresponder. So now, it’s two weeks of me not really having to do anything or go anywhere unless I want to. My Christmas shopping is done (except for that one package that’s still in the process of shipping), and aside from a little bit of wrapping, I’m set.

My plans? Catch up on some reading, play with whatever gifts I get, hang with the wife, kids, and whatever friends we get together with, and just chill. It’s my little holiday gift to myself every year – some time to give myself permission to check out of the grind and not do anything I don’t feel like doing. It is, on the whole, my favorite gift every year.

So, maybe I’ll see you, maybe I won’t. I’m going to be a gentleman of leisure for a while. I hope you get the opportunity to do the same – it’s a good place to be.

Anyway, here’s some tunes:

1. “Brian Wilson (live)” – Barenaked Ladies
2. “You’re A Star” – Josie & The Pussycats
3. “Pardon Me” – Weezer
4. “Leaning on the Day’s Parade” – The Badlees
5. “All You Zombies” – The Hooters
6. “Long Shot (live)” – Aimee Mann
7. “Lover” – Les Paul & Mary Ford
8. “Monster” – Lady GaGa
9. “Haunted” – Poe
10. “Grandmother’s Song” – Steve Martin

Yes, I understand the evolving nature of language, and how definitions shift over time, but this still hit my lowbrow humor button just right:

Perhaps this is related to the Joker’s scheme in 1951’s classic Batman #66?