Easy Money board game

Sometimes, you go out garage saling, and you find great stuff. One weekend last month there were garage sales all over the neighborhood. Here's a little gem I picked up for practically nothing: a fairly pristine copy of a clone of Monopoly that I'd never heard of.

I guess by the time I started playing board games, Monopoly's monopoly of monopoly-style boardgames was complete. So it seems very odd that Milton Bradley would try to put out a game that is nearly identical. In fact, according to Wikipedia, there was a lawsuit about it.

This version does have some interesting points. For example, you don't worry about color groups of properties; instead, you just try to collect one property on each side of the board. When you do that, you can start building houses on those properties.

And fully half the properties on the board have no set price. They go up for auction every time someone lands on them. I played it with Ethan, 12, and we got into a bunch of bidding wars.

To some extent, the design was done to make game play easier: rent prices are printed right on the board, and you mark your properties with a token, eliminating the need to deal with property cards at all.

Boardgame Geek has more.

The Voyage of the Beagle...as a blog

Image is Super Beagle from Wikimedia Commons, by Jeff Pierce, used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Someone is posting Darwin's journals from his famous voyage, rendered as a blog.

Why can't women find sexy costumes?

I suppose there is nothing new in inappropriately sexy costumes for women. This video from CollegeHumor, though, does a great sendup of the trend. And this post describes a new set of Marvel-branded Halloween costumes, where someone felt it was necessary to make inaccurate costumes of Marvel characters to make them sexy. Really. They couldn't find sexy enough costumes in the comics as they were. It somehow made sense to pay a designer to change the designs.

We were in a Jo-Ann Fabrics store this weekend, and they had costume patterns on the shelf. One of them was a set of women's costumes from The Wizard of Oz. All sexed up. Really.

Probably it's just survival for the costume companies. Costumes like those should be in demand year round.

Burnt Orange Gnome

Saw this at a garage sale on September 19, 2009. What IS that other gnome doing behind the dignfied lady wearing Longhorn orange?

_Ultra: Seven Days_, by The Luna Brothers

Image taken from the Luna brothers Ultra page, and used to link back there. :)

I've been ransacking my comic book collection for books that I could let my 12-year-old read. As a result, I've been rereading a lot of old favorites.

This one didn't make the cut for pre-teen consumption, because the Luna brothers have somehow perfectly channeled the inner lives of hot 20-something superheroines, and I'm not ready for him to read that. Granted, I've never lived the life of a celebrity/supermodel/superhero as depicted here, but even though no one else has, I am fascinated by this take on what it might be like to be a superhero.

In the world of Ultra, superheroes work for agencies that get them endorsement gigs as well as liaise with the police. The story is so much not about the superpowers that we don't see an origin story for any of the characters. In fact it's about the personal life of Ultra, a young woman trying to date again after a five year lapse.

I've probably read this story a dozen times; it remains one of my favorites. Three thumbs up, and I have pal Mikael to thank for pointing me at this book way back when.

Photos from Glen's 40th birthday in Dallas

Longtime friend Glen was surprised by a trip to see a Dallas Stars game this past weekend. Here are a few pics I shot with my phonecam of the event.

_War for the Oaks_ by Emma Bull

Photo by eschipul under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0; Source


I can't remember precisely why I got on an Emma Bull kick, but I had previously read and enjoyed Finder, a 1994 novel of hers, and this one, from way back in 1987, was good as well.

I got behind on my bookblogging; I finished this one a week and a half ago. It had some nice rules-of-faerie stuff going on, a nice love story...it was nice.

I never quite understood why it was called War for the Oaks, though. I mean, there's a faerie war, but oaks never seemed to be that important. Rock bands. Rock bands were important in the story. Bull wrote in the intro that she herself didn't actually play in a band until after she wrote this book.

I wasn't quite as happy with the ending as I'd hoped, but it ended up in a good place. Check it out.

Sculptures at our local library, the Milwood Branch

I love our branch of the library. I love living close enough to bike to it, of course, but the staff is dedicated and helpful, and for a small branch, it's gorgeous. I like these sculptures that decorate the garden in front, too.

Today I went in to pick up a book I had on hold, and the librarian said there was a second hold that was ready but not on the shelf yet. I think the computer told her that. She found it in a heartbeat, in a stack near her. Saved me a trip.

"Oh Happy Day" by Geoff Ryman, from _Interzone: The First Anthology_

I got Interzone: The First Anthology at the library. I almost didn't pick it up....I'd just read a fun adventure novel and I had an intuition that this book was likely to be heavy.

This collection of stories from the magazine Interzone was published in 1985, and edited by John Clute, among others, whose scifi novel Appleseed I enjoyed in June 2008, but somehow forgot to blog about.

Today I finished reading the first story in it. It was heavy. But I'm glad I didn't skip it. "Oh Happy Day" paints a grisly picture of life in a death camp whose inmates are gay men made to unload and ransack the bodies of other men after they are killed. A revolution of women has taken over the country and is shipping off all men deemed violent...and they aren't being too discriminating about it, either.

I'll say no more in detail about the story, save that it goes to a place worth visiting.

The story is frighteningly realistic, and worth pondering. It's not that I think a revolution of women is particularly likely. It's that a story like this makes you think about the mistakes we make when we try to make things better; about the excesses of revolution and idelogical fervor; and about the danger of labelling someone as other.