This morning, I noticed I had a missed call from Dad around 8:40 AM.  Since he usually only calls me that early if it is something of great importance, I quickly called him back.

The conversation that followed could only best be described as “random.”

*RING RING*
Dad picks up:
Dad: One-Eyed Willy.
Me: …Excuse me?
Dad: The pirate from Goonies.
Me: Yes, One-Eyed Willy, you got it.
Dad: That’s all I needed know.
Me: …Why?
Dad: I was trying to think of it and I couldn’t and it was driving me nuts. So I called you, but right after I did, I remembered.
Me: Glad I could…help?
Dad: Thanks, have a good day, son–and May the Force Be With You. *CLICK*

Those who know my dad, will confirm that a conversation like this is not that surprising. Random, yes. But not surprising.  His whole attitude since crossing 50 a few years ago has been “I’m over 50, now I’m eccentric and I’ll do whatever I want.”

Why he was thinking of The Goonies, let alone pirates, at 8:40 on a Monday morning, I may never know.

The other funny part of this is that I was enthusiastically quoting The Goonies Friday night while playing Bang! with friends.  I was sticking to some of my favorite Mouth, Data and Chunk lines, and the always classic “Slick Shoes?! Are you crazy?!“

And just for you LJ readers--I noticed the other day that LoudTwitter started posting my Twitter updates again. Well, i turned it off--unless folks actually want to see those. Comment below if you do.  If I have them again, I'm going to have them behind a LJ Cut.

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post. Feel free to comment here or on the original post

A bit of last minute planning has me going on a road trip with my parents in the not too distant future to see Lincoln's Tomb.  I think we're also going to see some other dead president related stuff during the trip.

You could call this a 'reunion' trip or sequel, I guess as going to see a dead president was our standard spring/summer break trip when I was in middle school and high school.

I'm not making this up. My dad would plan a whole trip around seeing the burial site of a president and/or his home. Bonus points if he had been assassinated. Having already seen McKinley, Garfield and Kennedy, this Lincoln trip will add to my collection (I think we've also seen Hayes...if there's a dead prez within a few hours drive of Michigan, I've probably seen him). 

There is a reason I really enjoyed the book Assassination Vacation--I could related to everything going on (to a point...we never went looking for John Wilkes Booth's grave, but believe you me, if Dad had wanted to it would have happened).

The amusing part of this is that I haven't gone on a trip like this with both my parents in quite a few years. How will I handle a family road trip as a 27 year old instead of a 17 year old? It shall be interesting. I'm toying with taking notes, pictures (well, I'd do that anyway) and audio recordings of the trip and perhaps turning it into some kind of wacky memoir.

Oh and we're taking my 13+ year old cousin as well (he'll be my younger sister's proxy, I guess, even though she is 24), which adds another layer to this outing.  I guess it would make for a good compare/contrast aspect.

I played a lot of board and card games over the past few weeks and it really made me think about game creation as a whole.  I was struck by how many games rely on random chance--mainly, dice--to move the game along (ex: Risk) and other where whoever goes first has a clear advantage (ex: Mancala, and to a lesser extent Guess Who.)

Heck, even card games rely on this: you are dependent on which cards you are dealt (ex: Euchre)

This led me to try and think of which games rely heavily on the skill of the player alone, and not random factors.  Chess was the first to come to mind.  You start with all the pieces you'll ever get and there aren't any random things dependent on dice (where you can move, who you can attack, etc).  And one of the rules of chess is that white always goes first, so the players know tihs ahead of time.

There are other games I'm sure that fall in this kind of catergory, but I just found all of this interesting.  However, I guess one could consider the moves of the players as random factors that influence the outcome of the game too.  My choosing to move my Knight instead of my Bishop dictates what my opponent's next move shall be and vice versa.  But if I'm planning on making a move, does that count as random?  Or are just my opponent's moves random in relation to what I'm doing?

I guess this is what people study in those game theory classes I always heard about in college.  I s'pose they weren't just sitting around playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.

For the record, I'm a horrible chess player, much to my dad's disappointement.  We would play chess a lot when I was younger, but I could rarely, if ever, defeat him.  I need to start playing that again, and challenge the old coot to a rematch.  Over the weekend I even found the old magnetic chess board we always played with.  I should have taken it with me, as I have a lot of memories associated with it.

Mostly memories of dad yelling at me for making a stupid move.

Below is the Family Christmas letter I wrote for Mom to send out to friends and relatives.  Last I heard, this was given the OK by both parental units.  I changed some things in this version to protect the innocents (mostly names).  Remember, I did this in the style of a hard boiled detective story. It was fun to write and of course meant to be taken humorously.  The idea was to include references stuff that had happened to us in the past year, so there will be inside jokes/references that readers outside of our family and friends won't get.

If you need to bone up on detective novel slang, here is a good start.  I didn't use too much of it, but what I did use could confuse some readers.

The whole letter is maybe four pages. Enjoy.

( Click Here to Read )

This past Saturday I went to the Detroit Science Center for the first time since I was probably in middle school, if not younger. I went to see the Shipwreck exhibit they have going on now. I'll be honest, I was a bit disappointed with it--but then maybe my hopes were just a bit too high (having an over-active imagination, that is not out of the question). The advertising led me to believe that it was going to be very pirate heavy, when in fact pirates made up a small portion of the exhibit and even then it was mostly new stuff and games, not artifacts and such. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it I left hoping to see a bit more.

The stuff they did have from shipwrecks in the ocean was neat, including a bunch of double-eagle gold coins from a ship that sank in the 1800s. And the exhibits where you got to pilot a little ROV (remote operated vehicle) were fun.

I guess in the back of my mind I went in expecting to see something right out of The Goonies or Pirates of the Caribbean, which was silly of me. But I had fun, and it was a great family outing. Mom enjoyed watching me build a shaky fortress out of these wooden plank things and Dad almost had a heart attack when he saw they had a Mr. Machine toy on display--something he had as a youth back in the '50s (or early '60s).

Everything can be improved with MORE pirates.

My parents have a yearly summer party and I was asked to come up with a teeshirt design for some of us to wear (not to sell). My only direction from mom was to make it 'something other people would wish they had.' Other than that, I had no ideas. My starting point was that this is the fourth such party which we call Sherylpalooza (named after my mom, the first was a surprise birthday party for her). Being the pop culture junkie I am, I quickly thought of spoofing Superman IV: The Quest For Peace and went from there.

The other issue was mom was only springing for one color printing, so it had to be a simple design. I started just by typing Sherylpalooza in Photoshop and looking at my different fonts. I stumbled on one that was similar to the font of old video games and I was quickly inspired. I made the shirt look like the start up screen of an old arcade game.


I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. The purple background was just for my reference but i think mom wants purple shirts. The font and such might be made yellow so it'll stand out a bit more. I like the alien dude i used, it looks like he has his arms up and is ready to party. My version of the title ("the Quest for Peace and Quiet") is a reference to last year's party which got a bit out of hand in regards to some of our live bands (yes, we have live music so the -palooza suffix works). See, I brought a couple hard rockin' bands with me from Lansing and well, they didn't go over too well with most of those in attendance. Because of that, I was stripped of my Stage Director duties for this year (not making that up, Dad takes planning this party very seriously).

Oh well.

The © 1981 DANCO LTD. is of course a reference to game maker Namco (Galaga, Pac-Man, etc) and the numbers below 1UP and 2UP are the years of the party (first was 2005). I may tweak this a bit, some things don't look like they line up that well.