Cleveland Rocks?

I am teaching this week in Cleveland, I went out last night to downtown to grab food. Happy Cow led me to a vegan restaurant called the Flaming Ice Cube but the address in Happy Cow was slightly off. I got into downtown and when the GPS said I was there I was in nowhere land. I plugged the restaurant name into my GPS and found it two blocks over. I was in Cleveland in the past and was amazed at how much of a ghost town it is, I found the same thing to be true last night. There was nobody walking around and no cars driving either, aren't there supposed to be people who live in the cities of America?

Anyway, went to the restaurant and had a delightful mock buffalo chicken sammich with some corn and red bean salsa. After dinner I figured I'd walk around a bit and try to find civilization, I found a two block area of population signaled by a one legged man playing a saxophone. When you're in a city and already feeling like the last survivor of the Apocalypse the last thing you need is the distant sound of a saxophone. Life is nothing but an adventure so I of course headed towards the sound, when I got closer I saw the above mentioned one legged man standing on a street corner belting out his tunes. The corner he was standing on was the beginning of civilization and that lasted exactly two blocks. Lola (Michael Symon's Restaurant) is in that area so I will probably be going back tonight. I went into a local bar and hung out with a beer before heading back to hotel. I had Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy which is a lemon aid / heffe mix, it was surprisingly good but very tart.

I can't possibly talk about Cleveland without talking about my flight here.. I flew from Hartford to Hate-Lanta, when I landed in Atlanta I found my flight to Cleveland was cancelled and they were proposing putting me on a flight in the morning which would have made me more than late for class. I went to the ticket counter and they told me they couldn't help me because they didn't know how to use the ticketing computer (yes, I'm smeggin' serious) and told me to call Delta's ticket number. I called and them and we found a flight that was leaving in about 10 mins to Cincinnati, at least it's closer than Atlanta, they put me on the flight and I returned to the same plane I just got off. I got off the plane and didn't even wait for the luggage to be unloaded, instead I went right to the computer kiosk and scanned my luggage tag, result - "go to agent". I go up to the lady and explained the situation and she calmly (and very slowly) looked up my bag tag and said my bag was in Atlanta and scheduled to fly to Cleveland in the morning (which I had told her already), then she, looking confused, said in a questioning voice "but you flew into Cincinnati?".. "Yes I did, I am going to rent a car and drive to Cleveland".. "That's a long ride".. Really do you think so! "Yeah, I know, can I just give you the address of my hotel in Cleveland to send the bag to ?".. "Hold on a sec, it looks here like I can put you up in a hotel and fly you out tomorrow on the 9am flight".. "no thanks, I just want to get on the road".. "ok, so you want me to mail the bag to the 20 Wicker St address?".. This went on for about 15 mins before I was on my way to the car rental place.. All in all it took over 90 minutes from the time I was off the plane to the time I was in my rental car, FAR to long in my opinion. I got a Hyundai Genesis which is a really nice quiet ride, the seats are very comfortable, the stereo has good sound and the car handles very well. You know what's open at ass o'clock in the middle of Ohio? Me neither honestly. I only stopped once and that was early on to get food, I tried to get coffee but those places were closed, instead I ended up with White Castle. Speaking of, they have a new Bacon Cheddar burger which was very good and my body didn't reject it as much as I had expected. Anyway, hours and hours later I made it to the hotel to take a nap before class. My bags did show up yesterday and were waiting for me when I got back to the hotel.

Did you know that Pittsburgh is only about 2 hours from Cleveland? I didn't.. Why does that matter? Because I'm going to see a Pirates game tomorrow.. I have heard PNC Park is beautiful, I will let you know.

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Other things...

I got the new Queen remastered CDs the other week, they are totally worth it. Each album comes with a second CD of extra stuff, those are take it or leave it, but the main albums sound so much better than they ever did before. They are much crisper and they really feel modern again. I can't wait for the next five to come out in June.

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I started a D&D campaign the other week, I had Becca take notes during the session so I can type up a recap / story. I am planning on posting that here and also in the Facebook group for the game. We are using 4th Edition and I have to say the game system is pretty nice now that they re-did a bunch of rules and added lots of races, classes, skills and feats. The only thing that I'm still unsure about is the ritual section, we shall see how that plays out in the next few sessions. When we decided on 4th edition I borrowed my friend Grim's books, after reading them I was stunned at how crappy the system was. I was complaining to Hoyle and he showed me his books which were totally different from Grim's first printing of 4th edition. In general I'm not a big fan of looking at books online (I know, how un-technical of me) but Wizards has a compendium which is actually pretty easy to use so I don't mind looking at that online. I guess the big difference is it's not a scanned in version of a book, it's a web interface into the rules.

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Sorry for the long blog, but this is what happens when I don't blog for a while.. :P

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The other day (like my specific time lines here) I was driving down to NY with Jessie. On the way down I was thinking about going to Dragon's Laire (gaming store in NY) to see what, if anything, they had for Heroscape and I started to think about certain people's obsession with board games..

When I was younger we had a bunch of video game machines (NES, 2600, Coleco, Intelevision, Master System, Vetrex) not to mention computer games but we were never overloaded with games. Maybe it's because games didn't come out as fast, maybe it was because there was not the internet where you can get instant access to stuff.. Either way, we would get a few games here and a few there but we never got a glut of stuff all at once. This gave us time to play, learn and enjoy each game before moving onto the next one. Around the time of the Genesis & SNES this started to change, more games came out each month and they were easier to get (didn't hurt that we had a hacker system set up and modded our Genesis and SNES to play pirated games as well as Japanese ones). The sheer amount of games made it almost overwhelming, like you felt bad for playing one game for a few weeks because there was always other games that you wanted to play and always new ones coming out. I think this is what led to things like cheat codes because if you wanted to see the end of a game but didn't have the time to dedicate you would just throw a cheat code in and you were invincible, this way you could polish that game off in a few hours and move to the next one. Now, I'm not saying choice is bad, but as a kid you just "gotta have 'em all" as they say, gotta have 'em and gotta play 'em all, gotta have 'em and gotta play 'em all at once, gotta have 'em and gotta play 'em all at once and gotta do it all today.. And why are kids suddenly being diagnosed with ADHD at alarming rates? Because there is too much to do and not enough time to do it. Enjoy that one game, let it enfold you, learn it's insides and outs and take the time to really master it. I'm not saying you can't play many different games but don't feel the need to play 'em all, there are so many wonderful things out there and of course we get the urge to want to see & do it all but just stop and really enjoy the moment, be it a game, meal, song, whatever. If you don't get my rant about games think about music, remember back when you only had a few albums, remember how well you knew those albums, now think about how that's changed over the years. Now you can plug an iPod in and transfer someone's entire music library, yes you now have a ton of great new music but will you ever really know those songs? There is something to be said for a little at a time..

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Phew, that was long winded... ;)

This weekend coming up is my birthday weekend. I will be at the CT Ren Faire Saturday (my birthday) and Sunday, hope to see you there..