The Glowing Edge

Category: Time Capsule

  • How Ah Became a Movie Stah

    How Ah Became a Movie Stah

    Marilyn, move your (admittedly gorgeous) ass over. Some of the rest of us wanna play, too.

    Y’all, I had my first “real” author photos shot recently, and I’m feeling the need to step outside in my flowy white dress and find a street vent to stand over. But only if Jessica Arden Blakely is there to pose, light, and capture the photos. That woman is a photographic magician-genius, and I hereby proclaim myself her Number One Fan. Only not in a creepy Annie Wilkes way, you know.

    I emphatically do not love the camera. Oh, I fake it, that’s pretty much required, but I don’t love it. I barely tolerate it, and that’s only because I do love having a visual journal of the amazing life I’ve been privileged to be a part of. But whenever I see myself in photos, I’m like, ugh. Me. Sigh.

    For this particular photo shoot I had decided to… dum, dum, dummm: wear makeup. Another weird cultural practice I’m not familiar with. I mean, I have some — after all it comes in the most clever and curious packages! — but I rarely use it. I’m a “blush is enough” (and only on date night) (assuming I remember) kind of gal. I love makeup, just never learned to use it.

    And of course, I work from home; I don’t know which “smokey eye palette” goes with “no pants.”

    Lisa-11 sm
    The nerd glasses make me smarter.

    But for this shoot, I did it. It was a two-prong offensive (can we use fight metaphors? Because I find that helps.). First I asked my stunning co-author Sonja Foust — who had just had her own portraits shot by Jessica (they’re awesome), and her makeup looked fab. In fact, it regularly looks fab on her video channel.

    So first, she sent me some self-help YouTube links to review (this one, this one, and this one) and second, she told me to go get a makeover.

    After I carefully studied her links, my first reaction was: zOMG do I get to wear false eyelashes? Like, I had visions of Katy Perry and Jennifer Lopez (not Kim Kardashian; hers looks like Mr. Snuffleupagus’s), and yo, they come in colors, don’t they? This could be fun. Except for the excruciating pain of repeatedly poking myself in the eye and the high probability of super-glueing my eyelids shut. But hey.

    Sonja nixed the falsies.

    The makeover, however, she encouraged. So despite my terror of ending up looking like Cyndi Lauper in the 80s, I went to Ulta and sat myself bravely in The Dreaded Makeover Chair. And after some very polite questions — “Do you actually want your eyebrows that shape?” — I got waxed, primed, and wholly beautified. And spent a fortune, bitches; damn that shit’s expensive. But, all thanks be to Liza Minelli (I’m SO fixated on the eyelashes!) and Joan Collins (see what I mean?), it was worth it.

    I mean, I went home immediately and washed every smidgen of it off. The newly-waxed eyebrow shape remained, of course. But then I carefully re-did it all, in my own version. And it was… okay! In fact, I kinda…sorta… Yep, I definitely liked it.

    So after a paranoid Skype with Jessica, who would be photographing me IN MAKEUP, I was down to figuring out wardrobe. This was to be a real live photo session, y’all, not just some kinda snapshot one-off and done.

    So I chose my “wardrobe.” And what can I say; black does it for me. Actually, gray does it for me too. Would you believe I actually own 9 plain black shirts (and 7 gray ones)? Most of them are identical. But c’mon, I’m not a total fashion loss — I have a sparkly tank top that’s sort of…gray and black. With little bits of um, some other color, I forget which.

    Lisa-21-300
    Me in the sparkly tank at the abandoned warehouse.

    Black shirt and jeans, check.

    Black and gray and something tank, check.

    When Jessica got to my house (dawg, she comes to your freakin’ house) — which I had frantically vacuumed — she calmly approved my “wardrobe” and started looking around and nodding. She told me the house would work great, there were several spots to shoot in, and we were off and running.

    I’m sure she took photos of my dumbass “pose for the camera” smile, but she also repeatedly helped me to relax, and took photos when I wasn’t freaking out, and cracked jokes, and promised me everything was looking fabulous. She told me how to sit, where to stand, when to look where, and get this…

    We even drove up the street to the abandoned salvage store and shot a few photos there. Kewl, no?

    The whole thing took just over an hour and a week later I received a link with 25 amazing portraits. I barely recognize myself. And I’m thrilled. Now I have shots for my books, my websites and client work, my LinkedIn, and all the fun places I want to put a bio picture, too. I feel so totally legit.

    Need portraits?

    Want a zillion self-esteem points?

    Call Jessica Arden Blakely.

  • The Weird and Wonderful New York City

    The Weird and Wonderful New York City

    Earlier this spring I started working with Johnny B. Truant to co-produce the online version of BlogWorld. BlogWorld is a giant live event that happens twice a year, bringing together over 150 speakers in blogging, podcasting, and web TV to an audience of thousands. Twelve sessions run simultaneously for three days straight; there’s no way to attend all those sessions if you go to the event, so Johnny and I produced the online version that includes all 100+ sessions, plus we shoot our own behind-the-scenes content (we did more than 25 interviews this year) for the “virtual ticket” purchasers.

    The slightly obsessive, bossy, and annoyingly organized project manager in me loves producing online events; it’s like that chemistry set that I wanted in elementary school — a huge, potentially explosive adventure that could be tidily organized into clean, neat little plastic compartments. (I also glued together dozens of matchboxes into drool-worthy closets to organize my friends’ Barbie clothes and accessories. I know, scary.)

    I love taming a ridiculously large and potentially unwieldy project; making the ravening beast sit up and prettily request a treat. I hardly finish one such project before I start dreaming about the next. (Also I fantasize about carrying a whip just like Indiana Jones. That would be badass, wouldn’t it?)

    As it happened, the live version of Blogworld was set to happen in New York City; Johnny and I were there last week to be a part of the action and shoot behind-the-scenes content for the people who purchased access to the virtual ticket.

    I was stoked; regardless of how intense our shooting and post-production schedule looked, I was going to finally see New York City! I had about 5 hours on Thursday night — assuming we were able to meet all our deadlines — in which to run wild, break things, and stay out of jail. Or, you know, be a tourist. Here’s the top three weird and wonderful things about my incredible trip. I tried to keep the list short because I write so damn much. I could write twice this much. Ten times this much. (And it would all be neatly organized.)

    1. The Single Most Useful Item I Packed

    This is almost two things. I had already purchased a small purse with a shoulder strap to replace my cavernous satchel, figuring the last thing I needed to do was invite people to lift my wallet, cell phone or other necessary goods from it’s gaping maw. That turned out to be essential. But even more helpful was a single item I tucked inside. The day before I flew out, I went to the bookstore to pick up a tiny Moleskine notebook, figuring the big green steno pads I normally favor were not going to survive the space squeeze. But I happened to see this tiny little notepad in a metal case near the checkout counters. The clever little clasp used a small inkpen to hold the spring-loaded covers of the case shut. Hah! No more fumbling for a pen, I thought. It even came with two fresh notepads for reloading.

    And the investment (about $10) was worth every penny. Dude, I used that thing every day. Notes about what we needed, carefully drawn maps and instructions, important phone numbers and other critical information. But when it came to my 5-hour foray into the city, it was invaluable because of all the maps, notes, and addresses I had written in there. Not only did my little notebook survive the crush of the city and event, it now has a permanent home in my purse.

    2. The Most Unexpected Thing About Where We Stayed

    Some marvelous staff person at BlogWorld made our hotel reservations for us, so I can’t claim any credit for this gem. We stayed in the Yotel New York, which (I later learned) is not in the prettiest area of midtown Manhattan — although it is close to the convention center where BlogWorld was held — but it may be the coolest hotel on the island. Click here to image google it. Then come back. I’ll wait.

    It reminded me of an iPod, with an Asian twist. Everything about the Yotel is a pristine, glossy white, with purple uplighting. There’s a giant white robot in the glassed-in lobby that will store your luggage for you while you wait to check in or out. The tables in the Japanese-influenced restaurant appear at first to only be a few inches off the floor, but they actually have recessed space beneath the tables so that even though you sit on the floor, your legs drop comfortably below. The tables can be lowered and covered so that voila, you have a dance floor. Btw, the food was outstanding. My puffy white queen-size bed folded neatly up to create a couch in my room, and my glassed-in shower sported one of those giant, square rainfall showerheads. All of it faced a floor-to-ceiling window looking out on the city. It was compact and luxurious at the same time.

    3. The Craziest Thing I Paid (A Lot) For

    On Thursday, I had a 6:30 pm dinner date in the East Village, about 30-something blocks south of the Yotel. But since I had 1.5 hours before I had to be there, I decided I would first walk the 20-something blocks from the Yotel to Central Park to kick off my Thursday night tour of the city. I decided this at 5 pm, when I left the lobby. I decided this having never seen the mad crush that is Times Square in New York City at 5 pm.

    Naturally, it began pouring down rain as I launched myself from the lobby. Not one to be deterred (I only had ONE free night in NYC!), I ducked into a shop and purchased an umbrella — the one thing I didn’t pack, but wished I had — and set out anyway. Swooped down through the garment district first, then made my way up through the theater district, and into Times Square. I never knew before this that Times Square is a whole buncha city blocks, not just a single intersection like Dick Clark made me believe all these years. I strolled up Broadway with ten jillion other people, past barkers of every description, a lady offering an orange rat to pet, Mickey Mouse and Goofy, a three-card Monty kid, a magician doing tricks, lots of crazy people. I tried not to gawk. But I gawked anyway.

    The rain stopped and I dipped into a sparkly shop filled with women from India (?) in gorgeous flowy robes and picked out a souvenir necklace with a shiny little silver bow tie pendant, covered in genuine faux diamonds. A kind of Liza-Minelli-Big-Apple-Cabaret kind of thing. Happy!

    At 6 pm I realized there was no way in hell I would be able to snag a cab in this crush, and I suddenly started looking for a train station. No luck. Where are all the stations when you suddenly need one? Nowhere I could find, and just moving a single block was an exercise in brute strength, never mind speed. Then I saw the young man with the bike.

    I had no idea how much it would cost for him to get me halfway down Manhattan (seriously, like 50 blocks!), but he was the most game, energetic, and earnest young man you could ever want to roll the dice with, and after nervously ascertaining despite our Turkish-English language barrier that he could find me an ATM on the other end of our trip, I hopped in his pedicab and we were off. He squeezed between SUVs and taxicabs so close I could run my fingers along their chrome. My gut twisted in that familiar, roller-coaster thrill ride kind of way as we barreled past the crowds, swooped in and out of traffic, and dared 3-ton vehicles to stop us. I started cheering when he made it through traffic lights, whether or not we had the green. Probably more when we didn’t. He started pedaling harder, grinning madly and glancing back at me periodically to make sure I was still aboard.

    Once we hit midtown the traffic eased a bit, and he started pointing out landmarks. Madison Square Garden. The Empire State building (glimpsed up above us on 5th Avenue), the first church built in New York, NYU campus spots. And as we eased into the East Village area I finally began to relax. Everything down there looks exactly like it did on Sesame Street. How can anything go wrong on Sesame Street?

    I reminded him about the ATM, and he pulled over, about 6 blocks shy of our destination. I was 10 minutes late, and undeniably exhilarated. I had just seen more of NYC than I ever would have on a subway. And what a way to see it! I didn’t care what it had just cost me, although I did feel a minor pang of worry about my driver, who probably never had to carry someone so far from tourist central. He calculated my fee, and I looked in my wallet. I had three twenties and a ten, just enough to cover it with $15 left over for a tip. He’d earned every cent. I paid up and got out to hoof it the rest of the way, but he insisted I get back in and let him finish the job. So we pedaled up in style, and I felt like the queen.

    4. The Birthplace of Punk

    Well, I tried for three, but I’m ending up with four. I told you I write a lot. After my amazing dinner with friend Michael Margolis (for whom I also produced a kick-ass online event), I got his grand tour of the East Village, and we went down toward Bowery (not all the way to Bleeker, where CBGB was) and tooled around St. Mark’s Place, birthplace of punk and a whole helluva lot of other cultural influences. Michael also introduced me to the secret cocktail lounge Please Don’t Tell, which is accessed through the vintage phone booth in the hot dog joint, Crif Dogs. (There was a wait of 2 hours to get in, amazingly. On a Thursday night at 9 pm. No lie.) When he flagged me my first cab ever, I was wrung out and done in, glad that taxi drivers take Mastercards and already know where my hotel is.

    There’s no possible way in the universe my week in NYC could have been better.

    Wait, except that I never got to meet my friend Malissa of Girlboxing over in Brooklyn at Gleason’s for a few rounds. And I didn’t get to head upstate to see my former trainer and world-champion boxer Bonnie Mann and her family. And…

    Next trip, baby. Next trip.

    (Pssst. Vegas is in January.)

    Photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photo pin, creative commons

  • He Likes Pie!

    He Likes Pie!

    It’s possible this was written as a rap.

    Whatever it is, I found it folded up and drifting around my kitchen, as I find many odd bits of flotsam and jetsam in this house.

    I read it out loud, and found myself giggling. I particularly enjoyed the garbeldy-gook at the end. The Maker is ineffable, buoyant, inexplicable. Oh, and he likes pie; don’t try to convince him otherwise.

    Here’s the translation, as it’s hard to read in the photo:

    Hi, my name is Seth and I like pie, So you can’t

    deny it so just stop trying to make me not like pie

    because it is impossible for me to not like pie

    cause pie is my life

    blebertiedo?

    hipapotamonstrositybiltacilatantovela

    I located further evidence of the claim in the driveway. In case there were any doubt.

  • The Dark Road to… Darkness.

    The Dark Road to… Darkness.

    Beware children! See how easy it is to slip from an ordinary good boyhood into shudder-inducing nightmarish-ness. Nightmarish-osity. Something dark that involves hissing and a small amount of drool, anyway.

    I was surfing through some of my recent pictures and came across these two from earlier this year — taken on demand from the Maker, who relishes a pair or five of those cheap plastic Halloween vampire teeth. I always purchase a “Party Pack” of these (the name makes me snort) and then I’m exceedingly careful never to touch the myriad pairs I see laying around the house for the next month or so.

    After about six weeks I don’t have to worry about them anymore since they’ve all been shared with friends and left at their houses, sliced and diced by the lawnmower, run through the wash and thrown out by me, or carried off by the cats. Tidy, huh?

    Nobody ever talks about who cleans up after Darkness.

  • Superlative Slang Slam

    The First: It’s the middle of December and it’s dead warm.
    Me: It’s mad dead warm.
    The Husband: It’s mad dead G* warm.
    Me: It’s mad dead G beast crazy sick warm.

    (prolonged stunned silence)

    Me: Go on with my bad self!
    The First: Don’t ever. Do that again.

    *for the uninitiated, “G” is short for gangsta, which sadly, means cool. Now you’re sorry you read this, aren’t you?

  • The Smell of the Very Last Baby

    The Smell of the Very Last Baby

    When the last of my baby boys grew out of his infant clothes I passed all of the marvelous tiny baby things I’d accumulated to another friend who needed them.

    Almost all.

    One of the Maker’s tee shirts (also worn by his older brothers when they were newborns) I folded carefully — unwashed — into a little Burt’s Bees bag and stored it, along with the paper tape used to measure the newborn baby, in a small cardboard box under my bathroom sink.

    I was careful not to open the bag.

    Perhaps twice in the next three to five years did I lock myself in my bathroom for a precious few minutes, away from the craziness of a house with three little boys and the demands of work and motherhood, to pull out the tiny shirt and hold it to my face to breathe in the last of the new baby fragrance. That milky, drooly, nuzzly warm skin smell, with its attendant memories of nursing, patting, cradling, and time spent gazing in astonishment at yet another sleeping, beautiful child.

    One day when the Maker was about 6 years old, he came to find me. “Look at this funny little shirt!” he exclaimed, waving it in the air with one dirty hand. My heart sank. No more baby smell, I thought. But then I laughed.

    “Can you believe your big brothers used to wear that shirt?” I asked. He squinted at me in frank suspicion.

    “It’s true,” I promised, and together we examined the little shirt. He snapped and unsnapped it, turned it inside out, and considered whether it would fit on our cat, Katie, who was making happy figure eights between us.

    tiny baby shirt

    When I showed him how I had cut off the tags so it wouldn’t irritate the little baby’s skin, he had a sudden revelation. He’s always hated tags in his shirt. “Did I use to wear this?” he asked, astonished.

    And I found that my throat had closed up and I couldn’t answer.

    So instead I settled for a nod and an enormous hug, one that I knew I could come back to, long after the smell of the very last baby was gone.

  • Dorm Room Archaeology: 1984

    Dorm Room Archaeology: 1984

    I uncovered two pictures from my college years, possibly the only two that were ever taken during that period, and boy did they bring back memories. Omg! We had a vaccuum cleaner! I’m pretty sure that belonged to my roomate Lee Ann. She ironed her jeans, for heaven’s sake.

    So that’s me in my mother’s University of Kentucky sweatshirt (which she wore 20 years before I was in college at University of Tennessee, Knoxville), grinning like a monkey in room 513 of Massey Hall, where I spent my first three years of undergrad before moving in with my boyfriend (whom I later married), see next picture.

    Lance in Lisa's DormJust look at that hottie! Yeah, he dug me. I guess he had brought us Chinese take-out for dinner; that would have been a major splurge for us in those days, probably why we got the camera out to document it.

    And here’s what else I learned from inspecting this photo.

    1. I had a Playgirl calendar. There on the wall! I swear I had totally forgotten about that. Note the strategically placed cat. That was either one brave dude or one placid cat. Not all of the models were so modest, but my roomie and I were. We routinely cut out paper doll-like shorts to tape up on the guy of the month.

    2. Electric typewriter, yeah baby! It was my high school graduation gift, and it got a lot of use since most of my papers had to be turned in typed. I DID take a computer class, since that was the rage. It was Fortran, and I damn near failed the class since I was a rank beginner and all the rest of the class was budding geeks. To work on the computer we had to GO TO A LAB. Yep, we trudged across campus to a dank dark basement somewhere and WAITED IN LINE to get on one of the dozen or so ginormous ugly PCs. I decided then that I hated computers. But a year later UTK was on the Bitnet and 8 PCs arrived in one of the dorm lobbies and I was hooked.

    3. Sock Monkey!! (Leaning up against the speaker, on top of my albums.) Sigh, I miss Sock Monkey. My great grandmother, the same one who made my pink pantsuit in grade school, made him for me. Wonder where he ended up?

    4. Albums. CD technology came out while I was in college, and my friend Robert Bowers invited me over to his dorm room one day to hear a Billy Joel CD (Glass Houses), but I didn’t actually acquire a CD player until well after college. I can almost tell you every single artist that was in that cardboard box of albums: Rush, Prince, Eagles, Queen, Boston, Billy Joel, Air Supply (that’s right, I’m telling the truth here), Asia, and maybe one or two others.

    5. Weight belt (hanging on the wall behind my lamp). I actually took a class in weightlifting. Everything other than the weightlifting in that class was stoopid,since it mostly required cutting pictures of buff people from magazines and glueing them on posters for a grade.

    6. Analog clock. That just strikes me as odd, now that I’m so used to seeing digital alarm clocks.

    7. Gone With the Wind. I was a theater geek in high school. I could recite many of the scenes from GWTW, but fortunately didn’t do so often. I wonder where in the heck that poster came from. Prolly the same place the lame “New York” (Theater Geek!) poster came from. (I’ve never been to NY).

    8. TV! We invariably had a television in our dorm rooms, which was a huge treat for me since I didn’t grow up with one. That’s probably why I have the cart over in front of my bed rather than where ever my roomie had placed it.

    9. This picture was taken in November. I can’t read the month on the Playgirl calendar, but I think I’m right on this because we didn’t have AC in that dorm, and we baked from August until October. On some magic date near Thanksgiving the radiators in Massey all kicked on and we had heat, but once fall hit in earnest we broke out our sleeping bags and blankets and piled them on. That’s the yellow inside of my old sleeping bag, and it looks like there are at least two other blankets under that.

    Thanks for joining me on that little jaunt down memory lane. What weird things do you remember from your way back years?

  • On McDonald’s French Fries

    On McDonald’s French Fries

    My recent post about Why Your Workout Isn’t Working prompted a funny chain of comments on Facebook, which I totally enjoyed. Most of them related bad food favorites, and McDonald’s was named in the very first comment (Hi, Greg!).

    Sigh. I love MickeyD’s french fries more than any other fast food french fries. And back when the Husband and I were vegetarians we would, once in a while, drop into a McDonald’s for the sole purpose of indulging in these. It was a rare treat, though, and mostly we made “french fries” at home, although of course we didn’t fry them.

    After the First (pictured above) was born, outings to any restaurant or fast food place were so rare that they really stood out in his memory, and were the source of endless rapture and recollection. He didn’t know any of the places by name; instead he remembered them by the food he’d experienced there. One shivery January when he was just about to turn 5 years old, I recorded this little comment, imparted with a deep sigh and some consternation, that he made to a visiting friend of ours:

    “You know those french fries they have at the french fry place? I like those… One time we made french fries at home but they were made out of potatoes.”

    You can kinda see his frustration, can’t you?

  • An 80’s Video Game Salute

    An 80’s Video Game Salute

    I grew up in the 80’s. Wait, maybe “grew up” is too judgmental, but I did live in the 80’s. We didn’t have an Atari 2600 because we didn’t have a television. But we had a computer, so I got started with a Commodore 64 game system. The 64 stood for kilobytes, baby. We had ‘em. And 16 colors too! In 1999″Weird Al” Yankovic referenced the C64 saying,

    “You think your Commodore 64 is really neato
    What kinda chip you got in there, a Dorito?”

    Hehe. It was true.

    If I didn’t play it on the C64, I played it in the arcade, using real, live quarters or tokens in place of same. Mostly I didn’t actually play the games, I watched boys playing the games, which was significantly better, since it involved less personal humiliation.

    So, for posterity’s sake, here’s a list of the 14 old skool video games I grew up with. You can click on the main links to play the games online, although not all of them work with a Mac. Leave a comment at the end and tell me which video games you played growing up!

    1. Pong Release date: 1972
    I have to start with Pong, not just because it’s the great-great-grandpappy of video games, but also because the Husband made a Pong game with LEDs on a circuit board in college. Which we actually played. But not for like, a long time or anything. /ahem/

    2. Space Invaders: Release date: 1980
    Designed in 1978 in Japan, this is a classic, the first arcade video game I can remember. The legend is that the game was so popular in Japan that it caused a coin shortage. *Facebook friends: you totally have to click through to see the Human Space Invaders video if you haven’t seen it already. (I wish FB would import my vids, but it doesn’t.)

    Oh, here’s a little Space Invader cartoon for ya, too. Good times.

    3. Asteroids: Release date 1979
    Word is that Universal won a bidding war (there was a war??) to movie rights to Asteroids. I can’t think why this wouldn’t be a great summer blockbuster. Oh, wait. Yes I can. Maybe I’ll wait for Candyland. Or maybe I’ll poke out both my eyes with a fork.

    Asteroids also inspired a bad joke in National Lampoon’s Vacation. (I don’t think you’ll be glad you clicked through. I’m sorry I even embedded the link. Really sorry!)

    4. Centipede: Release date: 1980
    That was a damn creepy spider!

    5. Defender: Release Date: 1980
    A game much like Space Invaders, only your ship flies over a horizontal landscape. It was my first experience with a navigator preview screen. I thought that was brilliant. (Still do.)

    6. Dig Dug: Release date: 1982
    We had it but I didn’t play it much. I didn’t like those ugly red and yellow and gold stripes, I think. But the “inflate the monster until it pops” was ingenious. I can think of aaaall sorts of clever ways to use that little effect.

    7. Donkey Kong: Release date: 1981
    Still one of the toughest arcade games around, I think; I never got past the first screen. But I loved watching the documentary King of Kong.

    Um, why is the gorilla named “Donkey”? Wait, don’t answer that.

    …Aaargh. I had to know so I wiki’d it. It’s safe for work.

    8. Frogger: Release date: 1981
    This is the stupidest frog in history. It can cross the road but not the pond. What an idiot!

    9. Galaga: Release date: 1981
    It was like Space Invaders, but it had a theme song! (Which sucked!) Oh, and it had scoring updates, like a pinball machine. No innovation there, but golly we were grateful.

    10. Gauntlet: Released 1985
    Maybe the first era of the MMORPGs of today. All of us D&D geeks wanted to be Warriors, Wizards, Elves, and Valkyries.

    11. Joust: Release Date: 1982
    All those dropping eggs, so few omelets. Who could NOT love a flying ostrich? Loved it. The flying harpies (buzzards) were cool, too.

    12. Lunar Lander: Released 1979
    Waste of time, but we didn’t have enough ways to waste time. Land your ship on the pad. There. You’re done! Well, not as easy as it sounds, but still.

    13. Missile Command: Released: 1980
    Protect your city or be disintegrated. I was mostly disintegrated.

    The Ms. Pac Man video below is Aqualung’s Atari 2600 review of the game. (Did you remember that it was originally dashes, and not dots, that the Pac family ate for dinner?):

    14. Ms. Pac Man: Release date: 1981
    Fruit and pretzels! Blinky ghosts! What could be better? The Husband could play this for hours on a single quarter. There was a tabletop version in the lobby of his dorm in college. I spent many nights there, watching him play. I couldn’t have gotten him away from that game for any amount of Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

    Oh, and the Pac Man franchise spawned it’s own song, and you haven’t lived unless you’ve clicked through to enjoy it. Actually you have, but you still need to hear it. Don’t you?

    Okay, kids! Leave comments and share your passion, confess your crimes, and spread your wisdom! Or ignore this post and get back to work.

    Image by kurtxio on Flickr

  • The Perfect Jersey Number

    The Best Jersey Number Ever from Lisa Creech Bledsoe on Vimeo.

    This is a short little story about the First that I hadn’t thought of in years, but it’s a great one because it’s just so like him to think of something like this!

    Facebook friends, just click on the link above (or the “view original post” link) to see the video.