I felt fortunate this morning, dealing with a head cold and nowhere to go, to be able to dig into a game I had wanted to play as a teen but that I never had access to. Thankfully, included in the massive haul I picked up at Christmas last year was Avalon Hill’s game...
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“What are you doing there, kid?” He is about nine and chunky, with a squarish head and sparse black curly hair. His brown-striped t-shirt has a quarter-sized ketchup spot near the center of his belly. He stiffens up quickly, as if the voice was from God. “Nothing. I’m doing nothing.” “You go on home....
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After I drove into the lot and parked this morning, I got out of my truck and fumbled around trying to drape my backpack on my right shoulder while holding a phone and a coffee mug in one hand and a folder of papers and a lunch bag in the other, and the backpack...
Read more →Whatever happened to Diamond Rio? I think I used those roller blades maybe twice? I always have this image of falling and breaking my wrists. Why am I so obsessed with board games? Obsessed. Obsessed with cardboard counters and colorful boards and wooden and plastic cubes. Old, new. I think about them too much....
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When I got up this morning, I made a cursory, obligatory visit to Facebook before I went in the kitchen to get something to eat. I mean, it’s what you do in the 21st century: wake up, check your phone, hit the can, check Facebook, eat, clean up, head out the door. I first...
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I do it often enough, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it seems at this time of year it always comes at me, amplified. For many, this season is a period for new starts, and I too feel some of this as December winds down and new calendars are poised to take their place...
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It was about three years ago this month that I somehow ended up sending a Facebook friend request to this guy named Derek on the East Coast. I’d like to say I remember the exact reason for the outreach, but I don’t recall what prompted it. What I do remember is, as a web...
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As a lifelong game fan and a strategy game collector, I had probably the weekend of my life this last weekend. It all started simply enough. I was wrapping up what I was doing at work at about 7 PM on Friday, and I thought I’d drop in on the games section of Craigslist....
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Whenever winter occasionally visits Albuquerque and dulls and bleaches the sky, I am regularly transported back to a few specific memories from my Chicago days. You know- those stills that get burned into our heads of particular moments, particular images. When I lived in the city, after my brief attempt at marriage failed, I...
Read more →It had started for me as a fantastic tribute to a hometown hero. Yesterday, on Sunday afternoon, Albuquerque threw a parade and then had a convocation on the city’s Civic Plaza to recognize Holly Holm, the seasoned Southpaw who gave invincible Ronda Rousey a shellacking in November’s UFC Bantamweight World Championship fight. Holly, as...
Read more →It’s early Friday morning and I am sitting at a corner table in a coffee shop near downtown. Peppy indie music floats down from the ceiling level speakers. Periodically, customers enter and exit the shop as the barista works through a line stacked two deep. It will get more busy as the sun rises...
Read more →Earlier this month, I saw a trailer for the movie “Spotlight”, and from the gritty, fast moving cuts in the commercial, I knew it looked like my kind of movie. I mean, Michael Keaton. How can you not like a film with Michael Keaton? And Mark Ruffalo? After playing an Olympic wrestler in “Foxcatcher”...
Read more →Last night, terrorists attacked 6 targets in Paris, including a restaurant, a concert hall, and a sports stadium, killing 128 (recognized so far) and wounding some 350 others. In the concert hall alone, the attackers stood on balconies and indiscriminately picked off 100 people below. The American metal band playing there somehow got out...
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A week ago or so, I was talking to a good friend about her dating life. She had been dating a great guy for the last 5 months or so, and then the picture incident happened, and everything changed. Basically, after being a couple for months, after the many times they had publicly exchanged...
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It’s the eve before my 47th birthday, and tonight was spent pretty nicely. A few weeks ago my sister invited me to go to a cardio boxing class she enjoys. I went to a first class three weeks ago, and I went again tonight, for a fifth time. I enjoy the classes for the...
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“And as a few strokes on the nose will make a puppy head shy, so a few rebuffs will make a boy shy all over. But whereas a puppy will cringe away or roll on its back, groveling, a little boy may cover his shyness with nonchalance, with bravado, or with secrecy. And once...
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