peel my love like a funyun
Last night I'm walking back from the laundry room with my basket full of clean shirts and underwear, and there are three scruffy-looking college-age white guys hanging around outside my door. They appear to be friends of my neighbors, who so far as I can tell are nice enough girls with lots of Christian iconography on their walls. As I walk past one of the guys says, "A timetable has been set. In one week and four days the ritual will be performed."
"What ritual?" asks one of the other guys.
"Five Great Dragons-" says the first guy, and then I'm inside my apartment. At first I thought that there were budding KKK members next door, but turns out I've got my terminology mixed up; the Klan term is "Grand Dragon," as in The Punch James W. Sheely, Grand Dragon of the KKK, in the Face Game. Lyse says the people next door are likely just D&D dorks, and since a search for the phrase "Great Dragon" only turns up sites like this, she's probably right.
Did everyone see the Roger Ebert review of last year's Dungeons & Dragons?
And then there are the dragons. What, I asked myself, is their nature? Are they intelligent? Loyal? Obedient? Do they wait for eons in dungeons, until they are needed? Do they eat? Reproduce? At one point Profion releases one from its lair, but he hasn't fitted his scepter with the correct missing part, and so the dragon attacks and breathes fire and has to be skewered by a falling gate. (Its blood flows into a river which begins to burn, just like the Cuyahoga before the cleanup.)
Sites like Stor are why I'm an Anglophile. Their current product is this delightful Java applet that lets you make cartoon avatars of people. So I of course did myself and a couple others.
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For everyone who, like me, didn't understand why California ran out of power in the first place, CNN explains the deal with deregulation. Succinctly: in an effort to open up the market, companies like PG&E had to sell off most of their plants and start buying power wholesale from other, independent companies. The rest is the brutal logic of the market.
Nasdaq lives, though.
