Hello Friday: Fiercest Nerds on the Block [Nov. 13-19]

What an awesome week! Sami got her baby back on Days of Our Lives and Al Gore was on 30 Rock. Plus I’m in the middle of a really good book. Seriously could life be any better?

HELLO FRIDAY

re: FIERCE ANTICIPATION: November 13-15, in which Ryan Dixon dissed both 2012 and Cincinnati.

Kyle: I just watched 2012 at midnight last night, and it was like 10,000 time better than I thought it would be, I actually kind of enjoyed it. Cincinnati has Graeter’s ice cream, and unless you have tried that you can’t really say anything bad about Cincinnati. I had to bribe a security guard at the school post office to brake in so that the ice cream my grandma send me would not melt… it was the best money I ever spent.

PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY

re: Tall Drink of Nerd: Bonding Over Board Games, in which Amy Robinson confessed that she hails from a family of cold-hearted trash talkers and solicited suggestions for more board games for them diss each other over.

(Thought) Chuck: My brother turned me on to “Settlers of Catan” and that’s a really fun one – too bad it’s only good for 4 players (6 with the expansion set.) Another one we played this weekend which we enjoyed a lot was “Bang” – it’s a spaghetti western card game where outlaws and renegades try to shoot the sherrif and vice versa. We played with about 10 people and it was hysterical. We also played a farming strategy game called “Agricola” which was cute. Another fun one that is similar is “Guillotine” – a card game where you collect nobles from a line of people on their way to be executed. You can play cards that screw other players over, re-order the line, etc. And for all you theatre geeks out there there is “Shakespeare,” where you go around collecting props, actors, etc. to produce a play by the Bard – the game itself is kinda standard, but the trivia questions are really fun (easy, medium and hard.)

OH, IT’S TUESDAY

re: Political Physics: Are You Ready to Send a Dear John Letter to the President, in which Monique King-Viehland asks if you’re over President Obama — because she’s not.

pakou her: obama is still my president of choice, and i have no intentions of penning a “dear john.” i agree with ernessa that obama never claimed to be the leftist savior so many people rewrote him to be, and i find it upsetting that those who voted for him forgot about the centrist platform on which he ran. while i, too, would like him to take a firmer stand on glbtq rights, corporate greed, global warming, and ending our state-sponsored militarism, he is clearly approaching all of these highly complicated issues as the penultimate strategist, focusing intensely on immediate changes that will lead us to some long-term institutional and cultural transformation. (a very “thurgood marshall” approach, no?) in a city where policy change moves at the pace of molasses, it’s amazing he’s accomplished as much as he has in the last 12 months given what he inherited. baby jesus probably couldn’t even clean up w’s mess in one short year!

 

WOW! IT’S WEDNESDAY!

re: And I Shall Read By the Light of This Cheese, in which I get inspired to buy fancy cheese by a book set in France, and ask if the same thing has ever happened to you.

AmyQOTWF: I agree with Eat, Pray, Love, only in my mind it was good food. Actually read that book on vacay in Hawaii and made a pizza thee day we got back home, because I was so obsessed with the pizza she wrote about. Right now I’m reading “Gluten Free Girl” This woman has an amazing love affair with food. Even if you are still eating wheat/gluten, you’ll want to try every olive oil, fancy salt and unique herb she writes about. Man I’m hungry.

re: Wonderfully Awful: Thou Shalt Not Covet the iPhone … Or Shalt Thou?, in which Robin Rosenzweig gets an iPhone and wonders what apps to put on it.

CH: This might be the best App ever. http://www.macworld.com/article/143919/2009/11/ca…

DEAR THURSDAY

Best Line From a Blog You Should Have Read:

“He must have lived here for at least 5 years, to be able to talk like that.”

M says probably ten, and I agree. But I am, as I am every time I hear an American speaking French, horrified by the accent.

“Do I sound like that?” I ask, wondering if an American accent sounds as charming in France as a French one does in America. Doubting it.

“You’ll always have an accent,” M says. “But your R’s are better than his.”

(Huge compliment, by the way.)

—From Secret Life of a Nerd Girl: Six Months and Pronouncing by Gudrun Cram-Drach