Your Random Acts of Happiness Quizo Update

Random thoughts from around the horn this week, folks, and for once we’ve got more good news than you can shake a stick at.

- Speaking of sticks, the Devils are currently in first place in the Atlantic Division on the back of an 8-game winning streak that includes victories over the Bruins and Penguins. Brendan “The Answer Is Still Right Even If You Don’t Know It” Shanahan has 3 goals in 5 games on his latest comeback tour and backup goalie Scott Clemmensen has an more-than-respectable statline of 22-9-1 2.29 GAA .920 SV%. Cries of “Marty who?” will not be tolerated.

- Chelsea’s sickening loss to Liverpool yesterday means that our challenge for the Premier League title is now essentially over. So that’s, you know, one less thing to worry about.

- With my attention to the entire absurd day-long media circle-jerk limited to movie trailers, the halftime show, and a non-rooting, academic interest in the game itself my reaction to it may be a little dispassionate, and while I can’t speak to yesterday necessarily being the best Super Bowl ever it was a damnably entertaining football game (unlike, say, last year’s snoozefest). While he is clearly a moron of the widest stripe Ben Roethlisberger is a pretty damn good quarterback, and it is a testament to impressive time management that Omar Epps managed to coach a team to a Super Bowl victory while co-starring on House.

- Yesterday saw certainly the best Super Bowl HALFTIME ever. Thanks to the vagaries of my class schedule I am sadly forced to attend the last Springsteen show ever at the Spectrum, which is an event I am sure Bruce will not choose to commemorate in any way. If you did not experience 12 minutes of pure, unadulterated joy at halftime last night you are a defective human being and should be sent back to the manufacturer for a replacement, with a note to make sure they put a soul in this time.

- On the movie trailer tip, did anyone else have a strange reaction to that GI Joe spot? It gave me the entertainment equivalent of drinking milk just before it goes sour; yeah, you can definitely eat your cereal and you’re not going to get food poisoning or anything, but something about the taste is just slightly incorrect. They should have just made a Snake Eyes movie since that’s all anyone really wants to see anyway.

- As you may have been aware, my desktop computer contracted a case of cancer of the RAM a little while back. Unfortunately in the last month or two this metastasized and got into the motherboard, network connections, and finally about two weeks ago into the hard drives. Once that happens it’s really just a matter of time, so after weeks of heart-wrenching, last-ditch attempts at saving it, I stopped chemotherapy and radiation treatments and got a new computer. At least I THINK what I got is a computer. It may in fact be some kind of sentient technological lifeform accidentally thrown back in time by some future civilization too advanced for us to comprehend. You know, kinda like the Terminator, if the Terminator sat under my desk and had to listen to me shout “OH MY GOD THIS COMPUTER IS AWESOME” over and over again.

I was having a hard time believing the performance levels I was getting out of my new machine, so I devised a test to see just how far I could push it before one of us begged for mercy. So, yesterday morning I was running World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, both with every graphical option and performance slider jacked all the way up. Each game coasted by at a cool 60FPS and never hitched for a single moment.

Oh, incidentally, I was running these two resource vampires AT THE SAME TIME.

Understand, if you are not necessarily a computer gaming-type person, that my new computer performing this well is roughly akin to successfully riding a unicycle on an icy street in the dark while juggling live chainsaws and chairing a Senate Finance Committee hearing. My new computer is so powerful that, if left unchecked, it could subjugate humanity under its silicon bootheel. I will be using it to check e-mail and kill elves. God, I love America.

JLK

Your "Deck The Halls... oh, God DAMMIT!" Quizo Update

Quizo - and here I mean the actual physical sheets of paper which I carry around with me on Monday nights - is obviously generated on a computer. Now over the almost 2 years we've been doing this it's been generated on a number of different computers, but I have tried to be conscientious about keeping everything in one place in the end, between home PCs and work PCs and work laptops and the office in the DH and whatnot. That's one of those things that GMail is great at.

When I had to return my old work laptop this summer I made certain that I got all the files I'd created on it that were mine - stuff for the theatre, personal things, and Quizos - into a zipfile which I then sent myself. This was back in... what was it? July? July.

Flash forward, if you will, to last week, and me telling everyone that tonight would be the return of Special Holiday Quizo. Everyone seemed pleased to hear that. Believe me when I tell you that none of you were as pleased as I was, since doing Special Holiday Quizo meant I could simply re-use last year's well-received Holiday edition, and the thought of Monday when I don't have to race home at the speed of light and spend my precious few hours of free time banging out trivia questions makes me positively giddy.

(Note that last year's Holiday Edition was won by Delicious Bass, who are now in something of a rebuilding phase. One of their team members moved out of town almost immediately after seeing the last play I produced. For a little while I thought I had offended him so badly - what with the murder of the baby and all - that I'd driven him away. Turns out he just got a new job. But if he had actually been shocked at killing ONE baby imagine what he'd think of Medea, opening January 11 at Second Stage, 2030 Sansom, tickets $20.)

(I nominate that for Best-Yet-Most-Circuitous Medea reference ever. Can I cook or can't I?)

So anyway, this morning I wake up, and before I go to work I sit down to find the Christmas Quizo amongst my many files and see if I had to update any of the questions.

Hmm... it doesn't seem to be here. That's odd. Oh well - when I get to work I'll go through GMail and find the copy of it there.

At work - browsing GMail - not there.

I am starting to seriously worry that I may have to do actual work at some point today.

I start going through every place I have so much as shed a digital skin cell in the last year. Home computer - nothing. Remote storage sites - nothing. Old e-mails, several accounts worth - nothing.

I have Quizos for every week for the last year and a half EXCEPT the Christmas edition.

It's the only one I don't have a copy of any more.

The ONLY ONE.

The odds against this happening are so high as to be mathematically disharmonious. I check everywhere again in the desperate hope that I have made a mistake, which in and of itself is exceedingly unlikely.

It's not anywhere.

I have to make it all over again.

Merry fucking Christmas.

JLK