ABANDON ALL FREE TIME YE WHO ENTER HERE

Right. So we went to Top Gun for dim sum with Jonathan (jch@CS, for the zephyrati) and Stewart, which was pretty good, even if Stewart insisted on eating chicken feet (ewww). I got milk tea at Gossip afterwards, and we had parked at Uwajimaya so I was like "well, we can pay 10 dollars for parking for two hours, or I can go buy something for 10 dollars and we'll get parking free..." so I went and got a Chococat CD case. It reminded me of cattchan for some reason.

We came home, hung out a little... Stewart took off for Redmond... then Eli went grocery shopping... and I... uhh... yeah.

Short shameful confession:
I started playing that Puzzle Pirates thing.

Sadly, of course, all the games in it are variations on puzzle games I already am pretty good at... Dr. Mario, Alchemy, Bejeweled, Super Puzzle Fighter, Chu Chu Rocket.. so... yeah. I ended up jobbing for the same crew/ship as Nykkel and Thunderbird, which was fun for a while until Nykkel and I both simultaneously lost our connections to the net, at which point I gave up playing for a few hours. Foy told me not to bother coming over, so I didn't... instead, I (man, today is definitely a day of me doing things I say I don't do) cleaned my room. Well, to some extent, at least. I took out the trash, and filled up two more trash bags with junk from my floor, and I swept, and I dusted under my computer table, and... yeah. It looks a lot better than it did before, even if it still looks pretty cluttered.

I uhh.. I assembled the Maison Ikkoku figures I got from the capsule machines in Japan. Now I just need to figure out where to put them. It's so cool, I got the whole set in my first 6 tries. Kyoko, Ichinose & Soichiro, Yotsuya, Godai, Akemi Roppongi, and Yagami. (Yeah, they skipped 3, 7, and 9 for some reason... I guess they consider Mitaka and Kujo secondary characters, although I think Nanao was more important than Yagami!) Hey, raise your hand if you also actually watched all 96 episodes of MI. Yeah, I thought so. Put your hand down if your name is Michael Duggan.

Eli and I ate tortellini for dinner and then I took a nap and then I played more Puzzle Pirates ARRRRRRGGGHHHHH. This does not bode well, me hearties. (I suppose it's not really fair for me to blame it on Nykkel, really. After all, I could just decide not to ever play again. Wouldn't be that hard. If anything, it's a little bit frustrating as a game anyway.)

Anyway, I should go to sleep so I can get up on time for work, and so I'm not in crappy condition to sing tomorrow night... I think I'm going to go ahead and try to join the NW Chorale or whatever with thatmathchick and jeliza... they're singing the Messiah this fall and I haven't been in a Messiah chorus in a billion years. I still know the tenor line to about 1/3 of the choruses though, so hopefully it won't be too hard for me to get up to speed, assuming they're going to let me sing tenor.

Also, atomx just reminded me, but I want to go see Lost in Translation sometime. Dunno where, looks like it's playing at a few of the small theatres in Seattle...

Al Franken spoke here

Huh, I thought I wrote this from my laptop two hours ago but maybe I wasn't logged in.

Anyway... so Al Franken came to Amazon today to talk about his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It was scheduled for 3:30pm in our AV room (which is literally about 60-70 feet from my office)... so I figured I'd check up to see if they had books or anything early. I went by at 2:55pm and there were ALREADY at least 20-30 people in the room! Holy crap!

So I went by and told Colin, but he was on a conf call... so I grabbed my laptop, power cord, ethernet cable, and went back to the AV room, finding a seat about 6 rows back that was next to outlets for both. And I sat there doing work for about 20 minutes (I needed to write a web page about some stuff, it was a PERFECT 20-minute task). It was funny, Chico was sitting next to me and he basically just zoned out for half an hour waiting for the presentation to start. Every 4-5 minutes I would look up as the room got more and more crowded. By 3:10 all the seats were gone. By 3:20 all the floor space was gone. By 3:25 I believe you couldn't even stand up in the back of the room anymore. (Colin got there around 3:10 and got a seat behind me.) They brought by the free copies of his book around 3:28 and there were NOT enough copies. We were both lucky enough to get them, but plenty of people were not.

Holy crap, so Al Franken shows up at 3:30 and gets a thunderous round of applause... then he spoke for about 30-40 minutes about various encounters he's had with the "characters" in his book (by "characters" I mean Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coalter, etc), and about a lot of other stuff like general politics, why Republicans suck, why the world is going to hell in a handbasket, just a ton of random stuff. And all of it was dead funny.

He opened the floor to questions around 4-4:10 or so, and EVERYONE had questions. It made me feel pretty dumb, actually... lots of stuff like "what do you think of [democratic presidential candidate]?" or "what do you think of Arnold?" (answer: he doesn't like him), etc... I'm just pretty politically apathetic, really. Al's speech made me wish I was more politically knowledgable, at least, and I definitely plan to read his book, though.

At 4:45 he had to cut questions, because he still had to sign books... about 50-75 people stuck around to get their books signed. Colin and I did. Assistants went up the line and wrote people's names on post-its and stuck them inside the cover page of the book to speed up the process. When I got up to the table, Al was all like "Hi, how are you?" and I was like "Great, that was a great talk," and he's like "So what do you do here?" "I'm um... I'm a technical writer, I guess it's kinda like being a comedy writer except nothing I write is funny," and he's like "Well of course not, everything here is so technical!" or something. And then I thanked him and Colin came up to the table.

Wow! I met Al Franken!
The 13-year-old Deanna in my head says, "Next you just have to meet A. Whitney Brown, and you're set!"