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By request, here is the Pearl Jam Magic the Gathering deck I designed, embedded in the email I sent to Mark Gottlieb who had the idea of a rock deck in the first place.

I was intrigued by your proposal of a rock-themed deck
from last June when I read the column this past week,
and went to work building my own.  I know I’m a bit
late, but what’s eight months between friends?  Or, in
this case, complete strangers?

The deck is Pearl Jam themed, with most of the
connections being to song titles.  It is as follows:

“Brain of Josh”

Type 1 deck

60 cards

13x Island (”U”)

11x Plains (Yield) *

4x Serra Angel (”Angel”)

1x Spiny Starfish (”Strangest Tribe”)

1x True Believer (”Faithfull” [sic])

1x Wall of Vapor (”Thin Air”)

1x Whipcorder (a combination of two: “Dissident”,

because he’s a Soldier Rebel, and “Whipping” )

1x Alter Reality (”Nothing As It Seems”)

2x Arrest (”W.M.A.”)

3x Boomerang (”Evacuation”)

2x Control Magic (”Not For You”)

3x Counterspell (”No Way”)

1x Moonlit Wake (”In the Moonlight”)

1x Plagiarize (”Black”) **

3x Sleight of Hand (”Sleight of Hand”)

3x Spirit Mirror (”Rearviewmirror”)

1x Telepathy (”Pry, To”) ***

1x Three Wishes (”Wishlist”)

1x Tidal Wave (”Oceans”)

4x Unnatural Selection (”Do the Evolution”)

1x Worship (”Immortality”)

1x Yare (”You Are”)

A few, the ones I marked with asterisks, need a bit of
elaboration.  Plains maps to the album “Yield” because
version #3 looks like the
album cover minus a highway and a yield sign.  Plagiarize is
“Black” because the chord progression is stolen
without credit from an obscure The Who song.
Telepathy maps to “Pry, To”, because constantly
looking at your opponents’ hands for {U} seems the
epitome of the verb “to pry”.  I know there’s a card
called Evacuation, but it doesn’t work in this deck
and Boomerang does, which I think is almost as good a
match.  I’m delighted with myself for three of them:
“Strangest Tribe” for Spiny Starfish, which it
certainly is; “You Are” for Yare, because surely there
was supposed to be an apostrophe in it (”Y’are”); and
“W.M.A.” for Arrest, because it is a song about an
arrest performed by a white power figure.  The deck
name, “Brain of Josh”, is a self-aggrandizing pun on
the song title “Brain of J.”  And before you say that
matching “Rearviewmirror” to Spirit Mirror is too much
of a stretch, consider that all mirrors are
rear-view mirrors. 

I’m sure you’ve seen the Unnatural Selection / Spirit
Mirror combo before, but I hadn’t until I discovered
it while researching this deck.  It’s magnificent and
works beautifully against creature decks.  The deck
concept is to slow down the early game with
countermagic and bounce, possibly protecting myself from damage, burn
and discard with the True Believer and Worship, until I can pull
out the killer combo.  Then I kill off all the
creatures for {1} apiece, unless I really like them,
in which case I take them for myself.  I then beat
them with the Angels and, perhaps, whatever I’ve
taken.

In my trials it won three out of four 3-player
free-for-all games.  Twice it won with stolen
creatures, once with a pair of Fangren Hunters and
once with a Pemmin’s Aura- (there’s your card name)
equipped Thornwind Faeries.  It lost to a creatureless
Vise-Prosperity deck.

Enjoy, and if you have a moment, let me know what you
think.  Thanks for the inspiration: it’s a lot of fun
to play with.

We got our annual “Employee Plus” neighborhood discount card at work today, a program so apparently wealthy that they have an Earthlink email address (none of this “our own domain” nonsense!)  One local coffee shop advertises itself with the following: “Since 1992 your local alternative to delicious coffee” (none of this “delicious coffee” nonsense!)  A dry cleaner proclaims, in the discount booklet, “No gimmicks!  No coupons!  No discounts!” (none of this… — well, you get the idea.)

If you get tired of the revolting coffee and the non-discounted dry cleaning, you could go to Johnny Rockets, where the gimmick is that their servers “will pour the ketchup for you!”

“They say that all that is left of Ait Kimrat is its name” (and even that, if I may note, barely exists.)  More on the Morocco quake.

Safeway Select’s “Enlighten” brand fat free soups seem to be copying the more expensive Health Valley soups that I have previously discussed.  Thing is, they forgot to add something.  Flavor.  To make the split pea soup even barely palatable, I have to add three packets of pepper, a packet of salt, and a teaspoon of garlic flakes.  Caveat emptor.

It’s difficult for me not to dress all in green every day.  Many mornings I pick out my clothes, lay them out, then realize every article I’ve selected is green.  Some days, like today, I give in to it: green Levis, green Polo sweatshirt, green hemp shoes.  My t-shirt’s black, but you can’t see it.  This has been going on for over a decade.  When it started I was in high school, and my mother would warn me that I end up looking military, like I was dressing all in camos.  These days I just make sure the shades are slightly different so that it doesn’t end up quite as imposing.

I’ve known several people who never dressed in anything but black, but green?  That’s weird.

An assistant high school principal in Michigan had a troublemaking student.  He was “virtually positive” the kid was a drug dealer, so prior to a police drug check he planted a baggie of marijuana in the student’s locker.  The administator was only caught when he laughingly told an on-duty police officer about it at a varsity basketball game.  Where did he get the pot?  He had a habit of stockpiling seized contraband in a drawer in his office.

(When asked if he had planted drugs in the past, the officer notes that he “infatically” denied doing so.  I guess no one hires cops for their compositional skills.)

If you were wondering, it’s a pain in the neck to edit half-gigabyte bitmaps in Photoshop.  Every operation takes ten minutes.

Does anyone else think the “Simple English” Wikipedia page is much harder to understand than the standard page?  Not to mention just plain wrong in parts?  Try to parse “The rule of all the Wikipedias, including this one, is that everything that is put onto the Wikipedias cannot be under copyright.”  Does that mean that some of the items put into a Wikipedia can be copyrighted?  Or how about “This is a difference license to GFDL”: exactly what language is that supposed to be?  British Substandard, I think it’s called.  Or try understanding “The changes you make are more than just making the words correct, so copyright is not kept” on the first pass.  Sure, the “simple” version doesn’t use Latinate words such as “requirement”, “permission”, and “obligation”, but reducing something to clunky Anglo-Saxon doesn’t make it easy to understand, it just makes it clunky.

I’ve added a note to the page.  Visit the “Talk about this page” link to make your own comments.

Five British citizens held at Guantanamo Bay for two years without trial are set to be released.  The British government lobbied for their release, and does not expect to file any charges against the men, if for no other reason than the fact that they were held so long in violation of international law.  Some academics are speculating that the men have a good case for seeking compensation from the United States.

I completely support this.  The way we treated these men is a disgrace.  I say let them sue.  I say settle the lawsuit.  Make a big deal about it, have a special investigation, create a constitutional amendment that explicitly ratifies the Geneva Convention, let heads roll.  All of that.

That being said, if The Herald wanted me to believe the men had been falsely imprisoned, as I believe was there intention, they did a horrible job.  Really, three young Muslim men from the same town (one third the size of Pasadena) all happened to end up in Pakistan, at the same, with shaky reasons for being there?  All three of them disappeared and ended up in the remote mountains of Afghanistan by complete accident?

The father of Rhuhel Ahmed, one of the detainees, said of the 23-year-old man that “He is a kid, straight out of school.  How could he be a terrorist?”  Who the hell does he think terrorist groups recruit, senile pensioners?  I started the article believing them to be innocent.  I finished it very skeptical.  Read it for yourself and see what you think.

I’ve been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering recently, building decks, trading, generally having a great time.  I’m playing with a couple good friends from my college days on a weekly basis, and sometimes going to play on the weekends as well, to places where I am considerably older than the average person in attendence (perhaps this should tell me something.)  I traded for a Jihad last weekend, and while I probably over-traded for it a bit, it’s nice to have this near-mint decade-old rare card, nice enough that I’m thinking about building a white weenie deck to exploit it.  I’m a playset (four cards of the same name) away from finishing two different decks.  They are both rares, one worth $0.80 apiece for each of the four, the other $11.00 apiece, and they are turning out to be equally difficult to find for trade. 

The other day I had a fun game with my friend Nathan, playing the Pearl Jam themed deck I designed in response to Mark Gottlieb’s challenge (if there is interest I’ll post the decklist.)  My deck was working out really well that game.  He went first and played a Coastal Tower, a land that comes into play tapped.  Then I dropped an island.  Second turn, his Tower untaps and he drops a plains.  I drop another island, and Boomerang his Coastal Tower back to his hand, leaving me with a 1-mana advantage.  Third turn, he drops an island, and then I drop a plains and Boomerang his island back to his hand; now I have a 2-mana advantage.  Fourth turn he gets back to two land and plays a spell, which I counter.  Fifth turn I drop a Serra Angel.  Sixth turn I drop a second Serra Angel and attack him with the first.  Seventh turn he drops a Serra Angel, but then I attack with both of my angels, forcing him to block or take 4 more damage.  He blocks and we both lose an angel.  He takes 4 damage from the other angel and is left with 5 land and nothing else on the table.

My win seemed certain.  But I still hadn’t drawn my deck’s killer combo, and the next turn he brings out a huge Mahamoti Djinn, leaving my angel woefully underpowered.  He then proceeded to kick the crap out of me, and I never drew my combo.  That’s the way of the game, I suppose.

That had to be really boring if you don’t play Magic.  But then again, you probably skipped down to this paragraph anyway.  If you did, go ahead and skip the rest of this post, as I’m going to be listing a new group of cards I’ve designed, to go with my previous list:

Fair Play
{2}{W}{W}
Enchantment
Each creature has “This creature can’t be declared to block a creature with power less than X, where X is this creature’s power.”

Reforestation
{1}{G}
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may return target basic Forest card from your graveyard to play tapped.

A British columnist is making fun of Americans for their obsession with competitive dog shows.  Something about residue on cooking vessels?

An orangutan, a European bison, an elephant, three chimpanzees, three tapirs, and four camels have been murdered by poisoning at the Sao Paulo zoo.  Some of the bodies show the presence of sodium fluoroacetate (CH₂F-COON), used in powerful rat poisons that are outlawed in Brazil (and the U.S., as far as I have been able to determine, although it used to be used to kill ground squirrels in California.)

J. David Humphrey, a man who has apparently had his humor gland surgically removed, found my Number of the Beast program page and pointed me towards his Revelation Study.  For only $29.95 he’ll tell me the name of the person he has discovered to be the true antichrist.

If you’ve already paid, perhaps you would be interested in a reminder of my September Rip-Off Revenge post.  Maybe you’ll get a newer car worth $9000 more out of the deal.

I’ve been listening to and enjoying KROQ Los Angeles’s “Rock of the 90s” weekend.  There’s a lot of reminiscing.  I’m one of the few people whose entire junior high, high school, and four-years-of-bachelor’s-degree-pursuing all took place in the 1990s (do the math if you’re so inclined — it’s hard to pull off.)

It’s a varied lot.  There have been acts and tracks that the intervening years have turned into classics — Pearl Jam and Nirvana.  There are bands the entire existence of which I’d forgotten — Sponge, King Missile, Dinosaur Jr., The Chemical Brothers.  There are songs that I’m pleased to say I liked when they came out and I found to have aged well — songs by Cowboy Junkies and The Prodigy, for instance — and songs that haven’t aged well at all — Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots (yes, as much as I fondly remember “Wicked Garden”, it sounds really tired.)  There are a few tracks I disliked at their release that I find more impressive now: Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People” sounds downright innovative when you consider the hordes of his clones that now clutter the scenes.  There are songs that I would have sworn predated the 90s but turn out to have just sneaked in (Jane’s Addiction, Depeche Mode) and ones I would have sworm postdated them (Incubus, Limp Bizkit).  There’s a lot of stuff I hadn’t heard since high school, a lot of memories.

I’ve also unfortunately been listening to the D.J. — Nicole Alvarez, I think her name is — whom I had never heard before.  She’s not very good.  She might be egosurfing and find this, in which case I’m a bit sorry, but really, she’s not very good.  She went off at one point about the drink absinthe, for instance, and made several errors in her soliloquy, claiming, for instance, that it was legal and that it had to be cooked before consumption.  She also claimed that it caused severe hallucinations and made one shoot one’s gun at “things that aren’t there”.  So I called the radio station.  I’ve never been treated nicely by KROQ when I’ve called — I’ve only done so a couple of times and haven’t done so in years — but I figured “what the hell”, right?  What’s the worst they could do?  Swear at me and hang up on me, I suppose.  I’m a big boy, and I’ve got nothing to prove to a radio station, and Miss Alvarez might appreciate my help.

I called, and the call went through.  Straight to Miss Alvarez.  And then something odd happened, something else that hasn’t happened since high school.  I asked if she would like to know more about absinthe, and she got a very false, very pretentious air, and said — I am not exaggerating — “No, I know all about absinthe, but there’s only so much time, you know.  But it’s good to know that there are other people well-educated about it.”  I was stunned for a split second.  What’s there to say?  I was tempted to respond, “Well, you made a couple of mistakes, would you like to know what they were?”  But I didn’t, I just said “OK, very good.”  After warning me to “stay away from it”, she thanked me and hung up.  Weird, eh?  This presumably adult woman tried to con me.  A complete stranger.  Over the telephone.  When she obviously didn’t know much about the topic.  I’m having trouble guessing what she thinks she had to prove to me.  I don’t think anyone has tried to do this to me since I was 15.  But the experience put a smile on my face for the rest of the drive home, and gave me a good story for mcgees.org, so I suppose it was well worth it.