Not Winning Your Own Lookalike Contest
Remember my ongoing issues with mysterious somnambulant injuries? I reported on my demonic back scratches here and here. Well, they’re back. The most recent mysterious and bloody injury is the following gash and bruise on my right bicep, which greeted me yesterday morning:
I will remind the gentle reader that my fingernails are bitten down to nubs, so are poor tools for unconsciously inflicting this sort of injury. As well, my separated shoulder makes the angle quite painful. Spoooooky.
In other news, the most hilarious and embarassing thing happened to me recently. As a professor, I must write frequent research papers and submit them to journals for publication. The journals send them out for anonymous peer review before deciding whether or not to publish. I send out a fair number, so some get accepted and some get rejected.
Recently I sent an admittedly poor one to a big name journal. It was rejected. But the best part was the external reviewer’s comments. To paraphrase, he/she said that the paper was poorly written, but that the topic was important. Therefore, he/she recommended that though the paper should be rejected, the journal should solicit its rewrite from a true expert on the topic. Then he/she recommended that that expert be…. me.
As a friend commented, it’s a lot like Charlie Chaplin coming third in his own lookalike contest.
In even more news, in response to a special request from a neighbour who has always been curious about the form, I have agreed to put together one last game of Dungeons and Dragons, a good 27 years since the last time I played. Yes, this is the darkest heart of hardcore geekotry, and not for the even marginally cool. In preparation for said game, I took a trip to Toronto’s Silver Snail gaming shop and scoped out some of the figurines.
What I found were figurines for UFC fighters:
Then it occurred to me… why not have actual UFC fighter characters play the game? One’s party could be made up of Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture and Anderson Silva, all choking out kobolds and trolls, and eventually each other.
Hmmm. Time to pitch this to Hasbro….
Penultimately, as an author, I know how crippling it is to see one’s own books on the bargain shelf of a bookstore. So this is not meant as a dig, but as a celebration. My friend Andrew from DC once wrote a great book featuring satellite images of the Earth, called The Earth From Space, which was unfortunately priced rather highly. I recently saw it on sale. All this means is that more of you can now afford to own a copy:
Lastly, I copped this article from The Hindustan Times in India (June 4, 2011), relevant to this post. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but some of it rings true. Just throwing it out there (click to enlarge):
