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Return of the Cruiser

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My long automotive nightmare is over. I find it almost impossible to believe. I’d grown accustomed over the last 3 ½ months to thinking of my old PT Cruiser as a long-ago dream, like lost love or a chance to play Hamlet. But it happened at last, though not without drama. (I was sure I had a picture of my car I could post here, but it appears I don’t. Don’t want to take one now, because it’s been sitting in a lot all summer and looks kind of grungy. Imagine, if you will, a white PT Cruiser with woody panels.)

The call came just after 7:00 this morning. The lady at the auto shop said my car was done and ready to pick up. She said they’d actually gotten a call the other day from the supplier, saying we’d have to wait another two weeks, but (as usual) they didn’t know what they were talking about. The part (a shifter cable) showed up yesterday, and they’d installed it and it was working.

I drove over, submitted my credit card, and got my keys back. The bill was steep – north of $1200. I have the money, thanks to the Lord’s provision, but it would put a big dent in my bank account.

The next step was to install new license plates. They’d actually expired back in July – not merely the tabs, but the metal plates themselves. I’d brought a screwdriver, but I found the screws were corroded, and some of them wouldn’t move at all. Finally got a mechanic (a young woman, just to make it humiliating) to do the job for me.

Then I discovered that the radio didn’t work anymore. I don’t know what it is about this garage and car radios – the one in the loaner I’d been driving didn’t work either. A guy checked the fuses, said they seemed all right. He’d have to take the dashboard off and check the ground wire. Couldn’t do it right away, could I bring it back at 1:00 this afternoon?

I took the car home, then drove it back at the time appointed. This time, thankfully, it didn’t take too long. He said it was a fuse after all. The diagram in the car, he said, was wrong. I said I wasn’t in the least surprised.

I was glad to have my wheels back, but sad about the cost. And what do you know? I opened my mail today, and there was a property tax refund from the state, covering the bulk of the bill.

Proof that God lets His rain fall upon the unjust.

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Screams in the REalm of Impossibility

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Collaborative games are something of a niche market in computer and board games. Perhaps it’s just easier to design a game around only one player.

In 1984, Electronic Arts released a cool, run-for-your-life game called Realm of Impossibility. Players had no weapons against hoards of zombies, orbs, and spiders. They could only drop crosses to block them temporarily and collect defensive spells to divert them for a few seconds. The main weapon they had was speed.

You can see the gameplay in this video review. About half of the dungeons have features similar to optical illusions, so beginners could run down dead ends that don’t look like it at first. That and the running like mad are two parts of the joy of this game. The third part is being able to play with someone else.

I remember playing this game with other people, yelling in mock fear of the terrors chasing us, getting separated, blocked, or killed, reviving each other, and booking it for the side of the screen.

“I’ll draw them away. You grab the thing.”

“Run, run! AHH!”

Playing by yourself was fun enough the first couple times, but it was a short game that didn’t change. It didn’t have the replayable nature of Pitfall, which seems odd given that Pitfall was just the Gen-X version of Temple Run. (Maybe it isn’t odd at all. People play Temple Run for hours.) But as a two-player game, both of you running to escape the hoards, Realm of Impossibility was great fun.

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Time and turkey

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Photo credit: Mark Miller, Creative Commons license, Wikimedia Commons.

I was thinking today (as one does from time to time) that, for a guy my age, I don’t feel all that bad. (Sorry, identity thieves, but I won’t tell you exactly how old I am.) I have my aches and pains, and I could bear to drop the weight of a pretty large dog, but I honestly expected to be in more pain at this age.

There are little reminders, though. I told you about losing my keys last weekend. Further along in the week, I lost them again. It was one of those dumb senior moment things – I had the keys in one hand, and something (I forget what, of course) in the other hand that I meant to throw away. What I figured out, after searching an hour for the keys, is that I’d dropped the keys in the trash basket, and put the trash… somewhere. Who knows?

I told myself I hadn’t had much sleep the night before. Yeah, that’s the reason.

Another reminder of a different kind came this past Saturday. I’d had a visitation of a vivid memory of a meal I used to order, about 45 years ago, at a restaurant in a St. Paul suburb that shall remain nameless. I wondered if the place still existed, Duck Duck Go’d the name, and what do you know? It’s still there (later intelligence informs me the place has been in business since 1969. The only other place I used to eat at back then that still exists is Perkins). I checked the menu, and my beloved Turkey Dinner was still on it. So I arranged with a friend to go eat there.

Maudlin back story: I’m not entirely sure how I and my then roommate started eating at this particular Chinese restaurant. (I won’t give you the name; this story might reflect badly on them, and I’m pretty sure that would be unfair.) I have an idea we went with The Girls Next Door: the four very pretty, Christian co-eds who rented apartments in the next house over. It was the nicest situation I’ve ever been in, girl-wise, until I made the mistake of falling in love with one of them.

This particular girl, who shall also remain nameless, had grown up in what we used to call the Orient. So I suspect going there was originally her idea. I wasn’t into Chinese food yet, back then. But I was into her. However, when we got there (Sunday lunch; you must imagine me in my brown tweed church suit), we discovered they had a small American menu. I ordered the turkey dinner, as did my roommate. It was really delicious, like mother used to make. As long as we still lived in the Cities, even after the Girls Next Door had scattered like so many golden birds, we’d go there for the turkey dinner.

So, 45 years later, I went back. I ordered the turkey dinner.

It didn’t taste at all as I remembered it.

I am not so arrogant as to think the cooking had deteriorated. I’m pretty sure I have a more sophisticated palate now. I’ve had better turkey dinners and gotten used to them. Perkins is very good. Boston Market, which is no longer around here, was excellent.

I’m not sure if I’m better off knowing that my memories misled me. Maybe I’d be happier just remembering an idealized meal.

Come to think of it, maybe I’m happier imagining an idealized Girl Next Door, too.

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Simple War Games and How I Was Accused of Cheating

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I mentioned before that one of my high school friends enjoyed realistic war games like Avalon Hill’s Tobruk and Squad Leader. Those are games with many numbers and complicated mechanics for building defense and attack strength. At least, they were complicated enough for me–a guy who tends to send one tank or team out to shoot up the enemy and takes too long to realize it’s a pretty dumb move.

That’s many steps away from games like Risk that just ask you to roll the dice to see how many enemies you kill. Risk limits your strategy options to piling up troops in Indonesia or North Africa to bottleneck incoming attacks. Squad Leader, according to BoardGameGeek, “utilizes programmed instruction to guide you through 12 scenarios of increasing realism and complexity. The scenarios run the gamut from street fighting in Stalingrad to armored advances across snow covered roads in the Ardennes.”

It’s not so much a game as it is “a game system which can be used to portray any WWII infantry action.” Measure the fun accordingly.

An advantage to board games, regardless the complexity, is the analog natural of the mechanics. You have a paper rulebook and cardboard pieces with numbers. There’s no programming to open the door to someone accusing you of fiddled with it to win, which is what happened to me while playing Lords of Conquest as a teenager on my Commodore 128.

Lords of Conquest was fairly simple. It allowed you to choose one of several world maps or create one of your own. You took turns selecting your territory or have the computer do it for you. Then you moved troops, controlled resources, and other things I no longer remember. The main thing I remember is the risk factor.

You could play with one of three levels of risk.

  1. Low: An attacker with equal force to the defender will always win.
  2. Medium: An attacker with greater force than the defender will always win. Maybe equal force would result in a draw without damage to either side.
  3. High: All attacks were based on percentages. An attacker with equal force to the defender would have a 50 percent chance of winning.

Playing with high risk was the only fun way to play, and it helped me understand simple odds. If I had a 40 percent chance of winning without any risk of losing my own forces, then I might as well attack on my turn and see what comes of it. My smaller or equal forces conquered larger ones many times. That’s how I won and earned accusations of cheating via programming. I was simply willing to take the chance of winning. If losing an attack meant losing my own territory, it would have been different, though maybe you could draw an enemy power into a vulnerable position with a feinted loss.

People don’t understand simple odds like this. They think if a die rolled three, two, and three, then I must turn up five or six next. But each side as a 1/6 chance of being rolled. Sure, it’s unusual for the same number to be rolled four times, but each roll has the same odds. And in a game that only rewards you for getting the right number, there’s nothing to lose.

The Press, Uncategorized

World Radio Live and Free North Korea Radio

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If any of our readers live in the Twin Cities area, you may be interested in a live event coming September 30 to Free Lutheran Bible College & Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. Key voices heard on The World and Everything in It podcast will be there, and we’ve boosted that excellent show a few times on this very blog. Seating is limited, so register ahead of time.

Today, The World and Everything in It has released the first of a two-part program on Free North Korea Radio, which has broadcast into the Hermit Kingdom for several years. Read some of the story in this piece, “The Campaign Against Kim.“

In today’s program, they tell of humanitarian supply trucks going into North Korea and government troops following up afterward to collect everything that was given out. Children came to understand that they shouldn’t eat the cookie given to them because one of Kim Jong Un’s agents would be along to take it away.

Music, Uncategorized

Victorious in Victoria

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I thought about taking a picture at the Nordic Music Festival in Victoria, Minn. this past Saturday. But it would have been pretty much like other pictures I’ve posted of the event in the past, made less interesting by the lack of my Viking tent. I’m still driving the loaner car, which isn’t big enough to carry the thing, and the guy who’s hauled my stuff for me to the last couple events wasn’t able to be there. So I showed up with my Viking clothes, my books for sale, a couple weapons, and my magnetic personality only.

And actually it worked out pretty well. There’s something to be said for minimalism, it seems.

The festival wasn’t held last summer, needless to say. Crowds were down this year compared to the past, but those who came had a good time. The weather was beautiful, a little warm but with a pleasant breeze. Everybody who made the trek seemed happy to be there, relieved to get a furlough from lockdown.

And I sold books. Very substantial sales. I’ve always marked this festival as one of those events where books didn’t move, but they moved this year. The main difference was that I was at the table under the canopy with all the other Vikings, rather than enthroned in solitary splendor with my tent, sunshade, and Viking chest.

Maybe I need to find ways to make myself more accessible.

The very thought gives me the willies.

Anyway, it was all a success, for me at least. Packing up was easy, and then I drove the half hour back home. And had a nasty shock.

I couldn’t find my house keys. I’ve never hooked them to the loaner car’s keys, because I’ve always told myself this arrangement wouldn’t last much longer (three months now and counting).

That didn’t mean I couldn’t get into my house. I have a spare key. You don’t get as old as I am, with the short-term memory I’ve got, without learning the uses of redundancy. But there’s an assortment of keys on that ring, and I wasn’t sure exactly what else I’d be losing access to.

It was getting dark by then, so I figured I’d put off searching the car until morning. Maybe the keys were in the car. Maybe they’d fallen into one of my boxes.

But what haunted me through the night was the growing conviction that the most likely scenario was that I’d dropped the keys, either into the grass on our camp site, or in the parking lot while packing my car.

Which would mean driving a half hour either way back to Victoria to hunt for them. Almost assuredly without success. Either they’d be lost in the grass, or somebody would have carried them off.

But in the morning, I checked the car again. And behold, they’d fallen into the crack between the driver’s seat and the console. (One of the disadvantages of wearing a pouch, as the Vikings did – the console forces the pouch to turn 90 degrees, making it easy for stuff to spill out.)

Great relief on my part. But oddly, throughout the day, I had attacks of the sudden conviction that there was something I was supposed to be worrying about. I’d turned on my WORRY switch, and it has no OFF position. You just have to wait for the fuse to burn out.

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‘The Most Reluctant Convert’

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I have paid insufficient attention to the upcoming movie, “The Most Reluctant Convert,” scheduled for release on November 3. Sadly, it looks like a limited engagement, but I suspect the DVD will be easily available. If it’s as good as the trailer makes it look, it might climb up beside the original BBC “Shadowlands” as my favorite Lewis movie (an admittedly small field to choose from, especially if you omit the Narnia films. Which I do, pretty much). Max McLean seems very good in the role.

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Playing Board Games as a Kid

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I’ve always enjoyed table top games, and my family were not gamers. We played games occasionally, and I think I largely encouraged what we played.

I could be wrong. On vacations, my extended family played Canasta, Spades, and “The Dictionary Game” long before it ever was published as Balderdash. Perhaps my older siblings brought some board games into the house, because we had an old edition of Parcheesi and an art masterpiece game long before I was old enough to show interest in them. In the early years, I was interested in PayDay, a silly, pun-filled game about making it to the end of the month. (I think that’s where I learned of the classic book Running to the Outhouse, by Will E. Makit.)

We played harder games in a gifted program in which I was placed for grades 4-6, games like Avalon Hill’s TUF, a dice game that asked you to make the longest working equation you could from the roll you made. You always had an equals sign and some kind of math symbol with the numbers, maybe eight dice total. It was hard. Other games I remember were Word Power and The Stock Market Game. Avalon Hill made great games back in the day. I wasn’t good at Word Power btw.

One of the project choices in that class was to design a game. I think I worked up two of them, neither entirely successful. One was an adventure. I vaguely recall a board that resembled a Narnian map with a sea serpent in watery sections. There was some kind of Sasquatch and a UFO too. Players could move in any direction on the grid in search of treasure, which was hidden by someone controlling the enemies.

The thing I remember most about this is working with my dad on how to design the game pieces. He cut up a broom handle to make each piece. The rounded tip of the handle was the UFO. Dad made smoothly sanded player pieces in different colors. I don’t remember how we handled the two monsters. I think the other kids liked it. It didn’t totally work as a game, but it was good project.

As a teenager, I wanted to play more complicated games but didn’t have a regular group to do it with. My sister married a guy who played chess with us often and enjoyed large games like Kingmaker, with a four-hour play time that probably begins after you study the rulebook for an hour or so. Diplomacy was another one we started and never finished (six-hour play time?!). I wasn’t good at these games. How could I be without playing a single full game?

I think I did play a single game of Squad Leader. That’s the kind of game my best friend in high school enjoyed. Military tactics was one of his strengths, and this was a complicated game that could be expanded into many more tiers of complication. He destroyed me. And I enjoyed it, I think.

Winning is not the main thing in a game. I want to enjoy the challenge of it, even if I lose, which is certainly a strength, seeing that I have had only marginal success in my life. Enjoying the challenge with some good people makes for a fun evening.

If you can tolerate it, I’ll write more about games in upcoming posts.

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Icelandic ways

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More translation work today, and that’s always good news. I generally work with something playing on the TV in the background (for fear that the full force of my intellect, if applied to the text undiluted, might burn out my computer ). Today I’ve been watching something a friend recommended, an Icelandic mystery series on Netflix. It’s called The Valhalla Murders.

Since I never worked on this project, I can comment freely. I won’t describe it in detail tonight – it’s no formula-breaker. At the center, as has become almost mandatory these days, is a Plucky Single Mother. It ain’t entertainment in the 2020s, unless you’ve got a PSM in there. Also a local boy who moved to Norway because he has Issues, and is not happy to have been ordered home to help the Reykjavik police – who aren’t that happy to have him in the first place. Nor in the second place, because when he shows up he’s Intriguingly Rude to everybody.

But what surprised me was the subtitles. I always turn the subtitles on with streamed movies nowadays, because I’m old and sometimes dialogue gets garbled (don’t tell me I’m going deaf, you whippersnapper).  You don’t have to use subtitles to watch it yourself, mind you, because it seems to have been double-filmed – the actors are speaking English in the English version. (Though some of it looks like it was overdubbed. Not uncommon even in English-language productions.)

But here’s why I’m confused. What I’ve learned through being a script translator is that the people who write subtitles NEVER look at our translated production scripts. Because of this, the subtitles tend to vary quite a bit from what we wrote (translation is more subjective than I care to admit). They usually seem to have been produced through transcription by someone watching the film. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But in this production, the subtitles vary extremely from what’s being said by the actors. It looks very much as if the subtitles were produced by following a production script in English, like the ones I and my co-workers do. But that those scripts weren’t used for filming the English version.

Maybe they do things differently in Iceland.

Music, Uncategorized

‘The Way You Look Tonight’

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What shall we discuss when we wish to remain a-political, on a day that will live in infamy in the annals of our national decline?

Sometimes, when I’m awfully low, and the world is cold, I will feel a glow just thinking, “I’m not in graduate school anymore.”

Or words to that effect. Astaire and Rogers did it better, above.