Post 198

Howdy. I'm alive. There are a lot of things I could write about (since last writing, I've seen Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma from the Train, Snow Falling on Cedars, Stay, X-MEN Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, and Taken, read Jane Eyre, The Prestige, and The Old Man and the Sea, acquired Billy Joel's Piano Man, Streetlife Serenade, and Fantasies and Delusions, discovered Mika, started learning Latin, given stand-up comedy a second try, been put in my Elders' Quorum Presidency, and started a new job), but I just gotta tell you real quick about this great new game I've learned.

So you all know the Kevin Bacon game, right? Well, this game is--well, it's totally unrelated I guess. One of the first days at my new job, I went into the little room where I work at a computer for ten hours a week and found that both of the computers in that room were in use: two of my coworkers were doing something with Wikipedia that was apparently giving them great joy.

The game is that you choose two apparently unrelated things (they used Bill Gates and Drāno) and, starting at the Wikipedia page for one, you find your way to the other by using links. All links on the page are fair game (if you can broaden by category, you'll do well) except, I assume, for the ones on the left hand bar (I think clicking on the main page or What Links Here might be considered cheating). They were playing strictly by speed, but when I asked them about efficiency, they both started clicking their back buttons and discovered that the loser (who had only been a couple of seconds late) had actually made it in fewer links.

This game is really impractical as a competition outside of, say, a computer lab, but I was just playing by myself and found it passingly amusing. It really makes me wonder whether you can make an impossible pairing. I just connected glasses to Jakob the Liar and then Billy Joel to the number 68.

It's a fun game. You should try it. You know you wanna.