Enjoyable Saturday Trip Recap Post!

I went up to my friend's Papfred and Tomato's house yesterday, and that's always nice. I hadn't seen them since December, I think, so it had been awhile. Everybody's busy with life and such. Got to see several other people I hadn't seen in a similarly long time, including Tevion, who insisted that he is now Tevreadion, as he gave up TV and so spends more time reading now. Apparently the biography of E.O. Wilson has him wanting to learn to identify ants.

So there was BBQing, and enjoyable chatter, and the always interesting first meeting between two dogs, with the seemingly inevitable brief squabble, after which no problems.* We played Washers, which is like outdoor Skeeball, I suppose. I finally started to find my groove near the end of the game, which was nice since I helped my team win by doing so. I got to see the XBox360 in action once more, this time with GTA 4, which certainly looked nice, though I was disappointed to hear they removed the hidden packages feature that 3 and Vice City had. That was a nice way to always have weapons handy, since you got them delivered right to your door. Grenades and body armor sure trump diabetes supplies, don't they Wilford Bremley? On the plus side, they made it where you can run quickly while carrying two-handed weapons, like a machine gun. That's something you can't do in GTA 3 or Vice City, which always kind of annoyed me, since I'd have to switch weapons while being shot at if I needed to flee the scene quickly.

Papafred also had a demo for DragonBall Z; Burst Limit on the 360, and I played that a little bit, and it's nice that it's controls seem similar to DBZ Budokai 3 for the PS2, so I actually took to pretty easily, as least in the basic sense. Nothing wrong with sticking with a game mechanic that works, right? Later on, some of the guys played a little Rock Band. I've humiliated myself enough on Guitar Hero in the past to know better than to try that, but it was moderately fun to watch.

Later, I burst Tevreadion's "No eggs" philosophy. See, he refuses to eat eggs because they come from a bird's butt (well, cloaca technically, but everything empties out there, so it's a sewer). He argued he could still eat actual chicken because the bird had been safe inside the shell. I pointed out most of the time, the part of the egg you eat was also safely inside the shell, and so isn't any different from a chicken. Gave him something to consider, to the extent he was able. He went through about a dozen cans of Stag yesterday, so I'm not sure how well his faculties were working. At one point we went by Casino Royale on the TV and he said 'Picard said this wasn't a good book', and it took me a few seconds** to realize he meant that Next Generation episode where Riker, Worf, and Data get trapped inside that hotel from the book the stranded astronaut had with him. Except that was called The Hotel Royale, but again, he was well into his cups by then, so points for effort.

We wound up watching that MMA stuff on CBS, and everybody had a good time when Kimbo Slice appeared to make his opponent's ear explode. We wondered why he hadn't been hitting it more from the start, though we all laughed when Kimbo said it was good the ref stopped the bout, since he was just going to keep hitting the ear otherwise. I think he'd have been better off if he just focused on his punching and kicking, instead of trying to go for the submission holds, that I guess he picked up as part of the jujitsu training the announcers said he was getting. It's good to diversify your abilities and all, but he seemed to be getting the worst of it every time they went to the ground, so he might want to wait until he gets more practice.

* The only exception I've seen is my father's dog Buddy, who I've never seen behave aggressively towards any other dog, even ones that eat out of his food bowl, or try to take his chew bone. First time he meets a new dog, his tail's wagging, and he walks right up, but in a way that seems to assure the dog there's no threat. Which is why Buddy's the only one of my dad's dogs I like, because he's not a pain in the ass.

** Even if it took me a few seconds, that still put me ahead of everyone else, since they had no clue what he was talking about. It frightens me that basically sober as I was - I could follow his drunken train of thought. Everyone else there was much closer to his level of inebriation, and they didn't have a clue what he was going on about, until I sort of expositioned it.