I was in my hometown the past couple of days, at my dad’s house (which explains why no post for yesterday), and I got the brakes fixed on our minivan. The mechanic is an old friend of my dad’s, so I trust him, and that’s why I take my cars to him when they need repairs. While at the shop, the old mechanic told us a story that happened recently to one of his regular customers.

The guy noticed he had a flat tire, but instead of fixing it himself, he thought of the mechanic. But he didn’t want to call the mechanic to drive all the way out to him (probably 15 miles), so he decided to just drive into town, to the mechanic’s shop, on the flat tire.

The mechanic didn’t say, but I suspect there was alcohol involved in the decision-making process for this guy.

As he drove down the road, several people tried to alert him about his flat tire, but he ignored them. Finally, a woman pulled in front of him and stopped, forcing him to stop. His truck was on fire. A passerby used a fire extinguisher to put out the fire, and the mechanic was called for his tow truck.

When the mechanic got there, the local volunteer fire fighters were on the scene, sitting on their truck laughing. When the mechanic got the guy’s truck to the shop, he found that half the wheel was gone — ground off during the drive. The front bumper was partially ground away, the brakes were all torn up and burned, the ball joint was destroyed, and the heater was torn to pieces. The mechanic mentioned another thing or two torn up on the truck, but I don’t remember them all.

Like I said, I suspect alcohol, in some form, was involved in all of this.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I was first introduced to the author Rose Estes through the Endless Quest book series of the 1980s. The Endless Quest books allowed you to control the decision making of the main character. For example, in the book, Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, the reader is the character Jaimie, a wizard’s apprentice:

Throughout the story, the reader must make many such choices. Walk down the dark tunnel or head further down the lighted hallway. Take the jeweled pendant off the pedestal or leave it be. Talk to the strange creature or run away or attack with your dagger. As a Dungeon & Dragons player in the 80s, I found these books moderately entertaining. At its core, D&D was a game of these kinds of choices, but the books could never match the intricacies and imagination of the game. Plus, the books use no game mechanics (rules and dice), so there was no way to replicate the real game experience with just static text.

As literature, the books were for children. The writing was weak. J.K. Rowling’s writing is much better even in her first book. But I read several of the Endless Quest books. They are all very small: less than 200 pages — and you may only read 50 pages depending on your choices through the adventure. Usually I’d go back and read them a second and third time to see where else the story would take me through making other choices.

I never really thought about the author. But then one of my favorite fantasy worlds was tainted by this children’s author. The World of Greyhawk (WoG) is a classic fantasy fiction setting from Dungeons & Dragons. It was created by E. Gary Gygax for the D&D game, and I experienced the world’s evolution through the game publications and with two Gygax novels. From the mid 70s to the mid 80s, WoG was the quintessential D&D game world.

Gygaxian prose is dense with unnecessary archaic language, but it had a specific style; it was “serious” and “adult.” In the mid 80s, Gygax lost ownership of WoG (as well as D&D in general). The first new book for WoG, after the Gygax-D&D separation, was written by Rose Estes.

I was excited for a new WoG book; it was my favorite fantasy world — even better to me, as a setting, than Middle Earth from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But Rose Estes’s writing was . . . disappointing. Abysmal. Atrocious. Crap. I was actually shocked by how bad it was — the writing style, the story, and how it was ruining such a great fantasy world. But someone at TSR (the publisher of D&D and WoG at the time) loved her, because she was allowed to write five or six more WoG novels.

Among WoG fans, Rose Estes is a hack — a bad children’s author who sucked the life out of a great fantasy setting. I really can’t say that I blame her too much, though, because she just did what she does: she wrote books. The villain in this “setting character assassination” is the jackhole who hired her to write for WoG. Once could be considered a mistake, but six times is villainy.

I recently rediscovered one of Estes’s Endless Quest books — Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons — among my stock of books, and upon reading it again, I had all these sour feelings come up again.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

We got a misdelivered magazine in the mail. It was addressed to a woman we don’t know, a few houses down the street. We’ll be taking the mag to her in the next day or so, but while we have it, it’s interesting to look through.

Security Management

Walking the Terrorism Beat
Pandemic Protection
Piracy
Biometrics
School Safety
Facility Protection
Strategic Planning

It’s 102 pages of security articles, advice, gadget reviews, book reviews, etc. It basically has everything you’d expect from a magazine, especially dozens and dozens of ads.

I never knew there were so many companies in the security industry — human security, gadget security, and security training. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’ve just never seen all these listed in one place before. There’s ads for everything from paper shredders to rent-a-guards to intelligence networks.

This January 2008 issue is Number 1 of Volume 52, so it seems that this isn’t a new rag. I want to read the thing, but it’s really just not polite to read someone else’s magazine without their permission. So I’ve just thumbed through it a bit.

I’ll be taking it to the owner today. I wonder if it would be rude to ask what job she has? Could she tell me? Would she have to kill me if she told me? Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t ask.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

This is Calfgrit6’s wish list for Santa [exactly as he wrote it]:

legos
1. MT-51 Claw-Tank. ambush.
2. Barraki DeepSea patrol
3. Tigr Shark attack.
4. Lobster Strike.
5. Iron condor
6. Deap Sea Treas
7. Lego castle chess set.

Play mobils
1. playmobil Take along castle.
2. Red Dragon.
3. Rock castle.
4. Dragon attack Cannon.
5. Captive prirce.
6. Dragon troops.

Starwars
Transformers
Darth vader/Death Star.

He has Lego and Playmobil toy catalogs, so he paged through both to write down the exact names of the toys he wanted. I’ve looked through both catalogs, so I had a general idea of what he was talking about, but the specific names left me perplexed. “MT-51 Claw-Tank Ambush”?

But when I looked at the boxes on the Lego and Playmobil toy aisles, in the stores, the perfection of his list became apparent. It’s pretty convenient when you can scan the shelves and find, “‘Lego Barraki Deep Sea Patrol,’ check. ‘Playmobil Take Along Castle,’ check. . . .”

And to make it all even easier, he numbered them in order of preference. He said he knew he might not get everything on his list, so he wanted to make sure Santa considered his favorite wishes first. Such attention to detail — he’s my boy.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com