Day 2 results

Better. Succeeded in getting up at 9ish, after going to sleep at 1ish. Was actually half-awake five minutes before my goal time of 9, which is a good sign (though it took 20 more minutes for me to actually leave bed). This is an intermediary step; let's see how far I can nudge it over the coming days.

My drowsy-reading was the latest issue of The Perl Journal, but this didn't really work; I read or skimmed the whole thing. I guess Perl is too much of a turn-on for me to fall asleep by. ooh baby

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This is the debate fomat?! I am filled with dread.

To keep you busy this evening

Something Awful's Debate Drinking game is funny, but only if you are me. (Henceforth: IFBOIYAM.)

Take three sips if…
…George W. Bush accidentally refers to Saddam Hussein as Bayou Billy.
…George W. Bush proposes reducing US casualties by equipping troops with +1 armor.
…John Kerry smokes crack cocaine when he thinks the camera is not trained on him.
…George W. Bush somehow sets his hair on fire by taking a drink of water.
…John Kerry kills a child with a dagger for no apparent reason.
…George W. Bush open mouth kisses Kerry during their walk-ons.
…George W. Bush sits on an egg during the entire debate and then at the end of the debate it hatches, a monkey emerges, and Bush bites its head off.
…John Kerry proposes including Zeus in the pledge of allegiance.
…John Kerry inserts a crazy straw into his urethra and attempts to urinate into his own mouth, claiming he learned the trick from the Fremen.

And don't forget Debate Bingo, as seen on jwz. (Reload the page between printouts to randomize!)

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I need to go to sleep, but I'll note that, as I'm writing this, most of the mainstream media seem to be handing this one to Kerry. I hope this is still true when I wake up tomorrow morning.

In format, it seemed better than I was expecting. Both candidates nudged the rules aside to make rebuttals (though GWB did it far more often) and the moderator (Jim Lehrer) rolled with it, giving them 30 seconds if they chose to start in. And on two or three occasions, he'd ask both candidates to confirm his own understanding of how they stood on a particular issue, and clarify if needed. So, thankfully, it wasn't quite the interleaved stump speeches that I had been fearing.

Bush's main point, as far as the C-in-C's role, seems to be: Conviction is more important than truth. It felt like he said "mixed messages" at least a dozen times, and at a couple of points seemed to talk down to Kerry, implying that it was simply mathematically impossible for him to lead any armies or make international alliances because he's already on the record as doubting current U.S. policy, and therefore nobody will ever want to be his friend. I wish that Kerry had isolated this point and attacked it straight-on.

Bush stung Kerry good at one point, I thought, playing off his "global test" line (whether or not you agree with that). But later, I was expecting him to smash Kerry's surprisingly strong words about dismantling new U.S. nuke programs right back in his face, but he let that go.

The lowest point in the debate for Bush, where I bet he lost a lot of people, came when the president of the United States leaned into the camera, visibly upset, and told his audience -- us -- "You'd better elect a president who..." Whoah. You have no place to take that tone with me, dude.

Maybe the most interesting point involved Kerry and Bush seizing the very concrete issue of how best to treat with North Korea and pulled in opposite directions, with both parties clearly stating why they felt the way they did. I sort of wish more of the debate were like that.

Puzzling news.

Lately I have gotten interested in word puzzles. Many, perhaps most, of my local pals are rough-and-tumble puzzlers, so there's been a lingering desire to catch up with them for a while, but more immediately I've been watching cthulhia's rather recent obsession for chomping through the crosswords found in all the local freebie rags, and so it was she who told me where I could buy a copy of good ol' Games Magazine around here. (The newsstand next to the Greenhouse at Harvard Square, aye.)

I loved this magazine during my final year or so of high school, and then it went away, and I forgot about it. I was aware of its return several years ago, but never got around to picking up an issue until a couple of weeks ago, spurred by my strange hankering to do a crossword or three myself. Except to pay $4.50 for it instead of grabbing one from the nearest subway seat like everyone else. Whatever. Anyway, I have two of them now, and it's pretty much the same magazine that I recall from more than a dozen years ago, except IIRC it was only bi-monthly before its tragic demise, and staple-bound, and now it's monthy and square-bound. And has video and computer game reviews. I dunno if it did before; it would have been when, like, Loom was brand new. (This is on my mind because I was playing Loom on an emulator today. It wasn't a very good emulator; all the verbs were invisible.)

I post this now because I think I just solved a three-star (highest-difficulty) puzzle for the first time ("On a Bender", page 40, November 2004). I'm playing a little loose with what "solved" means; the goal involved teasing a quote out of a tricky crossword variant, and I stopped once I had it. Yes, there was a little bit of backsolving, but still. I'm pretty happy with it.

On the other hand, I have yet to solve even a single cryptic crossword clue (two whole puzzles of which appear in every issue of Games). They are like mental cilantro, and I just lack the gene... but that's baloney. I'm smart, I'm flexible, I can do these! Except I can't! Grrrrr!

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I wish that each issue of Games actually contained not a spread of fun but completely unrelated puzzles, but a mini puzzle hunt -- a set of puzzles whose answers plug into a meta-puzzle, which itself can be solved for the single winning answer to the whole shebang. I suppose that would be hard to put together every single month, but, shrug.

Speaking of hunts, though: I think my rekindled interest in recreational letter-hashing will put me in good shape by the time January comes around, with my second MIT puzzle hunt (my first real hunt, by some measurements, since this year's was such a flop).

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BTW, since half or more of my teammates read this journal, here is my official team name stance:

I would be equally happy with keeping the 2004 team name, or switching it to something else. "jmac's Birthday Party" is an appropriately strange name for a team, and will in fact be completely accurate again for the coming hunt. OTOH it might be best thought of as one-time gag, and my age isn't as decimally interesting this time, and it's arguably incorrect to put my name when I'm nowhere near the center or head or whatever of the team (whatever that means). OTTH, there is fun in misdirection, so who knows.

Alls I know is, I still like "Team BÜMP" and "Known Hardware Issue".