The Shakespeare in the curriculum I was saddled with was almost entirely JULIUS CAESAR, simply because the school board loved WEST SIDE STORY more than ROMEO AND JULIET. Luckily the BBC's COMPLETE SHAKESPEARE series was on TV then, and often that was the best thing on TV during Summer Vacation. We had THE ILLIAD and THE ODYSSEY, GATSBY, some of Ray Bradbury's awful short stories, the shortened and dramatized version of 1984 that Scholastic put in their High School English weekly magazine, that short story about the Irish Civil War with two snipers fighting (and you know what the denoument is already), and a lot of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson poetry. Luckily I didn't have to read RED BADGE OF COURAGE like apparently everybody else. But ask me how I feel about Ambrose BIERCE's IN THE MIDST OF LIFE? Yeah. You think?

In NASA (I'm told) it's called Jargonautics. And you have earned your wings. :)

Since the Outlaws were a Florida band, I heard them a lot on AOR radio in Florida in the Eighties and Nineties. I consider "GG&HT" better than anything Lynyrd Skynyrd made (heresy, but I'm entitled to that opinion) and their version of "Ghost Riders (In The Sky)" the ultimate recording of that song. Of course, they made it through the songs in live performances by having multiple lead guitarists and tag-team delivery of the solo bits. Molly Hatchett and Blackfoot did it that way too.

The movie that Leonard Maltin called the worst to ever win an Oscar! I wonder if any film since has lived down to that honor.

Who dissed you by giving you black dice? (I seem to recall that if somebody gave you a black die it meant you weren't welcome at his game table.)

My mother the novelist (published since 1982 and twelve books to her credit!) was verily amused with Writer BrainTM. Reminded me to put a request on the shopping list for ingredients to Deadline Stew...a longtime staple in this household.

"The wolf was only trying to help."--Frazier on DUE SOUTH. In Tennessee they use every part of the Black Bear.

After seeing your "my blade glows blue in the presense of rules lawyers" t-shirt post, I suggested to the creators of "Knights of the Dinner Table" that Wil and ultimate rules lawyer Brian Van Hoose have a convention brouhaha sometime in the future. I wish GoogleEarth had a function in which you could overlay the globe with a hexagon grid for wargames.