Friends, I hope you had a good weekend. This past Friday, after a long workweek, Janice and I watched more episodes of the BBC's revived "Doctor Who." The latest episodes of "Smallville" and "Teen Titans" have also been pretty good, IMHO. I've recorded but haven't yet watched PBS's adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Kidnapped" and the Cartoon Network's satirical "Boondocks."
On Saturday, 5 November 2005, Janice and I drove to the Christmas Craft Festival at the World Trade Center in Boston. While we didn't buy any arts, housewares, or gift items, we did enjoy numerous samples of dips and hot chocolate mixes. We then went to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass., where I bought several role-playing sourcebooks and comic books/graphic novels to begin rebuilding the portion of my library destroyed in the recent basement flood. Now, all I have to do is find a place to put everything, since the basement is still unusable and is filled with slowly drying binders… We had dinner at the Border Cafe, our favorite Tex-Mex restaurant in the area.
On Sunday, Janice went to the Mansfield Animal Shelter, where she volunteers every week, while I played the "City of Heroes" MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) with Dexter V.H., who may be visiting the Boston area from metropolitan New York with Stuart C.G. this coming weekend. I also chatted with David I.S.
Speaking of games, last week's D20 "Mutants & Masterminds" 2nd Ed. superheroic one-shot in "Drake's Port" went well, and I'm looking forward to resuming our regular D&D3.5 "Vanished Lands: Seekers of Lore" fantasy campaign this coming Tuesday night at Brian W.'s place in Newton, Mass.
Yesterday afternoon, we screened Disney's "Chicken Little," which was an amusing computer-animated comedy. I still hope to eventually catch swashbuckling sequel "Legend of Zorro," and I'm especially looking forward to "Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the next "Harry Potter" movie, and Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong." We later had dinner at Mandarin Cuisine in Needham, Mass.
I agree with Steve M.R.'s blog that despite the falling popularity of the current administration, the U.S. has still to wake up to the dangerous direction that conservatives and some Republicans have led us and the entire world. There are enough challenges in preserving the environment, righting the economy, and mitigating poverty and disease without getting into ill-advised conflicts and attempting the nation-building that liberals have so often been accused of doing. Even if U.S. intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had good intentions (rather than to protect certain oil interests, as many people suspect), we've instead created more resentment and breeding grounds for terrorism… Rant over!
Gene's Worlds 