Still, after watching his interview with Katie Couric right after the debate, I do wonder who found him and how.

Joe sounds like he works for McCain, saying things like “We’ve seen who McCain is — we don’t know who Obama is” [in other words, "he ain't from around here"].

Joe also calls Obama “well-spoken, better spoken than I am.”  ["How dare he be better spoken than I am?  He's black!"]

He makes fun of Obama, portraying him as a performer who just fed him a memorized response [For a memorized response he should review McCain's response to a question about Russia's invading Georgia.  For his "answer," McCain simply recites a list of all the countries in the area].

Finally, Joe gets really ugly.  He says “he’s almost better than Sammy Davis, Jr.”

Now that’s just insulting. Who trained Joe?  Apparently he took a logic course in plumber’s school; note his appropriate use of the concept of slippery slope in the transcript below of his October 16 interview with Diane Sawyer: “I mean, $250,000 now. What if he decides, well you know $150,000, you’re pretty rich too. Let’s go ahead and lower it again. You know it’s a slippery slope. When’s it going to stop?”

We were on the only team I saw to gather the max of six people, we knew one of the hosts, and there was a question about Harry Potter, but we still didn’t win. Life is unfair.

There was a music round, a picture round, and a taste round; the taste round was a small piece of Turkish delight, infused with a flavor you had to guess (rose syrup; thanks, Pulao!). The winners got a bar tab and tickets to some shows and the eternal glory that is trivial victory in front of friends.

Although all six of us knew the answer to a TV question about The Office without using any brain cells (Dwight Shrute’s farm? Beets. I mean, come on), none of us could name the current UN Secretary General (Ban Ki-moon), no matter how hard we scrunched up our foreheads and pretended that it was on the tips of our tongues. This is why I don’t publish my last name on this thing. But at least you know you don’t have to be well-informed to take home fourth place. Woo-hoo!

Pulao and I were playing around beforehand, asking each other questions we thought up on the spot, and I could think of nothing whatsoever outside of funny character names in American literature. This was random, even trivial, you might say, but I thought I would test the illustrious 12apostrophes readership on their funny-character-name knowledge.

See if you can place these characters safely inside their respective books:

1. Stamp Paid
2. Kilgore Trout
3. Sal Paradise
4. Honey
5. Happy
6. Quentin Compson
7. Ras the Exhorter
8. Dr. Hilarious
9. Esme Squalor
10. The Dauphin
11. Major Major Major Major

Answers (click your mouse and roll over the grayed text to read it):

1.

Beloved – Toni Morrison

2.

He shows up in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, Bluebeard, and Timequake, all by Kurt Vonnegut

3.

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

4.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee

5.

Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

6.

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

7.

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

8.

The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

9.

A Series of Unfortunate Events – Lemony Snicket (First seen in The Ersatz Elevator)

10.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

11.

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Double Jeu

Try to keep two balls in the air. Moving the mouse both tilts the inclined plane at the bottom, and moves the Pong-style “paddle” at the top. Keep the bottom ball from rolling off the plane, and the top ball from passing your paddle, as long as you can. My all-time record score is 33 seconds. That’s not really impressive, but I worked hard for that score. Too hard. Simple-concept game, complex fun.

shoOot – (from the main page, choose “shooot” on the 6th line)
You’re the square at the bottom of the screen, moving only left and right, and you have to shoot the circles as they bounce around–and don’t let them hit you. The circles don’t shoot back; when a circle drops a colored pellet down at you, snatch it up, it will boost your firepower, add shields, slow down the enemy circles, or make you temporarily invincible. I thought the circles were shooting at me, and I avoided the power-ups for long time. Boy, does that make the game a lot harder. Oh, and when you shoot a big circle it splits into lots of little circles, Asteroids-style. Damn those circles.

Gimme Friction Baby! – (when the screen finally loads, click the green-ringed button on the bottom left)
The title sounds so . . . dirrrty, but this is a clean, family-fun puzzle game, I promise. You shoot white balls from a rotating canon onto a playing field, and try to explode the balls by tapping them, with other balls, three times. Don’t let them cross the dotted line above your canon. The balls bounce around and expand like hell when they stop. Got it? No, probably not. Try it out, it’s fun I swear.

Boomshine (http://www.k2xl.com/games/boomshine):

In this game, little colorful dots float aimlessly across the screen at different speeds and rebound off the walls. A mouse-click creates a small, expanding “explosion” that causes any dots it touches to also explode. The goal is to explode increasing numbers of dots, and the only way to do it at higher levels is to start chain reactions across the screen. There may be lots and lots of skill required for this game, but I’ve found that random clicks and watching the pretty colors keeps me entertained and works just as well. Also, turn the music off to hear the cool, chimey sound effects (which make for the cutest explosions ever, Pulao said once while playing).

Sphere (http://www.jigsaw.x0.com/sphere_e/index.html):

A locked-room mystery without the murder. You’re locked in the room, and your goal is to escape. Everything you need is somewhere in there with you. Click your mouse to see a different part of the room, zoom in, affect something in your environment, or pick up and carry an item (or combine your items together). Winning relies a little too heavily on the “Oh!-I-can-click-there?/Didn’t-see-that” factor, but the puzzles are fun and satisfying. When Pulao and I solved it, I was a little sad to leave the room behind. [p.s. when you need to do something else or close the browser, your progress (and items) can be magically saved.]

The Restaurant Game (http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/restaurant):

This isn’t a Flash game, per se, but something cool nonetheless. The goal of the Restaurant Game project, conducted by the MIT Media Lab, is to develop game-engine artificial intelligence that better mimics the behavior of real people. When you play (either as a waitress or a customer) the game learns from what you do, and down the line it will be released as a 1-player game, with game designer credits for all the players. As for the gameplay now, you interact with another person to either buy or serve food, and afterwards rate the other’s intelligence, kindness, etc., and guess their age (and what they eat for breakfast), which is always fun. You know, judging people. [p.s. best time to logon (to guarantee there'll be somebody to play with) is between 7 - 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.]

See, my two favorite games so far have been Taboo and Drinking Jenga and Apples to Apples provides a combination of both those games. (I feel legally obligated to tell you that drinking apparently isn’t really a requirement– but, like I’ve been telling my writing students for years, there are just some things you shouldn’t try without being drunk.)

The premise of the game is fairly simple. There are two kinds of cards: green and red. Green cards have adjectives on them, and the red ones nouns. One person turns a green card over, and then the rest of the players pick a red card each from their hand that they feel best matches the adjective. If the judge, the person who flipped over the green card, agrees with your noun-adjective matching, then you win– which means that you get to keep the green card. Whoever gets to ten green cards first wins.

Wait, did I say simple? I meant painful to explain, but the game ends up being fun anyway.

The main thing is that Apples to Apples is a sly game– winning at it is sometimes about having an imaginative vocabulary, or being quick with pop-cultural references, and other times it really is about you making connections that are weird enough to get noticed, but popular enough to get you get picked a lot. (For example, I picked Thunder as the best noun for the adjective Cranky– but I couldn’t tell you why.) Then again, sometimes it’s about an affection for puns, and sometimes it’s about simple associations between concepts. Who knows? Not me, since I didn’t actually win.

What I do know is that a sure-fire way to make it fun is to play this game with five other loud, oustpoken people. Or, to be honest, with four loud, outspoken people and a petite, quiet woman. (Well, to be perfectly fair, with one petite and quiet woman, one outspoken stoned guy, two moderately enthusiastic people, one fairly enthusaistic player, and a partridge in a pear tree. Plus wine.)

Regardless, it’s an incredibly fun game, and I know that some reader/contributor of 12apostrophes recently got it as a birthday present so I’m waiting to get invited over, especially now that I hear you can buy a bible expansion pack.

$24.99 at Target.com