Thanks to Jonathan for inviting me down to San Diego yesterday. I’d be hard pressed to find a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than listening sitting outdoors on a beautiful day, listening to Aaron Neville backed up by the San Diego Symphony .
Jonathan’s been cranking away at his newest endeavour, Deallocker. (They even have coupons for ticketmaster!)
Traffic in socal amazes me. The drive down, with traffic here & there, took about 3 hours. Yet the drive back, with zero traffic, took some where between 1.5-2 hours. I think the moral of the story is next time take the train.
Okay, okay. I know people don’t read my blog for the latest Fabio ongoings & whereabouts. You, dear reader, read this blog for one reason & one reason alone: Because I bring the awesome.
To amend for my Fabio ways, I reach deep into the bowels of the Internet to bring you not one, but TWO pieces of awesome.
“It’s Like Meeting the Girl of Your Dream and Finding Out She’s Five”
Before MTV sucked, it didn’t suck. Life was good for MTV in the early 90s and it shared the goodness with its viewers. Sprinkled into the mix of videos, ads, and shows were offbeat promos. Dennis Leary got his start ranting in them, but they peaked with Jimmy the cab driver.
There wasn’t much to know about Jimmy, other than he was a greasy New York cab driver who apparently watched a lot of MTV. And that’s all he would talk about music videos with his passengers, often somewhat confused. When Sabotage was on everyone’s top 10, he would tell people about this great new cop show coming to MTV.
Once he even did a spoof. Ironic, don’t you think?
Greatest Video Game Ever
A video game must be judged in the context of its era. Take Frogger. It’s a great game, but nobody is going crazy over it today.
With that in mind, Ninja Gaiden is the greatest game of all time. Those who played it on their NES instantly know what I’m talking about. Ninja Gaiden was no Super Mario. No, this game was darker. You father was slain in a duel. By whom? Why? To top it all off, you were a fucking ninja. That’s right, you were a ninja out to avenge your father.
If that doesn’t scream awesome to you, you obviously never were a 13 year old boy. To a 13 year old boy, that shit is fucking catnip.
Between the action scenes, it executed the movie scene notion phenomenally well. Beautiful graphics. Compelling 8-bit music. A story someone actually spent a little bit of time on.
In fact, so great was the pull of the story, was that when word spread we had beaten it, kids flocked to our house, just so they could see the ending.
The only hesitation I have in sharing the above cinema screens with you, dear reader, is you didn’t earn it.
You see, Ninja Gaiden was ridiculously hard.
Put yourself in this situation. You’re a pre-teen. You’re hooked. You want, nay need, to find out how things end.
You get to the final boss & he’s a bitch. Finally, using your special items, you beat him. Only, guess what? That wasn’t the final boss, be’atch!
Now you die on the 2nd. Oh, did I mention when you die you go all the way back to the start of the level? That right. The start. And it’s fucking hard too. Well, it starts off hard, but since you’re going to end up doing it 300-400 times, you get pretty good at it. And you better, because you need all your life & all your special items if you’re going to beat the two final bosses.
Finally, and your 101st try, maybe you do it. At last! Only no… it can’t be… only it is. Yes, a a third boss.
You’re so stunned you probably don’t even move the control pad the first time & simply die. But there’s only two special items! What to do? No matter what you do, you have to go mano-y-mano with at least one boss. And that’s impossible.
This game was so hard, my brothers & I re-wired my parents television equipment. We setup the VCR to connect to the out of Nintendo, so we could record fighting the final bosses. After a few attempts, we rewound the tape trying to find places we could save a single health bar or a weakness somewhere we hadn’t previously noticed. And, no, I’m not making any of this up.
The trick I found was wall jumping, a quirk of the game. See, as a ninja you can jump & stick to walls. If you were really, really good you could do a trick where you would jump away from the way, them come back very quickly & end up a little bit higher that where you started.
Now, if you’re thinking the physics of this are impossible, well excuse me, Mr. Smarty Pants, but you must have forgotten: it’s a fucking ninja!
So, if I remember correctly, you call the first guy jumping & slashing. You kill the 2nd guy buy wall-jumping to where he has a hard time getting you. And the 3rd guy you use both your items on. (I don’t remember what items to get other than the good one shoots rings of fire or something.)
Even today, hearing the music after watching Ryu’s father die in the duel, I still get a little misty eyed… *sniff*… *tear*
Catching up on the news, I came across an article on CNN about America’s most dangerous jobs. A few paragraphs, the author, Les Christie, makes the following statement:
The BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] does not count combat deaths in its survey; if it did, the military would undoubtedly have qualified as America’s most dangerous job last year.
It’s a little surprising Mr. Christie would make that kind of statement and not provide us with any data. Granted the BLS doesn’t count combat deaths, but given how readily available that information is, it’s surprising Mr. Christie doesn’t assemble it himself.
So, I was curious. Was the military the most dangerous job? If so, how did it compare to fisherman, who did take the top at 118.4 deaths per 100,000?
First step was to find out the size of military. According to Wikipedia, the U.S. has the 2nd highest level active troops, at 1,426,710. (Note that China has just under a million more, at 2,255,000.)
Based on icasualties.org, which uses DoD data, there were 846 U.S. fatalities.
