Another Three Unrelated Things

1) We spent several hours last night playing Punch Out!! for Nintendo Wii. This game is so, so fun but also so, so hard. It reminded me of when I was a kid. I used to have access to a wide variety of NES games, and there was one class of games which, while fun, I just instinctively new I’d never finish. Games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battle of Olympus and Double Dragon. And of course the original Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!This isn’t something that games have really stirred in me in the past, oh, decade or so. Nowadays when I don’t finish a game it’s usually because I’ve gotten bored or frustrated with it, not because it’s too hard for me to finish. So is “It made me feel eight years old again!” a ringing endorsement for a modern game? I don’t know.

2) I can’t really taste the cherry in Cherry Vanilla Pepsi. Which means it tastes pretty much just like Vanilla Pepsi. And I missed Vanilla Pepsi. So I’m pleased with it.

3) They don’t let you use flash photography at the Ringling Bros. museums, which means all our pictures came out yellowed and blurry. It was a pretty interesting experience, but a bit… hmm… unsettling in places. I mean, look at this:

That’s a shoe in a cage, provided with absolutely no context or explanation. Which is exactly how it was presented in the exhibit where we shot the (yellowed and blurry) photo.

Before our excursion to the Ringling museum you’d have never caught me putting “old shoe in an old birdcage” on my list of Scariest Things in the World, but now I think you’ll agree that I sort of have to. I mean… holy crap. This is the plot of Saw VII right here.