The best board game ever...

In early October of last year I had the opportunity to make a photo of a local Seattle game designer and entrepreneur who was beginning to market a new board game called Canoe. That gentelman was Bruce Alsip, who has been designing games for other people for over twenty years and has had some great successes. He is now living his dream of creating a world class strategy game exclusively through his own company.

The first game he invented was the beautiful and thought provoking Wykersham. In all of his designs he has tried to incorporate natural woods and hand crafted game pieces that are, as often as possible, made here in the USA. Canoe is no exception. He has a tendancy to keep his designs classic, and to add a timelessness that will make the games interesting to play and pleasing to look at for years to come. The other way Bruce's games set themselves apart is in the interesting look and feel of the boards and their pieces. All of his games are real conversation pieces. Just having them on your table invites all kinds of comment from those around. I play Canoe in public up to four days a week and have taken to having Bruce's marketing materials available to people because I get so many inquirys.

Canoe's name comes from a relative of Bruce's who used to have a company that built fantastically beautiful handmade wooden canoes. The Willits Brothers manufactured nearly a thousand canoes from their small shop in Day Island Tacoma over nearly 60 years. There is even a gambit in the game itself that is called a "Willits" in honor of these great craftsmen.

The best part though is, of course, the gameplay. Canoe is a "race game" similar to Backgammon with some of the strategy of Chess and the point scoring of Dominoes. There are also elements of checkers in it too. The play is fast-paced and allows the player to be wonderfully vindictive toward his or her opponent. This ruthless quality is one that I cherish. Having the ability to really thrash on your opponent is something that makes a good game great. Canoe can be very cutthroat.

The game is played between two players using cubes that look very much like the betting cubes from Backgammon. They were actually modified bacgammon cubes in the prototype. The cubes are moved around the board by rolling dice, but the dice also have another role. Depending on whether an even or an odd die is being played, the moving cube will be rotated to either the next number higher or the next number lower in the sequence. In this way the cubes have an extra transformation during the turn. Thus, the true dimention of the game comes alive. It is due to this complexity that this game has remained among the best I have ever played. That is saying a lot for me. It also says volumes that I play this game almost daily (up to 12 complete games a week in a typical workweek) and still haven't gotten to the level of proficiency that I would say I have become a "master."

I would recommend this game to anyone who has ever been an enthusiast of either Backgammon, Chess, or Dominoes.

A thorough explanation of the game and it's history are available at the Canoe website here. The website is also the only place to purchase the game. (Unless you live in the greater Seatttle area in which case you can get one from Bruce himself)

Take a look at the very least, it's fantastic!

Who says reality TV is all bad?

"Extreme Makeover" turns tears into smiles

Since they moved into the big, new house that "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" built for them two months ago, the Dore family of Kingston has been living with self-imposed don'ts — as in "don't sit there" and "don't put that there" — afraid that a stray jacket or dirty dish would spoil the look of a place so perfect it didn't seem like home.

Then Roseanne Dore's friends came over the other day and found laundry piled on the couch. They knew the Dores were settling in.

Just what's inside the six-bedroom, seven-bath home has been kept secret since the home was revealed to the family Nov. 17. They had to sign a contract promising not to discuss its contents and to limit visitors until after the show featuring the family airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on KOMO-TV's Channel 4.

For thousands in the extended Kingston community who watched the project take shape — or helped make it happen — it's been a long-awaited event.

Roseanne Dore, a widow and mother of daughters Aariel,13; Sarah, 17; and Jessica, 22, had been living on the property on Kiwi Lane in a storage shed with no plumbing since the family's home burned down eight months earlier.

This is one of the best stories I have heard in the last two years. I amost always get chocked up just heaing about it. I am just that sappy but I also think that the producers of the "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" show have their hearts in the right place.

I have, for the most part, been very much a hater of all things Reality TV has to offer but here we have an oppertunity to bring someone up and out of a bad situation. I find this type of show to be a reason to watch TV, At least network TV; that i haven't had for a long time now. Good job! If you can turn me into a reality TV viewer it could work for anybody.

Read the rest of the story. It's worth it!

GOP Leadership sees the light!

House G.O.P. Voids Rule It Adopted Shielding LeaderWASHINGTON, Jan. 3 - Stung by criticism that they were lowering ethical standards, House Republicans on Monday night reversed a rule change that would have allowed a party leader to retain his position even if indicted.

Lawmakers and House officials said Republicans, meeting behind the closed doors of the House chamber, had acted at the request of the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, who had been the intended beneficiary of the rule change.

When they rewrote party rules in November, Republicans said they feared that Mr. DeLay could be subjected to a politically motivated indictment as part of a campaign finance investigation in Texas that has resulted in charges against three of his associates. The decision, coupled with other Republican proposals to rewrite the ethics rules, drew fierce criticism from Democrats and watchdogs outside the government, who said the Republican majority was subverting ethics enforcement.

I actually can't believe this. The DeLay rule was one of the most controversial ethics rules in the last ten years in the House and I thought that it ws just going to be passed no matter what the electorate thought. All of the signs were lining up saying that DeLay was just going to ram this one home to save his own sorry ass.

Apparently there are more than a few GOP lawmakers who value their own tushies a bit more than they value "strong leadership." I am very glad to hear that they are seeing (or possibly hearing from constituents) that this course of action may be worse for the country than it's benefits would be good.

It seems to me that to be the party of "moral leadership" you might want to practice what you preach. Allowing Delay to serve in a leadership position while under indictment in Texas for campaign finance abuses, after hammering others for the same thing, might seem a bit hypocritical. Finally this message seems to be getting through.

The GOP Leadership in today's annnouncement also stated that they were leaving untouched the curent, tough ethics rules that, as recently as last night, were under threat of eviceration. This might signal that there is beginning to be a genuine moral backlash to the "morality" party's ill concieved relaxation of ethics rules.

More will almost certainly be made of this in the next few days. I will endeavour to bring more detail as it comes available.

Thank God for the Fafblog!

Of the Year 2004: Fuck It:

Some old dead guy once said that a year is a feast of days that we should savor one by one. If that's true then somebody already got to 2004 before Giblets did, probably a large foul-smelling barnyard animal, and it is now sitting in a steaming pile of crap on Giblets's front porch.

Giblets was even less satisfied with 2004 than he was by 2003. Where was Giblets's money! His power! His rap video mansions with their multitudes of ass-cheek-bearing hos! Instead Giblets saw debt and stupidity and headaches and annoying people and sickness and unemployment! Instead of a bountiful harvest of fanciful delights Giblets was presented with a vertitible smorgasbord of pungent aromatic mastodon feces!

And Giblets is not alone! What has 2004 done for anyone? Democrats got to get whupped by Republicans. Republicans got to completely sell out everything it means to be a Republican. Iraqis got to get tortured, blown up, and shot at. American troops got to get blown up, shot at, and stuck in Iraq underpaid. Doves got a war they didn't like. Hawks got to not like the war. Gays got marriage rights - in Massachusetts - at least a hundred and thirty six years late. The religious right got to stomp all over gays and watch Jim Caviezel get nailed to a cross. Did it make them feel any better? Does anything make them feel any better?

George Bush? Yeah, okay, so he had a fun time. Happy New Year, George.

The best Giblets can say is it's over. It was a magnificent and overwhelming festival of crapulence, but Giblets choked it down in the largest gulps he could. He awaits the next foul swollen circus monstrosity whose excrement of days lumbers towards us! Fuck you, 2004! And fuck 2005, while we're at it. Giblets is taking no chances.

I have said it before and I'll probably say it again over and over:

"God I love the Fafblog!"