Brothers and Other Characters
My brother came North to visit me this weekend. He spent most of yesterday watching Firefly on DVD, but he also brought his copy of Empire Builder, so we snuck a game into the evening.
For those hapless readers not familiar with Empire Builder, it is a railroad-building board game. Players draw cards representing loads which need to be transported, build railroad networks on a map of the United States (and Southern Canada), and move their trains (one per player) about to deliver the loads. John beat me by three turns (I maintain that he was smuggling—I mean, who pays $36 million for rice). I kept trying to think about the game as a graph theory problem, but my best idea was that it would be interesting to play the game with the load cards sorted generally in order of increasing value. It would be fun to see if it makes a difference in how the railroads develop. Also, I’d really like to play with a full complement of (six) players sometime.
After lunch today, I took John over to the Mall of America to meet his ride back to Decorah. I figured that since I was there, I’d take a walk around. I didn’t buy anything (again—the Dual 2.3 GHz G5 I saw last week was still at the shiny things store, but I guess I must be marginally fiscally responsible). I did see something completely unexpected. At one side of the mall is a space where they sometimes set up a stage for guest performers. As I was approaching it, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of small children cheering. Then, from around the back of the stage, right in front of me, came—I kid you not—the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I was dumbfounded. I sort of assumed they were cancelled in the mid-nineties along with every other cartoon I ever liked, to be replaced with another show about elementary-school children animated by the same computer as every other cartoon show. I was struck by how short they were; I’d always envisioned them as somewhat larger. Well, I guess as teenage mutant ninja turtles it’s reasonable for them to be teenage-sized. I wonder how they do that, anyway. I mean, they were teenaged when I was about five years old, so shouldn’t they be like thirty by now? Found straight jobs and settled down? I guess Thirty-Something Mutant Married Turtles doesn’t have quite the same ring.
