Oh, Yahtzee. You charismatic stallion, you.

Didn't get in until about quarter after eleven today. I was at first surprised that Jeanne was willing to let me off on such short notice, but getting back to the office, I see why. There is nobody here. Nobody. It is a freaking ghost town. I could be blasting death metal and nobody would notice. Or sitting around naked. Or hell, LEAVING. I won't do that, of course, seeing as they basically pay me to sit my ass in this chair, so in this chair my ass shall sit.

The reason I didn't come in at nine today was I drove with Bernie to the airport this morning so he could fly home for the weekend, then drove his car back to Waltham afterward so he wouldn't have to leave it in long-term parking. The bad traffic was kind of terrifying, and I was worried I'd get lost like I usually do, but I not only managed to flawlessly remember the way but also I did a passable job of handling Bernie's car. I drive a two-year-old Scion Tc, an adorable, sporty little car, and I must say I vastly prefer my car Constantine over an old, unfamiliar Camry. Constantine has a lot tighter steering, and Bernie's breaks were a little mushier than I would have liked, but I actually got the hang of it and did a safe and fairly decent job of getting home. No small feat for a terrible traveler like me. I am, in short, absurdly proud of myself. :-)

So I have a car for the weekend. Oh, the trouble I have planned. ;-) No, no, I'm totally kidding. But it was fun to freak Bernie out by talking about it.

I have also recently embarked on a probably brief but at least momentarily bright-burning love affair with Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation. The man is brilliant and hilarious, and his video game review earns its name by its rapid-fire-run-on-sentence-full-blast style of delivery. He's incredibly clever and well-spoken, peppering his reviews with hilarious comparisons, perfect metaphors, naughty words, and of course, really solid criticism. I like that he doesn't hate everything, and he's still willing to find bad points even in the things he likes. He has no slavish devotion to anything. His peppy voice and his fun British accent really put the icing on the cake. I confess, I've only played about a third of the games he reviews, and heard of/know something about around a third more, but even when I don't know what he's talking about I find him informative as well as hilarious. He often manages to encapsulate my thus-far-unarticulated feelings on a lot of games in a flurry of insight, verbosity, and profanity in precisely the right way-- his comments on MMORPGs particularly hits the nail on the head. I even love all the little details, like the weird and often bizarrely appropriate introductory music he chooses, or at least until the host site gave him that intro sequence. I keep my headphones on in the office, though, because I've decided it's less embarrassing to to get weird looks for laughing at apparently nothing than for the whole department to hear Yahtzee yelling about Lara Croft's "STONKING GREAT TITS."

Go watch Zero Punctuation. Even if you're not a gamer, you'll probably laugh anyway.