Heeeere cooooomes aaaaaa-nother one...

Happy birthday to a man who has gone out of his way to help me avoid cabin fever in the absence of my Songbird, as well as an integral part of Georgia filk fandom. sffilk is a year older today, and may he have many more.

In Memoriam: Ernest Gary Gygax, 1938-2008

Less than four months shy of what would have been his 70th birthday, the founder of the massive multimedia empire that is Dungeons & Dragons, E. Gary Gygax, has died after years of chronic health problems. Thanks to fleetfootmike for the news and this link to further reportage.

I never met Mr. Gygax, but I owe him a tremendous debt. The role-playing game he devised not only gave me an outlet for my own creativity, but made it possible for a shy, bookish, awkward teenager with no friends in school to find some...and have a way to spend Friday and Saturday nights other than sitting home wishing he could find a girl to date. This continued even after I went to college and found a much better supply of actual women who were willing to be seen in public with me.

That D&D helped accelerate my developing fannishness is beyond dispute. Even though the gameplay itself at times was tedious (I usually enjoyed creating and drawing the characters more than the game itself), it left me with some fond memories and some really good people in my life. So from the bottom of this aging fanboy's heart, Mr. Gygax, thank you very much and sleep sweet.

Found Filk: Rock stars and pop stars (female ones, anyhow) really are different

If this guy isn't a demented-music superstar already, he may well be one soon:

"Pop Star" by James @ War (Parody of "Rockstar" by Nickelback)

Supposedly, the members of Nickelback have actually heard this parody of their hit single and loved it. Sadly, the people who really need to hear it probably wouldn't even get the joke if they did...

Today's primaries: The good news and the bad

It's finally official: Arizona's Sen. John McCain now has won enough delegates to be granted the status of presumptive nominee in the race for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination. His sole remaining (serious) opponent, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, threw in the proverbial towel tonight and made a withdrawal speech to his voters and campaign workers urging them to unite behind the party's choice.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Sens. Hillary Clinton (NY) and Barack Obama (IL) are still locked in limbo as Ohio and Texas races are still considered "too close to call," while Vermont went for Obama and Rhode Island for Clinton.

On the one hand, having to face McCain, a seasoned campaigner on the political and military fields both, is enough to give any Democrat pause. McCain's tendency toward what some hard-liners in his own party deem "liberal" positions on some issues make him far more potentially attractive to so-called "swing" voters in the center than, say, a more ideologically pure candidate like Huckabee would have been. On the other hand, he's alienated more than enough of his party's crucial base voters to make him vulnerable...especially to either Clinton, who has both her own political savvy and her husband's to call on, or Obama, who has charisma to burn and has fired up his supporters with an almost messianic fervor (and I'm far from the first to use that word in describing the "Obama effect").

And it's got to be a bitter pill to swallow for those in the wingnut punditocracy like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who have been busily painting McCain as the next worst thing to the Antichrist for months. (Coulter actually said she'd campaign for Hillary before she'd let McCain win the White House.) So what does El Rushbo do now? Tell his 20 million weekly listeners to stay home this Nov. 3rd out of sheer spite...and let my party take away the White House from his? I can't see that happening—especially not if there's a chance the even-more-loathed Clintons could be moving back into the place. I can see him saying something along the lines of a paraphrase of former SecDef Don Rumsfeld: "We go to election with the candidate we have, not the candidate we wish we had."

What a yummy schadenfreude/vindication cocktail for the man who lost so ignominiously to the Current Occupant eight years ago in his last bid for the brass ring to end all brass rings. And once again, the point needs to be made that the only thing keeping McCain's mitts off that ring will be us on the left getting our people to the polls in strength. The way things look now, no matter who wins the Dem race, turnout shouldn't be a problem.