Back in the mid-80s, I was a big fan of interactive fiction computer games. You know. The kind where there's a line of text like:

You are in a room with a door to the north. There is a garden gnome on the ground, a shovel in the corner, and the sound of something falling.
> |

At the command prompt, you could enter "N" for north or "I" for inventory or "smash gnome with shovel." One action at a time and the simpler the better. Of course that latter one wouldn't work because you'd first have to "get shovel."

I wish life used this interface. Your girlfriend is crying. What do I have in my inventory? A rose. Give rose to girlfriend. Puzzle solved.

One of my all-time favorite ones was the IF game of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Created in 1984, this extremely difficult text-based game has quite a few red herrings and many, many brain-meltingly hard puzzles. For example, "'The Babel Fish Dispenser' was a particularly tricky puzzle appearing very early in the game. Failure to 'solve' the Babel fish puzzle did not kill the player, but rendered the remainder of the game unwinnable."

In my younger attempts, I couldn't even get to the pub before the Vogon fleet destroyed Earth, but I still loved every duo-chromatic text second of it.

Luckily, there's a new graphical version of the game online. I have successfully hitchhiked onto the Vogon ship and am attempting to get that pesky Babel Fish into my ear. If I only had a garden gnome...

Play the new Hitchhiker's Guide IF game and see if you can get a Babel Fish stuck in your ear.

There's something soothing about the dulcet tones of Jim Dale's voice. I've listened to him talk while I'm driving long distances, bent my ear to his voice while working, and fallen asleep as he whispers words into the night. And he always talks about the same thing -- the adventures of that young wizard Harry Potter.

He is the voice of all of the Harry Potter audio books. To be more accurate, he does all the voices for all the Harry Potter audio books. Every. Single. Voice. So many, in fact, that he holds the Guinness World Record for "Most Character Voices in an Audio Book" (146 voices for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows").

I first knew him as the [awesomely named] Dr. Terminus in "Pete's Dragon." He played a great traveling snake-oil salesman/con-artist. I wonder what other Disney villains could do great voice work. Possibly one of the Nazis from "Bedknobs & Broomsticks"?

How could I like this guy even more? This anecdotal reply when asked if people recognize his voice (from this article):

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes," he says, "I took my grandson into McDonald's to have a hamburger, and I'm asking in my voice, and I turn around, and two kids there with their eyes so wide open. He said, 'Are you...' and he said, 'Do Dumbledore!' So I'm ordering hamburgers as two different characters from 'Harry Potter.'"

I thought long and hard and decided that, if I was ever in that situation, I would ask him to order my McDLT in the voice of McGonagall.

Imagine my surprise and excitement to hear his voice as the narrator on the new show "Pushing Daisies." That's really all I needed to know to set a season pass. Fortunately, the rest of the pilot ("Pie-Lette") was as enjoyable as Mr. Dale's narration.

Since the Potter books have all been written and recorded, it's nice to know I can still tune in once a week to hear him talk about dead people and pies. He only does one voice, but it's enough.

It was the first large downpour of Fall, a mere six days following the autumnal equinox, and our basement had a small creek running through it from the the wall to the floor drain. My solution of disconnecting our downspout to solve a smaller leak had apparently failed.

There was only one thing left to do. I grabbed a flashlight, flipped up the hood on my sweatshirt, and commando crawled underneath our back deck. At that moment, if I was a betting man, I would have put my money on the three inches of standing water that was leaning against our foundation to be the leaking culprit.

As I started bailing out the miniature, under-the-deck lake, I dared a glance above me to find spiderwebs hung inches from my face like strings of lights at an outdoor cotillion. The only thing that kept me from screaming and scurrying out was an article I read recently about a spider expert who explored a number of spider myths. One of which is that "spiders don't bite except very rarely."

I learned many things from the Spider Myths website. Here are a few of my favorites:

1) Putting a house spider outside is most likely condemning it to death.

2) A "daddy-longlegs" is not really a spider. What I always called a "daddy-longlegs" is actually a harvestman, which is an arachnid but not a spider.

3) It's extremely rare to be bitten by a spider in one's sleep.

4) Spider bites don't actually leave two puncture wounds.

At the end of the day, the under-deck pond was drained and dirt was put in its place. The river is drying up, but is still yet to be really tested.

As a bonus, I also think I figured out my Halloween costume for this year -- "Under the Deck." I'll make a 2x6 rafter hat, hang spiderwebs off it, and smear mud all over my clothes. Now that's a scary. Admittedly, it's slightly less scary if the observer has read the same spider myth article I had.