Quote of the Day from Offhand Manor

"Where'd you put the crowbar?" - Me, in the parking lot of Orchard Supply Hardware.

Yes, we're shopping for That Thing In The Desert.

Drinking the Kool-Aid again...

I was drifting away from Traveller. I had pretty much stopped reading the TML, was focusing on Thousand Suns and D&D4E (like I'm really expecting to ever get a game together again) and happily accepting my status as an Elder (or is that Eldar?) Statesman of the Traveller universe.

Then Mongoose Publishing released a new edition of the Grand Old Game.

I resisted, honestly. I told myself that I didn't need another throwback to 1977. I had enough Traveller rules to choke a K'kree. I honestly wasn't even going to consider the game. Until I glanced at the preview pages.

whimper. They don't play fair!

So I ordered the book, and I'm impressed. Mongoose and Gareth Hanrahan have managed to capture the spirit of Classic Traveller while bring the rules into the 21^st century.

So, being me, I'm already considering a setting (The Night is Darkest Before The Dawn, the Sylea Federation in its early days) and thinking about At Close Quarters version 2.0

Oh, one amusing note. Like any group, Traveller fans have developed their own jargon over the years. We use abbreviations to track the various editions; CT for Classic Traveller, TNE for The New Era, etc,. Want to guess what the accepted reference for Mongoose Traveller is?

( You're going to love this one. )

And now this commercial announcement

Being in a truck for an average of eight hours a day means I spend a great deal of time listening to the radio. My preferred station while driving is KCBS. If I want music, I'll usually plug in my iPod. FM reception is pretty bad over most of my route and I'm enough of an audiophile to dislike static intensely.

This means I hear a lot of commercials. More accurately, I hear the same commercials over and over. A few are clever, most are noise, and there are those that annoy me no end. This post is about that latter category.

The first is a series of ads for Accountemps, a company that provide temporary accounting and finance workers. The commercials started out great. There are three main characters: Nurlman, an accountant at an unnamed company, Mr. Fernwell, his supervisor, and Bob, the never-heard from Accountemp temporary. In the first ad, Nurlman calls in sick, sounding terrible, but as Mr. Fernwell tells him about the amazing job Bob is doing in his place he experiences a sudden recovery from his illness, declaring he could be in by noon. No, Fernwell tells him, Bob has everything in hand. This commercial worked because it hit on so many points. We've all used an illness to milk an extra day or two off; and I think the fear of someone doing your job better than you is nearly universal. This ad stated "Accountemps provides exemplary workers who will handle the tasks you set for them."

But then, over time, the series changed. Nurlman's voice, a normal man's in the first few ads, became increasingly high-pitched and whiny. The set-ups grew increasingly bizarre, to the point that Nurlman, allegedly a full-time accountant, didn't know what Payroll meant. Seriously, I listen to these later ads and wonder how the company has survived this long. The message has changed to "If the loser Accountemps sends out to your site can count to ten, you're ahead of the game as far as we're concerned!"

The other ad that really bugs me comes courtesy of my former employers. Cost Plus first opened in 1958, the same year as the Giants inaugural season in San Francisco. So they've been running an add that goes roughly like this:

"When was baseball invented? That's a question sure to start an argument in any sports bar. Some say the game developed in New England in the 1830s from an English game called Rounders. Giants fans know that the game was really born in 1958..."

Stop. Right there.

1958? So, Mel Ott was never a Giant? Bobby Thomson didn't hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth against the Bums? Christy Mathewson didn't pitch two no hitters with a career ERA of 2.13? John McGraw was never our player/manager? Willie freaking Mays never made The Catch in the 1954 World Series?

Being a member of the Giants Nation means embracing the teams entire history, all the way back to the New York Gothams of 1883. Good, bad, and ugly, it's all part of being a part of the Giants experience. Especially the part about hating everything having to do with the Scum from Chavez Ravine.

OK, that's off my chest. Now, back to our program!