I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do . . . ho boy.

Last night, I dreamt that John Kerry and John Edwards paid me a visit in order to win my support in the primary. Which is to say, they were trying to convince me to vote for Kerry — Edwards confided that he knew he wasn’t going to win, but that Kerry had promised him the VP slot. I was quite flattered that they should give me such personal attention, but I had one important policy question before I gave them my response:

“What about the increase in bear hunting?”

Whoosh. The scene changed to a grizzled old guy in flannel talking about how hunters used to hunt all sorts of different animals, but now that the market for bear meat is so lucrative, they’re not hunting anything else. He expressed concern for the bear population, but when a living’s to be made hunting bear but not deer, what’s a family man to do?

Whoosh. I watched, as if from the top of a cliff, as the grizzled old guy shot down a brown bear and took it to the bear meat market, where there were dozens of wicker baskets filled with bear meat. Then suddenly at my elbow this guy appeared who had no individual identity but I instinctively knew was a Democratic Presidential Candidate.

“I can hunt bears too!” he exclaimed. “No!” I hollered, but he was already down there in the wilderness going after a _polar_ bear. I tried to shout out to him that polar bears are unusually dangerous and he should be careful, but of course he walked right up to a big dirty polar bear, who mauled him almost casually and then ambled away. The last part of the dream is the politician gushing blood in a way that’s so gory it wakes me up and I have trouble getting back to sleep.

Interpretation? I’m not even going to _touch_ it.

Man, I picked the wrong time to take a few days off of blogreading. There’s much good stuff out there on Iowa, post-Iowa, and the SOTU. Plus the normal chatter. Here’s a few links.

* Mary Kay of “Gallimaufry”:http://marykay.typepad.com/gallimaufry/ volunteered for Dean in Iowa and blogged the whole time. The most recent entry is “here”:http://marykay.typepad.com/gallimaufry/2004/01/iowa_part_the_f_1.html, and her sum-up is still forthcoming. Also (via “Calpundit”:http://www.calpundit.com/) there’s more Iowa reportage “here”:http://yin.blog-city.com/read/443926.htm from a blogger who participated in an actual caucus meeting.
* “Talking Points Memo”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ is hotter than usual these days, with Josh Marshall reporting directly from New Hampshire. For those who don’t read him regularly: the guy got enough donations to fund his trip there, so he’s doing all his reporting directly for his blog, as opposed to getting himself there on a press junket and giving the blog only the table scraps. He also has an interesting “interview with George Soros”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_01_18.html#002454.
* Dan of “Dislogue”:http://dislogue.dansch.net/, has returned after a long blogging hiatus, popping up here in Arlington, of all places. Welcome to the neighborhood!

Bush’s State of the Union address featured national security and the war on terror as one of his major topics, and he never mentioned Osama Bin Laden once. He has co-opted Iraq so successfully into the W on T that hardly anybody even calls him on it anymore.

If I didn’t have a personal stake in matters like, oh, say, the fate of our country, I might be able to step back and marvel at the way that he’s managed to bully the terms of the narrative to his liking and have the media and a good chunk of the electorate trot along behind. It’s a triumph of mass manipulation. As it is, though, I don’t marvel — I just grit my teeth and hope for the best in November.

A while back, I was worried about this sort of outcome: lots of Democratic contenders still in the field, sniping at each other’s heels and generally causing a ruckus. With Kerry’s victory in Iowa it now looks likely that a clear winner won’t emerge for several weeks — one commentator on NPR today even predicted that the fight for the nomination could go right up to the convention.

I _was_ worried, but it actually strikes me now as an advantage. Karl Rove can’t unleash the hounds on the winner until there _is_ a winner, and each week the race is still on is another week where there’s not just one person to attack. A close race also keeps the Democrats above the fold no matter what new attention-grabbing policy initiatives Bush unveils. Whoever finally emerges from the pack will have the aura of a victor, too.

So who do I want that to be? Back when I “decided to support Dean”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000080.html, I had already written off Kerry, which was clearly a mistake. One thing I’d love to know is whether his surge represents (at least in part) the fact that he actually does have a viable campaign, or whether he was just scoring off last-minute doubts about Dean. Kerry’s politics are actually a little closer to mine than Dean’s, but I’m concerned that he doesn’t have a campaign organization that can go toe to toe with Bush. As for that Dean-doubt issue . . . it bugs me. I find myself thinking “perhaps he’s too irate and brash to get elected,” but then must remind myself that this is just the media meme du jour, and may or may not have any grounding in reality. I wish I knew somebody closer to him who has a clearer idea of what he’s really like.

Ultimately either one of them is going to have a hard time beating Bush, but I wouldn’t be unhappy with either of them as President. So for now, _viva la campaña_!

UPDATE: Alert reader Ana has very kindly corrected my Spanish.

Here we are, nigh on six months’ worth of blogging, and I’ve yet to so much as mention my enthusiasm for German-style board games. That ain’t right! It’s true that I don’t get a chance to play a fine board game as often as I’d like, but the holidays are always a good time to try out some new ones. I picked up three newish games over the past few months; here are some capsule reviews.

New England won the GAMES magazine Game of the Year award last year. Its big design gimmick is in the bidding: the amount you bid each turn determines both your placement in the turn order and the amount you must pay for each of your two actions. This creates a very steep curve and a high price for going first, and as you might expect, going first can be very, very important. Players develop three different types of land (settlement, pasture, farmland) on a grid, so a la Lowenherz, there’s quite a bit of strategy in initial placement and in boxing out other players with your own real estate. Turns go fast and all the games I’ve played ended quite closely. The worst thing to be said about New England is that there’s not much new or groundbreaking about it—it’s another solid, B-level German game.

Alhambra won last year’s Spiel des Jahres prize, the German award that tends to favor games with broader appeal, unlike the more highbrow Deutscher Spiele Pries. The game is very simple: you have a hand of cards in four different currencies with which to buy and place buildings in your own Alhambra structure such that all the walls and roads line up. You only take one action each turn, so things move very fast. It has that “everybody’s working on their own project” dynamic of Princes of Florence and Puerto Rico, and at first glance it seemed like there wasn’t enough basis for interaction among players. Turns out there is, of course, and the game works rather well. Good beer & pretzels fare for the ubergeek set.

Carcassonne is old news to the savvy boardgamer, and a perennial favorite. At the game store I noticed they had a new edition that boxed the original game right in with both the expansions, neither of which I had ever got around to picking up. Even these are a year or two old, but nobody in Michigan had played with them either, so this game ended up getting the most play of all over the holidays. Mondo Carcassonne is a longer, more involved game than the bare original—not much more complicated, really, but something that’ll take 60-90 minutes instead of a quick half-hour. If the original game had a weakness, it was that drawing a tile of limited usefulness (like the dreaded elbow road) basically wasted your turn. The expansions add some more options, and pieces (like the builder) that can make that boring road piece an actual joy to draw.

That’s it for recent finds. Games on my wish list for the future: Pirate’s Cove, Traumfabrik, and of course a good Crokinole board.

I want to be more excited about the new agenda for space exploration than I am. My enthusiasm is undercut for obvious reasons: the crass political timing of the announcement, and the fact that Bush deferred all the real funding challenges to his successors. Like all grand schemes, it’s as likely that it will fizzle as that it will get off the ground. But I hope it happens. I hope we make a moon base, and eventually get people to Mars. Not just because it will inspire the kiddies to study math and science, but because it will inspire _us_ — it will give the country a unified goal to work toward, or at least to watch eagerly. We live in a bifurcated society, the hope of a post-9/11 movement toward national unity long-since lost. We could do with a big goal to bring us together. While the funding of it might get politicized, the goal itself — sending men and women to the stars — remains refreshingly aloof from partisan debate.

If you had asked me twenty years ago — or any of us, for that matter — how far Out There humanity would reach by 2004, we’d have assumed a Mars base and some asteroid mining projects, _at least_. We’d have been bitterly disappointed to learn how little would actually be accomplished in that time. We’ve been spinning our wheels for too long. The expectations of the popular imagination might have been optimistic, but they weren’t unrealistic. It’s high time we sought to put ourselves where we should already be.

Having a cold is bad enough, but it’s way worse when you’re worried about passing it on to your six-week-old daughter. Fortunately she shows no signs of getting sick. Her take on life is still very much in the eat/sleep/poop mode, though she’s beginning to find certain things in life mildly amusing, which is fun.

Anyway, in a continuation of yesterday’s diversionary tactics, have a look at:

* Teresa Nielsen Hayden on “geek knitting”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004347.html#004347.
* Chad Orzel on “going into space”:http://www.steelypips.org/principles/2004_01_11_principlearchive.php#107390976828382546 (make sure to read all three parts).
* And finally, “Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/01/dem_bones_dem_b.html wins the award for best opening line of a blog entry in this century:

John’s recent musings on plastinated corpses reminded me that we have a suspicious amount of human remains here at my mom’s house.

“Nice card”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/misc/george.jpg, Mr. President. Ella will appreciate it someday.

I’m still not voting for you, though.

Sorry for the content gap over here. I have a couple of entries (“Needed: A Grandparent Clock”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/archives/000246.html and “Smile Standards”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/archives/000247.html) over on the “baby blog”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/ that are broader in scope than the usual Ella-specific gushing. Go look at those while I figure out what to write about here.

From mid-November through the Christmas season, the best food in the universe is popcorn. Not just any popcorn, but those squat, decorated cylinders that contain equal parts of the cheese, butter, and caramel-flavored varieties. These popcorn tins are, in fact, perfect. You would _think_ that the perfect bin would be two-thirds full of cheese popcorn, with each of the others only taking up one-sixth of the volume. That would certainly be a more appropriate proportion considering the relative tastiness of the three types — but it is precisely the scarcity of the cheese popcorn that makes each fistful of it the more delicious, and in turn forces you to take some time to appreciate the subtleties of the other two. (This argument works equally well for the unwashed hordes who actually prefer caramel or butter to cheese.)

Suanna and I were making a return ‘n’ exchange run earlier today, a dreadfully tedious errand that took us to Toys R Us, among other places. But it was there, standing at the customer service counter, that I happened to glance at a pile of familiarly-sized cylinders decorated with pictures of the Hulk and Spider-Man. A sign in front of them read:

Popcorn Tins
Normally $7.50
Now only $.50

That’s not a typo. Look in the dictionary under “serendipity,” and you will see a picture of me holding a Spider-Man popcorn tin with a goofy smile on my face. If you believe in God, “serendipity” is too weak a word — you must resort to the far more sinewy “Providence.” And if you don’t believe in God, an event like the Popcorn Tin Unlooked-For will change your mind for a day.

Exercising a monumental degree of self-restraint, I only bought one tin. We’re driving back to D.C. in a few days, and there won’t be any spare room in the car. I can finish one tin between now and Monday easily, but not two — that’s as sad a commentary on the limitations of these mortal shells we inhabit as I can think of just now.