Fortunately, while I’m attempting to get my writing going again, I can spend the intermittent time getting my ass handed to me by professional Starcraft players in Starcraft II!  I spent entirely too much time playing Starcraft online back when I was a high-school freshman with braces, bleached hair, and a crappy haircut.  The thrill of the zergling rush.  The agony of your carrier fleet being destroyed.  The hilarious lurker army shredding apart your squad of marines in a nano-second.  All great, great stuff.  Unfortunately, my growing fondness for Diablo II and the encroachment of the professionals led to less and less Starcraft, but it still holds a place in my heart to this day (benchmarking, wiki, synergy).

Now, 12 years after the fact, it’s back!  I thought I had escaped but it’s pulling me back in!  Only it’s got a roman numeral after it (turbines).

Starcraft II, a game I’ve waited years and years for, is finally out.  And it’s glorious.  Plus it sort of justifies this ridiculous computer I bought last year.  Though I question the ridiculousness of the computer now – bloody planned obsolescence.  Everything old is new again, and while the game has changed in subtle ways, you never quite lose the feel for pumping out probes and pylons to kick start your economy, or building a strategic bunker wedged between supply depots and your command center to counter an early rush.  If you never played Starcraft, then you likely have a glazed look in your eyes and don’t care.  If you did, you still likely don’t care because I haven’t written in a while and this stream-of-consciousness style crap is bad when Kerouac writes it, quadruple so when it comes from me (blast fax kudos all around).

Anyway. if you have a computer that can handle it, get Starcraft II.  All the cool kids are doing it (Scientology, RSS feed, Echinacea).

Yeah, I don’t spend very much time around children.

Let me start with a recap of my year.  It’s been an eventful one.  A good one, to be sure.

The Rockies made the playoffs!  I’m primed to turn 25 any week now – that’s nearly a quarter century!  I got a job!  A job I enjoy!  I don’t wake up in the morning dreading the prospect of going to work.  Wonderful.

Most importantly, I’m getting married.  That’s next year, however, and slated for my big November-2010-haven’t-updated-blog-in-a-year-post.

Two young men, ages 15 and 16, were arrested earlier for stealing a car.  Ok, that’s pretty standard.  However, the two stole the car in a successful bid to make it to school on time.  Which leads me to wonder what the punitive measures are for tardiness and/or truancy in Little Rhody.  Most kids who steal a car are doing it to get as far away from school as possible – bombing down to the border to become dive instructors in Tijuana or something.

Apparently the cops had a problem with their chosen method of consummating their compulsory attendance duties.  A classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  Steal a car, get to school on time – that’s a paddlin’.  Late to school – that’s a paddlin’.  Avoid the problem entirely and skip – that’s a paddlin’.  You get the picture.

Anyway, bizarro America.  Right.  Who in their right minds steals a car and then drives to school! ?  If you’re going to steal a car and take it to school, at least make it a Porsche and pick up the ladies in the school parking lot.  Not that I would advocate car theft…But if you’re going to do something stupid, you may as well go big or go home.  Which is why we have the Darwin Awards…but that’s another topic entirely.

Leave it to Australia to bring to the forefront the real reason a young man probably doesn’t want to find himself incarcerated. Here in the states (and this program is presumably a world-wide thing, I wouldn’t know) we tend to focus on the “scared straight” tactic of carting inmates into our schools or wherever to yell and swear at troubled kids in an effort to scare them from committing crimes that would end them in jail /runonsentence. An Aussie court has taken a different tack, however, warning a young driver of the “big, ugly, hairy strong men…who will pay a lot of attention to you – and your anatomy.”

The young man, a 19-year-old with a rap sheet that includes charges of failing to stop at a police alcohol checkpoint and driving without a license, was making his third court appearance for driving charges. He was given the warning and prohibited from driving until 2013 and shipped off to Van Diemen’s land is required to perform 150 hours of community service.  Excluding fellows like Grant Balfour, it’s obvious they either don’t know how to count down under, or don’t play baseball…It’s supposed to be three strikes and you’re out, not four.

At the very least, this is a new frontier on the war against crime (we’re already fighting intangibles like terror, drugs, illiteracy, hunger – why not crime?).  The prospect of a big, big strong man with hairy knuckles paying meticulous attention to me and my anatomy would certainly be enough to make me pull over at that alcohol checkpoint.