And then, of course, there's le Jake Royale

This week cannot get any stranger. Trust me on that.

In other news (??? — yeah, that’s right, the strangeness, as it turns out, is not blogfodder, or blogf, as the Brits would refer to it; sorry about that) (as in bumf, you know?) (don’t you ever get out of the house?) I’ve been watching my iPhone 4 charge dribble down to nothing recently at speeds beyond comprehension. A little of that goes a long way, or, more to the point, a little of that doesn’t go a very long way at all. For a while I thought it might be my use of Bluetooth in my car listening to audiobooks (for some reason the phone isn’t linking via USB but every other device is), but I think actually it was due to too many notifications and location services. Did I recently update? I must have. Every update seems to want to make everyone a party to everything I’m doing yet again, but since I am not of the O’Cean persuasion, I do not need to tweet, toot, message, FB and 4Square every moment of my existence, nor do I wish to know when someone else does. When I finally realized the situation I turned everything off; we’ll see if that worked.

I also read that YDKJ had updated on the iPad to a multi-person game, which called for an immediate download. YDKJ ranks in the pantheon of trivia games, and there were many fond hours spent playing it back in the day. Sporcle has its moments, but Jack was just the nuts. An upgrade of either Windows or my Mac at some dark point in the past made my old disks unplayable; I remember clearly the day I had to tell this to the Emperor of Hamiltonia. His look of terminal sadness is etched in my mind. Anyhow, I haven’t played the new game yet. The weekend approaches.

Speaking of games on the iPad, or for that matter on the iPhone, I have to admit that I’ve been much less of a player than I would have expected. I download games, including games I have to pay for, and as often as not it takes me months to get around to playing them, and then I’m disappointed, and that’s that. Of course, they don’t cost much, but still… I go back to a small handful over and over—poker, sudoku, kenken, W.e.l.d.e.r. and maybe a couple of others—but they’re all casual and fast, the sort of thing you do while you’re waiting for your takeout Chinese lunch. For that matter, I don’t take advantage of that many other apps either. 10 or 20 at most. Enormous app stores are a great way to sell devices, but when push comes to shove, how many apps does anyone use? I’ve tried to convince people of this at the DJ, but a lot of content providers are dazzled by the enormous success of a handful of apps, and think that that’s where the action is. I don’t think so, at least not in my business. I can’t imagine Angry Books any time soon. Not that I haven't thrown a few books across the room now and then myself. Shades of Becky Sharp!

Meanwhile, tomorrow we haul off to Philadelphia. As W.C. Fields says in My Little Chickadee, “I’d like to see Paris before I die. Philadelphia would do.” Then again, why don’t we have a tournament in Paris? If it had an octos bid, everybody would go, damn the expense. That’s the what the $ircuit is all about. Hell, I’d go, for that matter. UPenn has cheesesteaks for lunch. UParis would have baguettes with brie. We could go on the weekend the nouveau Beaujolais is released; they drink that stuff for breakfast when it first comes out. Actually, I think that’s the Bump weekend. I'd switch in a minute. We could call it La Tourni Bosse! Avec les prix merdiques! Et la ronde “Oui Virginie!” Et la coupe des fruits voyages! We could host it at the Sorbonne. With trophies shaped like little Eiffel Towers. Moules frites for lunch. Debate ziti for dinner (because that's all anyone ever expects at a tournament), but whereas O'C calls it "Tastes of the Mediterranean," we would call it "La cuisine de la Méditerranée." Which would you rather have?

You know, I could really get into this.