Lawless Friday!

An ode to one my favorite childhood toys.

FEAR

     Everyone has a fear.  Something that speeds up the heart, sends shivers down the spine, and causes one to cower like aaaaaaaa, like aaaaaaaa, like aaaaaaaa... coward.  For Howie Mandel, it's germs.  For Matthew McConaughey, it's revolving doors.  For Nick Carter, it's success (lucky for him).  For me, it's this:

     Television static.  Just looking at this puts me in a state of great unease; I can hear that horrible hissing sound that exists in the void between TV stations.  It's overwhelming.  It's paralyzing. It's fingernails running down a chalkboard.  

     This all goes back to childhood.  For one haunted week in grade school, the family room TV had a poltergeist.  At randoms times during the dead of night it would turn itself on.  STATIC.  FULL VOLUME.  Yanked violently from my slumber, I descended the dark stairs, the TV growling louder and louder as I drew nearer.  I struggled and staggered against the crackling current.  With one final lunge, I hit the power button, ending the nightmare.  Before an electrician or paranormal detective could properly diagnose the problem, the TV was gone.  We had opted for a larger (less possessed) screen.

     While its days have all but vanished, the emotional damage TV static has caused me cannot be erased.  Changing the TV input from HDMI 1 to Component 2 is a nerve racking experience.  Coat hanger antennas stand like a crucifix to a vampire.  I find myself unable to watch the first 10 seconds of HBO original programming.  Skrillex sends me into fetal position... unless it's the dub-steb remix of Adele's "Someone Like You". Dance-crying is so in right now. 

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY from 1407!

Monday's Mildly Appropriate Illustration

Yea, it's a little late, but who cares?  Look how sharp Cookie Monster is in his suit and top hat.  Oscar, you're lucky to get the crumbs son!   

Original artwork by Mike Majcen.  Touch-ups by yours truly.

Look -- I'm Gina.

Good Evening, Internets!

 There are lots of great ideas flowing in 1407 tonight -- as usual.  I hope you are enjoying our blog!  It will only get better.  (HOW?!  --RIGHT?!?)  Here is a conversation I essentially had with myself RE: some of the better brilliance that's happening here.  (& I AM calling dibs on being Gina.  I think other people will want to be her  -- Panda & Lady WHatley -- I'm looking at you... Maybe be can do different costumes througout the movie?  IDK.  We can compromise!)  Anyway, check you all later  <3

 

The Power of Sax

It's Wednesday and that means only one thing:  POWER SAX!  The saxophone is the only instrument smooth enough, sultry enough, and powerful enough to push one through the hump day with style and grace. 

While the 80's may have been the heydays, Power Sax has enjoyed a recent revival. 
Enjoy these fine example of Power Sax, spanning genres and generations. 

Duran Duran - Rio (4:35)

M83 Midnight City - (3:00)

Lady Gaga - The Edge of Glory (3:00) 

Daryl Hall & John Oates - Maneater (2:40)  

On The Dark Side - Eddie And The Cruisers (1:45)

Stew!

Stew, baring it all

Having had half my face rearranged by the dentist, I have found yet another reason to love stew.  As opposed to your standard soup and Jello diet, stew allows me to enjoy a wide range of flavors and textures, all without compromising millions of dollars in dental work.  Stew is my crutch.  Stew is my savior.  Stew is everything that soup is not: complex, full bodied, savory.  Scarlett Johansson.  Soup can be great, when done right, but often it's bland, predictable, over salted.  Kate Moss.  So here's to you, ScarJo... I mean stew!

Recipe here.

Trust me, it works

I can work a scanner!

This is it folks.  1407BurnBook is fully operational.  Expect original crayon art, rants, raves, and general musings.  Feedback is encouraged.  Contributions are welcomed.   

      -Shaulleen

Words With Batman

On how this bastardized version of Scrabble has killed the integrity of the game

       With all the incredible features on today’s smartphones (email, GPS, streaming music, barcode scanners, robot assistants), perhaps the most utilized one of all is Words With Friends.  Where its muse, Scrabble, has become a relic of family game nights and church basements, WWF has risen as a great time consumer and excuse for people in the same room to not talk to each other. 

For nearly a year, I held out on WWF, scoffing at friends and family members fixated on their two by four inch screens.  But alas, with an eminent surgery on the way (meaning lots of bedridden time to kill), I gave in (sold out) and started a WWF account.  No stranger to Scrabble, I figured I would easily vanquish my slower and less verbose acquaintances.  But as the accumulated, I was perplexed on how these dunderheads kept lambasting me.  Why weren’t my Scrabble skills working in WWF?  The general game play and goals of the two are the same: use letter tiles to create words and score points.  Bonus spaces multiply letter and word values.  May the best logophile win.  And yet, with all my gaudy SAT words in tow, I ceased to prevail.  Then one fateful afternoon, whilst watching TV land, it hit me: KA!  I’m playing Words with Batman.*

 Examine a recent WWF board and you’ll likely find it littered with KAs, QIs, ZAs, and BAPs.  The vocabulary more closely resembles a 1960’s Adam West fight scene than it does a lexical battle amongst intellectual peers.  Batman words run rampant.  WWF games are a repository of obscure mini words, because these punch/kick sounds win games.  A ‘Q’ placed in just the right spot (on a triple letter space, between two I’s on different axes) can rake in 62 points (by spelling QI twice).  Now can anyone tell me what QI means?**  It’s irrelevant.  One tile, 62 points.  The same goes for the word ZA, apparently an acceptable shortening of ‘pizza’.  With yields that high from single letters, there’s not much incentive in going for big words.  Consider the fact that WWF awards only 30 bonus points, as opposed to 50 in Scrabble, for using all of one’s tiles in a single turn (known in the biz as a bingo) This 40% reward reduction makes a big difference in how players choose to lay their tiles.  A lone Q may end up scoring more points than QUICKENS, even though it’s a bingo.  In Scrabble, a rack liquidating play is the grand slam of moves.  In WWF, it’s more like a ground rule double.

 Bingo bonuses aside, the main flaw with WWF is that it allows endless possible word submissions, with no penalty attempting non-words.  The original Scrabble has a rule hindering players from laying down words that they don’t know.  After the tiles are placed, an opponent may “challenge” that potential word, at which point a dictionary is consulted.  If the “word” in question is not in the dictionary, the offending player loses a turn (and some pride).  If the word is real, the challenger loses a turn.  This is a thing of beauty: a built-in system of checks and balances.  The challenge rule demands a certain confidence in one’s English proficiency, one not present in WWF.

              Without a challenge rule, we end up with a board chock full of KAs, ZAs, and BAPs, as well some longer (and equally unknown) words such as NEUSTON, BLIN, and GROK.  Their meanings unknown to the average player, words like these score big and win games.  Additionally, as more and more 2-3 letter words populate the board, a phenomenon known as the “staircase effect” occurs.  For fear of opening up the board to an opponent, and because of the high point to tile ratio of “Batman” words, players often layer tiles on top of each other, in a staircase pattern of mini-words.  Once a staircase has begun, it’s hard to escape. 

WWF does not need to copy Scrabble’s challenge rule in order to restore integrity to the game.  In fact, a challenge rule won’t even work for WWF, since opponents can only see words after they are accepted and scored.  Instead, I propose a one strike policy.  For each turn, a player gets only one freebie.  One shot at making up a word.  If the second submission is not legit, that player loses a turn.  It’s that simple.  If you don’t know what you are playing, then you don’t deserve points for it.  Batman words and staircases will become less common and gambles on words such as CROZE will be just that, gambles.   Words With Friends may have taken Scrabble viral and put it in the palm or your hand, but it shouldn’t ruin the heart and soul of the game: flexing one’s lexical nuts.  That’s simply flagitious. 

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*This never happened.

**The circulating life force whose existence and properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine.

1407 Burn Book is up and running

Kraaaaaaaa!

And like that, this blog has officially started.

Original artwork and content coming soon.

In the meantime, pontificate on this:

Why do we park in driveways and drive in parkways?