Yesterday was spent out in Long Island (as opposed to on Long Island, where I spend lots and lots of time) playing various board and card games, which I generally lost at after starting out well. Notable games included Samurai (with its odd Japan-shaped board) and Frank's Zoo, a simple yet entertaining card game.

I also got to playtest Ports of Call, a game Al Newman (our host) is working on for a company whose name escapes me. We made some suggestions about things that could be improved and/or simplified. I kept noticing that the makeshift board sufferred from really bad information design, and over the course of the game came up with a pretty solid idea of how I would design it. Unfortunately, the person who's likely to design the final board has a reputation for pretty-but-inconvenient design. I've long had a fantasy of being independently wealthy and travelling the country helping game designers improve the physical design of their game pieces for free. The independent wealth comes into the picture not only because it would be nice, but because I'm pretty sure that actually doing that kind of design for a living is a pretty marginal existence.

I didn't get to go to the gym yesterday, or the day before, and I ate a lot at yesterday's barbeque (man does not live by games alone), so I expected that I'd have added a pound or two. Not so -- I lost another pound! That may just be because I moved my bowels by a considerable amount before going to the gym (which is where I weigh myself). Those of you who wish I'd include more personal material in this journal are now probably regretting that wish.

A shower, a change of clothes, and more than an hour's subway ride, and I got to Moshe's house by 4 PM, bringing Coca-Cola and strawberries, the latter going nicely with the homemade whipped cream Josh had brought. We hadn't planned it that way, it had just worked out. There were a couple of new people there, as well as the usual crowd. There was much snacking and neeping and telling of Harlan Ellison anecdotes and recruiting for apazines.

We eventually adjourned for Chinese food at the Golden Monkey. There was some confusion as we tried to find out whether the salt, pepper, and squid dish on the menu was the salt-baked squid with jalapeño peppers that many of us like. As is typical of the staff at Chinese restaurants, our waiter's English was very limited, and we had particular difficulty getting across the question of what kind of pepper we were talking about, so I tried something new: I pulled out a sketchbook, a pen, and a set of colored pencils and drew some pictures (see below). I asked the waiter to write in the Chinese for that kind of pepper, and he write it underneath, then crossed that out saying something about it being too hot, and wrote something else above the drawing. I forgot to ask him how to pronounce the characters, so I'm at a loss for how to look them up on the web. There is a system for looking up these kinds of ideographs, used for Chinese and for Japanese kanji, based on knowing some root strokes, but I don't know enough to use those systems. I'll eventually have to learn them for Japanese.

Jalapeño peppers?

I'd had some success before with asking for things with Chinese writing. On our last group visit to Congee Village, I'd managed to put together what I tought were the ideographs for "Roast Duck and Preserved Egg Congee" (a dish Lise, Vicki, and I are fond of, but which is not one of the congees listed on the menu, though each ingredient is listed in one entry or another). Our waitress confirmed for me that I had the right characters, and gave me approximate pronounciations, and I then looked them up on the 'Net and pieced together a GIF (see below) that I could load into iSilo on my Palm. A few days later, I walked into Congee Village and showed my Palm screen to the woman who took my take-out order, and it made life a lot easier.

"Roast Duck and Preserved Egg Congee" in Chinese

We did a bit of ghoulish rubbernecking on the way back to the subway from the Golden Monkey. The Wendy's restaurant where two men shot seven employees a few days ago is right at the intersection of Main and Roosevelt. I hadn't paid enough attention to the news to realize that, having only absorbed that it was in Flushing, so when Chris informed me, I wanted to at least take a peek. We looked over from the next block, not feeling it worth the bother of actually crossing the street, and saw a camera crew and light truck parked in front of it. I figure they were shooting some footage to insert into stories about the suspects having been apprehended. That's life in New York -- daily brushes with noteriety.

As if I hadn't done enough with Asian languages, on the subway ride home Chris and I tried to read as much as we could of one of the multilingual "No Smoking" posters, and I managed to piece together most of what was written in hiragana only. I couldn't understand any of it, mind you, except by comparing it to the English text, but I could pronounce it, more or less, and look the words up when I got home, to confirm that, yes, itsudemo means "anytime" and dokodemo means "anywhere." Quite a confidence-boosting day, all in all.