Tofu roulette

It's Friday, so that means my manager sends out his weekend digest of Friday Funnies. Most are cringe worthy and many are lowbrow, but all are eagerly anticipated as it means the weekend is oh so close.

Today's selection featured a series of one liners and this short recipe for the foodies in our team.

How to prepare tofu:

1. Throw it in the trash.
2. Grill some meat.

This led to much discussion about uses for tofu, including many questions – mostly, why?? You might be a vegetarian but surely almost any other source of protein would taste better than slobbery rubbery bean curd. Clearly, I'm not a fan. I've been known to turn down the offer of buying an otherwise appealing cookbook for a good price because too many of the recipes feature tofu. Fact.

Here's a fun game my friends used to play at cheap and cheerful Chinese restaurants way back in our student days. After ordering and devouring the shared Chinese banquet, there would inevitably be a small dish of tofu left over. This called for a game of tofu roulette. Despite our mothers telling us to not play with our food, we'd spin the plate on the edge of the Lazy Susan turntable and when it stopped, whoever had the misfortune of sitting in front of where the tofu stopped had to eat some.

At this point in the evening, we learned the importance of choosing the right seat at the start of the meal, especially if the table had a lean or the floor was uneven. Table cracks or joins also meant you had a higher chance of eating the most tofu at the end of the night as the Lazy Susan would default to stopping at the same point. I was careful to never be that person and haven't had the misfortune of eating tofu since those days. Long may my good fortune continue.

Cards Against Humanity

Cards Against Humanity is the best thing to happen to camping trips and parties in years. Billed as a party game for horrible people, Cards Against Humanity is a card game with a difference that achieves surprising results and an unusual insight into the people you think you know.

Here's how it works: there is a pile of black question cards that form the setting for each round of the game. Everyone takes turns to read out a question card. All the players are dealt ten white answer cards and need to find the 'best' answer for the question from their cards. Sounds simple.

What makes a good answer? One that the question asker will find funny, clever or appealing in some way. After everyone has submitted their cards, the question asker reads out all the answers and chooses their favourite. Sometimes it's hard to pick over all the laughter. Others are a bit more obvious.

The trick is to appeal to each person's personality. What do they find funny? What will appeal to their (warped) sense of humour? What will they be offended by? And what will get the biggest reaction from around the table? The winner of each round keeps that black card and the overall winner is the person who has the most black cards at the end of the game. It gets harder as the game progresses and the 'good' white cards get used up.

Here are a few examples of 'winning' questions and answers from games we've played:

Q: What do bad children get for Christmas?
A: Dead parents.

Q: Te Papa is developing a new interactive exhibition on ________
A: Inappropriate yodelling.

Q: How did I lose my virginity?
A: The Italians! (Random, I know - but hysterically funny at the time.)

Now, we've brought Cards Against Humanity on camping trips, weekends away and to friends' parties. Until Christmas night, we hadn't played it with family. After a few drinks and a(nother) huge meal, the cards came out and the inhibitions were promptly dropped as we did our best to outdo each other. We certainly got a whole new look at the people we regularly face around the family dinner table.

Cards Against Humanity: despite protests, I've yet to meet someone who isn't horrible enough to play.

Pavement dodgeball

I am a regular lunch time walker. Rain or shine, I'm out pounding pavements for half an hour or so of fresh air and back stretching-out.

There's one thing that can really put a damper on a lunch time walk, though: having to dodge all those people on the streets who are glued to their cell phone screens. I estimate that it's as many as 10% of pedestrians at any given time. So why do they try to keep walking with a drunken stagger for others to sidestep? If that phone call/txt/email/Facebook post/tweet so urgently requires your attention, then don't just grind to a stop exactly where you are. Be gracious and step aside to deal with it. The same applies to changing music: do it before you start walking and not in the middle of the footpath. Today, I had to dodge someone reading her Kindle while also sipping coffee. She's lucky not to have ended up wearing either of them!

I've often thought that dedicated walking lanes would be a good idea, much like swimming lanes that prevent slow swimmers getting in the way of water babies. There would be lanes going in each direction (keep left!), including slow lanes for window shoppers, passing lanes for striders and time out lanes for cell phone viewers. I liked this article about trialling cellphone lanes. Clearly, I'm not the first to encounter the perils of multi-tasking (that is, walking and talking). I'd love to see the idea take off.

Replace balls with cell phones

Until that happens, I'm inventing a new game: pavement dodgeball. Now, it's not strictly dodgeball as the balls are mostly replaced by hazards like umbrellas, baby buggies, shopping bags and dogs on lead, but the idea is the same. Actually, now that I think about it, the premise is the complete opposite as the object of my game will be to walk squarely into anyone coming towards me while glued to their phone or other electronic device.

I need some help with developing the scoring system. I have a few starting rules. Points will be awarded according to:

• the level of shocked reaction received
• the type of collision (for example, a gentle elbow brush or a full on shoulder charge)
• whether the hit was front on or from behind
• whether the target moves to get out of your way
• the knock-on effect (for example, if they move and someone else hits them instead).

Bonus points if they drop their phone!

What points or rules am I missing?

Laser tag

We had a childhood flashback yesterday when a group of 15 technically grownup adults played laser tag for a friend's birthday party. Laser Force, Laser Tag, Laser Strike - call it what you will. There is something hugely appealing about having juvenile fun running walking madly (no running allowed - you'll be warned then deactivated!) around a 400 m² maze shooting coloured targets. Add flashy lights, loud music and kick-ass names like Gravity, Infinity, Enigma and Predator and you've suddenly got the makings of a winner-takes-all competition where friends become foes in an instant. So much fun!

Each 10 minute round flies by and before you know it everybody's back outside, puffing a bit and asking big questions such as, "Who's Gladiator at the top?" and "How did Rogue get me so many times?" as the scoreboard is dutifully checked. Then it's back in to home base to start all over again.

Just in case you're worried about the retro-geeky images laser tag conjures up, just remember that if it is cool enough for Barney Stintson then it's cool enough for us all. But a word of advice: skip the Timeout section while you're waiting. It's little more than a crammed collection of poorly maintained arcade games that swallow game tokens, accompanied by a single-sided air hockey table and some random shoot-em-ups with poor graphics ... but trust me when I say that laser tag is still as awesome as it was when we were kids.

Why don't we do this every weekend, or at least for every birthday?

Paper Toss

Paper Toss is a hugely popular app for IOS and Android. Set in an office, it involves tossing a virtual piece of paper into a rubbish bin. It starts out simple enough: just throw the rolled-up paper into the bin. As the levels progress, there are obstacles to overcome, mostly in the form of a big floor fan that blows air at varying velocities, meaning that you have to aim towards it to make the most of the wind gusts while still landing your paper in the bin, all the while calculating the distance to the bin and how hard to throw your paper ball ... Sound easy? Boring, perhaps? Actually, it’s mindlessly addictive.

We have been playing Paper Toss for real lately. All it takes is an open-top rubbish bin, screwed up paper (paper hand towels work well) and some distance between the two. We have discovered that it is much harder to play Paper Toss in real life than on our phones – even without a fan or any obstacles. In order to add some rigor to the sport (and prevent cheating), starting and finishing lines have been drawn up so that no-one can cheat. It's a very serious (and highly competitive) business! We find that late afternoons are best to practise, even if our aim is a little less reliable at that time of the day.

Once we've conquered Paper Toss, we might move on to frozen grapefruit bowling next. ;-)

My iPod touch apps

Ever since discovering Free App A Day a while ago, my iPod touch has really come to life. I have only bought a few fully-paid applications but have downloaded lots of freebies. Free App A Day offers one free app for iPhone/iPod/iPad each day. I enjoy playing games, but am not too keen on action games or ones that eat my battery life before my eyes.

Here are some of the apps I'm enjoying at the moment. There are others, but these are the ones I use most frequently.

Classics
I've blogged about this before. The Classics app allows me to have 27 classic novels on hand everywhere I go. This is great if you are a bibliophile like me, or are caught waiting somewhere without a book to read or anything to do.

Build-A-Lot
There is something strangely addictive about building and rebuilding a community from scratch. Build-A Lot is not as complex as Sim City, making the challenges easier to dip in an out of when time is tight.

Fuzzle
Fuzzle is a fun game to play in short bursts, for example, when waiting in the queue for my morning coffee. It is a simple, untimed game which doesn't restart every time you open the application - it continues your saved game. Basically, you move the balls around the board to create lines of five balls of the same color. Every time you finish a row, the balls are removed. But after every other move you make, more balls are added.

Sudoku 2
I hadn't had much experience with solving sudoku puzzles before, but Sudoku 2 is great and has taught me lots. There are several different levels and the updates released have made the board and numbers even clearer to see.

Moonlight Mahjong
Use the touch screen to adjust the angle you view the game board or the size of the puzzle. Moonlight Mahjong has several different tile styles, and even one which uses numbers if you're having trouble finding matches. I randomly select puzzles to solve and they range from being relatively simple to quite complex.

Chicks
I have finally found a Lemmings-style game for my iPod touch. Chicks takes me right back to the 80s/90s when we first met little creatures who would fall off cliffs and bash their way through walls at our command.

Cooking Dash
I have spent far longer than I care to think about trying to master Cooking Dash. Flo dashes about trying to cook up meal orders for her customers, who are each only prepared to wait for varying lengths of time. The kitchen gets busy and the heat turns up a notch. The biggest frustration with Cooking Dash (and Diner Dash below) is that it doesn't save the game when you close the application - you need to start again from scratch.

Diner Dash
As above. Be warned: Diner Dash is also really addictive.

Do you have any recommendations of your own?

An offline wilderness

I am terrible at spending gift vouchers. Actually, I'm not a great shopper at all, but I can easily spend months pondering what to spend a gift voucher on and more often than not redeem them close to their expiry date. I have been carrying around $170 of Farmers vouchers for about six months now, a couple of $10 Westfield vouchers, and $20 credit at the iTunes Store. I finally used $60 in last week's Farmers sale (still more to go - actually, some of that came from trading in airpoints that were about to expire, lol), but the Westfield vouchers remain in my wallet.

While I generally like the idea of vouchers as gifts, either giving or receiving, it takes me more time than almost anyone else to research all my possible spending options before finally redeeming them, usually during some kind of sale or when I'm in desperate need of an item. I've always been like that; I'm not sure why spending is so hard for me when others seem to love it!

Next week, we are going away to a place with no cell phone coverage, no Internet access (I don't credit 13 KB dial-up as being 'Internet'), and very cautious use of electricity and water. Some would call that bliss; I call it cold turkey. I'll surgically remove my laptop from my side and switch off my cell phone before we leave, but have already collected a supply of books to read and a backup: my trusty iPod touch. Up until now, this prize has been an occasional toy; next week it will be my lifeline in a non-digital world! (Am I exaggerating? Not sure ...)

I have spent some time today preparing my iPod touch. My 60GB iPod holds my entire music collection but will be left behind; 16GB is a struggle for me, especially when sharing the available space with other applications, so I have put together some basic playlists to see me through the week. I also went shopping at the iTunes Store and almost spent all of my $20 voucher. Almost.

What did I buy? A few games that I've been playing the lite versions of, some more expensive than I would have bought myself (well, all of them really - I've only played freebies so far):

• Diner Dash - I would consider this a living nightmare in real life, but I've just signed up for 50 virtual levels and can't wait!
  
• Cooking Dash - ditto
• Fling - it's fun flinging things around on an iPod touch
  
• Fuzzle - strangely addictive
• Moonlight Mahjong - I've only ever played mahjong online and this is quite a cool version
• SimCity - I used to love playing this on my PC, so I'll see if I can achieve the same results on a 3.5" screen.

So, I'm nearly ready for my big week offline without email, Facebook, Twitter, blogging (although I might be able to prepare posts on my touch). Anyone would think I was heading for the depths of a jungle wilderness! I am looking forward to going away, really!

Games night

We aren't going away this Easter so, for Good Friday, we had some friends over for a games night. After perusing the supplies at both of our parents' houses, we found some board games we'd enjoyed playing in the past. With daylight savings ending in New Zealand last week, it's now time for winter get-togethers to happen. The Easter bunny had popped in earlier and left some goodies.

My sweetie and I warmed up with a couple of matches of Connect 4 and Othello. As our guests arrived, and the drinks started flowing, we moved to some games which allowed more players to be involved. Scattergories is perfect for this, providing that everyone is using the same list to play. If someone chooses to play with another list, as we found, then the scoring can be incredibly difficult but extremely amusing. We had some really interesting debates about what counts as an acceptable word within a category; eg is "exit" a way to get from here to there? Is "European" really a thing you shout? (It turns out that European was meant to be written down as a type of ethnic food, the category above. We laughed about this one for hours afterwards!)

After dessert, we moved on to Balderdash. I hadn't played this game before; it is absolutely hilarious. You are given a very difficult word and have to make up a definition for it. One person collects up everybody's definitions and writes the correct one on a piece of paper, then reads out everybody's definitions to the group. Each person chooses which definition they think is the right one. Those who are correct score a point. You also score points if other people choose your definition, ie if you have fooled someone else with your convincing definition. As the evening progressed, the definitions became even more 'creative', and some were straight-out dodgy! It was great to see so many of our friends crying with laughter while playing this game.

My sweetie has never played Cluedo before, a game I absolutely love, so we will have to keep it out and get a couple of others to join us on another occasion. I'm so glad that I chose this to be one of my 101 goals: #28 - Play a board game with friends. I'm even more glad that we had such a fun evening with friends on a long weekend.

Chocolate Scrabble

I love word games and puzzles, especially Scrabble, and it's no secret that I love chocolate, so what better combination than chocolate Scrabble? My brother and sister-in-law gave me a set for Christmas, and it's been sitting in the fridge ever since, waiting for the right guests to share it with. Tonight, we opened the box.

There is a whole series of chocolate games available, made of fine Belgian chocolate. Scrabble comes with 32 large pieces with double-sided tiles and a simplified board, so it's best to play it with only a few players. We had three couples pitting our skills against each other, and it was good for a few rounds each before we tore into the pieces to get the good stuff. Yummy!

I was shocked to discover that two of our friends had never played the real version of Scrabble before. It took some coercion to explain which moves were allowed, how double and triple letter/word scores worked (ie you can only use each one once), and which exceptions we'd all be prepared to accept. Hilarious!

And so here is the result from our first game:


We followed up this game with a round of 'rude word Scrabble'. I won't elaborate, but you get double points if you can use the word in a sentence. ;-)

We are having a games night at Easter, so I might break out the real version with our friends. And, of course, there will be lots of chocolate to go with it. :-D

Life after Scrabulous

Ok, so today's title might be a bit optimistic; I'm not entirely sure there can be a meaningful life after Scrabulous, but I'm sure as heck trying to fill the void that its removal from Facebook has now created. We knew for some time that it might be taken away, and we had a huge scare a while back when it disappeared for nearly a day, but this time I fear that it truly is the end.

Scrabulous quickly found its way into the hearts of many, and it's no surprise it became Facebook's most popular game application, giving fellow addicts their fix of word puzzles whenever they felt the urge to create a word or two. The message boards are frantic but, sadly, there is no real substitute for it. Try as they might to con us into playing WordScraper or the silly version of live Scrabble (which hardly ever loads properly, by the way), they don't measure up. I now have to make do with short, sharp bursts of word puzzles each night now via Scramble and Word Twist, but it's not the same, it's not the same, I tell you!

Some tributes from the floor ...

• Facebook friend #1: "... is sad they took Scrabulous away."
  
• Facebook friend #2: "... is missing Scrabulous!!"
• Facebook friend #3: "... freaked because Scrabulous isn't here!!"
• Facebook friend #4: "I have no reason to log into Facebook any more."
  
• Sister-in-law: "what will we do now?"

Yes, indeed; what will we do now?

RIP, Scrabulous.
You were a friend to many and will always be fondly remembered.
We hope so see you again soon, minus the lawsuit.

Tenpin bowling

Another day, another goal. I haven't bowled in years but had always enjoyed it, so added it to my list: goal #26 - go tenpin bowling. We had a couple of other options for tonight, but neither really appealed, so we booked dinner and bowling at Strike Entertainment Centre in Petone. Both the restaurant and bowling offer Entertainment Book deals (a main for a main at the restaurant, and a game for a game with bowling).

First off, dinner. Pretty bad all-round service. Average meals. Not too bad if you can block out all the screaming kids (even on a Saturday night) and try to get someone to actually serve you. We won't be dining here again.

The bowling was fun, though. I started well with my one and only strike! Ok, so it was all downhill from there, but I'd achieved what I wanted: a strike. One game really wasn't enough to warm up get into the swing of things, but it was exciting to watch the NZ rowing teams in some of their Olympic finals at the same time. Mahe Drysdale managed to score a bronze, as did Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater.

On the way home, we popped into Pak N Save (a really exciting activity for a Saturday night, I know). There was a crappy screen in the beer section, and before we knew it a small crowd had gathered to watch the women's double sculls final. There was disappointment and disbelief all round as we saw Georgina and Caroline Evers-Swindell win silver, then made our way mumbling towards the checkout.

Or so we thought. Once we got home and turned on the tv, we were wondering why the flag for the silver medallist was in the middle of the podiums. It wasn't until we heard the last line of the national anthem, "God defend New Zealand" that we realised that the Evers-Swindell twins had actually won gold instead! That photo finish was unbelievably close; the commentator didn't know how to call the final result, and none of us thought that it would be any different to how it looked on screen as we watched it live. What a night!

How many addictions can one have??

Make no mistake: Facebook is still my #1 current addiction, and the novelty definitely hasn't worn off yet (as I was informed it would). I tend to add applications which keep on going, ie no one-off quizzes for me, which just end up cluttering my page and telling me what my kids' names are (what kids??!). Applications like Have You Ever, 10 Second Interview (which goes on for waaaaayyyy longer than 10 seconds, I should warn you) and Interview ask seemingly endless questions about the world's universally favourite subject: meeeeee! Scrabulous is one continuous round of excitement and mystery, even when I'm getting severely beaten. (It's always a thrill to be severely winning, but I actually prefer games where the scores are more evenly matched - it's makes the challenge just that much more exciting.)

But now I have another. I usually ignore most application invitations and decline to ask 10 (20/30/40) of my friends to add one so I can work out my karma sutra position ... but Scramble popped up yesterday, and in less than one day, I'm hooked. Oh dear, how easy was that? There is something oddly fascinating about mixing up random letters and manipulating them into bizarre little words while trying to beat the clock. Two of my usual Scrabulous buddies have joined Scramble and we now have mini-challenges going back and forth between us.

There's also a race-the-clock-and-beat-others-online style of game. Initially, this held no appeal until I realised my picture was at the top of the leader board ... and usually stays within the top 1-10 for the duration of a three-minute game. Ooh, the thrill - and rush - of a new addiction. :-D

My latest addiction

Scrabble + fabulous = Scrabulous. I've been a Facebook addict for a few months, adding information and populating my page with useless trivia all about meeeeeeeee, resisting the temptation to add applications promising to reveal how many children I would have, what flower I would be, and who thinks I'm hot. Games have come and gone, but who would have thought that a board game from my childhood would become my latest online addiction?

I love Scrabulous. There's something oddly satisfying about logging on to Facebook before and after work to see who has played their next move, and what weird and bizarre words the dictionary will accept today. I can easily see why it is one of Facebook's most popular application. But Hasbro and Mattel don't seem to keen to share the world's excitement. The Facebook community have reacted with a mix of shock and horror. I agree. Aarrgghhhh!!

I have 3-4 active games going at a time, and my stats are generally 50-50. I even insisted on going online while on holiday to play my next moves. I'll eventually move on and find a new obssession, but in the meantime, I dread the day when I find a notification in Facebook saying that Scrabulous has been shut down or 'modified' ... heaven forbid it might happen while I'm still addicted!