Quick gaming report

I managed to get out to my Long Island boardgaming group for the first time this calendar year. I had a great time, even if the two games I played were both somewhat unsatisfying.

( Knizia's Poison and Z-Man's Partheon, behind the cut )

Lovely music

You can go watch a video of the surviving Wilburys (Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne) and Dhanni Harrison performing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" to honor the occasion of Dhanni's father George being enrolled in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2004. Playing the part of Eric Clapton is Prince Rogers Nelson, and holy crap, is he good. I think he'll go far.

("Holy crap" phrasing and link recommendation from pnh via Avedon.)

E-mail virus spew: detective work

Some computer that has both me and tnh in some e-mail address book has been contaminated by an e-mail spewer. I've received at least half-a-dozen virus e-mails pretending to be bounces of messages that I sent to her Gmail account. However, before I got these I didn't actually know her Gmail account, so they can't be from my machine.

The clincher that these aren't just harvested randomly from the web but are instead from someone we both know is that I just got the same e-mail except this one claimed to be a bounce from info @ salwar kameez india.com. tnh is an evangelist for custom-made salwar kameez purchased online. This, too, is an address I didn't have before. (My company dress code barely puts up with the way I dress now. Blousey, colorful unisex Indian clothing would probably be a firing offense.)

It's possible that the contaminated machine is tnh's own. It's also possible that it belongs someone who knows both of us and has followed her advice about clothes shopping. If you qualify, please investigate your system. Thank you.

Postscript: One interesting thing about writing this post is that I had to re-write several sentences to make it clear that the computer, not the person, was infected. My computer acts as an extension of my will in so many ways that the distinction between it and me often seems blurred.

Nudity, Vanity Fair, and so forth

This month's Vanity Fair has a remarkable cover, in which Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson manage to be both nude and astonishingly unattractive.

VF contributor James Wolcott points towards a two-part essay by Lance Mannion on nudity and actresses (and actors) that is one of the sanest discussions of how nudity works and doesn't work in film. Go read part 1 (Because I can't resist the temptation to write about pretty young actresses getting naked) and if you like it, follow the link at the top of the page to part 2 (More naked actresses---because February is sweeps month).

Mannion's commentary is easily the best thing I've read about the subject of sex in art since Neil Gaiman's introduction to a volume of The Complete "Omaha", The Cat Dancer, which included this reaction:

[It is] simply a story in which the virtual cameras continue to roll while people take their clothes off and make love (just as they do in the world you and I inhabit) -- delineated with an unblinking charm which has the odd effect (for me, at least) of making one wonder where all the sex has gone in the other fictions one reads or hears or sees. . .