The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by G. Jules:

Ooooh, someone else who's played Wink Murder! I once scandalized several troops of my fellow Girl Scouts with that one. (For people who haven't played it before: everyone sits in a circle and blinks at one another. One person has been randomly chosen as the murderer, and winks at their intended victims, who then drop dead, ideally with gruesome sound effects.) The varient we were playing had people guessing the murderer's identity at random intervals -- if they were incorrect, they died.

So when I played the murderer, I killed off several people in quick succession and then guessed somebody else as the murderer. Voila. I was dead, and everyone else died through attrition as they made guesses. Nobody thought to guess the dead people. (Next round, they added a new rule: the murderer had to be alive at the end to win. These were the same people who insisted on using the little check-off sheets to play Clue, so I wasn't very surprised.)

Mafia I was introduced to my freshman year of college, by some of the older physics majors. It was big in the science fiction society, too. One of the frequent players in that group did a formal study that demonstrated that in the first round, the villagers are far better off choosing their lynching victim at random than discussing it. Which makes sense -- the werewolf/mafia is around to deflect suspicion from themself, and the villagers don't have much information to draw on.

Does the fandom variant include the moderator coming up with descriptions of the horrible deaths of the villagers who perished in the night? That's always been one of my favorite bits.

Chiming in on gas prices -- gas in Mississippi, even down south where I am, is only $2.50-$3.00 in range right now. The woman at Avis said they were seeing long lines, though, of people who thought it wasn't going to stay there, and some stations were only selling premium. I dunno. I was in Atlanta two weeks or so ago, and they were hovering just under $3.00, only a couple of days after the media were reporting that Atlanta was having shortages.

Of course, that's just gas prices. I've only gotten within 60 miles or so of the coastline and the kind of damage that far inland is already horrifying -- I'm glad I'm not even trying to get to the coast. I'm also glad my plane out of here leaves this afternoon. (A lot of the people I've talked to here feel like Rita's going to turn and hit them again, even though she's not forecast to. I guess after Katrina, it's hard to believe there's a severe storm headed sombody else's way.)

Oh, I am envious of your tomatoes. My one tomato, potted on my stairs, has been slowly giving in to small spots (up to the size of a dime) of a grey mildew I've been powerless to stop. Pulling the affected branches didn't stop it, and at this point it's claimed more than half of the plant. I don't think the green tomatoes it's set on are ever going to have a chance to ripen. And damned if I can figure out why it only affected the tomato, because the lemon balm planted under it (only way to keep it from taking over) and the herbs and marigolds (for bug control) in the other pot have been doing perfectly fine. I have dill and tarragon marching through the herb pot. They've already overtaken territory alloted by treaty to the cilantro and the purple basil, and chopping the plants to half size only encourages them.

(If I had a garden-garden, this would all be quite a bit easier, at least in terms of stopping the dill's rampant imperialist tendancies; but I know rather too much about prevailing soil conditions in former quarries in general and the Boston metro area in particular to want to take that risk, even if I did have a garden plot.)

Somewhere in my web rummaging this morning, it was pointed out that police/paramedics/etc. sometimes try to use a victim's cell phone to contact next-of-kin, and wouldn't it be a good idea to *flag* that entry in your address book, instead of yet-another-cryptic-first-name.

It's an excellent idea, and not just in case of emergency. I used to work in a lost and found office, and it was amazing the number of cell phones that turned up with no clear person to call. Generally -- as this was on a college campus -- we wound up calling "Home" or "Mom" or "Dad" and asking them to tell their kid that we had the cell phone. But we got a surprising number of cell phones where the best lead was "Tina," or "Ned."

I wish I had something else useful to say. My heart goes out to everyone there, and everyone still trying to track down friends and family members in the area.

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