phik

I’m running out of Best of Penny Arcades. We’re starting to scrape the bottom of a very well-constructed barrel which, it must be said, contains a spectrum of overall delicious offerings.

OK, sure, I kinda beefed it when it came to October. But I’m going to make up for it. No blood no foul, &c. October roundup!

• toshok moved to Boston.

  No kidding! We are very pleased to welcome him, just in time for winter, the best 9 months of the year! Bring a poncho and grab a snickers.

• metric came to town.

  It was an 18+ show, and the 18-20 crowd had big black Xs on their hands in magic marker so they could be easily identified as targets of this country’s absurd alcohol laws.

  I hadn’t listened to any of their new album yet, since it wasn’t technically on sale, but unlike Jacob I don’t know that I necessarily prefer it that way. The new album is, however, mind-bendingly good. iTunes informs me that I’ve listened to it 37 times since then.

  During the show, people kept requesting songs from the first album that they wouldn’t play. Towards the end, she asked if anyone wanted to come up on stage and ad-lib something to music, and of course someone took her up on it. This guy went up and bounced from one unrelated topic to another, mostly talking about how drunk he is — and he is pretty clearly sauced, despite the Xs — but nevertheless did a better job than I expected, or would have done myself in the face of paralyzing stage fear. After he did that for a few minutes, he waved the lead singer back over to whisper something into her ear.

  “I can’t believe, after all that, you just asked me to play I.O.U. Go home and listen to the CD.”

• jsb

  It was time for me to pick up my canpass — totally awesome, by the way; it makes me long for the return of the INSpass — so why not catch a show too?

  The next day I played Scrabble for the first time in many years, which made me remember when we tried to play Scrabble in Montreal. We couldn’t get ahold of an English-language version, of course, so we had to settle for French.

  “What’s the difference,” you ask? Letter and point distribution. More E, U, and S, fewer W and Y. And Y, W, and K are all worth 10 points! That was a weird game.

• Not much travel in October! I only flew four segments the whole month. Not so for November, by all appearances.