Birthday Wishes

Hey everyone listen up your attention if you please. First I wanna say thanks for everyone who wished me well and sent me messages on my Birthday. I got stacks of messages and cards, and it was great to know so many of you care about me and are excited that I'm now 21.

The real fun hasn't even started yet though, as my last post, August 25th 2007, is a reference to my upcoming Birthday party. Why is Mario posing as Uncle Sam? It's a costume party, that's why! Not many of my friends have had costume parties before, and I wanted to try something a little different. It was a little risky, as I thought everyone might think it was lame, but so far the response has been really positive, so I think it's gonna go off really well.

I'd really like to post some photos afterwards for you all to see. I've just gotta make sure I finish my costume in time.
For those following along at home, the answer to my Balderdash puzzle was:

• Korea became an independent country

Today is actually August 15th, the day I was speculating about, and if you head over to Wikipedia down the bottom right side you'll find 'On this day...' and see that today is Independence Day in North Korea & South Korea (1945).

Lastly, in tradition from the very begining of my blog, here's a list of everyone that wished me a Happy Birthday. You'll notice my house mates are both absent from the list. It seems they forgot and I wasn't going to remind them.

Name	Method	Time
Alex & Maureen	Phone	7:48am
Pam	Missed Call	8:09am
Tim	Person	8:51am
Ubuntu Forums	E-mail	9:01am
Joel Derrick	Person	9:04am
Steff	SMS	9:57am
Emma	E-mail	11:26am
Trav	SMS	11:44am
Cara	SMS	1:04pm
MeadiaWiki Forums	E-mail	2:01pm
Kate	SMS	4:22pm
Eva	In Person	6:23pm
Steff's Grandpa	In Person	6:23pm
Karen	SMS	7:03pm
Pam	Phone	7:15pm
Lauren	SMS	7:28:03pm
Roxy	SMS	7:28:47pm
Maureen (Again!)	SMS	8:01pm

Thanks once again to everyone who sent me messages!

Time Warp

Let's get it started, in here.

Right now it looks like my blog is suffering from some weird time warp, as what I'm about to post about happened exactly a week ago.

And it was exactly a week ago when I got to help celebrate the Birthday of my good (but blogless) friend Karen. A group of us gathered at her place and played what I'd describe as half a game of Balderdash. I'd read an article that mentioned Balderdash in passing only a couple of days before, so to be sitting there playing it was quite exciting. Here's a quick summary.

Each round has a player in charge, who picks a category (such as a acronyms, dates, strange words or 'famous' people) from a card which has 6 different words and definitions on it. The leader of the round writes down the 'real' definition of the word (or event, acronym, person etc.) and the other players have to each write down what they think the definition is. All the definitions are then shuffled together and read out to all the players, who have to guess which is the truthful one. Points are awarded for guessing the truthful one, or having another player guess your 'fake' definition.

While it was a game I thoroughly enjoyed, to say I didn't do very well would be a supreme understatement. You have to move 26 spaces (you moved when you score points) to win the game and we stopped it when one of the players was well over 15 spaces in. At that stage I'd moved only a single square. Perhaps now some of my definitions seem quite fake, such as that S.Y.B.F stood for Southern Youth Baptist Fellowship, or that on some date in 1956 some people finished building the biggest jukebox ever made, holding 5000 songs, but at the time they seemed quite plausible.

I'd really recommend to any group looking for a change from the usual Scrabble, Taboo and Trivial Pursuit.

Let me pose my own balderdash for you here though, comment with what you think the correct answer is (no cheating on google or wiki!)

Besides the fact that August the 15th is the day after my Birthday, what happened on August 15th 1945?

• The first microscope was invented
• Korea became an independent country
• Agrippina Vaganova published a book Vaganova method ballet technique
• Two of Saturn's moons, Janus and Epimetheus were first observed
• The first book in what would become the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy is released

Now remember what I said, no cheating!

Fire, exclamation mark. Fire, exclamation mark.

Dear Sir / Madam.

On Friday night, after Ashley's great Birthday party at the ice skating rink that left my feet rather sore, some friends and I decided to make best use of the laser tag (lock on) set that had been loaned to Kids4Life and was destined for return that very next Saturday.

At about 10:30 we took the laser tag gear down to our local lake although Craig didn't want to come along. We played a few games around the boat shed, which was good but a bit too big and open. As it approached midnight, we shifted out game down to the now abandoned children's playground, as this was a closer setting with much more cover. During the very first round I was crouched behind cover on a platform with a fireman's pole out to the side, and heard two people of the opposing team crawling around underneath me. I then had to brilliant idea to slide down the pole with one arm while using the other to shoot both members of the opposing team commando style, then running for cover before they had a chance to react.

I still need to practise my one handed power slide down a pole however because my execution of this hasty plan was poor at best. I jumped at the pole and before sliding even a few inches, I had lost my grip and landed horizontal on the ground, with my left knee being the first point of impact, followed by my left forearm scraping painfully across the sand. The next thing, I've been shot twice by the opposing team members I was meant to surprise, and I'm hopping away in agony yelling 'don't shoot, don't shoot, I'm injured!' Within a few minutes my knee recovered, but it took a couple of days for my arm to stop stinging.

I'm three paragraphs into my blog post and you're probably wondering where the fire is. Patience my young padawan. So a few rounds into dm_playground, and I'm sitting on the bench waiting for everyone else on my team to run out of lives so I can play again. Then someone calls out 'is that a fire over there?' I stand up and look and sure enough, there is a reasonably large fire well under way on the other side of the lake. Straight away Steve Y. calls 000 and informs the authorities of it. We pack up the laser tag and within a few moments the fire brigade has arrived. They put it out within a few minutes, and we went over there to talk to them but they didn't seem very interested in talking to us. It turns out the fire was fuelled by a stack of hay bales left over from the Australia Day celebrations that day, and upon asking one of the fire fighters they said it did look suspicious.

In closing,

Looking forward to hearing from you.

All the best, Maurice Moss

(Gotta love the I.T. Crowd)