Xbox Tosser

I often make fun of other cars when I’m on the road. I find it’s a good alternative to getting irritated by how badly people drive. And often it’s the people in big cars with silly names who are the worst drivers of all.

The BMW X5, for instance, often contains small women who talk on their cellphones with a car full of children. They should be not on the roads at all, never mind driving such a big car. With a nod to my healthy general disdain for gaming, I call those cars Xboxes.

Then there are the Mercedes Kompressors. How very virile to spell it with a K! I call those cars (and their drivers) Kompressor Tossers.

Now for the really nasty part. Recently we acquired an Xbox. Not for the gaming, of course (who’s got time to play silly games?), but to fulfill the Philosophe’s long standing dream of achieving entertaining/tech nirvana. And it really is very cool. Now we can access pretty much everything on our computers through the box – music, pictures, movies, you name it.

But it’s still an Xbox, and so it came with a couple of sampler games, including Pacman which I was excited about for 5 minutes until I discovered I’m not the ace I used to be on the arcade game. The other thing with the samples is that you only get to try one level (the  object being, of course, that you go on to buy the actual game).

Unfortunately I have discovered a most silly game called Zuma (hey, I didn’t choose the name!) which involves a frog shooting coloured balls out of its mouth at other coloured balls. The idea is that if you have a blue ball in your mouth, say, then you aim for any sequence of two or more blue balls, which when hit, will disappear and prevent you from dying (or whatever) when and if the balls make it through the spiral to the holes.

(That’s me in the middle, about to die)

I’ve now completed the first level of the game, which is as far as the sample allows. But I can’t stop playing. And it makes my thumbs hurt too.

As a good friend said when he walked in the door yesterday after being out of town for some months (and I was too absorbed in shooting balls out of my frog mouth to even get up and greet him): “I see things have really progressed since you got your PhD!”