Model making

A very early memory of mine is a "ship in a bottle" that my dad had acquired somewhere. I was fascinated by it, and couldn't understand how the ship got into the bottle. My parents encouraged me to build model ships and planes and cars, those classic old Revell kits. I spent many hours assembling kits, but I was impatient of course.

A lot of my playtime as a child was model-making of various sorts. One of my favorite toys was simply a bunch of plain wooden blocks of different sizes. I would pile two smaller blocks atop a longer block, call it a "battleship", and drive it around the carpet of our living room, staging battles with other block-ships. I loved other construction toys, like Tonka trucks, which I would deploy in large earth-moving configurations in the sandbox. And of course Lincoln Logs, and Tinkertoys, and Legos.

One of my favorites was our family Erector Set, a ridiculously complicated box full of hundreds and hundreds of little metal pieces which we could put together and take apart any which way.

I don't really have a lot of memories of my dad playing with these various construction kits, but what I do remember is that he had a diecast model car on his desk, like one of these. It was some sort of convertible sportscar, perhaps a Porsche, and it had tires that turned and doors that opened and best of all the steering wheel was a real linkage and if you turned it the front wheels would turn.

I think I spent many an hour just annoying my dad while he was working on whatever, driving his little model sportscar all around his desk.

Dr Demento is retiring

I came across the news that Dr Demento is retiring. It of course made me think of my dad.

I have (blurry) memories of listening to Dr Demento shows in the mid 1970s with my dad. I have no memory of how he found out about that radio show; perhaps he heard about it from one of his students at the college. Or perhaps I somehow heard about it from somewhere and figured out how to play it on our home radio? Certainly dad didn't listen to radio very much. He didn't even listen to music very much, although we had a nifty record player at home with a selection of LPs. But dad only played Bach, if he played anything.

Since I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, I mostly liked the silly novelty stuff that was played by Dr Demento: They're Coming To Take Me Away, or Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.

And, of course, Weird Al Yankovic; I knew everything by Weird Al by heart back in the 1970s. Though back then I had no idea that Weird Al was barelay a year older than me, and lived almost right next door in Downey. Maybe he didn't want people to know that fact back then; Downey was certainly not a very funny place.

My dad, as I recall, was considerably more highbrow, and favored performers like the Firesign Theater, the Marx Brothers, Victor Borge, etc.

Dad was particularly fond of Tom Lehrer, and knew a lot of his songs. I have no idea how dad came to know about Tom Lehrer; it must have been back in his college days, or soon afterwards, as Dad mostly knew the really early songs (The Elements; New Math; Poisoning Pigeons in the Park; that sort of thing).

Although, looking closely at the Wikipedia page for Lehrer, the timelines match up, as Lehrer was apparently hanging around MIT at the same time my dad was, in the mid 1960s.

In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time math studies at Harvard. From 1962 he taught mathematics in the political science department at MIT. In 1965 he gave up on his mathematics dissertation on modes in statistics, after working on it intermittently for 15 years.

So perhaps dad met him, even knew him then, though Lehrer was a decade older and I don't remember my dad saying anything specific about meeting him. I feel sure I'd remember if dad had shared any memories of that guy who "taught mathematics in the political science department".

I see Tom Lehrer is still alive! Amazing. I believe he was still actively teaching mathematics at the University of California Santa Cruz when I was accepted there. But I did not attend UCSC. I'm sure I would have enjoyed having a singing professor in my math classes (legend has it that Lehrer indeed had a piano in his classroom and would often open his lecture with a song).

(Side note to these side notes: my brother-in-law Dante Amidei, who teaches physics at the University of Michigan, for several years taught an introductory physics class targetted at liberal arts majors, which he used to refer to as "Atoms for Architects", riffing on Lehrer's lifelong love for teaching mathematics to non-mathematicians, a joy which my father also shared.)

I think I stopped listening to Dr Demento about 45 years ago, but it was fun to talk about him with my dad, who would sometimes think back on those years happily.

Playing Gloomhaven with my dad

My dad loved boardgames. He played all sorts of different boardgames and was always on the lookout for a new one. He favored abstract, strategic games with minimal amounts of luck and lots of possible strategies he could devise and play.

Sometimes he found games such as Twixt, which was perhaps the epitome of abstract strategic games of a certain period in the board gaming world. (It was also the epitome of a game which nobody would ever agree to play more than once.)

At that time, of course, we didn't have the deeply developed worldwide culture of inventing, playing, and sharing board games which arose in the 21st century. There are much more entertaining board games than Twixt nowadays!

During the pandemic years, my dad picked up Gloomhaven, which was possibly the most famous game to come out of the board gaming surge of the last twenty years. Dad was initially interested in Gloomhaven primarily because it was so famous, but he became quite interested in it because it was in the category of cooperative boardgames: in Gloomhaven, all the human players must collaborate to successfully win the game.

My dad particularly liked cooperative boardgames.

Also, dad liked Gloomhaven because I liked Gloomhaven.

I liked Gloomhaven because I had grown up playing computer games like Adventure and Zork and Wizardry and Bard's Tale and Ultima, all those Dungeons and Dragons style games where you build a party and explore the world and have encounters and accomplish quests. Dungeons and Dragons is great but it always succeeds or fails based on the efforts of one person, the Dungeonmaster, who has to do a huge asymmetric amount of work to envision, construct, and facilitate the scenario, while the other players just show up and play. Sometimes you have a great Dungeonmaster, but even then sometimes the Dungeonmaster has an off night. Gloomhaven was like playing Dungeons and Dragons, but you didn't need to have a Dungeonmaster.

But playing Gloomhaven as a true table-top boardgame was a lot of work!

First of all, you have to have a large table. Gloomhaven is an immense game with an enormous amount of physical kit that must be manipulated during the game.

But more importantly, playing the original table-top version of Gloomhaven requires an extensive amount of intricate bookkeeping, in which each play must adjust various tokens and state markers during the playing of their turn in order to keep the game flowing along nicely.

That is, table-top Gloomhaven successfully got rid of the Dungeonmaster, but only by making everyone the Dungeonmaster.

However, it turned out that there was a computerized version of Gloomhaven; even better, it was a very well done adaptation which retained all the fun of playing Gloomhaven while removing all the drudgery.

Conveniently for me, playing the computerized version solved several other problems that I had with Gloomhaven: firstly, we didn't have to leave the physical game set up in the living room, a huge benefit since it took up the whole room and it often took us days to play through a single scenario; secondly, I didn't have to make the 30 minute drive to my parents house just to play some Gloomhaven with my dad, which made it vastly easier for us to fit in some time for game playing and chatting without all the wasted driving time.

The result was that, during the last few years, my dad and I must have played several hundred hours of Gloomhaven together. Amazingly, during that entire time, we never even finished the complete original Gloomhaven campaign, mostly because there were a few scenarios that we just couldn't crack with our party.

We played Gloomhaven faithfully right up until the final few weeks of dad's life, when he was finally just too exhausted to work the computer. At that point I went back to driving over there when I could, and we sat and talked instead.

Over the past few months I've thought a couple times about firing up the game again and finishing off the campaign, playing the entire party by myself. I don't think I'll do that; it's nicer instead to just leave things just as they are in my head.

But I'll remember those years of Gloomhaven for a long, long time.

Happy Father's Day, dad

As my wife observes, this is a year of firsts, and here's one of them.

My parents were never very big on the "Hallmark Holidays", although after I became a father my dad would always remember to send me a Jacquie Lawson greeting card.

My dad wasn't very big on using the phone, either, so often I would call my mom and ask her to hand her phone to dad so I could wish him a happy Father's Day or whatever. He was always polite and returned the favor, though he soon wished to be off the call.

I guess I've become somewhat like that myself; I'm not great on the phone either.

Father's Day often lines up with my birthday, although this year it's a bit off. Either it came early, or I'm running late; probably the latter. A more happier observation is that Father's Day means that we're just coming up on my daughter's wedding anniversary; one of my favorite days!

Well, anyway: happy Father's Day to the fathers in your life, wherever they are.

The Body in the Castle Well: a very short review

I'm reading my way to Bordeaux, trying to get ready for a visit I hope to make to the region sometime soon.

There's a lot to know about Bordeaux, it has centuries, even millenia, of history. Not far from Bordeaux is the Lascaux Cave, where cave paintings believed to be twenty thousand years old have been found.

My dad was a compulsive reader, across a variety of subjects, but mysteries and detective stories were a particular favorite of his. My mom mentioned that, shortly before his death, my dad had been reading his way through Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series, which are set in the Dordogne region, which runs roughly east from Bordeaux along the Dordogne River.

My dad happened to have just finished The Body in the Castle Well, so I picked up his copy to get a taste for the series.

Walker is primarily a newspaper columnist (he's the US Bureau Chief for The Guardian), and this novel has some of the feel of being written by a journalist. It's well-researched and somewhat encyclopedic, and you get the feeling that Walker seeks to educate you as much as he seeks to entertain you. In this book, we get to learn some art history, and some falconry, and we hear a bit about the ending of French colonialism in Algeria.

With all that history and science tossed in with the detective story, I can see why my dad was very fond of Bruno, Chief of Police.

I'll surely read a few more of Walker's books.

Surfing in Alameda?

An organization called the Neptune Beach Surf Club is proposing to build a Wave Park in Alameda, out in the currently little-used section between Encinal High School and the Alameda Hornet.

Their website features a simple map and some brief descriptions.

The city says that they are exploring the concept.

I've been to that location several times, although not recently. We put in our inflatable kayaks at the boat ramp and in the small protected section of the bay near the boat ramp that's sometimes called Encinal Beach. There's a very-hard-to-find soccer field out there maintained by the Alameda Soccer Club.

It would be good to see continued development and reuse of that part of the city, and something that's water-oriented seems like a natural fit for the city.