In 1979 a friend of the family dropped by our home in Camarillo, California. He had with him a blue book. There was a dragon on the cover. The title emblazoned across its top read Dungeons & Dragons. If that wasn’t enough to get my attention, he had dice. And oh, my flippin’ God, what dice they were! I’d never seen anything like them before. It was a game, he said, which I’d already deduced; my eleven-year-old brain was desperate to know what sort of game required such gorgeous, glittering dice. They were so beautiful I could have eaten them.

I bet a lot of children did.

Our friend photocopied the rulebook and gave it to me. I devoured it (this time, I’m speaking figuratively.) I tried to play. But the photocopied version of the game didn’t come with photocopied dice, so I had to play with a handful of sixers. Believe me, nowhere near as fun. I recruited neighborhood friend Victor (still a neighborhood friend, almost thirty years later) and soon after, picked up my own version of the game. I had the official rules, I had pencils, I had paper. And most of all, I had the dice. An an obsession was born.

I fed that obsession for years. Victor and I really had no idea what we were doing. Our campaigns were messy, hack and slash affairs with long fights and massive hauls of treasure. But as we progressed we learned he value of telling a story and by the time I was in my early teens, I was itching to tell more. I was like a primordial ooze. All I needed was a spark of lightning and I could get on with all the evolving stuff. That spark came when I picked up a Robert E. Howard Conan anthology. I was so enthralled that I grabbed a pen and began to write.

I haven’t played the game in decades, and I don’t write fantasy stories anymore (vampires are real, dontcha know,) but there was a stretch of years when I lived and breathed Dungeons & Dragons. I saved up my allowance to get all the rulebooks, mowed lawns to buy the modules, scored the odd drug deal to buy the miniatures and spent hours painting them in my bedroom listening to Thin Lizzy and The Who and Joe Walsh. And ever-present during that era, printed on all the material, associated with everything I collected, was the name Gary Gygax.

He died this week at the age of 69.

There are so many clever lines I could come up with to serve as an off-the-cuff epitaph. “He looked into the eye of a Beholder,” for example, or “He rolled for surprise and scored a 1,” or, my favorite so far, “He saw the Gelatinous Cube moving slowly down the hall towards him and when the Flaming Hands spell failed to stop it, he fled and sprung a pit trap, which he couldn’t avoid because he had a Dexterity Score of 8 and he fell and hit poisonous spikes and the DM laughed and laughed.”

The web favorite is this. “I guess he failed his saving throw.”

Seriously. Check it out. Even John August is in on it.

Rest in peace, Gary.

Weirder than Ledger’s overdose rumours and his youth and his actually not being alive anymore were the Google contextual ads on the same page as the CNN article. You’d think that they’d present stories like that without any advertising at all out of respect for the deceased, but I dunno. Maybe that’s crazy talk. I’m sure the traffic on the page is unbelievable, so maybe the added revenue is worth the odd pang of conscience.

But I wanted to focus on the ads for a moment. They were weird. The first was for Sympathy Bouquets. All right. I suppose that makes sense. I can live with that one. The second was about the removal of Belly Fat. I won’t even go there, except to wonder what it was in the article that inspired the placement of that one. The third read, “Send a Bereavement Dinner.”

Huh?

Here’s the link. I guess the company delivers dinners for all occasions. Not a bad business idea, I suppose, but definitely a sign of our weird times. I could see sending a “Romantic Dinner” to a newly engaged couple, or sending a “Get Well” rib-eye to someone who’s recently been gored by a steer. But sending a dinner to someone who’s just lost a loved one seems a little off. “Sorry about the accident. Here. Have some shrimp.” Does it come with lots of extra Kleenex? Is it laced with sedatives? I just don’t know. The world is so strange.

Though in this context, the belly fat ad makes a little sense. Get enough bereavement dinners in you and you’ll stand to lose a pound or two.

I had actually grabbed a screen cap of the ad block, but I lost it. Now that the story has moved to the top of the heap it’s no longer contextual. Now it’s just University of Phoenix crap and Career Builder nonsense because, I guess, the demographic is so vast at that point there’s no sense in targeting anyone.

Sorry, Heath. You were way too young. Let’s eat.

Kick it off by hitting play on the fine, fan-produced Underworld video below and read on:

#14. “Pluto”/”Pluton” by Clare & The Reasons.

The album is lush and delicate and melodic with just a dash of nostalgia. “Pluto” is an adorable little tune that breaks the news of its demotion to our recently de-planetized satellite and then console it with words of encouragement (” Chin up Pluto, the stars still want you and we down here do too.”) “Pluton” is a reprise of the same tune in which Clare Muldaur’s voice evokes a quiet, spacy theremin inflection. Marvelous. One of 2007′s little-heard gems. [hear the songs on their myspace page.]

#15. “You’re a Wolf” by Sea Wolf.

I caught Sea Wolf in the same evening as the aforementioned Earlimart/Echoplex gig. I dug them enough to try the album. The song is a perfect little pop jewel, sparkly and quick, with a nice underpinning of strings to hold it down. I couldn’t get it out of my head for days after first hearing it. [myspace]

#16. “There’s So Many Colors” by Akron/Family.

The timing was just right, I guess. On a late flight bound for Washington, DC, I leaned back in my coach seat, half asleep, headphones on, and this proggy tune drifted into my world. I listened to it several times a day for the next week while hiking through our nation’s capitol in 90-degree humidity. It reminds me of heat and sweat and pandas. [official site]

#17. “The Lingering Procession” by Eric Enocksson.

If I were being truthful, the only reason this isn’t in my top three is because it comes from a movie soundtrack. Don’t ask me to explain that, because I don’t think I can. As for the tune itself? I blithered about it quite enough here.

#18. “Best Mamgu Ever” by Underworld.

See video above. A common complaint about “Oblivion With Bells,” the new album by Underworld, is that it sounds like every other Underworld album. I’m not going to argue with that. But when Underworld is as good as they are at what they do, I don’t really mind. It’s not the same without Darren Emerson, and I think it took them an album to figure that out, but this time out, they put together something that holds together really well. [amazon]

#19. “Give It A Night” by Bella.

I love this song for the feelings it stirs. It feels like an affectionate nod to Eighties synth pop with an energetic rhythm and marvelous, romantic lyrics. Bella is another of those acts that sort of snuck on the scene and dazzled anyone who noticed. [official site. myspace.]

#20. “UnBiloTitled” by Babyshambles.

I don’t know what it is about the new album by (ex-Libertines) Pete Doherty and company, but Shotter’s Nation is sooo much more interesting than the last one. In fact, I wasn’t even going to pick this one up (the cover is hideous as well) but the reviews were strikingly good. This tune is exactly my type: a simple build from slow shamble to all-out jam.

#21. “Tarnished” by Dälek.

As if it weren’t enough that Dälek shared his name with the evil entities of Dr. Who fame, he puts out some really dark, twisted, electronica infused rap. “Tarnished” is a slow, ominous rage against the decay of a society that aspires to gloss and glitter but finds itself wallowing in nightmare. It’s a soundtrack for the disaffected. Check out his music at his myspace page.

Oh hell. Is that more than twenty? Sue me.

We’ll miss him. Though his career was studded with highs (M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player) and lows (Pret-a-Porter, Beyond Therapy) he was a force of nature. No one had his touch for ensemble pieces. He was a classic ringmaster, peerless and dedicated to the craft.

I simply must update that story about Adrienne Shelly. Apparently, she complained to a construction noise he was making in a nearby office. He punched her. The punch killed her. He dragged her body back into her office and set her up to look like she’d committed suicide.

“I was having a bad day. I didn’t mean to kill her. But I did kill her,” he said.

That’s the hellish, repellent, and yes, the unbelievable truth.

Adrienne Shelly was found dead in her office on Thursday. An autopsy is being performed (probably has been by now) but I don’t think anyone doubts about how she died. It was the sheet around her neck. That’s how she was found. So strange. I know her best from the Hal Hartley films that she did. I’d wanted to dismiss her as an airhead actress, but she turned out to be a talented and ambitious filmmaker.

But for some reason she again climbed up to that high wall and leaned out. This time, however, Martin Donovan wasn’t around to catch her.

Link to CNN story.

UPDATE: Just asking, am I crazy, or does this image of Adrienne look a lot like the Garbo stamp in the sidebar?

We lose Don Knotts and Darren McGavin over the weekend. It’s not a surprise, really. Knotts was old when I was a kid and McGavin was older than he. I grew up on Andy Griffith and the Herbie movies. As far as I knew, Knotts was like required viewing for every kid. And I’ll always remember McGavin for his obsession over the amazing fishnet stocking leg lamp in A Christmas Story.

But the real surprise this weekend is the death of Octavia Butler, who dies on Saturday after slipping on ice and hitting her head. She was a science fiction writer whose importance came not from being black or being a woman (both of which are rare in that field) but because she managed to weave important contemporary themes of race and struggle into her stories. The strange thing is that I happen to be exactly in the middle of her newest book and on the Friday of her accident, I happened to listen to an episode of NPR’s Science Friday on which she appeared. The episode is about the ways in which SF writers have a hand in inventing the future and solving many of today’s problems. And the reason I want to listen to the episode is specifically because she’s one of the guests and for some reason I want to hear what her voice sounds like.

The new book is Fledgling. It’s about an young black girl who awakens in a dark cave, horribly battered and stricken with amnesia. She soon comes to learn that though she appears to be an eleven-year-old girl, she’s actually a fifty-something-year-old vampire who has been genetically altered to be resistant to sunlight. It’s full of strange sexual and racial and social undertones and has been keeping me up at night, not because it’s at all scary, but because it’s so damned interesting.

Link to the NPR episode.

Link to the boingboing post that turned me on to the book.