Wednesday, December 17, 2008

A Coincidental Wrong Number

Eventually, I'll get around to writing a fairly long, detailed post about contemporary American politics, but I'm waiting for various bits of the Blagojevitch scandal to calm down, and I've been busy trying to get all the writing (conference papers, novel) and reading (Pynchon's Against the Day, Latour's Politics of Nature) out of the way by the time I fly to St John's on Xmas Eve. So until I get around to writing that, here's something that used to happen to me in Newfoundland.

About every three months or so for a period of about five years, I would get a wrong number on my mobile phone from someone looking for a person named Yahtzee. I never actually tried to track him down, because I didn't care. But over the past year, I've become inordinately fond of Zero Punctuation, the video game reviews hosted by The Escapist Magazine. I rarely play video games, and I'm rubbish at them. But I do understand the ideas involved, and I find them very interesting. And the man behind Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee Croshaw, is one of the most entertaining people on the internet today.

Just after listening to the latest Zero Punctuation review, a scathingly abusive treatment of the latest Sonic the Hedgehog game (They still make Sonic games? I was surprised too.), I thought about my formerly regular wrong numbers. Since my phone number changed when I moved to Hamilton, I don't get these wrong numbers anymore. But I imagined just now that actual friends of Yahtzee Croshaw were trying to call him. This meant that they were ranking up hideously high mobile phone charges for accidentally calling me in eastern Canada over long distance from Australia. However, that's probably not the case, as very few people would ever be that stupid.
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Also, there's a really good Roberto Bolaño short story online over at The New Yorker, and you should read it.
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Some of the reasons why I love love.

1 comment:

JM said...

Ahh Zizek, so unforgettable. : )
- John.