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Scribblenauts Remix and the Flannel Shirt Crisis

    Hey, everyone out there in the ether. There's a lot of sales going on this weekend for I-Pad games. I just bought a game called Scribblenauts Remix. It is normally about $5, which seems a bit pricey. Today it is a cool 99 cents. A lot of games try to say that they are different or innovative and I think this one is. The graphics are nice and crisp and the game play is thought provoking. Here's the recipe. You have this little dude named Maxwell. He encounters situations as he travels from place to place and tries to collect stars. Your mission, should you  choose to accept it, is to create the tools necessary for the dude to overcome obstacles.
    For instance, on one level I decided that I need a winged horse to fly me over an obstacle. So I tapped the pencil icon. This brought my keyboard to the screen. I typed in Pegasus and sure enough, this cool winged horse appears and whisks me to safety. Then I collect my gold star and move on to the next level.
     On another level, there is a school. You have to start adding (creating) (imagining) things that belong in a school. I typed 'principal' and he popped up. The game liked that but it wasn't what was needed to get my star. I tapped the hint button and it says, "What do students need?" I refrained from typing 'spanking' and typed book, notebook, desk etc. All those appeared and were okay with the AI but did not earn my star. You can shake the I-Pad and get rid of all the extra stuff at any time, by the way.
     This game has 50 levels. It encourages creativity for young people, I think. It is possibly better suited for kids or grandkids than an old (shooter) gamer like myself but I thought it was very cool. The graphics are cartoony, as you can see. It is cute, in a word.
     A personal note about this odd game. As I played it, I could hear the old John Lennon song playing in my mind.
       Imagine a winged horse
       Carrying us away
       Imagine a ladder
       To climb this stupid wall today
Okay, I changed the words from John's great song. To sum up, I definitely recommend this game for the sale price of 99 cents.
      I almost forgot about the flannel shirt thing. Have you ever noticed that crisis is now a misused word with the media types? A crisis is actually pretty rare, severe, dramatic and dangerous. Death or damage would be imminent. Now the word is thrown around freely. So this is not a crisis, but my joke for all the drama queens who misuse the word. Okay.
    Don't you hate flannel shirts? They shrink terribly. I bought several of them the other day and purposely bought them way too big. They swallowed me. Now the sleeves are a bit short after a couple of washings. Ticks me off. Hey, I live here in the mountains where you either are required to look real scroungy or at least wear a flannel shirt and put on that Grisly Adams or Yule Givens facade.
    Speaking of things that shrink. Since the recession started, most of the stuff at the grocery store has either shrank or the price has doubled. My 'fun sized' candy bars would make a set for a ring. Potato chips have gone from a 12 oz. bag to a 10 or 10.5 oz. On the ice cream front, ice cream went from .5 gallon down to 1.5 quarts, which is one pint less. Is some guy at the factory eating all my pints? You may say, well, they surely dropped the price a corresponding amount. Nay, faithful pilgrim. The prices went up! On that candy bar thing. It used to be 99 cents for 10 bars and has decreased to 8 bars while the price went to $1.25. What was once a 1 pound bag of coffee changed to 11.5 ounces, several years ago. Now, I think they are also cutting the stuff with something else because it seems to take more to get the same taste. Yes, I am old but I drink champagne to cleanse my pallet, so my taste buds are fine, thank you.
    Hey, let's talk bread. The slices of bread are so small that you have to reach down into your toaster to pull them out. Hamburger and hot dog buns get smaller and smaller while the price doubles. I do so appreciate the marketers giving their brother men a break during these hard times. I love you guys, really. A case of soft drinks used to be, by definition, 24. Now there are 20 in some of them. I could go on and on, but that would not make my flannel shirts grow. This is not a crisis, anyway.
    From the author's green retreat, I'm CE Willllllllllssss. The key got stuck.
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