don't shoot the pianist
he is doing the best he can

As it would have happened twenty years ago: my cousin gets engaged, her parents let my parents know, and I find out from family.

Today: my cousin gets engaged, updates her relationship status on Facebook, I find out five minutes later and let my parents know.

Well, it’s happened again. A working-class man spends a few dollars on a lottery ticket and wins big. With the new-found wealth, his life changes completely. And not for the better.

Three years later, the body of $17-million Florida Lottery winner Abraham Shakespeare has been found buried behind a home belonging to the boyfriend of a woman who befriended Shakespeare not long after he won his prize.

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New skates should be sharpened before being used.

I decided to take my new blades to a public skate at Kingsgate Ice Arena out in Kirkland yesterday afternoon, and figured I’d get there a half hour early so I could get my skates sharpened beforehand. As luck would have it, the arena shop was closed until a half hour before the session ended. The rental office didn’t have hockey skates in my size, so I figured I’d skate around until the shop opened up.

That was probably a bad idea. As much as I enjoy the challenge of attempting to skate on blades that probably couldn’t slice open a block of tofu, it’s a lot more fun when they’re sharp. As it was, I had a very dull inside edge, and—outside edge? What’s an outside edge?

It could have been a lot worse—surprisingly, I managed not to fall once despite having the traction of your average Seattle driver in a snowstorm—but I have to say, skating with a dull edge is a bit like an engine problem limiting a Ferrari to 30kph. Quite frankly, it makes one look like a beginner. I think there were five-year-olds skating circles around me.

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I got a new phone a couple of days ago. Pre-installed in the Games section were the demo versions of Tetris, Wheel of Fortune, a logic game, and something called “Surviving High School”. I’ll spare the details, but suffice it to say that I had no idea that high school life was nothing more than a finite state automaton.

Who buys these games, anyway?