Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 09:35:07 -0500 Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: Pugg (pugg71@hotmail.com) wrote: > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: > > They need to [...] Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" [...] wacky > > principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" [...] Andy Kaufman > > [...] internal bleeding, [...] Richard Belzer [...] a sixteen-color > > island unless another quiz show scandal [...] Ezio Greggio in a T-shirt > > [...] a disclaimer [...] have very hard lives and deserve our pity, > > Trizantine weave [...] MISS PIGGY'S SPECIAL WAS RUINED! > > I get maybe about 30% of the references in that one. Could someone > please post explanations of all the references I don't get? Use > diagrams and/or flowcharts if necessary. Please e-mail me as I don't > read this group. Well, whaddaya know? I started writing this several days ago, and just got around to finding your article, so here it is. It's not terribly entertaining, but I had to write it because Matt McIrvin called me up and said he didn't understand anything I said. No, wait, I called him up and told him that. Actually, no, I called him up and said I was writing this anyway even though he already figured all this out. DAMN HIM AND HIS BIG BRAIN FULL OF TV!!!! So now you get to see it, no thanks to Matt. Last week, I wrote: > > On November 3, Nick Bensema (nickb@io.com) wrote: > > > > Earlier, I could routinely get to the fourth level on one life. Now, > > I'm lucky to make it out of the first. > > > > Why? Because I started worrying about that worthless cherry that jumps > > in and does laps around the ghost pen. > > That's Ms. Pac-Man, dude. Regular Pac-Man has a cherry that just sits there > like a rock or something. In Pac-Man Plus, it's a can of Generic Coke, and > in Pac-Man Jr. all the fruits have turned into toys that walk around eating > your power pills and crapping out big sticky dots. (Note that in the > original, Galaxians were considered fruits.) Original Pac-Man (which was "Puc-Man" in Japan) was an unusual game in that the four ghosts had slightly different algorithms they followed as they chased you, and the game occasionally tried to shake things up by having all four of them simultaneously reverse or head to the four corners of the board, but it didn't have any true randomness, so people learned to beat it by simply memorizing a path they could take to avoid all the ghosts. (It was more or less deterministic.) While the Japanese creators of Pac-Man were developing the sequel (Super Pac-Man), the American distributor decided to improve the game to add a little more novelty (to cash in on the craze) and to make the game less predictable (to make it less easy to play for three hours on one quarter) so they added a few little hacks and renamed the game Ms. Pac-Man, the difference being that the fruit prize wandered around the mazes (which were different shapes on different levels) and the ghosts were a little less predictable. (They were still mostly predictable, though. Also, the game wasn't yet ruined.) Then the Americans decided they needed to ruin the fun for everyone, and modified the original game a second time, resulting in Pac-Man Plus, which was just Pac-Man except the fruits had been replace with what may or may not have been a product placement (the cherry was a can of sort-of-Coke) and the game cheated to ensure nobody could ever play too long. When you ate a power pill, instead of all four ghosts turning blue, three would turn blue and the other would kill you instantly. Or sometimes the ghosts would just turn invisible. (This is not to be confused with some of the modified bootlegs, such as Hangly Man, where the maze's walls would turn invisible. The first Pac-Man bootleg I ever played was an even more modified version of Hangly Man where the Pac-Man had been changed to a little Popeye head.) The first sequel by the Japanese, Super Pac-Man, didn't have any dots in the maze, just lots and lots of fruit (all of one type on each level.) You had to eat keys to open doors to get to the fruit, and there was a button you could push which made you move at double speed (a feature some people added themselves to the original, via a simple hardware modification) and a second type of power pill allowed you to become invulnerable and pass through closed doors. So if you ate a super power pill and held down the button, you could clean out the whole level in about ten seconds while just ignoring the ghosts altogether. It was too easy and not as interesting as Ms. Pac-Man. The next sequel was Jr. Pac-Man, or Pac-Man Jr., I forget which order the name went in because there were so many games (it's not the same as Baby Pac-Man.) This one was tedious because it was just Ms. Pac-Man except the maze was now about three times as big (the screen scrolled as you moved around) and, for no apparent reason, as the prizes wandered through the maze they ate your power pills and turned regular dots into big fat dots that slowed you down. I think they put that in just to force Nick to stop ignoring the worthless prizes, by replacing them with evil worthless prizes. > Don't get me started on Super Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Baby Pac-Man, > and Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man (the latter two games were half a pinball machine > nailed to a videogame, and a pinball machine nailed to half a videogame, > respectively.) Super Pac-Man's the easiest. Oh, and I almost forgot > Pac & Pal, the one nobody loved. But it's easy too, especially if you > keep hitting the "Killer Halitosis" button that lets Pac-Man shoot the > ghosts with deadly expanding circles emanating from his mouth, penetrating > ghosts and their Gardol Shields. I can understand that one might freak > you out because it has all the fruits on every screen at the same time, > and that little green ghost who keeps carrying the fruits away, plus > it has a lemon and none of the others had lemons, just the weird fruits > they have in Japan. Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man was a pinball machine with a small grid of light bulbs in the middle. Every once in a while, you you got a ball locked, you could move your light bulb around the tiny square while another light bulb chased it in slow-motion. The left flipper rotated your symmetric dot, and the right flipper moved your dot one space, in a direction indicated by a compass next to the game board. It was a real dog of a game -- not very good as a pinball game, and the attempt at a video game was below pathetic. Baby Pac-Man was better. It was an upright cabinet with a small pinball machine in the bottom and an actual video Pac-Man game in the top. If you shot the ball to the top of the board, it would be captured temporarily and the video game would start, until you moved off the bottom of the screen at which point it turned back into pinball. The pinball game was too tiny to be any good, but the two halves were integrated with each other and both were playable, unlike the worthless grid of light bulbs in Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man. Pac & Pal is one nobody remembers, perhaps because it was no fun. I don't remember ever seeing one in an arcade (it may not even have been imported to the U.S., but that would be hard to believe given the huge craze for selling anything with the word "Pac-Man" stamped on it.) This one was like Super Pac-Man in that there were no dots and lots of locked doors with fruit behind them, except that this time instead of keys you had to eat playing cards, and each card opened up one fruit (usually at the opposite end of the maze.) A special fifth ghost (light green and short) would head for any unlocked fruits and carry them away if you didn't stop her. Instead of power pills, the maze had two of the Galaxians (as seen in the original game when they ran out of ideas for fruit) which gave you the ability to shoot stun rays from your mouth by pressing a button. So you couldn't eat the ghosts, just mildly annoy them. It was an irritating game with annoying sound effects. Eventually the Americans started producing wholly unrelated games with the name "Pac-Man" slapped on. Pac-Land was one of those side-scrolling- jump-over-the-killer-mushrooms-while-walking-fifty-miles-to-the-right games that used to be popular, like most of the Mario games and that f'ing Smurf Adventure. I've always hated those games where all you could do was make precision jumps over lethal hurdles over, and over, and over... (Moon Patrol was the only good game like that, because it was so lenient in its jumping that it could move faster, and it didn't require you to memorize the scrolling wallpaper.) Pac-Mania was a revival of the original Pac-Man with fancy 3D-ish graphics in orthogonal perspective, better music (which got louder as the ghosts got closer), and the ability to jump over the ghosts (except for Funky, who could also jump into you.) There were more arcade games after that (such as Virtual Pac-Man) and a number of home games, but nobody really cares. I'll bet nobody ever makes a movie out of the Pac-Man board game I have (where your plastic Pac-Man would eat marbles by sitting on them) or my favorite early '80s artifact, a bootleg Rubik's Cube with unlicensed depictions of Pac-Man characters on the six sides. Oh, Gardol was a mouthwash or toothpaste or something that had TV commercials in the 1950s with concentric circles coming out of people's mouths, although I don't know if that represented bad breath or the Gardol Shield, I just know of this "Gardol Shield" through old issues of Mad magazine (the Smithsonian of TV commercials.) > > [...] > > > > And suddenly, I started to notice when the cherry was thump-thump-thumping > > its way out of the escape tunnels. I started to chase after it as soon > > as it showed up, and as a consequence I usually ended up with Pinky all > > over me. Damn you, Pinky! > > > > And even though I've identified the problem, I can't get my zen back. > > This always happens when I lose my zen. > > What's worse is when you mention Pac-Man on the Internet and immediately > Hollywood gets a bad idea from you. > > On November 5, a mere 48 hours after you mentioned your love of Pac-Man, > The Hollywood Reporter printed a story that some company named > Crystal Sky has spent an undisclosed amount buying the film rights to > Pac-Man... for a live-action movie. No, really. Live-action Pac-Man movie. > > DAMN YOU, NICK BENSEMA! DAMN YOU TO THE EXACT CENTER OF AN INFINITELY > LONG TUNNEL WHICH GOES ALL THE WAY OFF THE RIGHT EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE > AND COMES BACK ON THE LEFT! This, of course, is a reference to one of the cleverest details (of many clever tiny details) in the programming of the original Pac-Man. There was a tunnel leading off the right-hand side of the screen, and if Pac-Man went down it he would reappear at the other side of the screen, and the ghosts could do this too, but the ghosts only reappeared after a slight delay, as if the wormhole was longer for them than it was for you. > Still, I suppose Hollywood deserved SOMEONE giving them an idea that bad, > so in a way, I'm glad it was you. > > Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: > They need to get that wacky Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" and that wacky > principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" and they can run around > eating pies That's a description of an episode of "Fridays", a "Saturday Night Live" knockoff starring talented people like Michael Richards (from "Seinfeld") and Melanie Chartoff (from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose") as well as the terrifyingly repetitious Mark Blankfield. In that episode one of them, I forget who, put on a yellow rain slicker and ran around trying to eat a pie while the others pursued. Sadly, that's just about the funniest thing they ever did (most of the other sketches were just Mark Blankfield overacting while pretending to be stoned), with one exception... > and then Andy Kaufman would come in and beat them all up and > the Masked Magician would reveal how to swallow a sword and suffer from > internal bleeding, Once when Andy Kaufman hosted "Fridays", he had the idea to end the episode not with yet another lame sketch about Mark Blankfield being stoned, but to stage a fight with the other cast members. He stopped in the middle of a typically unfunny sketch (people were at a restaurant taking turns going to the restroom and coming back stoned) and refused to continue, so Michael Richards went over and took the cue cards and dropped them in his lap, and Andy threw a glass of water, and then a big fake fistfight erupted. It was all carefully planned, of course, but for some reason many people believed Andy Kaufman's brain broke on TV, and I don't understand why they don't think that all the sketches on "Saturday Night Live" are real too. One of the other things Andy Kaufman (and his co-conspirator Bob Zmuda) did on "Fridays" was that Andy (who could actually swallow swords) played "The Masked Magician" purporting to demonstrate how magic tricks worked (much like some Fox specials two decades later, except that Andy was a more talented magician) where the joke was that Andy would show how to swallow a sword, then pull it out with blood all over it. The censors wouldn't let him do it as bloody as he wanted to. That's a shame because if he had, then people who believed the staged fight was real would be saying "Did you see 'Fridays'? Andy Kaufman really killed himself, and then he really started a fight!" > then Kramer would turn into Richard Belzer and > George Shapiro would become Danny DeVito, causing the real Danny DeVito > to vanish, due to The Law Of Conservation Of DeVitos In Live-Action Movies > Based On Sixteen-Color Video Games, In Milos Forman's movie "Man On The Moon", based on Bob Zmuda's biography of Andy Kaufman (in which Zmuda takes credit for just about everything), Jim Carrey played Kaufman, and Danny DeVito played his manager George Shapiro. However, because Kaufman and DeVito were on "Taxi" together, for the scenes where Jim Carrey and the now-elderly cast of "Taxi" recreated some "Taxi" moments, Danny DeVito's "Taxi" character was omitted. > and any violations of that law would > result in Andy Kaufman being exiled to a sixteen-color island unless > another quiz show scandal resulted in Jack Barry being put on a kids' show > where he could tell kids how to draw on their TV screens to make a boat. Now here's where it gets tricky. In the 1950s, game show host Jack Barry hosted a rigged quiz show called "Twenty-One" (this is depicted in Robert Redford's movie "Quiz Show".) For some reason there was a huge craze for quiz shows (much bigger than the one two years ago) and it became a big scandal when people found out that TV SHOWS ARE RIGGED!!! THOSE PEOPLE ON THE LITTLE SCREEN AREN'T REALLY GENIUSES! Jack Barry and "Twenty-One" got the boot, but be eventually made a comeback with "The Joker's Wild" -- a REALLY OBVIOUSLY rigged game show, but nobody cared because the questions were so easy that the only people would could enjoy the show would not be swift enough to notice that whenever a contestant was losing they'd switch reels on the big slot machine so that every wheel had nothing but jokers. Every time Jack Barry would say "The score is 400 to nothing, the only way you can win is if you spin three jokers..." you could see that the reels were solid masses of jokers and everyone would act all surprised when the contestant hit the fake jackpot. The other show Jack Barry is remembered for is "Winky Dink And You", one of the most unusual children's TV shows of all time. You had to send away for a cardboard frame filled with clear plastic, and put it over your TV screen (this was back before TV sets came in large and small) and because the title was "Winky Dink And YOU", whenever Jack Barry's little cartoon friend Winky Dink fell in a hole, YOU had to draw a ladder so he could climb out, and if you didn't buy the plastic sheet, Winky Dinky would DIE, unless you just drew right on the TV screen with your crayons, which you probably did, because you would have been pretty small if you liked this show. On one of Andy Kaufman's TV specials, there was a sequence where he was arrested for breaking the rules of television, and the judge exiled him to a crudely-drawn cartoon island, so he asked the boys and girls at home to draw him a little boat so he could sail back to the TV studio and finish his special. ("Pee-wee's Playhouse" later ripped off the idea of ripping off "Winky Dink And You".) > Sadly, they probably won't do something that awesome. It'll probably > just be Ezio Greggio in a T-shirt with sticky letters on it that say > "PACK MAN", and then Leslie Nielsen would chase him around while yawning, > and then there would be a disclaimer screen explaining that the movie > is not meant as a serious portrayal of people with eating disorders, > who have very hard lives and deserve our pity, especially if they're > so fat that they can't get up and walk out on movies like this one. Oh, man. Where to begin. First, Ezio Greggio sucks. He's one of Italy's national treasures, somewhere between Roberto Benigni and all those burnt corpses in Pompeii. I refer you to my review of the movie "2001: A Space Travesty" for an explanation of why his powers of awesome unfunniness can suck all the energy from Leslie Nielsen's sad, tired body. And I refer you to even earlier comments about the movie "Silence Of The Hams" (in which Ezio wore a T-shirt that said "JO DEE FOSTAR") if you truly wish to understand how funny his sense of funny isn't. SEE, HE SPELLED IT "JO DEE FOSTAR" INSTEAD OF "JODIE FOSTER"! It's almost as sophisticated as Cracked magazine! Anyway, Ezio Greggio and Leslie Nielsen were both in "2001: A Space Travesty", which ended with the audience being told that now we would hear some funny fart noises, and then a guy made some fart noises while explaining them (the fat person farting, the skinny person farting, the little kid farting, etc.) which may be the lowest point in the history of comedy, surpassing even Leslie Nielsen's live-action "Mr. Magoo" movie, which ended with a disclaimer explaining that the movie was not intended as an accurate portrayal of the visually handicapped. (Of course, it didn't say that in Braille.) > -- K. > > I believe I just accidentally made Trizantine weave. Okay, here I'm just meta-ing about how proud I am that I got from point A to point B by passing through point Ezio and point Kaufman and point Fart. That week I was learning to make jewelry and armor from chain (it's quite simple, really -- all you need is two pairs of pliers, and fifty thousand million pairs of metal SpaghettiOs, and a bucket of patience and Band-Aids) and I had just learned how to make box chain and its backward little brother, Byzantine weave (which is box chain with some extra pairs of rings in it.) Trizantine is so named because it's like Byzantine except that it has sets of three rings instead of two rings, thus it's named after a nonexistent historical period because people who make things out of metal at the Renaissance Festival like to make math jokes which involve imaginary historical periods. > Oh, there's my problem -- I forgot to interlock > Andy Kaufman's real twin brother with Danny DeVito's > imaginary evil twin. MISS PIGGY'S SPECIAL WAS RUINED! The obligatory callback. Andy Kaufman's character Tony Clifton (the obnoxious, unfunny comedian) was a creation of sheer genius. First you weren't supposed to know it was just Andy Kaufman having fun torturing the audience. Then you were supposed to catch on that it was Andy Kaufman in makeup. Then after a few months of that the real Andy Kaufman would start running across the stage behind Tony Clifton. So you see, the Tony Clifton character was what Phil Dick called "a fake fake". In Bob Zmuda's book, Bob talks about how he played Tony Clifton when it wasn't Andy. There's no mention of how Andy had an almost identical-looking brother (Michael) who played Tony Clifton most of the time. (When Tony Clifton looks like Andy, he's either Andy or Michael; When he doesn't look anything like Andy, he's Bob.) In the movie of Kaufman's life where Danny DeVito played a guy who wasn't Danny DeVito so that nobody played Danny DeVito, some guy played Bob Zmuda playing Andy Kaufman playing Tony Clifton, and because the movie was based on Zmuda's book, there was no mention of Andy's secret twin brother. (They weren't actually twins, but they looked like they were. You can see pictures in Bill Zehme's excellent "Lost In The Funhouse", which is the good biography of Kaufman, written with access to his family and George Shapiro's audio diaries and everyone else that Zmuda didn't talk to. Zehme is currently hosting some Comedy Central show I haven't seen. Note that you're only allowed to write an Andy Kaufman book if your name starts with "Z", so I expect to see a two-volume set by Zsa Zsa.) And THAT'S why "Pac-Man: The Movie" is a bad idea. Whether or not it involves Pac-Man wrestling women while wearing long underwear under his boxing trunks to conceal that he has duct tape wrapped around his crotch, for the part of Andy's wrestling that involved frottage, which would be all of it. They should just make "Pac-Man" into a rigged game show. It could air between cartoons on WPIX! -- K. A while ago, WPIX changed their logo from the World Trade Center to that dancing frog, and I still think the terrorists blew up the wrong one. I liked them better when they were an independent rerun station, especially when they'd air filler consisting of kids attempting to play video games over the phone between Deputy Droopalong cartoons. Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 09:36:52 -0500 Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: [on explaining one of Kibo's explosions of special cultural references] "talysman" (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > sorry, I don't even know who Andy Kaufman is. he sounds like > an economist or something. and what's "Parker Lewis Can't Lose"? > I think kibo's making fun of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", which > means that he thinks Ben Stein is a woman! either that, or he's > mixing up that movie with real-life actor Parker Stevenson, who > played Isaac Asimov in a crime drama once. "Parker Lewis Can't Lose", starring Corin "Corky" "Gumby" Nemec, is one of those rare cases of a knockoff being better than the original -- the TV show of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (starring Charlie "George Burns" Schlatter) was pitiful (and I didn't care much for the movie, either, as Ferris is the sort of jerk I didn't want to spend any time with -- the plot is that he bogarts his friend's father's sports car, and his friend has an abusive father, and Ferris wrecks the car and then tells his friend now he has to stand up to his abusive father, and then the movie stops before we find out in what sort of funny way they were going to handle the child abuse.) "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" had a great cast and a nice sense of surrealism (better than most cartoons, even) and, hey, what other show dared to expose the horrors of being forced to comb "My Little Pony"'s mane against your will? Ben Stein is the only celebrity I can do an impression of, except that it happens when I don't want it to. I can sort of do Bill Gates doing an impression of Kermit doing Bill Gates, too, but that doesn't count because two of them are just sock puppets. I liked Parker Stevenson's short-lived 1985-ish series "Probe", a show for which Isaac Asimov got his name in the credits. I have no idea if he did anything. He was previously credited on "Salvage One" and I seriously doubt his involvement with it went beyond collecting a paycheck (he would have had something to say about the episode about the oil which was chemical identical to regular oil except bright green), and then there's "Light Years", where he was credited with writing a movie that has already been made in France before they put his name on the dubbed version. I liked "Salvage One", but "Light Years" is really hard to sit through, even as French cartoon movies go. (Tip to animators: Anything with lots of rotoscoping will be condemned to only be seen at sci-fi nerd conventions between Ralph Bakshi disasters. Don't trace your cartoons. You could just show the real stuff you're tracing over, or you could learn to actually animate where people can move and stuff. "Parker Lewis" was also more cartoony than "Light Years".) Oh, lest I forget, you need to link "Parker Lewis" to "Solar Crisis" (directed by Allan Smithee) because in that movie, Jack Palance says my all-time favorite Jack Palance sentence, "I FORGET what my name IS... but I know it BEGAN... with AN ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!" to Corin "Corky" "Parker" Gumby" Nemec. Also, "Corin Nemec" only got spelled out on his birth certificate because a dead fly fell into a teletype and caused it to spit out that garbled anagram when it was supposed to be printing an arrest warrant for Robert DeNiro. Be sure to build a bridge to "Brazil" too, because I liked that movie a lot better than "Solar Crisis" (it's so bad, Allan Smithee should have taken his name off it and used some made-up nonsense name, like "Corin Nemec".) -- K. Other Japanese movies in the news: "Black Tight Killers" is playing at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, but I've already seen it, and I'm worrying about whether I should go see it on the off chance that the subtitles will be even wackier this time. Their description seems to be copied right off the DVD I have, so I have a suspicion they're showing the same blurry print with the burned-in fractured English. And I just found out it's only playing last week, even though it's still on the marquee today. Well, at least I got to see it even if you can't. Also, I still don't know whether "Tight" is supposed to be a noun or an adjective. Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 09:38:08 -0500 Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Status: RO In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote: [regarding a live-action "Pac-Man" movie, which should be disregarded] David DeLaney (dbd@gatekeeper.vic.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: > > They need to get that wacky Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" and that wacky > > principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" and they can run around > > eating pies and then Andy Kaufman would come in and beat them all up and > > the Masked Magician would reveal how to swallow a sword and suffer from > > internal bleeding, then Kramer would turn into Richard Belzer and > > George Shapiro would become Danny DeVito, causing the real Danny DeVito > > to vanish, due to The Law Of Conservation Of DeVitos In Live-Action Movies > > Based On Sixteen-Color Video Games, and any violations of that law would > > result in Andy Kaufman being exiled to a sixteen-color island unless > > another quiz show scandal resulted in Jack Barry being put on a kids' show > > where he could tell kids how to draw on their TV screens to make a boat. > > I am sitting here _trying_ to parse the fuck out of this sentence, only to > discover after deep analysis that it doesn't seem to contain any. Heeeelp! Here it is in words of one syllable, because anything in all caps counts as one syllable: KIBO LIKE TV. KIBO THINK DRAWING ON TV SCREEN FUNNY. KIBO LIKE WATCHING WRESTLER MAN MAKE FUN OF TV SHOWS FROM BEFORE KIBO BORN. KIBO DRAW BOAT NOW. KIBO SMASH BOAT! SMASH WITH SCRIBBLE! RRRR. (That oughta hold the little bastards!) It might work better if you imagined me dressed as Commander Mark from "The Secret City" and Winky Dink can be the thing from the animated phone company propaganda film in "The President's Analyst". > > I believe I just accidentally made Trizantine weave. > > Try it sideways and see if it tessellates... Know what I hate? When I've made a big patch of 6-in-1 chain mail and there's one ring in the middle where I goofed and linked it through seven instead of six, and I didn't notice until a few inches later when I realized that the extra ring made the whole thing stiff as a board and it takes a lot of delicate surgery to extract the bad ring because the piece is so stiff I can't move the others out of the way, and then when I get it out I have to figure out how to get its replacement in, and I say "Oh, screw it, now I know why all real Crusaders just wore wimpy 4-in-1, AND THAT'S WHY THEY'RE ALL DEAD!" There should be an easier way to make chain mail, preferably involving Legos. -- K. Also, I'm told it was quite a sight to see the UPS man having to get a dolly just to bring in my little shoebox-size carton of rings. They're like SpaghettiOs, except denser and they probably only cause half as much internal bleeding if swallowed.