A. 駆逐艦　B. 航空母艦　C. 巡洋艦　D. 戦艦　E. 潜水艦

Theoman led off this time, and he did a fine job, sinking the battleship at D in the first shot.  He used actual knowledge of the language to guide him, which is unofficially frowned upon, but the knowledge was vague, and his source amusing, so all is forgiven.  Actually, I believe the song he is referring to is about not simply a battleship but a space battleship, which would presumably require a three-dimensional board and make the game even more excruciatingly long than it already is.

Next came Dragon, who seems to think that children are not supposed to have fun when they play games.  Perhaps this is a reflection on her own childhood, a bleak, soulless period of time in which board games were inflected upon her as a source of torment while she hovered in that featureless void.  Or it could be that her problem is simply with children getting excited over what is, at heart, an extremely violent event: the sinking of a ship.  Call me a cynic, but trying to get kids to stop thinking that blowing things up is cool sounds like a lost cause to me.  Her targeting strategy, however, was not a lost cause, at least not entirely.  She correctly identified that the Carrier, the only 5-hole ship in the game, is the longest kanji compound at B.  After that, though . . . Miss, Miss, Miss, Miss.

A Fan’s guess was brief, and thus our response is brief: Miss.

Just as in the real game, the Carrier turned out to be the easiest to get a hit on; after Dragon, both Shirley and Theoman on his second pass lodged red pegs in its dull gray hull.  The other ships ended up being considerably more elusive, except for E, the submarine, which Theoman sank through clandestine, undisclosed methods (we suspect Jack Ryan may have been involved).  But the destroyer (A) and the cruiser (C) live to fight another day.

I would like to apologize again for the lack of an entry last Monday; my computer was inflicted with a virus.  Rather than get down about it, however, I have decided to make the event into the theme for this week’s puzzle: diseases.  We’ve got the common cold, the slightly less common flu, TB, tetanus, and a couple of kinds of pox.  Grab your canes and your whiteboards, folks: it’s time for differential diagnosis.

A. 風邪　B. 結核　C. 天然痘　D. 破傷風　E. 水疱瘡　F. 流感

The lead actor turned away from the director, got into his poorly defined character, and turned his gaze toward the camera.  In physical terms, this change of eye angle was very slight, but the psychological ramifications were huge.  Before, he was merely standing in the vicinity of filming.  Now he was on film.

People have many difference reactions to being on camera.  Some love it.  They live for it.  They feed off the energy of an imagined audience and become incandescent, transforming into someone they’d never before dreamed.  A recording device grants quickness to their words, grace to their feet, and a variety of mystical qualities to their hair.  They say the camera adds ten pounds—and for the true actor, it’s ten pounds of confidence.

Of course, there are others who do their best impression of Flick, the kid in A Christmas Story who got his tongue stuck to a light pole.

The camera is fickle.  It chooses the targets of its awful awkwardness-inducing powers at random.  The semi-willing lead in this production, for example, seemed competent enough.  He wore a suit, which—though slightly too broad at the shoulders and much too broad around the waist—had recently been ironed to within a thread of its existence.  His tie was done up in the rare Atlantic knot, which looks so silly that people only tie it to show off that they can.  Before he opened his mouth, at least, he appeared perfectly comfortable with a script in his hand.

There were other factors that didn’t show up on camera as well.  As captain of his high school debate team, he had gotten first place in both the Policy and Lincoln-Douglas Debate categories at the NFL (National Forensics League) National Tournament.  As valedictorian, he had given a graduation speech that a number of adults called the best they’d ever heard—to be fair, most of them saw his mother on a regular basis, and may not have been able to afford to say otherwise.  In college, he had stood up to present issues before the student congress so many times that he had been unofficially banned from their meetings.

In short, this kid was no stranger to the spoken word.  But in front of the camera, he delivered his lines with all the elegance of a man with a mouthful of ice cubes who was getting over a hangover while trying to impress a woman and learning to ride a unicycle.

With its geysers, so eruption-prone
It’s a wonder this place hasn’t blown
But it’s pretty, and thus
We go by car and bus
To the glory that is Yellowstone

Event: Yellowstone is established as the world’s first national park
Year: 1872
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park