Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!!!

:: I wonder if this guy has a partner-in-crime named 'Rama Lama Dingdong'.

:: Here's an interesting article about Choose Your Own Adventure books. If you're a certain age -- my age, perhaps -- you remember these books somewhat fondly. Told in second person, you'd read a few pages and then be presented with a choice, whereby you turned to page X if you chose to do A, or page Y if you chose to do B, and so on through the book, until you came to one of usually between 25 to 30 endings. "Interactive fiction" at its most basic, I suppose, but still, quite a bit of fun. My favorites were some of the space opera ones (of course), as well as a spy book called Your Code Name Is Jonah, a quite scary one called The Mystery of Chimney Rock, and...well, most of 'em were pretty fun. You could also learn from these, such as the one where you're lost at sea on a rowboat and you're parched with thirst and the sea water looks so appealing, so you choose to drink some. Bad idea, that!

Here's another cool site about the Choose Your Own Adventure series that actually graphs out some information about each book and how the endings are distributed.

Incidentally, I've always been irritated that there really, truly is no way to get to the "Ultima" ending of Inside UFO 54-40 without just stopping reading and flipping to it. I remember that there is no traditional way of doing it, but I'd always hoped there was something overlooked in the book...maybe a page where each line starts with letters that spell out "Turn to page 101 to get to Ultima", or something like that.

:: I honestly wasn't wondering what Sylvester Stallone has been up to...and yet, now I know, anyway. Yeesh.

More next week!