Fair and balanced?

Ah, crap.  News Corp (which owns Fox) is making a play for Dow Jones & Company.  Not only does DJ publish a number of important stock indexes (most notably, the Dow Jones Industrial Average), but they also own the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and MarketWatch, three of the top financial news sources.

I see this ending badly for small investors.

A new addiction

A few weeks ago when I went to the eye doctor, I realized I didn't have any games for my Nintendo DS that I could just pick up and put down on a moments notice. All of them were long, involved games that you have to load and then save when you're done. Animal Crossing, Final Fantasy III, Brain Age, etc, all take considerable time to play.

To solve this, a couple weeks ago I bought Club House Games, which has dozens of card and board games like poker, blackjack, checkers, dominoes, etc. Some of them short and sweet like Spit or Memory, others more complicated like Chess or Shogi (Japanese Chess).

One of the games included is Koi-Koi. It's played with a Hanafuda deck of 48 cards, arranged in 12 suits, each illustrated with a different flower. You score points by matching cards and creating sets. Getting the hang of the cards is the hardest part of the game, once you understand them, it's actually pretty simple.

And very addictive!

Nintendo was founded in the 1889 to produce Hanafuda cards!  Although their main focus is on video games now, they still make the cards. I ordered a deck from J-List this morning so I can play with real people, not just against the computer.