When I went to Border's to buy a wall calendar, they had two full carrells of books devoted exclusively to Sudoku. There is a Snood-version of Sudoku that lets you play it with Snoods instead of numbers. In the pit orchestra I was in last year, people were passing Sudoku pages around like numeric bongs to pass the time between acts of Mikado. Over at the Chompblog, every Tuesday's update is Tuesdoku Tuesday (which is not as fun as the competing feature, Newsday Tuesday, on the URI! Zone). So what's the big deal about Sudoku?

I stayed home from work on Monday and Tuesday of this week to get over a random winter bug, so I figured there'd be no better time to unearth the secrets of Sudoku for my blog-reading public. In a controlled lab setting (my office with Booty sleeping next to a giant glass of orange juice), I played a few (52) games of Easy mode Sudoku at websudoku.com to see what all the fuss was about.

Sudoku is "okay". It's an intriguing premise and I can appreciate the elegance of how the solutions come together without any need for guessing, but at the end of the day it's a boring addiction more than a fun one (your mileage may vary, especially you SUV-driving motherlovers). By the time I was on game twenty or so, I was clicking "Play Another" out of habit, and not because I got any particular enjoyment out of beating the puzzle. It reminded me of playing Snood for the eighty-billionth time, or running through Diablo II for the ninety-billionth time hoping to get that one Screwdriver of Kings off a monster.

Speaking of puzzle games with loopy Japanese names, does anyone remember Sokoban? You were a non-union worker in a warehouse and you had to push all the boxes into clearly-marked storage zones. You could only push the boxes though, so if a box got pushed into a corner, you had to restart the level. That there was the epitome of a frustratingly boring carpal-tunnel-inducing addiction but I still beat it as a kid. There are plenty of web versions online if you do a Google search, so I'm sure you could use up some of your company's valuable work time by giving it a try .

Speaking of valuable company time, you should also watch these videos:

Karaoke for the Deaf (3MB WMV).

Booty Says Hello (322KB WMV).

Booty and Amber Become Lap Cats (140KB WMV).

Amber does Chin-Ups (157KB WMV).

LOST awakens from its two months of reruns tonight! It's Mr. Eko's story and there are two to one odds that Ana-Lucia gets fed to a bear then shot tonight.

Cyclops Kitten No Hoax
But flamingmouse could be
Cost of sex rose from $250 to $2,500

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