Monsters! Science! Giddy Joy!

You must join me in saluting an awesome article summarized by Scicurious at Scientopia. It is awesome because it looks at monsters from Dungeons and Dragons (in the course of some totally scientific research about gaze following).

I wish I'd thought of that.

Well, you can be sure that my entire future research energy is going to be dedicated to figuring out a way to make D&D relevant to some totally scientific medical library topic.

Perhaps this will give me the 'in' I need to begin my study of the information needs of liches.

You have inspired me, Levy J, Foulsham T, and Kingstone A! Time to haul out my battered research texts, by which I mean the Monster Manual and associated monster-heavy tomes. There are a lot of monster books published for the d20 System under the Open Gaming License, and for a while I bought every one I could find.

You can never have too many monsters, that's what I say.

I Could Use That Much Sleep, Though

Because everyone loves to hear about other peoples' dreams, here's last night's entertainment at the Theater of My Brain.

I dreamed that I was very tired (also true in real life), so I went to bed, and when I woke up I realized I had slept for three days straight, and missed my flight to Portland, OR, for Christmas (this flight is real).

I was very distressed that not only had I missed a holiday vacation of awesome familyness, but it was all my fault, and I was therefore not going to be able to get any use from the enormous amounts of money that I spent on the plane tickets (the high cost of these tickets is true in real life).

Doing a little highly sophisticated dream interpretation, I perceive that certain themes occupy my mind:

• sleep
• time/being late*
• money* 

Obviously my spirit is troubled, and vague premonitions of ill fortune disturb my peace of mind. I should take a nap.


*These themes also appear in another recent dream, suggesting ongoing preoccupation.

Goose-Related Observations

I saw that someone had won a "Golden Goose Award."

Why Golden Goose? I thought. What's a golden goose? There was never a golden goose! There was an ordinary-looking goose that laid golden eggs!

I was filled with outrage.

Then I found out that there actually was a golden goose (egg type unspecified), helpfully noted by Wikipedia as "not to be confused with the goose that laid the golden eggs." Upon reading the summary of the tale, I recalled that actually I did once know about the Golden Goose, because I remember all the people being stuck together. I suppose it must have slipped my mind in the 25 years since I first read it.

Thank you, Wikipedia. I will not make that mistake again, I can tell you.

It remains unclear why someone named an award after this Golden Goose, or whether the recipient now has the power to make people stick together after the first one tries to pluck a goose feather. One can only hope so.

In seemingly unrelated yet also goose-related news, I understand that kiwi fruits are also known as Chinese Gooseberries. Chinese geese must be enormous.

I want one.

At Least I Had Clothes On

My work sent around one of those helpful "check on your withholding status because the end of the year is coming and we're going to be preparing your W2" notes recently.

I can only assume that it was this which prompted my brain to deliver me a dream in which it was April 15th and I had completely forgotten about taxes.

I was frantically explaining to someone that it was all because of the baby having distracted me (a pretty good excuse) and trying to gather my paperwork, convinced that I could still get it done in time.

With online filing, this is probably true, although not recommended, so I was right not to be totally panicking in the dream.

"Having a baby should just automatically get you an extension!" I said.

So thanks, I guess, work. That was entertaining.