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Ordered myself some pseudo-free (still have to pay for shipping, plus a few bucks to avoid the advertising on the back) business cards from VistaPrint:

I didn't actually want to print my home address on it, so I used the space for a haiku:

     a haiku written
needs a season to be real
  um... tree in blossom!

At one point I started having a chat with this one nice gal at the bus top, and ended up giving her one of my old business cards, but had to awkwardly scratch out the email on it. I have this possibly unlikely notion that having a card like this might be useful in similar social situations, but probably not so much as I think.

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Crowd Control of the Moment
Slashdot had an article about the White House Crowd Control manual recently unearthed by the Washington Post. Here was my favorite bit from the PDF:

The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protesters (USA! USA! USA!) As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site. The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities.

I'm not sure which part I find less wholesome, the almost self-parodying use of yelling "USA! USA! USA!" or the idea of importing the local football team and/or frat to act as rhetorical muscle.

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Games of the Moment
Gamasutra on 20 Really Difficult Games and the design lessons to be drawn from them. Some of these I haven't even heard of, and the only one I really got through was Blast Corps, which was absolutely terrific. (via slashdot)