Last Outpost of Backgammon Etiquette

Great Moments in Backgammon

Terribly shot and horribly scripted, it is nonetheless Bond's one backgammon duel, and so should be celebrated here.

New Board

Backgammon Motherfucker Convention Deemed Successful

Backgammon was played in several places - pretty much anywhere a table and two chairs could be secured without being buffeted by video poker chicanery or the dingdingding of slots.
Among the places found to play backgammon:
-The homebase of Luxor
-Empty cafes of Mandelay Bay
-Within alarming eyeshot of the world's largest chocolate fountain at Bellagio
-Caesars Palace
-Paris

Possibly other places. Possibly not even all of the above places. In fact, the entire trip has been wiped from my memory by spending four days in Tucson with family members. Perhaps Lucky Doubles Roller will post additional details, but I doubt it.

Basil Poledouris is in Heaven Now Sitting Beside Crom's Mighty Throne

That's why they call it long pig Marimoto-san

Things have been pretty quiet on the bacon front around here recently. However, leave it to the Japanese to get things going again with a dual breakthrough in both bacon and robots. Not only have our friends in the land of the rising sun come up with a robot that can tell you what things taste like, but this selfsame robot has pronounced that people taste like bacon! Already this little fellow has made a greater contribution to the wealth of human knowledge than Twiki on Buck Rogers ever did. Just pray that the robots don't decide that they also like the taste of bacon.

Teriyaki long pig here

Proud Moments in Religious Thought and Action

Rwanda Nun Jailed over Genocide
BBC - A Roman Catholic nun has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for her role in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Theophister Mukakibibi was jailed by a traditional Rwandan court for helping ethnic Hutu militiamen kill Tutsis hiding in a hospital where she worked.

Two other Catholic nuns were found guilty by a Belgian court in 2001, and male priests have also faced trial. According to the president of the local gacaca court in Butare, the nun selected Tutsis sheltering in the hospital and threw them out for the militias to kill.

He said she did not spare pregnant women, and was also accused of dumping a baby in a latrine, the Reuters news agency reports. Some members of the Catholic hierarchy in Rwanda had close ties to extremist politicians and aided Hutu militias in the run-up to the killings.

Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in the 1994 genocide and thousands of people were killed after seeking sanctuary in churches.

---

God Lets Local Issues Sort Themselves Out in Rwanda - Too Busy Listening to Ted Haggard Prattle on About the Evils of Homosexuality.

BBC - Twenty-year-old Zafran Mukantwari was the only person in her family who survived the genocide. She is tightly veiled and speaks softly as she tells me what happened 10 years ago.

Her family were Catholic, she says. Those who killed them worshipped at the same church.

At the age of 10, Zafran found herself alone and at first she continued going to church. She thought she could find support there. But then she began to question her faith.

"When I realised that the people I was praying with killed my parents, I preferred to become a Muslim because Muslims did not kill." Before the genocide more than 60% of Rwandans were Catholic.

And when the killings started, tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to churches for sanctuary. But they found little protection there. At the church of Sainte Famille the priest in charge of the church, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, is blamed for colluding with the killers. Discarding his priest's cassock, witnesses say he took to wearing a flack jacket and carrying a pistol.

Great Moments in Backgammon

There is much to love about this photo, but for starters, Linda is the editor of Las Vegas Backgammon Magazine. That's right, backgammon had regional magazines. I have little doubt there was also Santa Fe Backgammon Magazine, South Tahoe Backgammon Magazine, Aspen Backgammon Magazine and the Monterey/Carmel-by-the-Sea Backgammon Intelligencer Journal.

Schwarzenegger Election Prayer

Here in Cal-i-For-Ni-A, we will dutifully put a ridiculous man back in charge of the world's fifth largest economy. We are a simple people who want only a strong leader who willl battle the evil nurses and teacher unions, then stomp their bones to dust. We can only do this with the help of Arnold's god, Crom

Arnold Prayer

Great Moments in Backgammon

We live in savage days now where an old man in a Philip Morris sweashirt can't be found explaining the finer points of the game to dames like Jeanie and Susan in Nassau. And why has Philip Morris abandoned sponsorship of the game?

I'm a New Zealand zoo official, and this monkey's going to Newtown!

SYDNEY - The crew of a large cargo ship headed for Sydney have been told to catch or kill a rogue monkey running loose aboard the vessel or they will not be allowed to dock.

A spokesman for the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service said the container ship, said to be coming from China, was due in Australian waters within two days.

Although a spokesman said the shots were of a poor quality and showed only a "small brown blur", it was believed the monkey was a macaque.

The crew have no idea how the animal came to be aboard and say they have not been able to get close to it since first spotting it sitting on top of a container some weeks ago.

Story goes, these great big rats come scuttling off the slave ships and raped all the little tree monkeys.

Creationist also doesn't believe in taxes

"Intelligent" design proponent to be jailed for tax evasion. Praise Jesus.

Backgammon Motherfucker Convention to be Held in Vegas

YPMTRGA Members are encouraged to travel to our annual convention in Las Vegas from Nov. 17-20.

Itinerary is still being put together but possible panels and conferences include:

-Playing Backgammon in an Enormous Hotel Lobby: How loud can you be? What are the drawbacks? Are there waitresses?

-Dracula's Haunted Castle: What was his connection to ancient Egypt? Could Anne Rice have been on to something?

-Are Luxor's Hieroglyphics up to Snuff? How might they be improved? (Chalk provided)

-Cable TV in Las Vegas: Is it better than it is real American cities? A non-stop 72 hour sampling should provide answers.

-Why is Everything so Far Away?

-Why is it so Cold/Hot?

-Where is my Corkskrew: The TSA vs. My much needed tools: A Case Study.

Anti-sodomy preacher engages in sodomy (and snorting meth)

The leader of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals, a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, resigned Thursday after being accused of paying for sex with a man in monthly trysts over the past three years.

dude on dude action here

Our War With Fish Will Be Long, But We Will Win!

Oceans' Fish Gone by 2048
International Study by Ecologists & Economists Predicts Collapse of World Ocean Ecology
The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That's when the world's oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

The study by Boris Worm, PhD, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, -- with colleagues in the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Panama -- was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.

The researchers analyzed several different kinds of data. Even to these ecology-minded scientists, the results were an unpleasant surprise.

"I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are -- beyond anything we suspected," Worm says in a news release.

"This isn't predicted to happen. This is happening now," study researcher Nicola Beaumont, PhD, of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, U.K., says in a news release.

Honey, I'm home

What Asinine Thing is Cory Doctorow Posting on BoingBoing Today?

"This may be the funniest pie-chart joke evar [sic]: "Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man," represented as a pie-chart, resembling Pac Man. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)"
posted by Cory Doctorow