Listened to some Mike and The Mechanics after ages

Over this weekend, I was on a nostalgia trip, listening to all things old - soft ballads, rock anthems, the works...fished out two of the Mike and The Mechanics greatests - Living Years and All I need is a Miracle. Still sound so good and ofcourse, quite refreshing after listening to them after some 15-20 years. I also listened to a lot of Eagles and Don Henley in particular - Learn to be still, Tequila Sunrise (like Glen Frey too), Boys of Summer, End of Innocence, Love will keep us alive, New York Minute, among others..today I would download Mono (not the Japanese instrumental rock band but the british duo trip-hop act that churned out "Life in Mono" about 11 years back. I like trip-hop at times - used to listen to a lot of that when I was going through a rather depressive phase: Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Everything But the Girl, etc)....wish last.fm or Pandora could play their free radios this part of the world (sigh!)...

Lexulous is to Scrabble what Mafia Wars is to..Dope Wars?

These days I play Mafia Wars off and on over FB (Facebook to the uninitiated) - a very addictive game involving various "mafia gangs" (basically your Facebook buddies who have also signed in into the game). That, and my favorite all-time game Lexulous (not over FB, but the game site www.lexulous.com. The FB version is not timed and can take ages to finish, esp. while playing across timezones) and therefore is not a lot of fun for people living outside the States. There are some truly cool features about the FB Lexulous though - stats, bingo history, personal scratchpad, graph, etc...but nothing like a short and sweet game on the original game site. Infact, I realized I was faring much better against strong FB players because of my "honed" gaming skills on lexulous.com.

So, coming straight to the point, Lexulous is the (in)famous variant of the classic board(and now also online) word game, Scrabble. I love both of these games. I also loved a nifty little app called Dope Wars ages back - where you "buy and sell" all kinds of drugs on the streets of NY, LA, London, etc, earn tons of dough, launder it, bank it and become a "rich ganglord". So when I got caught into the hype called Mafia Wars over FB, I was pleasantly surprised. Except for the bells and whistles (armors, vehicles, buying and selling properties to make more money),the feel of the game seems so similar to Dope Wars..Apparently there are other apps out there that are similar if not identical to these games. So....how does anyone guard oneself (one's intellectual property)in the world of games? A slight twist - cosmetic or added bells and whistles - seem to be all that you would need to launch your own little online game. Is that it? Well, not quite. Even when the net is crawling with millions of variants of tetris and pacman (there's a pacwoman variant too!), card games galore - and now classic board games like Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleship, etc, very few actually catch the attention of people in droves. Lexulous and Mafia Wars are some of the lucky ones. Lexulous has managed to outwit Scrabble online in terms of hits, while Mafia Wars claims to have 4 million users accessing it in a month (atleast in June'09)! Incredible! Ofcourse, its not just luck in the virtual world that makes you tick. The interface, the user-friendliness, and that x-factor that only an avid game enthusiast/designer can build in into the game. These are some of the things that separate the men from the boys I guess...

"Third World" Aviation risks

Another plane crash in less than a month - again, with a French connection and involving an Airbus. Apparently the model A310 is banned in EU since 2007. What bugs me no end is that while everyone talked about the AF447 crash earlier this month purely from a scientific or humanitarian angle, leading papers immediately after the Yemenia A310 crash started commenting on the "risks that third world aviation poses". Why? Just because kins of the victims can rip off airlines for millions when its a "First World" aviation disaster like the one earlier last month, while the second one happened involving a plane belonging to a third world nation? Could someone please ask the kins of those who died whether it makes any difference to them or the dead? Is this truly the second decade of the 21st Century? Or perhaps we really are too prejudiced to realize that we have not changed much from our greatgrandparents...