Life as a BlackMan (the board game*)

from wikipedia's entry:

Life as a BlackMan is a board game designed and marketed by Underground Games, Inc., a black-owned game company chaired by C.E.O. Chuck Sawyer. Unlike the Game of Life, which simulates life for upper-middle class whites, the intent of Life as a BlackMan is to depict life's struggle to get ahead from the perspective of oppressed minorities in the United States. The game is promoted as a way to teach tolerance. However, critics of the game charge that Life as a BlackMan, like Ghettopoly, only reinforces negative stereotypes of black Americans.

Object of the Game:
Players begin the game as an eighteen-year-old black male high school graduate who is ready to enter the world and build a career. After starting the game, players must make their way through a number of treacherous districts, each with its own hazards and diversions....

...Building a pile of cash and getting rich is not the goal of this game. The one and only object of the game is to stop going around in endless circles, find a good career, and attain Freedom. The first person to reach Freedom wins.

company website: blackmangame.com (I really like their flash intro.)

*"we are, most of us, pawns in life. Our only consolation is-- the game cannot be played without us." -Georg Lukács(1885-1971)**

**No, not George Lucas. Cross-posted at HZ.

9.10 and 3/4

I decided to check my comments [at HZ] after watching the nightly news.(On NBC tonight. I'm Katied out. She warned me on her debut last Tuesday that Limbaugh would be on 2 days later and I skidaddled. Well that, and she described freedom of speech as a privilege, apropo of her introducing CBS News's new nightly editorial foofaraw.)

NBC dutifully reported that nothing whatsoever is going on, anywhere in the world, besides 9.11 commemorations. Did the other networks report anything different? Fox probably had a little more footage of Junior hugging people than their competitors did, but I'm guessing that's it. I think I might be more a more patriotic person if I avoided TV news altogether. Look, don't get me wrong-- I really don't see myself as a curmudgeon, nor do I place particular value in the curmudgeonly approach to life. All the same, I tire very quickly of corporate TV whores, the politicians included, climbing all over each other trying to outdo one another in subtly telling us what kind of ideological import we should be ingesting viz 9.11, and precisely how to swallow it.

I am not altogether averse to sentiment, per se, just the false and cheap kind. I do like this image, for example, taken by photographer Don Nixon in 1999:


via daystarvisions.com

Cross-posted at Hugo Zoom, except for the following:

And now, a question: do you AH readers want Jay and me to continue posting here? I honestly don't know how long Arvin will be gone doing his thing. My impression is it will be quite some time, though he could surprise me. The blog will in all likelihood stay up whether we continue posting or not. I hope it will, at any rate.

When I post here it's generally stuff that I cross-post at my home blog, Hugo Zoom, as is the case here, although if people comment here I treat the comments as completely separate and don't assume you've checked to see if anyone is discussing the topic you bring up at HZ. I did have one person leave the same comment at both places on one occasion-- but I don't expect people will generally go to this much trouble(!) and I'm happy to respond both here and at HZ.

I've noticed that Jay sometimes creates content here that I haven't seen at his regular blog, Skookum. For that matter, Jay("Spartacus") has a lot of interesting items you'll miss if you only look at his material here, like this recent piece("pardon me") about the 9/11 commissioners' conflicts of interest.

Anyway: I am not speaking for either Jay or Arvin, but I thought this would be a good time to ask for some feedback.

Part-time No Benefits

According to WSJ (5/20/05) “The number of super wealthy in the U.S. has surged, with 430,000 households now worth more than $10 million. That’s up from 65,000, adjusted for inflation, in 1989.”