(2) Tue Aug 31 2010 23:07: There's this stanza in "Chattanooga Choo-Choo":

Leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore
Dinner at the diner, nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina

This promised timeline has been bothering me ever since April, when I took a trip on this very route, Penn Station to 'Carolina'. A Harper's or something similarly dense might occupy you from New York to Baltimore, but your ham-and-egg dinner would take place in the middle of the night. But maybe there are two trips to the dining car, with ham and eggs being breakfast the next day? It is kind of an odd dinner.

(4) Mon Aug 30 2010 23:52 Pac-Man vs. Fever: After Sumana bought the Wii for our household, breaking my long sojourn away from the world of closed-source video games, I did some catch-up work. I looked online to see which Gamecube games people had really liked, and bought a bunch of used games cheaply. My research was cursory, involving the application of simple heuristics like "are the words in this top-ten list spelled correctly?" and "is this not a one-on-one fighting game?"

Which is how I ended up buying Pac-Man vs. (heuristic: a Pac-Man game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto?!?!!) before learning about its draconian hardware requirements. It's best as a four-player game, so you need four controllers. But only three of those controllers are Gamecube controllers. The fourth controller is another computer: a Game Boy Advance connected to the Gamecube (or, in this case, the Wii) with a special cable.

So that's a) a Game Boy Advance, b) a special cable, c) three Gamecube controllers (I had one), d) three other people nerdy enough to put up with all this for the sake of a Pac-Man game.

OK, it's just a game, I'm out five dollars, no big deal. (The disc I got is actually the bonus pack-in bundled with Pac-Man World 2, a game so awful that its main purpose in life is to drive down prices of the bundle for people who want Pac-Man vs..) But then I met Pat Rafferty. One day Pat was browsing through my Gamecube games looking for stuff to borrow and never give back. When he saw Pac-Man vs. he mentioned that he had played it, and that it had been one of the greatest gaming experiences of his life. What's more, at his parents' house in upstate New York he had a Game Boy Advance and the connecting cable.

I treated allegations of these "parents" who had exactly the now-obsolete hardware necessary to play Pac-Man vs. with the kind of skepticism I usually reserve for supposed Canadian girlfriends (and the supposed American girlfriends of my Canadian friends). I mean, if Lake Ontario had formed a little to the south, upstate New York would be Canada. Why wouldn't Pat show me his birth certificate?

It didn't help when after Pat's next visit to his "parents' house" he conveniently "forgot" to bring back the goods. But, recently, he reported that he'd made another trip, and this time he had the hardware. Pat also owns two wireless Gamecube controllers to my one, so now it was just a matter of finding two other players.

After some false alarms, we finally got it set up yesterday, at the Manhattan apartment of Pat's friend Kevin. By this time Pac-Man vs. had acquired Lucky Wander Boy-like status in my mind due to the difficulty of even playing it. But unlike Lucky Wander Boy, Pac-Man vs. is a really well-designed game.

Here's how it works. The player with the Game Boy Advance plays Pac-Man on the Game Boy Advance. Looks just like regular Pac-Man, except instead of four ghosts (or whatever), there are three. The other three players look at the television and each controls one of the ghosts.

On the television, each ghost sees a rendered isometric view of their part of the maze. The person playing Pac-Man can see the whole maze, because that's how you play Pac-Man. The ghosts have to coordinate to trap Pac-Man and clobber him.

In an event with great implications for Pac-Man continuity, the ghost who's able to clobber Pac-Man becomes Pac-Man for the next round. Whoever made the kill gets off the couch and swaps places with the person who has the Game Boy Advance. Eventually one of the players plays a good enough game of Pac-Man to exceed some point threshold, and they are dubbed the winner. Then you immediately play another round because it's real fun.

Was it worth it? Well, I don't know whether it would have been worth buying all this gear, but it was definitely worth patience in waiting for everything to come together. Now, if I could only get Four Swords to work...

Wed Aug 25 2010 10:52 Retro Spec Now Available: Retro Spec, the 20th-century-themed specfic anthology, is now available for purchase! (Amazon, B&N)

This anthology includes my short story "The Day Alan Turing Came Out", which Locus described as "A moving vision from a happier world." This is probably the only time anyone will ever describe my fiction that way, so act now.

(1) Sat Aug 21 2010 21:08: Susanna told me about Contemporary Masters, a big installation piece at the Salt Lake Art Center that's a playable miniature golf course inside the gallery. Awesome! Here are pictures of Susanna, John, and the kids playing the courses.

Fri Aug 20 2010 20:26: Hey there. I've been writing a whole lot, but it's all been work on Constellation Games. None for immediate consumption by you. It's a really strange feeling—now that I'm no longer worried that I'll flake out before reaching the end of the novel, I can really concentrate on flexing my dramaturgical powers, bending reality to my will for the sake of a smoother narrative.

It's a mixed bag. I like slipping in a new scene where there was no scene before—the secret history of the second draft!—and I really like fleshing out a sparse exposition-heavy scene into a full drama with characters and dialogue and jokes. But I really don't like when the thing I need to say next is scattered across three chapters throughout the book, three chapters that are ultimately pointless because they don't significantly advance the plot. Such that I have to come up with a brand new framework and then snip off bits from those three chapters to decorate my tree, discarding everything else.

But, once I finish this bit, the revision will be about one-quarter done. And once we get to the halfway mark, we'll see about finally making it possible for you to start reading this sucker...

Bonus link: REST Fest 2010. I don't think I'll be going, but it looks cool.

(1) Tue Aug 10 2010 20:39: On the plane back to New York I watched The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. It was listed in the in-flight entertainment system as "Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, The." They should have gone all the way and called it "Good, Bad, Ugly, The The And The."

(4) Fri Aug 06 2010 17:18 Bully For Torosaurus: While I was gone there was an online flurry of interest about a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, "Torosaurus Marsh, 1891, is Triceratops Marsh, 1889 (Ceratopsidae: Chasmosaurinae): synonymy through ontogeny". The general tenor of this discussion is conveyed by this Daily Mail headline: "Triceratops 'never really existed but was just a young version of another dinosaur'". And the larger implication is conveyed by this guest post to Kottke, classifying Triceratops with Brontosaurus and Pluto as an instance of science cruely taking away a beloved childhood icon.

First off, the Daily Mail headline is inaccurate. (Shocking, I know.) It should be "Torosaurus 'never really existed but was just a mature version of another dinosaur'." Why? Look at the dates. The first Triceratops was discovered in 1899, and Torosaurus was discovered two years later. When two species turn out to be the same, the earlier name takes precedence; that's why Brontosaurus became Apatosaurus and not vice versa. The name of the paper is "Torosaurus is Triceratops", not "Triceratops is Torosaurus". So whatever happens, the name Triceratops stays.

But it is just a name. There's not some platonic form of Triceratops that can be taken away from you. Nothing changed about the universe. Pluto is still out there and these animals did exist. But we come up with abstractions like "planet" and "Triceratops" to help us manage the complexity of the universe, and abstractions are always leaky.

All three of the incidents in that Kottke guest post have this in common: you learned to give a name to something, and then the people responsible for names changed the name on you. Here's a 1989 New York Times editorial quoted by Steven Jay Gould in the title essay of Bully for Brontosaurus:

The Postal Service has taken heavy flak for mislabeling its new 25-cent dinosaur stamp, a drawing of a pair of dinosaurs captioned ''Brontosaurus.'' Furious purists point out that the ''brontosaurus'' is now properly called ''apatosaurus.'' They accuse the stamp's authors of fostering scientific illiteracy, and want the stamps recalled.

Apparently there was backlash against this, even though Brontosaurus was formally retired in 1903, so there's no reason except pop culture that anyone in 2010 (or even 1989) should even remember the name "brontosaurus". And people got really angry about the redefinition of "planet" to exclude Pluto. But if scientists made some discovery that shattered our preconceptions, like discovering that Triceratops was a carnivore or that Pluto is actually the size of Jupiter, no one would be angry. There'd be no one to be angry at.

People get angry when they see the social constructs of science being refactored to be simpler. It looks like the scientists are cheating, because the refactoring has no basis in physical reality. But the constructs themselves—"planet" and "species"—are just tools we came up with to make thinking easier. This is why two species can be discovered to be the same species, and why the name of the combined species is chosen according to arbitrary rules. The rules are all there are.

Incidentally, you know how the Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus thing happened? Well, in 1877 A.O. Marsh described Apatosaurus in a "typically rushed note" (Gould), and then two years later he described Brontosaurus. As I mentioned, the distinction lasted until 1903. Quoting Gould again:

When [Elmer] Riggs restudied Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus, he recognized them as two versions of the same creature, with Apatosaurus as a more juvenile specimen. No big deal; it happens all the time.

That's exactly what happened with Triceratops! A.O. Marsh really loves taking credit for discovering species. He describes some juvenile specimens as Species A, and two years later some more mature specimens as Species B. Still later, some other paleontologists restudy the specimens and call him on it. Same story both times. It's just that in the case of Apatosaurus it took about twenty years, and in the case of Triceratops it took a hundred and thirty.

At the Museum of the Rockies there's a line of Triceratops skulls from juvenile to adult. Jack Horner, one of the authors of this paper, is the paleontology curator at the MotR and probably worked on that exhibit. I wonder if there was some moment where Horner looked at that line of skulls and thought "Maybe that should keep going..."

(1) Fri Aug 06 2010 07:49 Purchase Order Equivalent: Before I left for India, someone emailed me with a random REST question. Yesterday, they re-sent the email with a kind of rude preface that implied I have some sort of SLA for answering peoples' random REST questions. Which I don't! I'm a private citizen who's free to answer a given email whenever I want, or even to never get around to it—the same right I allow the Internet pseudo-celebrities to whom I send email.

So I was kind of cheesed off at this person, but frankly the rudeness worked—I answered the question just to get them out of my hair. The question is, how do you make the creation of a new resource an idempotent operation? Imagine a factory resource that you POST to to create something new. Typically, if you send the same POST request twice, you'll get two new resources. How do you make it so that the first request creates a new resource and the second request fails?

The short answer is to use POST Once Exactly. I mention POE in the REST book, but POE never made it out of the Internet-Draft stage, and I can't even find the Internet-Draft at Mark Nottingham's site anymore. Besides which, the email message described something similar to POE as an option, but wanted something simpler. So here's something simpler, for some value of "simpler".

When you buy (eg.) computer hardware from NewEgg, they give you a space for a "purchase order" along with shipping address etc. This is for use when you're buying stuff in a commercial context. You can put whatever you want in that space. The purchase order is a key into your company's purchasing system. It's meaningless to NewEgg.

Newegg doesn't use the purchase order for anything, they just put it on the invoice for your convenience. But in theory, they could keep track of the purchase orders you've used. Since they know which orders are yours, when you place a new order the site can run a quick check to see if you've used that purchase order before. If you have, they can stop the purchase from going through, since you're probably trying to process the same purchase request twice.

So the simpler solution is. You're defining the media type or the form describing what the client is supposed to POST to the factory. Include a slot for a "purchase order". This is a random string chosen by the client whose only purpose is to uniquely identify a resource to be created. On the server side, reject a POST request that uses a purchase order already used by this client ("this client" distinguished from other clients by the authentication credentials). Now the POST request is idempotent: sending it 10 times is the same as sending it once.

I call this strategy "Purchase Order Equivalent", or POE. Thoughts?

(1) Thu Aug 05 2010 20:21: This weblog has been silent because I was in India attending Sumana's father's funeral. I have some stuff to say about the people I met there, etc. but I'm going to think about it for a little while longer.

I want to briefly mention a weird thing I came home to. Although I don't use Twitter, I do occasionally search for people who link to my site in their Twitter feeds. Usually they're linking to Beautiful Soup. Today I saw a typical example:

Rubyist, pythonista or even php fan. We can all love http://bit.ly/7aRD8T amazing parser library #beautifulsoup

The atypical part was that this was from Paula Deen's Twitter feed. Paula Deen has a show on the Food Network, and I associate her with making food out of butter and hanging out with Jimmy Carter. I could see her tweeting about beautiful soup, but not Beautiful Soup.

I guess what happened is that, like many celebrities, Deen has a tech person who posts on her behalf, and the tech person forgot to sign out as Paula_Deen before posting to what they thought would be their own Twitter feed. The rogue tweet alarmed some people (example), and has been removed, but this follow-up that refers to Deen in the third person bolsters the "tech person" theory:

Paula hasn't gone techy, she's off today but getting ready to head to Alaska for a working vacation.

Paula Deen's tech person, I'm glad you like Beautiful Soup, and everyone makes embarrassing mistakes, so don't feel bad.

(5) Sat Jul 24 2010 16:06 Name That (This) Game: While writing a new scene for Constellation Games I came up a game that's like strip poker, except that instead of taking off your clothes when you lose a hand, you replace your clothes with opposite-gendered clothes. The current name of the game is "Cross-Dressing Antistrip Poker". I'm trying to think of a name that's closer to the "Texas Hold 'Em" part of the spectrum--something that alludes to what makes this game special but focuses more on color than on flat descriptiveness. Ideas?

(It's possible that Cross-Dressing Antistrip Poker already exists and has a good name, but on the Internet as it exists now, it's not possible to find reliable information on such things.)

(2) Fri Jul 23 2010 08:31: Where's my book on the Fermi Paradox?

Tue Jul 20 2010 07:23: I did my impression of Richard Ayoade. Sumana said it sounded more like Robin Leach. I believe this merely demonstrates that their voices are more similar than you might have thought.

Thu Jul 15 2010 11:58 Reviewed!: Locus has a review of the Retro Spec anthology (out in September), including a tiny spoiler-filled review of my story, "The Day Alan Turing Came Out".

(4) Sun Jul 11 2010 05:14: I'm in Prague! Bet you didn't expect that! It's for work, but I have today to look around. The subway system is great!

(4) Fri Jul 09 2010 13:37: Remember a couple weeks ago when I was sick? That never really went away. Fortunately, I'm now on a different course of antibiotics, I'm lying around on the couch instead of trying to do work, and feeling all right.

I'm also thirty-one years old today. In order to feel less old I'm reading Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle by Steven Jay Gould (one of only a couple of his books I haven't read). Afterwords I'll do some novel revisions, assuming that doesn't seem too much like "work". I also shaved my beard. This is Leonard's exciting life!!!

Tue Jul 06 2010 08:18 Useless graph:

(3) Sun Jul 04 2010 22:19 Fourth of July Party Pun:

"Can I take your bowl?"
"No, I'm going to eat more in it."
"Are you British?"

Mon Jun 28 2010 19:34 The Update Wore Tennis Shoes: Oh, I forgot to mention this in my review: a scene in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes features the art of Marcel Duchamp. There's a gag where a few of the boys squint at Nude Descending a Staircase for a while before deciding it doesn't appeal to their prurient interest.

Sat Jun 26 2010 16:09 The Network Is The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes: In my quest for the pop culture origins of the Internet, I bought a used copy of the 1969 Disney movie The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, starring Kurt Russell. Why? Basically because Wikipedia listed it under "The ARPANET in film and other media". This got me pretty excited.

It's a little far-fetched to expect an ARPANET reference in a kids' movie released almost immediately after the ARPANET was created, but the movie does take place at a college, and I figured it was possible someone had gone to Stanford, talked to some computer people to see "what's up with computers these days", and gotten the phrase "Interface Message Processor" or something to use as a bit of set dressing.

After all, moviemakers today routinely employ science advisors to tell them that what happens in the screenplay is impossible because it violates the second law of thermodynamics; the moviemakers then decline to totally rewrite their screenplay and instead add a little scene of someone shouting "We need more thermodynamics!" I wasn't expecting accuracy, but I was hoping for a throwaway reference on a chalkboard.

But, in point of fact, Wikipedia is wrong: this movie contains absolutely no references to the ARPANET. [0] In fact, it barely contains any computer. The computer breaks about fifteen minutes in, Kurt Russell gives himself superpowers trying to fix it, and we never see it operational again. The rest of the movie focuses on Kurt Russell's new computer-like ability to scan and regurgitate a wide variety of data.

In an accidentally realistic twist, the Russell character's powers don't make him any smarter—there's no question of using him to solve the world's problems—he just knows a lot of facts. (He's also good with languages, and there's one line that claims he's solved the Chinese Room, but they don't go anywhere with this. They show him going to the UN and palling around with all the delegates, but it's not like they're asking him for advice.)

The movie also deals in an antiseptic Walt Disney way with topics like student demonstrations (misleadingly played up on the movie poster), but it all takes second place to the dean's rivalry with the dean of the nearby state college, a numbers game run by the always-enjoyable Cesar Romero, and the use of a superhuman with the powers of Wikipedia to win a trivia quiz show.

Why would someone watch this movie and think it had some reference to the ARPANET? I have no idea. I find it likely that this movie was copied into the Wikipedia entry from a more general list of old movies about computers, like this one. In the movie there's one computer component that superficially resembles an IMP, but 1) it's not an IMP, and 2) the H316 hardware used in the IMP was also used in other minicomputers, including the incorrectly-maligned Kitchen Computer, so even spotting something that looks like an IMP proves nothing.

Someone with more hardware knowledge might know what computer was used as a prop in the movie, if it's a real computer at all. Judging from glimpses of the labels on buttons, I think it's a mishmash of equipment from the early 60s that was stripped and rewired to blink randomly.

I did find one interesting bit of window-dressing: at 10:30 there's a partial shot of what looks like a cheat sheet for a computer's instruction set or operating system. It's called "POS", the instructions are divided into a "Physical Level" and a "Logical Level", and they include "EXCP", "WAIT", "OPEN FILE", "CLOSE FILE", "GET FILE", and "PUT FILE"--all of those take an argument (?) "CCB-NAME". Since the ISO networking stack has a "physical layer", it's possible someone glimpsed this card, thought "Aha! The Internet!" and rushed to Wikipedia or whatever source Wikipedia is based on. That's the best I can come up with.

If I may damn with faint praise, the first fifteen minutes of the movie are fun. The opening credits are great, with a corny sitcom-theme-style opening song (which describes a much better movie) and visuals that combine colorful 60s geometric design with computer imagery like punch card chads and reel-to-reel tape.

The first scene features a professor played by William Schallert (who'd just played the Federation bureaucrat in "The Trouble with Tribbles") trying to convince the antediluvian dean that dropping $10k on a computer (about $60k in today's money) would be a great investment for the school.

Meanwhile the loveable, nonthreatening youth of the college are eavesdropping on this conversation via transitor radio, and check this out--Kurt Russell is eighteen years old when they're filming this movie. The other kids are in their early twenties. I've been watching all these old B-movies that cast twenty-four-year-olds as high school students, and by comparison these college-age kids look too young to be in college! It's insanity.

Anyway, the kids convince local businessman Cesar Romero to donate an old computer to the college, he does so (apparently without wiping the tapes he's been using to computerize his numbers racket), there's a great scene where they set up the enormous computer, and then an interesting scene where the computer's capabilities are demonstrated (pretty realistic, by the standards of the rest of the movie). In a very strange twist, the computer breaks when the professor tries to get it to run a twenty-year-old program off a tape. (That would be a program from 1950--like a friggin' UNIVAC program or something. Supposedly this computer's twenty years old.) That's pretty much the end of the good part.

Of all the movie's inaccuracies, the worst comes at the end, when the guy who was in "The Trouble With Tribbles" reenacts the first scene with the dean, except instead of a computer, he's trying to get the dean to drop a few grand on another technological wonder, the electroheliospectrograph. Apparently computers are just a fad for this guy. Kurt Russell reprised his bland college-student character in two sequels, which employ more traditional SF gimmicks like invisibility potions and strength serums. If I'd been in charge I would have made a new stupid college computer teen comedy every few years as a kind of marker to track society's feelings towards computers through the 70s and 80s.

I watched the movie with Pat, 1) to make watching a bad old movie bearable, 2) to have another pair of eyes looking for ARPANET references. Pat's opinion: "They should do a sequel starring Kurt Russell as he is now."

The movie was remade with Kirk Cameron in 1995, and it's possible that movie is the one with the reference to the Internet, but I'm not really interested in something that late.

[0] I got a used DVD of the movie, and there were a few seconds of skipped video. It's possible the elusive ARPANET reference was in there. It's very very unlikely.

(1) Fri Jun 25 2010 19:04 How To Recognize Different Types of Web Service From Quite A Long Way Away: As I emerge from the swamp of sickness, I bring you free stuff on the Internet. Today, it's a record of one of the two talks I gave at TriPZUG back in April when I went to North Carolina for WWW2010. The other talk, and my WWW2010 talk itself, will be forthcoming.

This talk is a quick exegesis of the "Richardson Maturity Model" for web services. If you want to get into it you can see the slides and hear the (slightly edited) recording. If you just want the stuff from my talk that's not in other, similar, discussions, here it is:

First, a clarification: some people think the Richardson Maturity Model is named after me, but that would violate Stigler's Law of Eponymy. It's actually named after my father.

Second: for this talk I identified three really simple questions you can ask to determine where a web service sits on the RMM:

1. Is there more than one URI?
2. Do URIs designate specific things? (As opposed to invoking actions.)
3. Are there any links?

Third, something I mention on the main talk page but that I'd like to give more exposure here and get feedback on. After the talk I got dinged by a friend for not giving a good enough response to this question in the Q&A:

"We've been pounded with REST for the past ten years, and no one has come up with a standard besides 'HTML' or 'XML', ad nauseum. Do you see any resolution to that coming?"

What I said in response to that question was technically accurate, but I didn't provide any advice. Here's my advice. You want a good default choice that can settle arguments and save you from having to make all the design decisions yourself? There is a standard: AtomPub. Take whatever you're trying to do and make it fit the AtomPub paradigm. Not only will your design be RESTful, your service will fit into a preexisting ecosystem.

If you think AtomPub won't work with what you're trying to do, you're probably wrong. Google, for instance, publishes web services for many very different applications (spreadsheet, calendar, map, etc. — basically anything that gets pluralized and has "Google" slapped on the front), and they're all based on AtomPub. You might find a better fit with your problem space if you did a RESTful design from scratch, but that's the nature of standards.

Convincing?

(5) Sun Jun 20 2010 18:35 Roy's Postcards Anniversary: A year ago on Father's Day I launched Roy's Postcards, a project to transcribe and comment on the >1000 postcards in my late father's collection. This weekend I'm sick, for the first time in quite a while, and it turns out to be the perfect mental state to type up transcriptions and do menial tasks in the GIMP. So I topped up the backlog with another 100 postcards. And since today is Father's Day, you get an AWESOME BONUS POSTCARD: Hobbiton in Northern California!

Stats update: there are now almost 400 postcards in the Roy's Postcards archive, 250 in the backlog, and 550 still to be typed up. Beyond that, since starting this project Susanna sent me 175 postcards our father sent her, and in a masterful display of parental non-favoritism, I've got almost exactly the same number of postcards for Rachel. With my sisters' postcards added in, this project can go on a whole year longer than I originally planned. So it's like I'm launching it today!

Sat Jun 19 2010 21:30 The Joy of Being Sick:

Leonard: [burp]
Sumana: Wow, that sounded like Skype booting up.

Mon Jun 14 2010 22:49 ACK!: Sumana showed me ACK!, a fun web comic that brings the Amar Chitra Katha drawing style into the present day. "Yo, I was huge in the Mahabharata!" It's like a Sumana-friendly "Space Ghost: Coast to Coast". Humor value for those who haven't read ACK comics? TOTALLY UNKNOWN.

(8) Sat Jun 12 2010 14:24 100% Completion: The first draft of my novel is complete! At 91,500 words, it's five times longer than the longest fiction I'd written up to this point. Now that I've finished a draft, I can tell you the name of the story without feeling like that'll jinx it: it's called Constellation Games.

Tue Jun 08 2010 07:27 Man Bites Dog: Now Fun!: Kevan and Holly are here! They brought Sumana and me some games as gifts, including Man Bites Dog, a deck of cards with common New York Post-style headline words like "FEDS", "CROOKED", and "BLASTS". There are also some rules for a game, but upon reading the rules we came to the same conclusion as Board Game Geek reviewers ("it is totally about luck", mean rating 4.74 out of 10). Instead of playing, we started experimenting to try to make a more fun game using the same cards. Here's what we eventually came up with.

Everyone gets five cards, and when you play a card you draw back up to five. Everyone scans their hand looking for a word that can be a headline all by itself, like "HERO" or "TERROR". If you've got one, play it in the center of the board. If no one has one, exchange cards until someone does.

Your goal is to make magic squares of headlines: an NxN grid of headlines that can be read either horizontally or vertically. You start off with a 1x1 magic square:

HERO

Now play proceeds clockwise from whoever played the first card. Play three additional cards around the first one to make a 2x2 magic square:

HERO  COP
DRUGS CRAZY

Now you've got four front-page Post headlines: "HERO COP", about a heroic cop, "DRUGS CRAZY", about someone who really likes drugs, "HERO DRUGS", about new lifesaving drugs, and "COP CRAZY", which might be about a crazy cop or about someone who's crazy for cops.

Now do it again. Build around two of the edges to make a 3x3 magic square. You're free to play a card on top of a card already played if you really need to get rid of a problematic word, but in general you should just fill in the two new edges. Here's a 3x3 square I made up--you can see there are now nine headlines.

INDICTED HERO  COP  
MAYOR    DRUGS CRAZY
ATTACKS  RARE  CZAR

That's "Attacks Rare: Czar", clearly some kind of Homeland Security thing. I don't recommend playing to ensure the diagonals also work, but you can often find something fun by reading them, like "INDICTED DRUGS CZAR" in this case.

Fill in another two edges to get a 4x4 magic square, and then another two to get a 5x5 square. You've won! Laugh and learn. There is no way and no reason to keep score.

The fun of newspaper headlines, as longtime readers of either this weblog or Language Log know, stems from the fact that they've given up the short words that let you figure out what the longer words mean. In a crossword puzzle, a letter can be used in two different words. By making a crossword puzzle out of headline words, a word can be in two different headlines and pleasingly mean different things each time.

We tried a number of crossword variations, but we liked the magic square version the best. At every stage you end up with valid headlines, and the headlines grow over the course of the game, from "HERO" to "HERO COP" to "INDICTED HERO COP" to "INDICTED HERO COP NAKED" to "INDICTED HERO COP NAKED AGAIN". At the end you have a compact mass of silliness.

So, that's our variant. You can make your own MBD deck by picking nouns and verbs from actual headlines, a process that if automated would keep the game fresh and topical. I would also really like to see a magic square made from four or five real headlines.