Ladewig.com

My Uncle Jim is on the move, from Orlando to Alameda. He’s blogging as he goes. You can follow his journey at california – or bust!.

I love the random names that show up on some of the spam I receive. Normally I don’t pay much attention as I delete whatever winds up in my junk e-mail folder, but today one caught my eye: Electroplated A. Devastates. Truly a classic name.

If you have a cat or dog and feed them canned food, there’s a new product available for storing those cans more efficiently. We were at a birthday party yesterday and found out a couple we know has started selling a pet food organizer. The company is called CatchaCanCan, and their web site is http://www.catchacancan.com, so check it out if you’re interested in cleaning up some clutter in your pantry. Plus 10% of all proceeds get donated to an animal-related chartiy, as determined by a quarterly vote of customers.

This sounds like something Archbishop Burke, here in St. Louis, would do… take away a little girl’s First Communion. An AP story reports that the Diocese of Trenton invalidated the First Communion of a girl with a rare digestive disorder because the host contained no wheat. Eating anything with gluten could harm this girl, but the church says the host has to have some wheat, or her Communion is invalid. Says who? God? If God exists, I doubt he/she/it would really care whether the host has gluten in it or not. This is yet another Church rule handed down by a bunch of guys (emphasis on guys) ages ago.

The Church says that she can receive Communion by only drinking the wine, but celiac sufferers have concerns that wine may be contaminated during the service or before the service by coming in contact with materials containing gluten.

Many other churches allow the use of gluten-free hosts, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church. I think it is about time that someone in Rome gets a clue.

Chris Brooks highlighted a Stephen Colbert interview with GameSpy. Colbert started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1976 when he was in seventh grade. Chris says he started playing D&D around that time as well.

I started playing in 1981, when I was in the seventh grade as well. The eighth grade teacher at my school was into war games and D&D, and a group of us used to meet each weekend at the school for gaming. I remember Ed taking all of us out to the Dungeon Hobby Shop in Lake Geneva. We were pretty impressed that TSR, the makers of D&D were in the same building upstairs. Living in Kenosha, Lake Geneva wasn’t very far. We used to go to Gen Con every year as well. The convention was held at UW-Parkside back then, so I could hop on my bike (before I had a car) and ride over. It really ticked me off when they moved it to Milwaukee.

The core group met pretty regularly up through high school. After that, it was pretty much the end of RPGs for me. Never seemed to have the time.