Average Grod's Average Blog

I've been working really hard to put together a new site that I will be updating on a regular basis. What does this mean to you dear and faithful reader? It means you will actually have new Wildhog content to read on what will be a much more regular schedule. It means you will need to update your bookmark. And yes, it means Wildhog will officially be dead. Its been laying there and at times it has been difficult to tell if it is still breathing. It is. But not for long. The fork is coming. Here is a small preview. If you link to this page go ahead and delete the link. Check back here over the next couple days for one final post pointing to the new site. Thanks.

Today Emma came home from Sunday School with a project she made. She had taken little sticks and put them together on a piece of paper to make a small family.

She said it was our family which made sense because there were four stick people and we have four family members. She named them off when describing it to us. "Daddy, Mommy, Emma, and Shiraz." Shiraz is the cat. When asked "What about Lincoln?" She replied "Well I don't want him in MY family."

She once asked us if Linc could sleep in the badage. She can't quite say garage so she says buh-dodge. I said that it would be too cold for him to which she promptly replied "Well there is a trash can in there where he could stay warm in."

Yep. I definitely think she wanted a little sister.

Why do people feel the need to use colons in titles so often these days? Head over to the list of books I want to read this year and you will see what I mean. Maybe I am stuck in a particular genre whose subject matter lends itself well to a sort of title: subtitle naming convention. I think authors (or more likely publishers) can't make up their minds when it comes to titles.

They need a catchy word or phrase to grab your attention regardless of the fact that it may not make much sense by itself. They need the post colon text to actually tell you what the book is about. After reading Sway and most of Freakenomics I am sure someone has probably studied this and I wouldn't be surprised if books sell better when they are titled in this fashion. I fear that games don't fair as well.

One of the best games I've ever played is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This seems like a fair title and anyone familiar with the series knows that CoD 1-3 were set in WWII. CoD 4 needed the subtitle to let people know that this game would update what was becoming an overused setting in the First Person Shooter Genre. CoD 5 was made by a different developer who revisited WWII albeit in Japan this time. They of course chose to go with the colon to further clarify that this would be a World War game. The developers of CoD 4 are hard at work on what would logically be CoD 6 but why go the easy route when the market has already been saturated with title: subtitle games? CoD 6 will be Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. How long will it be until we see a Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2: Zakhaev's Revenge? Zakhaev was the main bad guy in CoD 4. Sooner or later someone will make a game or book with more than one colon and it is just gonna sound silly. Not cool, not clarifying, and not even intriguing.

Take a hint from Microsoft who in a rare moment of lucidity has gone back to 1990 and gone with a moniker that is both traditional and easy to understand for its latest Windows product. That's right. The new Windows which is due out later this year will actually be called Windows 7. I would have named it Windows7: What Vista Should Have Been.