You can't touch this FAC

A middle school in Fairfax County, Virginia has banned touching. Any touching. Now I could go the rest of my life without seeing two 13 yr old kids sucking face around their braces, but how will they play football? No wrestling? Even basketball? I guess those sports are usually found in higher grades, but really? No high fives? No bonding expressed through ass-patting after a great job on the field of competition? No putting those little braids in each other's hair? NO HAND CLAPPING GAMES!? What if you accidentally touch skin to skin passing a baton in a relay race? Disqualified?

This is why I want to be a Libertarian. Too many rules and laws are made in haste and leave common sense and responsibility out of the picture. The truth is the school is horribly over crowded. Read a study on crowding and the affect it has on the human psyche. Of course they are getting in a lot of fights -- they are like too many chickens in a hot henhouse, pecking each others feathers out of sheer frustration. Actually I guess it is a good solution, because the more crowded it gets, the more likely they will touch, the more will get suspended, the fewer are in the halls and classrooms. Yeah, right.

Anyway, FAC is going to be a good one!
I cannot guarantee whether you will or will not be touched. I can guarantee a cold beer, some trivia, and pool, darts, and air hockey.
We are going to Sliders!
This week we are going to the far back room in the hope that it will be empty and we can take over all the good games. If you can't find us just ask where the air hockey is....

4:30 ish this Friday, and in honor of no-touch we will be looking at the detritus of the humans collected for us by Davy Rothbart in his splendid magazine called "FOUND". We will also be viewing "Dirty FOUND", a testament to how much people like to be touched, looked at, or at least talked to.

Wikipedia's disambiguation of "touch":

Somatosensory system, for the various sensory receptors that trigger the experiences labelled as touch or pressure
Haptics, for the study of human touching behaviour

Touch (60s band), a rock group
Touch (band), a 70s rock band
Touch (album), a 1983 album by New Wave duo Eurythmics
Touch (1987 album), a 1987 album by Laura Branigan
Touch (Sarah McLachlan album), the 1988 debut album of Sarah McLachlan
Touch (song), a single by Canadian rock band The Tea Party
Touch (Amerie album), a 2005 album by R&B singer Amerie
Touch (Amerie song), a 2005 single by R&B singer Amerie
Touch (Omarion song), a song by singer Omarion
Touch (Supremes album), a 1971 album by Motown group The Supremes
Touch Music or Touch Records, an electronic music record label, the main branch of the Touch company (UK)
Touch FM, a group of commercial radio stations in the UK
Touch (Noiseworks album), a 1988 album by Australian hard rock band Noiseworks
Touch (Mike Anthony song), a song heard from Noah's Arc

In fiction:
Touch (manga), a 1980s Japanese manga and anime series
Touch (novel), a 1987 novel by Elmore Leonard
Touch (film), a film by Paul Schrader, after the novel by Elmore Leonard
In sports:
Touch-line, the line on either side of the playing area of some football games
Touch (rugby), the area outside the 2 touch-lines in rugby
Touch judge, an official who monitors the touch-line in a game of Rugby football
Touch football (rugby league), commonly known as "touch"

Other:
touch (Unix), a classic computer program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems
The Touch River, a river of southwestern France that flows into the Garonne River

Bear" Keep your laws off my haptics" Bonney

FAC -- look how early i am!

Okay FAC-ers,

This past week(end) was marked by a small but stalwart group at FAC. We got to have a lot of fun at the brewery, saw some cool art, ate some tasty Surfside cheese fries (the fries there are the BEST), and even took over Elliot's for a brief time. We also coincidentally re-convened at Coopersmith's on Sunday night for the Geeks Who Drink trivia. Without Luke, our team "LEGION OF DOOM", would have never won. We knocked the "Frosted Prom Virgins" skirts in the dirt. There was some unrest about our win, but we will certainly be back next week right up front to show those chuckleheads that we are not a fluke! (Wouldn't that be a great villian? 'The Fluke', it would look like that leech-man from the X-Files and have the power to emit a horrible gas....)

ANYWAY, on to the upcoming FAC and what are we doing this week??

Well I am taking votes for Pitchers or Sliders. I think we should get some more trivia on. Plus those places are close and not too expensive. Despite the uncomfortable time I had at Sliders last time, that is my vote.

Tell me what you want or we will default to Sliders. OR if you have another place you want added to the voting list for this or future weeks, let me know.

I am including the whole Ken Jennings trivia for this week at the very end of this post.

But first a word from our sponsors:

This is a picture from Burning Man, supposedly this car resides during the other 11 months of the year right here in Ft Collins!:











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Tuesday Trivia XLV! Accept no substitutes! I just wrote the questions for this week and I'm starting to think they're too hard. If you agree, just write TOO HARD on your submission, followed by the profanity of your choosing, and you will be given full credit.

Congrats to our perfect scorers last time. Was that you? Find out at http://www.ken-jennings.com/messageboards/viewtopic.php?t=2235 . And since this Sunday is Mother's Day...a big Tuesday Trivia shout-out to all the moms out there. Kick out the jams, Mother's-Day-ers.

(Also, speaking of Mother's Day, shouldn't the apostrophe come *after* the 's'? Is there one particular Mother we are meant to be honoring now ? If it's Mother Earth, why didn't my local Wiccan bookshop inform me of this development?)

THIS WEEK'S QUIZ

1. In which EU country is the first national language spoken fluently by fewer than a tenth of its people?

2. What movie was originally titled $3,000, for the size of Vivian Ward's paycheck?

3. Which signer of the Declaration of Independence was a brewer by trade?

4. What optical component is named, in the 17th century, for the legume whose shape it resembles?

5. What crime were "resurrectionists" guilty of?

6. What Fort Payne quintet is the only band ever named Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Awards?

7. In the four major North American sports organizations, what unusual distinction is shared by these teams and no others? Cleveland Browns, Dallas Cowboys, Detroit Red Wings, Detroit Tigers, Indianapolis Colts, New York Jets, and Toronto Maple Leafs?

LAST WEEK'S ANSWERS

1. What media company's logo is a dog whose left eye is a five-pointed star? Dog + star = Sirius Satellite Radio, soon to merge with XM.

2. Why did Joseph Hazelwood spend three years working at Bean's Cafe, an Anchorage, Alaska, soup kitchen? This was part of his community service for running the Exxon Valdez aground in Prince William Sound, causing the infamous oil spill.

3. What novel's narrator is only referred to as "the second Mrs. de Winter"? Rebecca is the first Mrs. de Winter.

4. Who's the only person to land atop Mr. Blackwell's "Worst Dressed" list three times, in 2001, 2006, and 2007? Britney Spears, though she shared the latest honor with Paris Hilton. Maybe the two can celebrate by going underwear-shopping together.

5. What word, from the Greek for "uneven," refers to a triangle whose sides all have different lengths? Flashback to 6th-grade geometry: those are scalene.

6. HO scale is the world's most popular size of what? Model railroads.

7. What unusual distinction is shared by these countries, and no others? Afghanistan, Australia, Burma, Canada, French Polynesia, India, Iran, Nepal, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka. All have (in whole or in part) really kooky time zones--the kind that are offset by 15, 30, or 45 minutes from UTC rather than a whole number of hours.

Bear "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation" Bonney

FAC This day in history

Well, this is quite the somber FAC mail.

As we look upon the sad events this week at Virginia Tech, we should remember that this Friday is the anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School.

I guess we should remember to pay attention to our kids, to our co-workers, our neighbors, to our friends and family, to notice their pain and depression, to offer support to them. I probably went through a lot of High School as the "question mark kid". (Actually I was "That girl that wears a cape" or "that freak with the cane") All of us have felt like we were on the outside at some point, and hopefully someone was there for us.

BUT in an effort to celebrate our connections to one another and form better relationships with our friends and co-workers, we really need to keep up the FAC tradition!

So let us all go forth to SLIDERS on Friday afternoon and remember those that have passed, celebrate those we are with and try to humiliate Berri by kicking her butt in trivia!

FAC April 20th at Sliders, 1006 Spring Creek Lane (Shields and Stuart), 4:30pm


Andy Serkis was born on April 20th:




























Actually, so was another really creepy guy.....

Nevermind.

You know, not a lot really good happened on the 20th in History, so instead I will show you some fabulous photos selected for your pleasure (click for larger):

FAC Winter Bliss

Hey, ya'll.

Well I know we may all be a little tired after sooooo much fun we are going to have at the Winter Bliss Junior Dance--- I mean office party, but we are going to have a very special FAC.

This week we are going to Slider's. I know, odd, but it will be fun because they have NTN Trivia there! We can play some trivia and make ourselves smarter while we drink!

So 4 or 4:30 Friday (tomorrow) at Slider's. That is all.

1006 Spring Creek Ln (corner of Stuart and Shields)

Here is an image for you:

A sassy pink fly rod that someone I know wants real bad...













Oh, and here is a tiny little Faberge kangaroo!