I don’t know how I feel about discovering that I’m as bad at bowling in Second Life as I am at bowling in real life. I do know how I feel about Splitsville, the bowling alley I found in Second Life: I love it! The design is classic, complete with checkerboard floors, dizzying carpet in the billiards area, and naugahyde banquettes behind each lane.

The site offers three areas for bowling: indoor lanes, rooftop lanes, and the outdoor bowling pavilion south of the building. All the lanes provide a free bowling glove and HUD (Heads Up Display, which is an attachment scripted to help you do things like animate your avatar), and you grab the ball of your choice from the rack near each lane. The HUD provides adjustments for speed and aim along with a “Throw Ball” button. After starting the game, you position your avatar, take aim using the HUD, and click the “Throw Ball” button.

If you’ve positioned yourself well, you might throw a strike. The script runs your avatar through the usual movements of bowling, including the occasional face plant as you slip on the polished floor. The animation seems to return you to your original position; but even if you just threw a strike, there’s no guarantee that you won’t throw a gutter ball if you presume to stay in that spot for the next throw.

The game allows for one or two players per lane, so you can go by yourself and practice or take a date. There’s no need for special shoes—I bowled in my stilettos (hm…maybe that explains all those gutter balls). The only thing I wish the HUD or the lane would provide is a bit more information about how bowling is scored, and an indicator to tell the players whose turn it is. It’s been a long time since I bowled in RL, and the sport has some quirks in those areas that should be explained to the new and the rusty.

In addition to bowling, there are scripted billiards tables, dancing, and a swimming pool shaped like a bowling pin. You can sign up for bowling buddies if you want to bowl with another aficionado, or join the Splitsville Bowling League. The Splitsville Arena offers concerts, and the Pro Shop is a good place to buy bowling shirts and teddy bears.

So if you find yourself wandering the grid in search of an activity, and you’ve had your fill of the usual dance clubs, head over to Splitsville and try your hand at virtual bowling. And be happy that you don’t have to rent special bowling shoes that have housed thousands of other smelly feet.

What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers is is a book by Amy Sutherland that has been getting much attention in reading circles full of witty, cute-as-a-button womyn (who are afraid of smart people like me) lately. It teaches you to train your husband to do things around the house by using techniques common in animal training. This paragraph was to show Mr. Kriticle that I can be somewhat kind. The rest is for the other readers:

OK. OK. OK. I’m trying to tell myself What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage is at least better than books on good house-keeping. All psych students know the old trick where you can get a professor to move by having everyone look at the place you want them to go, which is all well and fun, but do you really need this kind of effort to get your spouse to move? If you have to stare at the kitchen for hours in your already droning life to get your husband wash a few ceramics, you need to call a lawyer. While I agree men are comparable to rats and canines, please tell me why womyn need to spend their lives finding out how to get them to do tricks. Despite the satisfaction some pop-tart soccer mommy might have when her husband actually talks to her like a human being instead of one of the children, you are still deciding to surround your life around his brainlessness.

What’s saddest about What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage is that it only adds to the asinine concept that women have to spend money, bow down all day, and get off all night to get men to do what they are better off doing themselves (and that includes all three tasks dears). Here’s an example that is so generously offered by a review in Newsweek: “If your mate picks up just one dirty sock without being asked, give lots of praise.” Do I really need to comment on this? For those of you desperate procreators who think this is insightful, read it again. Read it slowly this time. Now read it one more time. Now you have two options:

1. Realize that you should never feel compelled to praise someone for something they should do out of respect, responsibility, or cleanliness
2. Stab your self in the eye because you think you should have to reward a male for doing something you do all day.

The article cites BF Skinner and other classic conditioning psychological researchers for this, guess what I call it? Growing up. Now, lets all agree that showing tits and kissing ass is not a broad’s only natural talents, and encourage womyn to instead get a backbone and kick ass until they get what they deserve because we’re not only entitled, but also superior. Want more? “Don’t take it personally: Laundry is just laundry, not a symbol for how much your spouse loves you or values your marriage.” Then it shouldn’t be a problem for your beer guzzling, idiotic husband to get off his ass and do it himself.

Conclusions: Sutherland is a conspirator with a penis and a wife who defied him by cutting her hair without permission. I’ll give it 2 and a half stars only because it compares men to animals.

So if you are now a one-eyed subordinate, empower yourself with The Daring Book for Girls and trick yourself, once again, into thinking you are free. Or, for those of you who are smart enough to know that confining yourself to pleasing a male for the rest of your life, get The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys and learn how to be self-sufficient. Either way, after you’ve read these, take your DIY to a new level and try Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation to fully realize a girl can be perfectly happy without an X chromosome in their life.

The Kingdom begins with a history lesson, a visual timeline which starts in 1933, and takes us through to the present. It takes up only a couple of minutes at the beginning of the movie and merely scratches the surface of the history of Saudi-US relations, but Peter Berg is still to be commended for providing some context for the premise of this film. It’s no Syriana, but in some ways that’s a good thing. Syriana was brilliant, and complex, an absolute must-see, but a wee bit confusing. The Kingdom manages to both entertain and educate, slipping information about radical Islam and Saudi princes in between car chases and gunfights.

I’ve had a mad crush on Berg since he appeared as Dr. Billy Cronk, the smart, sexy, passionate doctor on the series “Chicago Hope” in the mid-90s. He went on to direct the film Friday Night Lights, which has since become a television series (he also directed the pilot), and has just wrapped Hancock, starring Will Smith, Jason Bateman, and Charlize Theron, which will be out this summer. He’s always struck me as a smart actor and director, willing to delve below the surface of his subject matter, and The Kingdom, for the most part, doesn’t disappoint in this regard. It does suffer from some clunky exposition for the benefit of the audience. “How many princes are there in Saudi Arabia? And do they each have a palace?” don’t seem like questions these agents would have to ask, for example. It’s also hard to believe that forensics expert Janet Mayes (Jennifer Garner) would be unaware of the fact that it is against Islamic law for her to touch a dead Muslim.

In spite of all that, The Kingdom manages to deliver a fast-paced, suspenseful action movie with snippets of some pretty well-written dialog, and some sharp acting. Jason Bateman provides comic relief as Leavitt, the wisecracking, Pixies t-shirt wearing (he’s an FBI agent AND a hipster!) who arrives in Saudi Arabia with a passport marked with three Israeli stamps (“My grandma lives there, is that okay?” he tells the uneasy Saudi guard). Chris Cooper (who coincidentally also appears in Syriana as well as Jarhead) steals all of his scenes as FBI Bomb Tech Grant Sykes, a slow-talking, quick-witted Southerner, and Saudi Colonel Faris Al Ghazi, who ends up helping the FBI team in their investigation, is brilliantly played by Ashraf Barhom. Leading the team is Jamie Foxx as Ronald Fleury, a fiercely determined agent out to discover the perpetrator of a bomb attack on an American compound in Riyadh which has killed not only a hundred or so Americans, but one of their own, an agent on the scene. This is what fuels the whole team’s determination and provides the emotional hook for the story, but this is not a revenge movie in any sense, and this is also what saves it. In spite of the forced nature of some of the scenes, Berg’s message here is ultimately that the Saudis and we have much in common – love of family, pride in our culture, and a sometimes manic resolve to preserve and protect what is ours, no matter the sacrifice.

Linden Labs bills its virtual world, Second Life, as a place built by its residents. The idea is to create a second life, albeit in a digital environment instead of an analog one; but in this case you’re limited almost entirely by your own imagination. If you want to, you can build a house in the sky, made of clouds. You can live inside the head of a hollowed out snowman. There are plenty of fantastical places in SL, rife with psychedelic animated sculptures and structures that defy the laws of physics. There are also places built to emulate places that exist in the real world: the NW 21st Avenue Project, modeled after 21st Avenue in Portland, Oregon, is a well-done example.

The project begins with a single block of NW 21st Avenue, including virtual versions of the movie theater, bars and restaurants, convenience store, and residence that exist on that block in real life. The neighborhood around NW 21st Avenue is not the only key Portland location represented. Visitors can also enjoy a portion of the newly re-developed Pearl District, complete with condos and art galleries; a small version of the Saturday Market, an arts festival running every weekend from March to December; and Pioneer Courthouse Square, commonly called Portland’s “Living Room.” And because I’m always on the lookout for good coffeehouses in SL, I was happy to find a replica of the Haven Coffee Shop. Seating options are important, though; I wouldn’t mind seeing a better selection of sit poses offered at Haven.

Walking around—and sometimes flying, just because I can—I find lots of little details that I recognize from the real Portland. The structures are mostly architecturally accurate, the sky is often overcast, and photos of the places represented provide truth-telling and sometimes an extension for the eye to follow down the street. A giant screen image of Mount Hood looms over the plaza. I do have to quibble with it being placed to the west, though. Mt. Hood is east of the city in reality.

One of my favorite little details is that the builders have placed several replicas of the Benson Bubblers, drinking fountains that were installed throughout Portland between 1912 and 1917 to encourage lumber workers to drink water instead of alcohol. I’d love to see a replica of Seward Johnson’s statue, Allow Me, a bronze man holding an umbrella, which stands in the real Pioneer Courthouse Square, just because it’s iconic.

The founder of the project, Ty Magpie, explains that the build is more than just a model of the city; the intent is to provide a platform to introduce “trademark Portland” sites to visitors from all over the globe, helping promote those neighborhoods and small businesses in the real world. Ultimately the site will be an SL venue offering street parties, live music, movies at the theater, and art festivals. In the meantime, it’s a cool place to explore and hang out, and I bought a wonderful piece of glass art for my SL home at one of the galleries.

Putting It All Together: The New Orthomolecular Nutrition by Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph. D & Morton Walker, D.P.M. is an excellent book that brings the reader’s attention to how damaging the effects of a poor diet can not only be to the body, but also to the brain and psyche of a person. Most people are ignorant to what food allergies are and how they can adversely affect a person. This book details greatly the effect on junk food and allergens (mainly sugar) on the brain of an individual. Depression, neurosis, schizophrenia, etc.. are all addressed in the book and how orthomolecular practitioners are using nutrition and vitamin/mineral therapy to solve the imbalances of patients. This book is a must for anyone who is interested in how to heal yourself and others of dis-ease!

I do want to make a note though about being careful with some of the advice about vitamins you may read. This book mentions that vitamins are pretty safe at doses way higher than the RDA. This is true for the most part. However, it would be very wise to be in the hands of a trained professional if you wanted to try extreme mega-dosing of different vitamins. Though rare, vitamin toxicity has occurred and can adversely affect the liver. Also, vitamins and minerals work in groups. A megadose of one type of vitamin, can imbalance another vitamin/mineral in the body. Lastly, you also have to take care to get the right vitamins; the ones sold at your neighborhood Food Lion probably have as many chemicals and toxins as a processed TV dinner. That being said, vitamin therapy is much safer than jumping on the newest pharmaceutical drug, because that is guaranteed to cause liver toxicity and side effects!

If you enjoy this sort of book and learning more about how the human body really works, you may also be interested in The Ultimate Healing System: The Illustrated Guide to Muscle Testing & Nutrition.