wiijected

The big plan hatched on Wednesday night was to have a Nintendo Wii boxing tournament while I was back in Madison. We sent out invitations Thursday for a Sunday party--to a mixed group of people ranging from a couple who have been here thirty years to someone who's only been here three weeks--and we received 20 RSVP yeses. Only on Saturday, though, did I get around to the matter of actually trying to purchase the Wii. I had just been presumed that, where there's a will, there's a Wii, especially around here, since you can't spell "Wisconsin" without "Wii." Instead, a massive wiisearch campaign resulted in our learning there is not a single Wii for sale within 100 mile circle around Madison. Efforts to rent or borrow a Wii also proved fruitless, or at least not until after we sent out the announcement to postpone the party.

We're hoping to reschedule for Memorial Day weekend, when I'll be in Madison for the Mad City (Half) Marathon and the spring 2007 edition of the World's Largest Brat Fest.

The spring 2004 WLBF, btw, was what broke me of five years of pescatarianism (a pescatarian is someone who would be a vegetarian except they eat seafood). Many lapsed vegetarians/pescatarians have some story about being tempted by being in a group of people at a party or a picnic or someone occasion where it would be really awkward to turn down meat. Me, it was that I had to drive by the WLBF on my way to and fro work, and the afternoon of its last day I just pulled into the parking lot and had two bratwurst with mustard all by myself. Even aside from various concerns about the content of bratwurst, it's a weird food to have crush one's pescatarian will, because vegetarian faux bratwurst is a very close substitute for the real thing. (Indeed, according to the WLBF website, this year for the first time they will be serving vegetarian brats for the first time. If only they had done this three years earlier, who knows how many animals lives would have been spared the unhappy fate of being shoved down my postpescatarian gullet.)