What in the hell …

I drank the valerian and mint tea. I took the herbal make-you-sleep-well pill. I breathed slowly and relaxed. Etc. But no. I’m awake again. Stupid body. Or is it mind? (Perhaps I’m being deceived by an evil genius? [Perhaps I’m made of glass!]) Ah well. Affords me the opportunity to note a great new game my wife and I made up the other night when we were in bed. See, we play this game.

In 2001 or so we backpacked around parts of Europe (bits of Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Czech Republic, and Switzerland) for like 4 or 6 weeks (for like $1200 total for the two of us, not counting airfare to and from the US, we were thrifty to the point of misery). It was really cool, but we were seeing all the same stuff and staying in the same rooms in hostels, so the only time apart while awake was in the shower or the bathroom, really. So we ran out conversation topics, kinda. To deal with that, we came up with two games. One was spitting off of bridges and racing the spit floating in the water and other assessments of better spit. The other was a variant on a song lyrics game from the UK TV show Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Here’s how you play.

I say “I went to a party last night.” You answer “what sick things I saw,” because you know it’s that great Jawbreaker song “Bad scene…” Or maybe if you’re new at the game I give you a bit more to work with, saying “I went to a party last night, what sick things I saw” and you answer “Make out sessions and bicycle messengers, punks and art-school dropouts.” Or if I wanted to be more challenging, I would say the second part of a line or a rhyme or a verse, instead of the first part, like “after they died it was Mockingbird hill” or even just “it was Mockingbird hill” (to which the answer would be “back home the buses went up in flashes.” The lines aren’t sung either, just spoken. That game got us through the European trip.

A second game we started playing on long car rides is the terrible band name game. It’s easy. You make up a name for a band that doesn’t exist, like a really bad band name, but one that sounds at least semi-plausible. To test how bad it is, say “Hi, we’re ___________ [band name] from ________ [wherever your from].” For instance, Electric Death Apparatus. “Hi, we’re the Electric Death Apparatus, from Minneapolis Minnesota.” That’s a bad band name. Here’s some more:
Goatshoulder. The Finger Muscles. Erewhon Sundays. (Worse yet - Erewhon Sundaze.) The Fortunate Suns. Any name with a ska pun in it (the trick is to do one that hasn’t been done before, which rules out Skagina, Skanorrhea, and Luke Skawalker, sadly.)

So the new game we came up with is another word-game/guessing game. It originated as a technique to help win the bad band name game but rapidly was spun off into its own growing concern. It’s simple. You take the name of an existing band then replace the words with related words (related in whatever way), and people guess what the original band name was. For instance: Mouthcarton. (A variant of Jawbox.) Or, Boats From Venezuela. (A variant of Jets to Brazil.) Or as Andrew once posted here and confused me (before the game had been officially invented, cuz he’s visionary as all get out), Babblesmasher, for Jawbreaker. The new name will almost invariably be bad (so far the only exception is The Joneses, a variation on the Smiths, though I think Babblesmasher is passable but not good.) It doesn’t count if the name you come up with is the name of an actual band, of course. (For instance, there’s a band called the Celibate Rifles, a variation on the Sex Pistols. That doesn’t count, because the idea is to come up with names for bands that don’t exist. The Celibate Rifles used this technique to name their band, which is a real shame.)

Here’s a few more, if anyone wants to guess:
The Antidote
Wink 91
Harmful Worldview
Dirtsyrup
Contemporary American (or, Medieval German)
Station Wagon Rainen
BD/ED
The River Girls

You get the idea. One thing none of these games are good for is helping cure insomnia.