The first incident is the closest I have ever come to a personal injury lawsuit. I was playing skeet ball, as usual, and when I reached into the returned ball container, I sliced a long piece of skin off of my hand (a similar injury would occur if you were to take a potato peeler to your hand). The safety guard was missing from that machine and the rough metal was exposed (you have to reach onto the metal cavity to get the balls).

The Chuckie Cheese manager (just think how proud his parents must have been) whisked me away to his office, bandaged me up as best he could, and bribed me with a bucket of tokens. Now, it wasn�t much of an injury (long but not very deep) and my parents probably wouldn�t sue even if my arm had been severed. But it was very exciting. Like any sane kid, the bucket of tokens completely took my mind off of my missing skin. After all, I was now eligible for a Pac-Man stuffed animal!

The second C.C. incident was the one I was reminded of today. I was playing skeet ball. When I got the ball in a ten point whole, it would give me fifty tickets instead of two. This made me enormously happy. I ended up with yards and yards of those little red tickets. I probably bought ten pairs of wax lips, 20 novelty pencils, and maybe even and oversized plastic comb. I was so excited, so pleased with myself that I went to go brag to my parents about what had happened. I ended, dramatically, by telling them �the machine went spaz�.

My dad found this line hilarious, and is probably still repeating it to this day. I know that he has retold me that story at least once a year since it happened. I would guess that he is most amused by the word �spaz�, but hey � it was 1985 and I was 11.

Last night, the transformer at work went spaz. My boss called me at 9 pm to tell me not to bother to come in as we have no power. That was great news (except that I got the song �Informer� in my head, except with the word transformer)(funny it was that song and not the theme song to transformers).

So, I�m off today to London. I�m pretty sure that I won�t see a computer all week. I will talk about them though, as this is a class trip. Leo is there already, I hope he can handle the people it.