My Civic Duty

I have had the pleasure of being randomly selected by the State of California to perform my civic duty as a potential juror in the County of Los Angeles. I report for service tomorrow at 7:45am. Yay.

Actually, if you get on a case, it is rather fascinating to see how the system works. I have only been selected as a juror once for an indecent exposure case and that was um…interesting. But it’s the waiting that sucks, which is why I plan on bringing my Nintendo DS and iPod along for the day.

I don’t know how it works in other states but in California, if you report on your selected day and you are not called or are called and not selected (which is what happened to me last time), your service is done. Prior to that, you had to report for three consecutive days if you were not called. We now have an on-call system which works out much better.

Onto other things. Our friend Tim came over last night for our fortnightly evening of dinner and games. While we usually roll the dice for a wicked game or two of Triple Yahtzee, last night we played some Wii and rocked out to Rock Band.

And let me tell you something about Rock Band. It’s fun solo. It’s better with two. But with three people or more it’s downright euphoric–especially if nobody is an accomplished singer. My God, we couldn’t stop laughing at each other. Tim was our vocalist for most of the songs but I took over for Foo Fighters’ Learn to Fly (while Tim switched to drums and Ann played guitar). Rock Band really is more fun than should be allowed.

Yet from that, it was easy to see how tensions rise within actual bands. I wanted to take over the mic for a few songs but Tim insisted he continue to sing. We also couldn’t decide on which songs to play next. And that was only after performing for about an hour! Can you imagine what Dave Gahan must have felt like trying to convince Martin Gore, two guys that have been performing together for well over 20 years, that he wanted contribute some of his songs for the last Depeche Mode album? After playing Rock Band with a group of people, I sure can!

Well, Ozzie’s asleep on my lap so I’ll take that as my sign that it’s bedtime. Happy December!