I've spent far too much time at this encyclopedic site about videogames old and new.

The site lets you sort videogames by the year they came out, among other parameters. So I've been looking at games that came out in 1976. I'm fascinated by this Atari/Namco car racing game--which, to judge from the description on that web page, as well as my memory, was a game in name only. You sat down and saw a crude, blurry, endlessly looping projection of a race track. Sometimes you would run into stuff. The author of the page has it right: the game's chief draw was that it was big.

(That game makes think about other games you could sit down inside, like Atari's 1983 Star Wars. These games always had a strange allure for me when I was a kid: they were dark and loud inside. Of course, inside there also usually was chewing gum, odors and fluids. "Use the force, Luke." To get the gum out?)

Another thing that intrigues me about games of this vintage is the wood laminate manufacturers often seemed to favor for the cases, as with this game, and this one. The influence here seems to be Atari's 1972 Pong, the first commercially successful game. But what a pity: Pong was designed by Nolan Bushnell, who a year earlier designed Nutting Associates' Computer Space. If nothing else, Computer Space had a truly dynamite cabinet. But it flopped. Perhaps the lesson Bushnell learned was: don't spend any money.

This game has cabinet imagery that reminds me of the new (sic) horror movie House of 1000 Corpses, which I reviewed for the Isthmus last week. This game also reminds me that sometimes the cabinet imagery was far better than the actual game.

Clearly I'm obsessed with my childhood. I sometimes wonder what Proust would have come up with if he'd had the Internet for fact checking.

Just curious, is there a viable alternative to supporting the troops? Postulate for a moment that I don't support the troops--even though I do. (I do! Don't hit me!) What does this mean? I disdain the troops? I pooh-pooh the troops?

I feel sick.

I guess what goes around comes around. You stop one hideous orgy of vandalism only to start another, several thousand times worse.

Thanks, Mr. President.

The 1960s are finally over in Madison.

The 1970s are here at last. Hand me my coke spoon.

I was excited to read that hunky Colin Farrell will appear as Alexander the Great in an Oliver Stone biopic. So excited I ran to the other room to tell Ereck. This conversation ensued:

Me: You'll never guess who Colin Farrell's going to play!

Ereck: Give me a hint.

Me: He's ambitious, and fey.

Ereck: David Geffen?

What I just said to Ereck:

"In the Porky's sequel that is my life."

The snarky epidemic

Merriam-Webster's web site defines snarky, adj., as "crotchety, snappish," and dates the word to 1906.

We have had 97 years to get used to this word.

So why is everyone using it all of a sudden? It may be antique, but frankly, I'd scarcely heard of it till the past year or so.

Now it's showing up everywhere. Look at this chart I made, which tracks the frequency of the word's appearance over the last ten years in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Why snarky? Why now?

For some reason, in my mind I associate the word with snarky New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, but she apparently has not used it since April 1, 1998: "Perhaps the White House spinners thought the gamy, earthy atmosphere of the bush was just the place to convince puritanical and snarky reporters of the most basic truth: Nature must take its course."

But certainly Dowd's colleagues at the Times are still under the snarky spell. On March 9, 2003, Caryn James wrote of critical reaction to Salman Rushdie's latest book: "The reviews ranged from respectfully disappointed to dismissive, and were followed by a deluge of snarky tabloid stories."

And Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, in a December 29, 2002 look back at the year, "Greeting-card sentimentality and snarky, knee-jerk irony proliferated with abandon this year."

The snarky domain is not limited to the East Coast, of course. Last February, San Francisco Chronicle television columnist Tim Goodman even used snarky in a provocative headline: "The Snarky Pants just won't fit."

And the word has moved out to the heartland. It showed up yesterday in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article about the Oscars, by Kathy Flanigan: "Tightened security did its best to subdue the always snarky Joan Rivers."

The newest sighting is in a letter by one Sarah Graham Miller to today's Hartford Courant about the scandal surrounding Waterbury, CT's former mayor, Philip Giordano: "Giordano thought he had it in the bag. He was snarky and smarmy in the press, but had nothing to say on the issues."

The last time I can remember something like this happening was in about 1986, when everyone I knew was going around saying, "This is true." But maybe that was just one group of disaffected teenagers in Tennessee.

I've been hoping Elizabeth Smart would start a similar fad with the phrase "Thou sayest" (cf. John 18:37), which is what she said to the cop who asked her if she was who she was. It's a nice, solid-sounding phrase. But so far, no fad.

I predict Donald Rumsfeld will soon amend his dismissal of our friends across the Atlantic to read: Snarky Old Europe.