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I did it. I beat Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. And I did it with only a couple of small gamefaqs.com checks. This sort of event might be commonplace for you but this is a pretty unique happening in my life. I believe this is only the second game I’ve ever beaten in my lifetime, and the other one was Tony Hawk’s Underground (the first of the two).

From this bit of information you may have surmised that I’m a fan of the Tony Hawk series of games and that would be a correct surmission. (Note that I know surmission is not a word, but ‘a surmising’ seems to be the correct phrase and that just sounds dumb.) Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was one of the first two games I bought for my playstation 2 and based on that game and how much I played it and thought about it, I was worried I might waste my life away. That did not happen, thankfully, and my interest did eventually wane. I have continued to follow the series ever since but with a more normal level of enthusiasm.

So, with that useless information in your brain, I leave you with yet more useless information… With a single combo score of nearly 1.7 million points, I have also now reached the levels of the crazy pre-teens on the Internet who used to always kick my butt when I briefly played online That’s basically just craziness. I’ve only done that once but I also had another of about 1.1 million points so it’s not just a flash in the pan. I’m here to stay!

The Washington Post did an insightful experiment where a world famous concert violinist performed unannounced at a Metro station in Washington DC at rush hour. If you’ve ever been in an urban environment for much time at all you’ve no doubt seen street performers. In my experience the vast majority of them are completely ignorable. I do still try to give them a few seconds of ear as I pass though, just in case. It’s enlightening to see what happened in this real-world experiment!

Read the article now!

Now that you’ve read the article… it brings up the idea that it may only be really possible to appreciate art in the proper context and environment. That even totally beautiful and amazing art may be overlooked and unappreciated if viewed from the wrong mindset or perspective. That makes sense to me. It also makes me think of the role of art as a concept and idea in our daily lives. We’re inundated with pseudo-artistic advertising so much that we can become trained to block it all out, especially while on our daily commutes. We’d go crazy otherwise. The difficulty is in knowing when to open up the blinders a little bit when there’s something worth experiencing going on. It seems that all too often that just doesn’t happen.

As a side note, this picture of nose art on the front of a World War II airplane makes me think, too. It probably falls under the pseudo-artistic category due to its relative lack of quality but it also is such an icon of American culture that you just can’t ignore it.