My cousin Fish plays Return to Castle Wolfenstein and all sorts of FPSes. I managed to convince him that Heinrich Himmler was indeed a real person, and not a creation of computer game designers. Such is the problem of pulp fiction action hero/villain Nazis. Real history is so easily forgotten.

Fish finds me sadistic for this, but being tortured by lightning-wielding silly-German-accent mad scientist zombie Nazis in a torch-lit gothic dungeon is pretty damn funny. The caged skeletons dangling from the ceiling by rusty chains are the icing on the cake. Camp at its finest hour.

I also play Warcraft III- Fish wonders whether the people have British or American accents. The answer to that is they speak in a dialect of English known as Campy Fantasy Film English. I'm sure a true linguist can look into this. Fish also says that Arthas the paladin is comparable to Bush in his warlike righteousness; we had a good laugh mentally imposing Arthas' forthright knightly dialogue on Bush's simian head; "I stand for the light!" "Feel my wrath!" "Slay them all!" 'For honor!" "Betrayers of the light!" "I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth!!! Do you hear me?!!" I'm afraid this is only funny if you say the above in a grim and determined manner, setting your jaw just so.

Have also done lots of mountain hiking so it's not like I never go outside. I'm outside quite often. Kinda tropical. There's a type of fern that curls up when you touch it, and stairs carved into the rock and tumbled rockfaces and waterfalls that trickle over them (but they look dirty) and small orange crabs bright enough to appear cooked that scuttle away with amazing dexterity when you (unwisely) poke them with a toe. The good thing is that you can see very far into the mountains that fold in a green felty fashion like a giant's cloak in the foreground. It's easy, in the shadow of a mountain, to misjudge distances, until you see tiny white blots that are apartment buildings on the adjacent mountain's rocky spine, and you realize that walking from point A to point B would be the fruitful work of several days. You can see into the densely populated valley with its concrete forest of buildings, and saddles of mountains and the sea between mountain gaps, until the mountains fade into a universally flat haze in the blue distance against the horizon.

It's very strange how halfway around the world the rustling murmur of cicadas and the warm smell of suntan lotion can make it feel so much like home.