#1: Lost. This may have had something to do with a parade?

#2: The beginning is gone, but I do recall ending up in the basement parking-level of an apartment building. I was dumpster diving and managed to score a bunch of books and records. It was mostly noise and industrial stuff, nothing I really wanted - seriously, how many Merzbow collaboration records do you need? - but since it was free the price was right. I also stumbled across a number of books concerning the Metroid series of video games...I didn't realize there was that much to the story line where you could write anything longer than say, 10 pages on it. From checking Wiki, my imagination clearly got the best of me. My friend Alex showed up later to pick through the detritus as well as several others. Thankfully I had been given a headstart so I cherry-picked the good stuff. Before waking up, I saw my little pile of treasures and wondered how I was going to carry it all home.

Commentary: One of the neat things about being fairly indifferent to whatever is going on in mainstream culture is that when I do pop my head up from under the rocks, I'm amazed that there's ALL THIS STUFF to do. Case in point, television shows and movies. I've spent a good portion of my life starting Fall '08 watching six seasons of '24', four seasons of 'Lost', and every episode of 'The Shield' (among others) pretty much back-to-back. So while every other person was left hanging in Spring with 'season finale' episodes until the Fall programming starts, I just loaded the opener in Megavideo and thought nothing of it. I mean, it's almost as good as being put in a state of suspended animation, then thawed out 5-6 years later. All this stuff that you knew was going on then...well, now its all come to fruition. Anyway, the point of this is that video games are in a similar category. I've always wanted to 'geek out' on a long-running series, like Megaman or Final Fantasy and play them all back-to-back, cover-to-cover. Considering the price of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for PS2 (it's the first 8 games, plus 2 Japanese titles), I just might have to do so.