On Golden Eye and Ultimate Fighting

During my sophomore year in college, my roommates and I became hopelessly hooked on the Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye, a first-person shooting game in which you could have up to four players drinking Genny Ice out of plastic Domino's Pizza cups and attempting to riddle one another with bullets at the same time.

This addiction of ours officially reached a problematic level when one roommate had a dream in which he shot the other roommate in the head point blank with a .357 Magnum revolver.

We decided to take a break from the game for a little while after that.

I bring this up because the other night I took part in a viewing of UFC 82 "Pride of a Champion" at a friend's house and found it to be oddly delightful -- perhaps even habit-forming -- despite the completely gruesome nature of the bludgeonings that took place.

In part that had something to do with the high percentage of my five-dollar wagers that I won (all viewers were required to bet) even though I was hopped up on Liquid Charge and didn't even know what zip code I was in, let alone being able to prognosticate who might incapacitate his opponent in the upcoming match between Anderson Silva and Dan Henderson (for the record, Anderson won with what I like to refer as the "life strangulation" technique).

Afterwards, I remarked (and someone else agreed): "It's a good thing that UFC 83 isn't until April, because you really can't watch that more than once every couple of months or you'll want to kill people."

Then we fought.