Luck be a youtube video tonight.

Life is difficult to understand, and often it seems the chances for success and opportunities for happiness are distributed disproportionately among jerks, that wealth and power are becoming the new version of royalty in the world, either you are born into it, or you learn to do without.  Scraping by on subsistence wages, and hoping to break even before you give up the ghost.  Or as Ian Anderson sang so prophetically;

"And you place your final burden

On your hard pressed next of kin;

Send the chamber pot back down the line

To be filled up again."

Occasionally, though, you find the pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow, the golden ticket, the goose that lays the golden egg.  If you are lucky.  Or, ingratiate your self with someone who might get wealthy, and powerful, which is the path I chose.

Fellow blogger, +Mike Raven who writes the very funny Blog of Thog has decided to pursue a career in performance art, and here is his latest masterpiece.

Wow, Is That Powerful, Or What?!?!

I am not sure how many views it takes to make "viral" but this video has at least enough to be "bacterial." which is a good start.  Plus, it is about Clash of Clans, a gaming sensation that is sweeping the nation, and a good thing, too.  This nation could use a good sweeping.

This guy is headed for the big time, and has asked me to manage his first world tour. 

Mike is not an old man, but, he is not too young (like a certain train wreck teen idol whose name we will not mention) he is what we call, in the entertainment biz, "just old enough to make me rich and not need a full time babysitter."

So, buy your tickets to the "Song of Thog."  Get your "Thog" tshirts, and baseball caps, and sun visors, and videos, and action figures, and bumper stickers, and CDs.  Plus, as an added bonus for you old timers, and as tribute to stars from days gone by, we are going to release the first album on 8 track tape, too.

In an unrelated question, which gated community for filthy rich entertainment moguls is rated highest?  I was just wondering.

Clash Of Clans, Pardon me sir, would you have any spare ELIXIR?

At the urging of my son I downloaded and started playing "Clash of Clans," a game by Supercell.  Actually, we started playing long ago, we had started our own clan, it was only the two of us at the time.  He downloaded it recently and started playing again and our clan had ballooned to the maximum of 50 members.  Weird, but cool.  After some amount of browbeating, and endless harassment, I decided to give it another go.

It is a game of resource harvesting and allocation, with the opportunity to raid the members of other clans, destroy their stuff, and steal their things.  When starting you need to build mines for elixir and gold, and a storage facility for both.  Then you need to build defenses, barracks to train troops, and administrative offices, like the clan tower and town hall.  All in the name of progress.  Kind of like life, you know.

Of course, no game is complete without some metric to measure progress.  In this game they are called trophies, but, they are not that important, they get a player higher in the rankings of a clan, but they bring bigger raiders, and more difficult challenges, so many people say you should stay away from amassing too many, which is not a problem for me, but it makes a great excuse when my sons ridicule my paltry rankings.

After establishing your base it becomes a nonstop march towards upgrades.  Constantly making things better, the troops more accomplished and the defenses more robust.  But the real push is making the mines more productive, and the storage vessels more voluminous.  It all comes down to hording those two precious commodities, gold and elixir.

However, it is elixir that really drives the game.  After a while you become a junkie for the stuff, needing it more and more to upgrade so many things, but mostly to train your troops.  You need to troops to protect your elixir (though, through an odd design decision in the game, your troops can not defend your base, only the troops your clan mates are willing to give you can provide security) and to go get more trophies, gold and ELIXIR.   Elixir is the driving force, though.  It is an all consuming need, and you take wild chances just to get your hands on some.  You may raid a fortress you know you can't defeat because they have a lot of elixir stored in a place convenient for looting.  Sure, you will lose some archers, and barbarians, but think of the rewards, ELIXIR!  Sweet glorious ambrosia.

"Press here to Grovel."

It is probably a good thing there is not a "beg shamelessly for elixir" option in any of the menus, or, that I have not found it yet, because who knows how low a middle aged man would stoop for some of that purple red liquid heaven, ELIXIR.

But, the game is fun, and if you have hours everyday to kill you should check it out.  If you play I can send you a few troops, and would be happy to share the gold a bit, but, don't ask for any elixir, there is none to spare.