Pardon the double-post both here on DorkTower.com and on my normal LiveJournal account, but the word needed to get out far and wide:

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, we’re proud to announce the winner of the “Win This Booty-Ful Art” contest.

Almost 300 entries came in, which blew me away a little. Many of them were VERY, very good. Some of them got me to laugh out loud, and were all kinds of brilliant and original and snit.

A few were a bit obvious, and several were sent in by over a dozen folks each. There were LOTS of variations on Ratite (”RAT-ite,” getddit? Geddit?), which is bloody clever, since I didn’t even know that a Ratite was the family of flightless birds Kiwis belong to! So a consolation prize goes out to Kiwi Carlisle, of St. Louis, for being the first person to make the connection, thus learning me a new word.

There were also many, many pairings of the words “Plunder” and “Down Under.” The most succinct was “The Plunder from Down Under,” but Dartanyan Hetrick’s (Dallas, TX) “Rats of Plunder from Down Under” was the first such to come in, so a consolation prize goes to him, as well.

The SECOND RUNNER UP, Christian Peters from Cologn, Germany, certainly knows his way around an English language pun, with the dreadful but tasty “New Sea Landrat,” artfully stuffing all elements of the drawing into one very ridiculous card.

The FIRST RUNNER-UP, who will be expected to fulfill the duties of the winner should he or she be caught in a naked Penthouse spread, is Beth Reiten, with “Mutiny on the Barbie,” which doesn’t really explain what the rat is doing there, but was very silly nevertheless.

The GRAND PRIZE WINNER, however, is Kelly MacDougal, whose “G’Day Matey” again never really explained why there was a rat there in the first place, but just made me laugh. A lot.

(Steve Jackson himself suggested “Yarrrrr! They Wuz Outta Parrots,” so I guess I should send HIM something, as well, since he’s kinda sorta my boss and all…)

Congratulations to all the winners, and I now hereby publicly challenge Mr. Steve Jackson to fit the “G’Day, Matey” card into the game.

Yarrrrr!

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Munchkin Quest 2 has been announced, so I can now speak of it openly.

When Steve first brought the idea to me for cover suggestions, I asked for more information about it.

“It’s called “Munchkin Quest 2: Looking For Trouble,” he said.

“OK,” I said, a little later. “How about something like THIS:”

Now, I can absolutely respect and support Steve’s decision NOT to put a toilet bowl on the cover of a major release, instead going with THIS cover:

…and yet, I can’t help but think that somewhere, the Baby Jesus is crying just a little.

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Speaking of toilets, a while back I asked if folks could guess what this Munchkin Quest monster could possibly be:

This wan’t a competition: there were no prizes. Still, surprising few people guessed that it would actually be called (wait for it….)

The Komodo Dragon.

Thank you! Thank you! I’m here all week. Try the liver.

Dorkstock VII: The Year of the (Musk)Rat. Finally got the logo done. Yay!

Yup, Dorkstock is happening again this year, as a convention-within-a-convention at Rock-Con, the pride of Rockford, Illinois.

I’m not joking: Rock-Con is a superb little convention, mostly miniatures, but that’s where Dorkstock comes in! We’ll have games galore! We’ll have Igor Bar contests! We’ll have trips to Beef-A-Roo! It’ll be an absolurte blast! So come on down, and say “hi” to the Army of Dorkness!

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I’ve noticed that whatever I post on the new Dork Tower web site tends to get picked up by the LiveJournal Dork Tower feed. So I’ll try not to post on the main DorkTower.com site too often. Probably only Tuesdays and Thursdays, with briefer updates and ramblings going on my LiveJournal site. Since not everybody’s into LJ, I’ll try and mirror this as best I can on my MySpace page, my Facebook page or my new Blogspot home. But until someone comes up with a way that these can be automatically mirrored, these last three spots may be spottier.

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The Lovely And Talented Judith and I went up north for the weekend, to the Whad’Ya Know road show in beautiful Door County, WI. (MUNCHKIN GAG ALERT: As Steve Jackson joked, “isn’t there a Treasure County, too?”)

Door County is a cute little Cape-Cod-like peninsula, the kind even landlocked states seem to have. It is most assuredly extraordinarily pleasant, especially if you like buying cheap tacky souvenirs, hideously expensive tacky souvenirs, or cherries. Did I mention cherries? Door County is to cherries as Forrest Gump is to shrimp. You can get sweet cherries, sour cherries, cherry pie, cherry streusel, cherry jam, cherry salsa, dried cherries, cherry cobbler, sour candy cherries, cherry gumbo, fried cherries, cherry po’boy…

Of course, to get anywhere north of Madison on Highway 42, you have to drive through Rosendale, a speed-trap so notorious, it’s citizens wear it with pride:

It is, also, apparently, a community with a problem. One brought on perchance by TOO MUCH ILL-GOTTEN SPEED-TRAP MONEY FLOWING THROUGH THEIR VEINS:

It was very much the Entire Wisconsin Experience. Who was sitting next to us at the Sister Bay Bowl Friday fish fry (perch, of course)? Outgoing Green Bay Packers president Bob Harlan.

We even managed to fit in a Swedish breakfast at Al Johnson’s, a restaurant more famous for its goats on the roof than it’s very decent Swedish pancakes and meatballs. It was sorta like if Ikea opened a petting zoo…that you couldn’t reach…to taunt you…the bastards!

And, of course, obligatory shot of Cartoonist staring into the Distance, with vast Lake Behind Him.

Anyway, if you say “Door County” fast enough, it comes out as “Dork County,” and that’s fine by me.

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Working on Munchkin Quest II (BTW: love that folks on BoardGameGeek are rating Munchkin Quest, even though it’s not out for months yet.

Take a guess what this monster will be called.

Go on. Guess. Try it. Go on….