Finally, we got one. But first the story:
Yesterday was quite the day for people waiting around in lines for things. There was the whole Harry Potter frenzy, of course. Three small tangents about that: first, the Huffington Post collection of Harry Potter stuff, including some spoilers, some funny parodies, some interesting analysis, etc. Second, I heard that there was a mob scene at the midnight party at Arborland Borders– like thousands of people packing the entire parking lot. This was not on the radar for anyone in my household, including my wife the HP enthusiast and scholar. And third, Annette is about two-thirds done reading.
BTW, here’s a kinda cool flickr set of pictures from a HP book sale party in London.
In more local line-waiting news, there was the Ann Arbor Art Fair (which we avoided entirely, though yesterday would have been a nice day for it weather-wise), and the grand opening of an Apple store in Briarwood Mall. I’ve been waiting for this arrival of a branch of computer Mecca right here in town and the first 1,000 customers got a T-shirt. So since Will and I had some errands to run anyway, we went out to the mall. A lot of other people had a similar idea. At 9:30, a half-hour before the store opened, the line looked to me to be over 1,000 people (though the newspaper suggested it was a lot less), which seemed like a lot to go through to walk through a store and to get a T-shirt.
So Will and I wandered down to the EB Electronics game store. There was a small line there and we got in it, and, by about 10:30, I had spent way WAY too much money for the Wii that Will and I had sought for so long. It turns out that Nintendo, the Wii’s maker, had asked retailers to hold Wiis until Saturday this week. Lucky us.
On the way out of the mall, we walked back past the Apple store. There was still a gazillon people patiently waiting to walk through a store in the mall. Crazy.
Anyway, there wasn’t much Wii-ing until late in the day because we needed to get ready for some friends coming for dinner and to continue the housecleaning for the in-laws who are arriving today. But we did finally hook it up and it was good. Here’s Will this morning playing Wii tennis:
There’s a ton of other features with this that we’ll have to figure out, but so far, it looks like the Wii is delivering on what it promises: a different and group-oriented approach to the video game experience. Wii on, my friends, Wii on.