It's been a while. The Nature Domer had a big move and the attendant derth of online access to deal with, but I'm back on and ready to entice you all once again with terrific trivia that only your Nature Dome deck or website can answer.

As always, the questions are here, and the answers will be posted throughout the week on the Nature Dome Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/NatureDomer

1. With back-to-school time in the air, how do teachers get a discount on decks of Nature Dome Mammals?
2. Which cuddly cutie is an unexpected omnivore?
3. Which 5 mammals in the deck have both Power Cards and Attack Boost cards?
4. Can you name the 7 mammals in the Nature Dome Mammals deck that live primarily or exclusively in the water?
5. What's the highest possible value for a single attack in Nature Dome Mammals?

Want to know all this and much, much more? Get the Nature Dome Mammals dueling card game for yourself at www.NatureDomeGame.com -- you'll not only have a blast battling friends and family with real-world animal powers, but you'll learn about magnificent mammals from around the world as you do! 

There has been much talk about the digital TV conversion that was supposed to happen today--how TVs without digital receivers or converter boxes would have nothing but nothing on.

It seems like eons ago that the commercials for this revolutionary event started--and it seems like only yesterday. Time flies . . .

But I was very disappointed when the day finally came, only to have the date officially pushed back in order to let the millions of people who have ignored the millions of commercials about the impending doom of NO TV have time to get the equipment needed to keep getting their fix uninterrupted.

I had envisioned a sort of nirvana for those people out of the conversion loop--unlike myself, having the luxury of thoughtless dronedom thanks to my obliging cable company taking care of whatever they did to ensure my continued reception of their wares. I had actually hoped that my service provider would forget to flip the switch.

Can you imagine anything as wonderous as a few days, a week, a month even, without TV? What would happen if it just went away? Withdrawal at first, I'm sure. Minor panic in the street. A rash of over-staying one's welcome at one's more proactive neighbors' houses, perhaps.

But then . . . oh, then . . . imagine the games people would play. Candy Land, Monopoly, Twister, rummy, poker, dare I say even Nature Dome. People young and old, huddled around the coffee table in front of the cold, lifeless TV . . . playing, laughing , strategizing, spending time with each other, bonding, talking to each other in the original wireless fashion--face to face . . .

It came so close to happening for so many millions of people . . . and then, with the stroke of an ostensibly well-meaning pen, hope faded, eyes dulled, minds shut down, family members disengaged and life marched on into the night . . .

As anyone who knows me knows, I am anything but techno-savvy. I am, after all, a creator of card and board games.

But I have been making a concentrated effort to get Nature Dome out to the web-browsing masses. The latest attempt is with a YouTube video of me and my son playing Nature Dome . . . really more of me getting mercilessly thrashed by my son, the self-proclaimed champion of the Nature Dome universe

It was a lot harder for me to figure it all out, I think, than it is for, say, your average 14-year-old boy lip-synching the latest rap music hit, but I'm pretty pleased with the effort. Find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVljSb5y87g

And now, after many adventures with a less-than-cutting-edge video camera, inadequate video editing software, finding freeware editing software online, paying for a version of the "freeware" that actually worked for me and fighting with YouTube itself to get my video to upload (soooo slowly), it's finally there--and I'm a lot wiser about all of those issues.

So I, usually the last person to adopt any kind of technological "convenience", am finally dipping my toe in.

Any help anyone out there can offer would certainly be appreciated. Other than that, I'll keep plugging along until, as the old Cheers song says, everybody knows my name . . . or Nature Dome's anyway.