I often have reason to visit my daughter's middle school, for a variety of reasons, like to refill her lunch account. When you enter the building, for security reasons you have to go to the office and get a visitor's pass. You fill in some information, look into this little camera on top of the computer screen, snap the shot, and print this little temporary badge you stick on your shirt.

I fool around with these a lot. I list my first name as Zombie, look crazed into the camera, and list the purpose of my visit as "eat brains." Sometimes I'll just be blatant about it all and under purpose of visit I'll type "embarrass daughter." This is actually redundant. She's twelve; I embarrass her by merely existing.

That's actually an exaggeration. She's in chess club now, utterly not the type, but I used to play a lot as a kid and one day I happened to be back from a business trip early, so I stopped in to her chess club meeting (because I have to drive her home after chess club) and taught the kids something called Monster Chess. That, oddly enough, boosted her status. Let me tell you - that's rare for the parent of a twelve year old. So now she likes it when I show up.

(In case you're curious: the way Monster Chess works is that white only gets two pawns and a king while black gets a whole set, but white moves twice each turn rather than once. Once you figure things out black can always win but, before that happens, if you're white and you know what you're doing you win a lot and completely freak out the other player. Also, the games only last a few minutes.)

So, this past Thursday, at my daughter's request, I stopped by chess club. I went into the office and made up my badge. I didn't fool around at all - I played this one completely straight, didn't type anything funny, just looked at the camera and snapped. The only thing that was different was that I was wearing a hat.

There must have been something funny with the light setting. The result was so cool that I decided to post it: