Here’s something funny: 37 people have listed “adult swin” as an interest on LiveJournal. Is that on the Khartoum Network? (I’m bad.)

I am going to have so much to catch up on with my various friends and feeds. But it probably won’t happen right away! Ah well.

It was a good holiday.

I still didn’t have a memory card for my PS2, so when I saw an EB Games store in the shopping center I visited on my way home, I stopped in. I also looked at the used games, and I picked up four. I got State of Emergency and Space Channel 5 for me, and GTA: Vice City and Final Fantasy X for my brother-in-law. (When he heard I was getting a PS2 he was very excited; he’s never asked to play my PSX but he was interested in those games for PS2… so I got them for him. He’ll have to borrow the machine, of course, but that’s fine - it’s just a short trip down the stairs.)

What bothers me, though, is the State of Emergency game. It has a blue sticker on it that says Property of Blockbuster Video Store #51087. The blue part is just where the words are, but the entire disc is covered by the label and there seems to be an ID tag (not RFID, but like that) or ink bubble under the blue part as well. Now, I know Blockbuster sells products from time to time. It would be extremely difficult to remove the whole label, and there’s a warning printed that says “removal of this label will make the disc unplayable” or something like that.

So they could have sold it as a used game without removing the label, and then the person who bought it later traded it in at EB Games. Or…could I have a stolen disc? Would EB Games have accepted it? It’s a mystery, and I’m not sure that I’ll bother figuring out the solution, but perhaps I’ll give EB Games a call tomorrow and see what they say.

A co-worker who knows I like Star Trek (she once saw me reading Star Trek Lives! and mentioned she was a fan too) brought in a gift for me the other day. It’s two Hamilton Collection ceramic plates, Captain Picard and the Enterprise and Best of Both Worlds. I accepted them to be polite, but we don’t want additional clutter in the house so I tried to figure out what to do with them. To my surprise, they’re actually worth a little bit of money! That’s when my wife got a good idea: save them for the Shore Leave convention in July. I’m either busy or exhausted the entire time I’m there, but she’s willing to take charge of running a silent auction with the proceeds donated to charity.

My challenge now is to decide what charity to give the proceeds to. Something that Trekkies and geeks would appreciate is appropriate, so I could go with some organization that donates computers to needy families/schools; another friend suggested Earth First as an appropriate alternative. Please feel free to leave other suggestions as comments on this entry! (I’m keeping my big charity list in mind, too.)

Added: Also under consideration are Baltimore Reads and the National Space Society.

Normally I like what the people at BevNET have to say about various drinks. But I disagree with them completely on their review of Holiday Spice Pepsi.

If you haven’t seen this concotion in local stores, don’t look for it. If you have, don’t buy it. It’s among the weirdest things I’ve ever had the displeasure of drinking. It does have “spice and bite” as the BevNET review says, but the spices are too mixed and it’s hard to figure out what’s in there. It might be cinnamon, but I’m not sure…I like my spices to taste like they’re supposed to. If something is flavored with nutmeg, I want to taste the nutmeg, even if only slightly.

Now, it probably doesn’t help that I’m not normally a regular Pepsi drinker. I usually drink diet sodas exclusively (I haven’t succumbed to Mountain Dew Pitch Black or LiveWire because they don’t come in diet), and when I do get plain cola it’s usually Diet Coke rather than Diet Pepsi. (I prefer Diet Coke with Lemon over Diet Pepsi Twist, but on the Diet Vanilla ones I like them both.) Anyway, I can definitely taste the fact that this is regular, and not diet, so that might be coloring my perception a bit…but I still think it’s horrid. That said, I’m still using it to take my meds with in the morning at night, and I probably will until it’s all gone or goes flat, whichever comes first. That way it’s only two swallows a day of a non-diet soda.

My girlfriend, who is a perfume aficionado (and rather knowledgable about the subject), sent me an article about two new perfumes from a company called Alex Max. They are “Gay Gal” and “Gay Guy,” and feature female and male pheromones (respectively). The “Gay Gal” perfume also has “more spice” than most women’s perfumes, and the “Gay Guy” perfume is more floral than most men’s perfumes. Because yes, of course, lesbians are butch and gay men are feminine! I’m sorry, but this just seems too silly for words. The company also has a perfume called “Metro Guy” for metrosexuals and another scent called “La Vie On Rose” - [sic], believe it or not.

Ogg Vorbis Phone Post (90k, 0m21s)

It’s raining like the dickens here - it’s very dark, despite it only being almost six o’clock. But I can see this absolutely gorgeous rainbow straight ahead of me.

But now I have to get out of the car and run into CVS. If I had a camera phone or something like that I would have taken a picture - maybe I should get some cheap little digital camera to carry around with me all day.

Transcribed by my mother

Ogg Vorbis Phone Post (62k, 0m14s)

Here’s a tip for everybody: If you’re chewing gum and wearing sunglasses, don’t blow really big bubbles that go up past your nose, because when they pop, they will stick to the lenses of your glasses, and that’s kind of hard to scrape off.

Transcribed by my mother

It’s official: that TV show the other night gave me Armchair Everest Fever again. I just returned from the library with an armload of books:

• Climbing Everest: Tales of Triumph and Tragedy on the World’s Highest Mountain by Audrey Salkeld
• Within Reach: My Everest Story by Mark Pfetzer
• Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine by Jochen Hemmleb, Larry A. Johnson, and Eric R. Simonson
• Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine by Peter Firstbrook
• Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-Altitude Mountaineer by Anatoli Boukreev
• Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory by David Breashears and Audrey Salkeld
• The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm by Matt Dickinson

Add to those books the ones I already own:

• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by John Krakauer
• Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest by Beck Weathers
• The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest by Anatoli Boukreev

Oh yeah. I am all set for some major Everest geekery. I will also be referring to EverestHistory.com, EverestNews.com, NOVA: Everest, National Geographic: Everest, MountEverest.net, and all the Google search results I can handle.

I really wish I were able to attend the James Doohan Farewell Convention taking place in Hollywood this weekend. It looks like it is an absolutely stunning event, with just about every original Trek star attending, along with Trek artists, stars from later Trek shows, as well as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Scotty’s Star party (tickets $75) sounds like fun, and I love the description for the actual $150/head tribute banquet (at which Wil Wheaton is speaking): “This is not a Black tie affair, but you may come over dressed if you’d like.” What I’d really love is to drop $595 on the “Gold Star” level tickets, which gets the whole shebang of events, plus all major autographs in person. (I thought Shatner wasn’t even signing autographs anymore, but his autograph ticket is only $60, the same as Nimoy’s.) Of course all this is happening right now, and it’s in California, so I have no hope of getting there. But my, it does sound like a wonderful time.

I did know that Jimmy Doohan had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but I didn’t know that his star on the Walk of Fame had been purchased! That’s good news.

I know I have several friends who enjoy video games, so I thought I’d mention that I’m selling an Atari 2600 on eBay. It includes two joysticks, two paddles, the Star Raiders controller, and fifteen games (including a few that are listed as Rarity 4 on AtariAge). I’d be willing to consider discounted shipping or something if you’re somebody I actually know! (No fair just randomly commenting and claiming you want discounted shipping; I have to actually know you already.)