major_clanger | Off with the pounds, away with the dollars

Amazingly, I managed to spend twelve days in the USA, stay at a hotel with a complementary breakfast buffet, go to a convention, and lose three pounds. It must be the benefit of exercising in thin air.

I also gained a few items; well, there are just some things you don't see over here, and with the dollar about on a par with the Flainian Pobble Bead they were so damn cheap that one almost felt obligated to what's left of the US economy to buy them. So, my rampant consumerism checklist:

Grave Robbers from Outer Space, a very silly card game (via those nice people at Compleat Games and Hobbies, which I can highly recommend to anyone visiting Colorado Springs)

A Belkin Quadra 4-in-1 Pen. It's a biro! It's a PDA stylus! It's an LED mini-torch! It's a pocket Death Ray! (OK, 5 mW laser pointer, but it's a start...)

Dockers Stain Defender chinos. Not all of my trousers are black, and the ones that aren't have a bizarre magnetic attraction to coffee/red wine/tikka masala sauce. Maybe these will survive longer than most.

Specially for bugshaw, a DVD of the short-lived live-action version of The Tick.

Plus books of course: I finally picked up John Barnes' The Sky So Big And Black and Steve Stirling's The Peshewar Lancers, plus, in the non-fiction shelf, The Mapmakers, John Noble Wilford's fascinating history of cartography.

So: something to wear, something to watch, something to read, something to play and something to incinerate my enemies with (or at least point them out from a safe distance).

MC

Off with the pounds, away with the dollars

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