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Teeth found in wallet at Falmouth Wal-Mart

An unidentified shopper was browsing through the wallets at a Falmouth, MA Walmart, when he unzipped one of the compartments and found a surprise — ten human teeth. One of them even had a filling.

The man turned the teeth over to the store’s management but left before police arrived. According to the paper, the teeth are from an adult and because they had no blood or gum tissue attached, they can’t be tested for DNA.

“We’re not aware of anything like this happening in the past, and we believe this to be an isolated incident,” said Ashley Hardie, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

Police are hoping the shopper will come forward so they can speak with him.

Spooky.

What better way to inaugurate a new posting spree to the blog than another Stupid Thing I Want to Own!

 
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Time to blow the dust off this thing. Now that I’m back on the overnight shift, I figure I’ll try to get back to posting to this thing semi-regularly. Let’s do-it to-it, as it were.

Being able to brew your own beer seems like a handy skill to have. I haven’t run the figures, but I have a suspicion that it’d be cheaper than walking across the street to the Loudoun Street Mini Mart for beer. Well, once the initial equipment investment has been made. Of course, if I were to get into this, I can’t go in with anything less than top-of-the-line:

Blichmann Engineering makes a line of fermentors and brewing pots that looky mighty swanky.

This is their BoilerMaker brew pot, with built-in level gauge and themometer.

This is the FERMENATOR, the Terminator of fermanation tanks. No lame plastic bucket for me. I’d probably go for the littlest one pictured, the 7 gallon model, which makes 5 gallon batches.

I guess I’ll have to do some reading, because I’m not sure what other gear I’d need. So far it’s looking like almost $1k initial investment (including a cheap fridge for the Fermenator to sleep in). That’s not including ingredients. Maybe I should stick to a $30 plastic bucket system…

Because I can’t arsed to write anything regarding what’s been going on, I will instead rely on pictures to be substituted for the proverbial 1,000 words.

This is Laser, aka Mr. Beams. He is a dapper gentleman.

‘Bugs is quite taken with the new addition to the family.

Max has accepted the new puppy with stoic dignity, as befitting a creature with such a fine neckbeard.

You know what I haven’t done in a while? Played paintball.

Oh, and somewhere along the line I got married.

Click on any of the above pictures to see tons more related pictures.

Having had a brief moment to reflect, I realized today that of all the gaming systems I’ve bought and read in the last six years, I’ve only actually played two: Decipher’s 2d6 system (used in their Star Trek Role Playing game), and d20. And of the two, I’ve only played the Decipher system two or three times. That’s six years of d20 gaming under my belt.

And y’know? I still don’t like it.

I’ve played and run D&D (3.0) and Star Wars (Revised). I’ve bought and read Weird Wars, Call of Cthulhu, Swashbuckling Adventures, and Perfect20. None of them really do anything for me, as systems go.

On a whim the other night, I picked up a copy of Castles & Crusades at Game Parlour in Chantilly. It professes to be a simplifed version of the d20 ruleset (a noble goal), with the aim of capturing the old Basic D&D gaming feel. I haven’t had a chance to crack the cover yet, but I’m already thinking it’s not going to scratch me where I itch. Continue Reading »

Because writing blog entries is boring, here are some photos of what I did in the month of July:

On July 2nd, Mari and I joined the rest of Mari’s Maryland crew at the last hurrah for Pargo’s Restraunt in Frederick. It was a bittersweet farewell, as Kenny had put in some serious time at the bar, and his status as a regular got us a very nice discount on our bar tabs. There’s talk of the Pargo’s crew moving over to the Green Turtle when it opens up in a month or two, but it’ll never truly be the same.

On July 7th I coaxed my lil sister into coming up from Richmond with promises of drinking and BBQ. In this, I believe we succeeded. The Innaugural Bushway Invitational was well-attended by both Mari and I’s respective coteries, and much full-contact beer pong and asshole and three-man was played. The only problem was that we ended up with more alchahol than we started, which was a big problem considering how much we already had leftover from the wedding.

The weekend of July 20th we had our first Natural Bridge/Busch Gardens trip of the season. Normally we hit each spot at least once during the summer, so we thought we’d combine the trips into one. First stop was Williamsburg and Busch Gardens. The new Griffon coaster is pretty tite, defintely securing a spot in the top three coasters at the park (the other two being Apollo’s Chariot and Alpengeist). We’ll be back to exercise our season passes come Hallowscream.

Stop #2 was Natural Bridge, home of the Natural Bridge Safari. The place has been open for 4 years or so, and we’ve been visiting at least once a year for 3 of them. They’ve been expanding and cleaning up the place, but it seems less fun these days: Maybe they had to take out some insurance to gaurentee the investment dollars needed to expand. Whatever the case may be, it means they’ve got a lot more rules than they used to. If a zebra steals my bucket of feed, you damn well better believe I’m gonna punch that zebra. Apparrently that’s against their new “rules,” so this may have been our last trip to the the ol’ Safari.

Anyways, that was July. August wasn’t nearly as picture-worthy. We do have a couple of new pics of the puppy in her gallery: You can view each gallery by clicking the pictures above, or view all my Picasa galleries at this link. Knock yourself out.

And here are some pictures to prove it!

Click the picture to view the full photo album.

So, I went another month wothout writing an update, despite the numerous amount of noteworthy things that went on:

• April 6th was the premiere of Grindhouse, a fine way to kill 3 hours or so. Saw it with Robert, Chris, Ben, Mike, and Mari. Afterwards we swung by Unos for a few drinks and lively film critique. Consider it a rehearsal for..
• April 7th, my 29th birthday! We celebrated with dinner at the Hula Inn, followed by drinks at Car Pool, both in Herndon. It was a great chance for my friends (Robert & Liza, Chris & Mandy) to meet Mari’s friends (Kenny, Tim) and for everybody to meet my lil sister Rachel and her beau Drew. Merriment was had by all.
• April 8th was Easter. Family gathered at my sister Paige’s house. Mom and Dad were there, and Rachel and Drew, and of course Paige, Jeff, and lil Luka. You could say this was the third day of my Birthstravaganza, as I got to open gifts and such, but I ended up sharing the spotlight with Paige who announced that her second baby is on the way!
• Skipping forwards to the end of the month, we moved out of the grubby little temporary apartment in Leesburg on the 19th. Yeah, that’s a Thursday, so I really didn’t get any sleep in after getting off work in the morning. From work I picked up Mari at the apt., then to Purcelville to pick up the rental truck, back to Leesburg to load up the truck, to Martinsburg to load the stuff we had in storage and Mari’s folks place, then to Lovettsville to unload everything. We wrapped sometime around 10pm I guess, followed by a last trip to Purcellville to return the truck and back to Leesburg for our last night in the apt. Mari’s folks were a huge help during the whole ordeal, as l was tripping over my eyelids once I got past 30 hours of being awake and working. They were lucky to get that much work out of me, as the next morning I left for…
• Vegas, baby! Bachelor partyin’ with my boys Robert, Chris, and Mike. As per Vegas rules, the only thing that didn’t “Stay In Vegas” was my copy of the room key for the MGM Grand. Somehow it ended up in my pockets, rather than at the front desk at checkout time. Maybe I’ll stick it in my scrapbook as a souvenier.
• While I was in Vegas, Mari settled on the house in Lovettsville. My family and hers pitched in to help her get settled in in my absence. They did a teriffic job hanging blinds and unpacking critical boxes, for which I can’t thank them enough.

And that was pretty much April for me. It took Comcast the intervening two weeks to hook up our cable (despite calling them 2 weeks prior to the move). Mari had her bridal shower last weekend, and I’ve been living off the leftover hors d’ouvres ever since. Saw Spiderman 3 (disappointing) and Disturbia (pleasantly suprised). I think that brings us back to now. One of these days I’ll upload a few more pre-and-post move-in pictures of the house, stay tuned.

Here’s three RPGs scheduled to be released in 2007 that I wouldn’t mind owning/reading/playing:

Reign - Projected Release Date: ??/2007

REIGN expands the frontiers of fantasy gaming by elevating the action to an international stage. Monarchs, mercenaries and merchant princes gamble armies and fortunes to win nations in a rich and vibrant fantasy setting. REIGN’s simple but complete rules model the triumphs and disasters of societies as small as a village or as large as a realm-spanning religion. With REIGN, your characters can defend threatened nations, bring prosperity to desperate provinces, make laws and perpetuate justice… or, if you prefer, loot conquer and pillage on a vast and awesome scale.

Similar to the old Birthright campaign setting for AD&D, Reign answers the question “What happens when my character takes over a kingdom?” It uses’ the ORE (One Roll Engine) system popularized in the Godlike, Wild Talents, and Nemesis games.

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