This is a rangpur lime:

This is what happens when Tony Sinclair travels to the ends of the earth in search of “cocktail perfection”:

When I first caught wind of this new discovery I made it my mission to track down a bottle and last night I gave it a try.

It’s pretty great. Very refreshing. I drank it straight with some ice and it was kind of like drinking a gin and tonic without bubbles or the horrendous “morning-after aftertaste” that you get with tonic.

It just launched nationwide last week so if you can’t find it locally you should be able to soon!

At the north pole of Saturn you’ll find this:

It’s a perfect hexagon composed of nothing more than swirling gases.

That in itself is pretty strange. But check out NASA’s press release which also includes an animation of the swirling.

Look closely at the animation.

Closely.

There is a distinct triangle within the hexagon, and it spins right along too! Within that triangle is a circle.

But what is it really?

It’s part of a vast Freemason conspiracy to colonize other planets and take over the universe! I believe that Saturn is the Freemason Galactic HQ. It is from here that they will one day launch their invasion of Earth.

Freemasons love America though, so we should be good.

It would seem my victory over the Mythic Dawn and Lord Dagon was short-lived.

A portal to the Realm of Sheogorath has opened near Bravil and I need to investigate!

Today Bethesda released the first true expansion pack for Oblivion, called The Shivering Isles. It’s 1/4 the size of the original game and adds something like 30 more hours of gameplay.

I’ve kind of got my hands full with Castlevania right now…but I’ll make my way back to Cyrodill soon enough!

Huell Howser is my hero.

Maybe you’ve seen him on TV. His ‘traveling across California’ documentaries air on California PBS stations all the time.

He basically has made a career of traveling up and down California touring and taking in all the things this great state has to offer.

Huell’s got a very distinct interviewing style. He always wears a silk shirt and always has a big black microphone in his hand. He’ll usually interrupt the people he’s interviewing every few seconds to go “WOW!” and “Are you kiddin’ me?” also “Holy cow!” He’s not being sarcastic either – Huell is genuinely interested in what people are telling him.

The man loves California!

Shows like California’s Gold seem to be squarely aimed at the 60+, retiree crowd…but I’m 28 and I really enjoy them too.

Set your Tivos!

I think HAM radio has a limited future.

See there’s this thing we’ve got nowadays called the Internet, and it lets people type or talk to each other from around the world!

I know that HAM radio as it exists today will be gone in 30 years. You know how I know? Because if you do a Google Image Search for ham radio operators you’ll either find really old pictures of people, or pictures of really old people.

HAM radio today is dominated by nice old white guys with facial hair. I cannot explain this phenomenon. I merely report the facts based on observation. There are a handful of younger nerds who do it too though…

Amateur radio gear is insanely expensive. The transceivers, the cabling, the antennas, ugh. Computers with internet connections are cheaper!

They do look nice though… I barely know what the hell this thing does but I WANT IT BADLY:

It’s got all kinds of buttons and knobs and holy cow that is one nice shiny display.

They even sell radios that’ll let you download images from weather satellites in real time. REAL TIME! I guess that’s cool, but we’ve got accuweather.com and countless other weather sites nowadays.

Every now and then I’ll listen to HAMs on my scanner shooting the shit (or ‘chewing the rag’) as they say. They all sound like a nice enough bunch of guys, but there are real benefits to communicating over the Internet. For example “/kick SomeGuy You are being a jerk.” or “deny from SomeGuy’s.hostname.com”

I was listening to the Insomniac Net last night (‘nets’ are big chat rooms) and some random guy was jamming it, blasting country music and periodically jumping in to go “Ooooooh yeah baby. Feel it. Feel it. OOOOOH YEAH!”

It was funny at first, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for the senior citizens trying to conduct their trivia game because they couldn’t be heard over the music.

Do you think the jammer walks up to old people in real life and steals their canes too? I doubt it. But I bet he’s thought about it at least once.

They were running ‘the net’ on the WinSystem, a huge and expensive-to-run network of repeaters that links people up and down California. They were able to just turn off one of the repeaters to block the guy, but doing so effectively severed their connection to a big part of their network and delayed everything for like 15 minutes.

Thousands and thousands of dollars of radio hardware sitting on unattended mountaintops across California were rendered unusable because of just one mean guy with a radio.

Old guy #1 was all “This guy’s coming in off of Sunset Peak. We should lock that one down. Are you looking into that, Joe?” A few seconds later an irritated-sounding Joe shot back “I’m working on it.” Then some more music would play. Then more OOOOH YEAH. Then more admins talking. This went on for a while while they tried to track down the perp! It was all very exciting and very sad at the same time.

I can understand the allure of drawing in remote signals through a complex process of tuning and adjusting expensive, high-tech, specialized hardware. In that respect it is a neat hobby, especially if you like talking to strangers.

But at the end of the day it sure seems like a lot of work to talk to people on the other side of the world.

Last night I hit a milestone in Oblivion.

I got all 50 achievements! I am DONE!

It only took me 103 hours of playing over the course of a year, but I did it. I’m the Champion of Cyrodill, Baby.

This accomplishment represents my new approach to video game playing: Buy less games – and of the games that I do buy, play them all the way through before buying something new. So far it’s worked out well!

During the ending days of the NES’ reign I had close to 50 games and I really only played a handful of them on a regular basis. The rest were essentially $50 paperweights…even as a child I realized that stack of games represented a huge waste of money. It made me sick!

Oblivion was the only retail game I’ve purchased in the past twelve months. Five years from now I won’t see it as $60 down the drain. I’ll see it as something that brought me a year’s worth of quality game-playing!

Of course the Shivering Isles expansion pack comes out next week, so I’m pretty sure this isn’t the end of Oblivion for me…

Last night as I was getting ready for bed I took the time to sample my own armpit odor. I wasn’t really trying to, but sometimes when you take your shirt off and your head is turned just the right way you get a whiff of the good stuff whether you want to or not.

As expected, the fumes were horrific and gag-inducing. They smelled – and this exact phrase popped into my mind – “like the dickens”.

Then I wondered what Charles Dickens had done to find himself the subject of such a maligned catchprase. Things hurt like him all the time, and my armpits even smelled like him! Charles Dickens must have been a true ass.

Well that’s not really the case. The internet has informed me that ‘Dickens’ actually refers to THE DEVIL!

My armpits smelled like SATAN HIMSELF!

There is only one solution. I must now scrub my armpits with angels.

My neighborhood was on fire yesterday.

Here’s a picture I took-

The local news pretty much ignored the fire, but CNN had hours of live coverage if you happened to be watching.

We walked five minutes to the reservoir near our house to take pictures and watch the helicopters fill up with water…and to watch things burn with like five hundred other looky-loos.

I shot some action-packed video:

Luckily the Santa Anas were blowing away from our house so we didn’t have to evacuate this time. But we were ready just in case!

And we have to wait until April 12th to see it.

I bet this lady wouldn’t be smiling if she knew that someday the entire world would see her sitting on a toilet.

This and hundreds of other gems from one man’s “found” photograph collection appears at Square America. There’s some really neat/funny/crazy stuff in there.