Post-Easter Weekly Features

I hope everybody had a happy Easter, provided it's the sort of thing you celebrate. And if it isn't, then I hope you had a good weekend anyway. With all the egg hunting, basket finding and family parties, I stayed too busy to update the weekly features, so it needs to be done now. Fasten your seat belts.

This week's top five category is catalogs I actually enjoy getting in the mail:

5. Land of Nod - Though pricey and affiliated with Pottery Barn, you can find some cool retro toys within its pages and they often carry Star Wars and superhero sheet sets.

4. National Geographic - This catalog, filled with exotic pieces of faux artifacts and ornate maps and globes, makes me long for the type of den in my home that old school explorers a la Commander McBragg (of the Underdog Show) must have had.

3. L.L. Bean - While I like the clothes, it's the cool camping, fishing and exploring gadgets that I would never use that I really enjoy leafing through.

2. Lego - New sets just do not come out often enough, and they come out pretty often. I even like just looking at the sets I...I mean my kids already have. It's like standing in the Lego Store and spinning around in circles minus the dizziness.

1. Think Geek - The most unique catalog out there right now to my knowledge, with an amazing array of products, from bacon flavored...well, everything, to office warfare weapons to real spy gear. For the home or the office, they've got something to make your day a little better and a lot geekier.

This week's cool-ass thing you will never own is the ever-shifting mask of Rorschach from Watchmen. By far the best character of the graphic novel (and of the movie, though it paled in comparison), it would be awesome to go into a costume contest with a mask that paid proper homage to him as it's symmetrical black designs continuously morphed into new shapes. Alas, the alternate timeline that allowed Dr. Manhattan to invent the fabric it was made from never occurred. On the plus side, we have not come as close to nuclear war and Nixon is no longer president.

This week's sign you are a nerd is that the abbreviation for the SyFy channel bothers you. I mean, do they have some sort of aversion to the letter i? I'm not that impressed with their line-up in the first place, but you could at least throw the c in there for good measure.

This week's nemesis is cold weather baseball. Nothing causes hand stingers like hitting with aluminum bats in cold weather. Plus, swinging and throwing motions just don't seem the same with long sleeves. Baseball is supposed to be enjoyed in the sun and with beer, but we have to suffer through cold, crisp days before we can get there. This is extrapolated in the considerably shorter little league season, where half the games are played in such unpredictable Spring weather.

This week's lesson learned is that the bathroom is not the best place to try and multitask. Don't believe me? Drop your first cell phone in the toilet and let me know if you ever feel comfortable putting it near your face again, no matter how quickly you get it out or how dry you get it afterward.

This week's equation...

let's us calculate the percentage of accuracy with which weathermen predict Springtime weather. You can calculate this by multiplying your distance from a large body of water in miles (d) and the number value of the current month (m, with March being 3 and April being 4 and etc.) by ten the subtracting the product of the region of the United States you live in (r, with the Southwest=1, South=2, Southeast=3, Northeast=4, Northwest=5 and Midwest=6) and the absolute value of your line of Latitude and dividing this all by 100.

Finally, this week's Star Wars quote is, "Perhaps you think you're being treated unfairly."

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading, and please vote in our poll regarding the fate of our monthly poll.