Chris’s note: Rarely on a Monday morning am I greeted with such a bizarre and inappropriate yet disturbingly lucid spam message. Let alone four of them like I got this morning. But it carries a good message, so I’m going to let it pass. A Happy 2008 New Year to you all, and lots of teen boy cum loads to us, every one! Amen!

They’ll play with it, that’s for sure. And the MindStorm would be excellent for introducing a kid to programming – it’s essentially BASIC programming (if statements and conditional loops) but graphically set up like LEGOs in that there are IF blocks and COUNT blocks that you put other command blocks into. CJ thinks it’s awesome and I’m glad to foster him in learning to program (their team got an award for creative programming, and CJ was one of the two programmers in the group – and yes, that absolutely *is* stepfatherly pride!) – but yeah, don’t expect 8 to 10 to be taking full advantage of the kit’s potential. It’d probably be more cost effective to get some of the cool Star Wars kits (or whatever) that don’t revolve entirely around programming and gear ratios.

Chris’s note: Although this is a spam message and I’ve deleted the links, it does raise an interesting question. I’d say it depends on the kid. Some of the more advanced LEGO stuff is definitely geared towards teens or adults. Having a LEGO robot is fun, but programming is not. I can tell you this with all certainty: as an 8-10 year old, I would have used the parts to build whatever I wanted to play with at the moment and would not have spent hours upon hours programming a robot to do what my imagination and hands and some very special vocal sound effects from my mouth could make it do in seconds. I’m more of an in-the-moment LEGO guy.

But you know what? I’m not the expert. This is a question for Q. His son is in the LEGO robotics club at his school, and is about this age if I’m not too greatly mistaken. Q, what do you think?

On a totally unrelated note, check out this amazingly wonderful piece of 60s weirdness. The night before Easter a lot of my family ended up at my aunt and uncle’s house in Indiana. My aunt makes a legendary goulash which, in my 31 years on this planet and despite my endlessly hearing about how amazing it is, I have somehow never got to try. I sense a conspiracy. Anyway, she chose the night before Easter to reveal her big secret to us: the goulash recipe in question was not handed down from her Germano-Austrio-Slavic ancestors as we had all assumed, but rather came from a cookbook she had conned from a traveling kitchen knife salesman in the early 60s.

In retrospect, the truth is actually a much cooler story than the handed-down thing. Apparently this guy had been told that my aunt and uncle were newlyweds, and he waited for my uncle to be gone from the house before making his move on what I can only presume he thought would be a financially inexperienced new housewife. But like I said, my aunt has Germano-Austrio-Slavic ancestry. That’s gypsy blood, people. You can’t con a gypsy. That’s like trying to outrun a Kenyan, or out-long-divide a Japanese guy, or out-sexist a 1960s traveling kitchen knife salesman, or out-bigot an overweight sci-fi web author from Kentucky. It just can’t be done.

The gypsies are a savvy people, and in an instant my aunt was onto him like a shark smelling chum in the water. That poor, dumb bastard never stood a chance. He promised all sorts of fantastic deals and confusingly worded installment plans, and my aunt just nodded and acted more and more interested until, convinced she was hooked, he started offering free stuff just for “thinking it over.” BAM! She had him. He left her with a few free things, not the least of which was the 1961 Cutco Cook Book: Meat and Poultry Cookery, Volume One by Margaret Mitchell. Of course, when he returned the next day, she was strangely uninterested in the knives, but she thanked him kindly for all the free gifts, and from that day forth my uncle has enjoyed the benefits of marrying a clever woman in the form of endless meals of heavenly goulash. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve never actually been allowed to eat any. Did I mention this? Not that I’m bitter.

Anyway, my aunt pointed out that she had never had any interest in making anything from this cook book other than the goulash, which is evidenced by the fact that the goulash pages are well worn and ingredient splattered from years of use, while all the other pages are pristine. I reasoned that if something as good as the goulash came from this book, then it might contain other treasures as well, and was therefore definitely worth investigating. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. It was like being down in The Well Of Souls with Sallah and opening the ancient Egyptian crypt that housed… 20th Century Wieners.

I shit you not, I thought I was going to piss myself when I saw this. 20th Century Wieners. How in the hell did they think that name up? After I laughed myself into a frenzy, I passed it around and let the fam get a kick out of it. That night I stopped by and picked up the ingredients, and come Easter we dined on 20th Century Wieners. They’re okay, I guess, but I don’t like tomatoes that much. Everyone else seemed to love them, ’cause they were gone in no time. Frog Boy keeps asking me for the recipe, so here it is for all the world to enjoy. A quick check of a few search engines yielded nil results on both “20th century wieners” and “twentieth century wieners.” That’s right folks, this is a Sci-Fi Guys web exclusive! If you see 20th Century Wieners anywhere else, you’ll know it came from here first. Bon appétit!

Hey, gang. In my eagerness to be home before midnight, I forgot to mention the Super Tech Heroes ultra-huge behind the scenes story. Apparently set in the future of the Marvel universe, the official company line from Mega Bloks is as follows: “In 2150, heroes from the 20th century have been brought back to life with the aid of cybernetic technology. These awesome machines fight crime and uphold justice in the modern cities of planet Earth.” Just FYI.