the vynsane asylum

I opened a new box of Pop-Tarts this morning to find I'd won an XBox Kinect game.

Just a game. Not a Kinect or an XBox.

Not having an XBox, much less a Kinect, that's pretty damned worthless to me.

At least, if they ship the damn thing on time, we've got a Christmas present for my "got to have every new game system and accessory, even if it's a piece of shit like the Kinect and we never use it."

(Maybe that's based just on my limited experience, but the Kinect is so wonky they should never have released the fucker, and the games are all weak knockoffs of the Wii party games.)

Take it, return it to Best Buy, and get something you actually want.

When I first started dating my wife, we went to Huntington Beach. There was some event going on, can't remember what. A guy was giving out prizes to a crowd. He said he'd give the next prize to whoever had the drivers license from furthest away. I showed my Virginia ID and won. It was the soundtrack to the Flintstones live action movie that came in a case shaped like a clam. She may still have it somewhere.

I would do that, but prizes like this are usually marked somehow that they're not for sale and would be really tough to return. (Mrs A used to call radio stations whenever she heard them say "to the twelfth caller," regardless of what the prize was, and I got a Stray Cats album, of all things, that way. The UPC was punched out.) I'll just see it as saving money on a Christmas present.

Years ago, my dad won a contest of some sort from a radio station and got two CDs and a tape. Having no interest, he gace them to me. The CDs were a Poison album and a Tora Tora album. The tape was some dude who looked like a generic, flash-in-the-pan R&B singer, and I didn't listen to it for a week or two. When I finally did, I was shocked when it opened with the opening chords of "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" (I knew Kravitz's earlier hits, but didn't know the name.)

Guess which one of those three I still listen to (after upgrading to CD a couple of years later)?