Impulse buying

Today was simply a glorious day weather-wise. The day was beautiful and temperatures where in the high 50’s. As a result I persuaded the S.O. that golf was in order today. For both of us not having played in four months-we actually did pretty well.

However, to engineer that little feat-I had to pay the piper up front. ( Too bad she never seems to grasp that concept in reverse -e.g. if you want the nice earrings maybe some sexual yoga might be in order……). Accordingly, we had to get all errands done on Saturday and that included a stop at, where else but Costco.

We bought the foodstuffs we needed and re-stocked some basic wines ( a subsequent stop being the store where the good wines are sold) and then, as fate would have it, I cam across this little gem in the DVD section.

As I looked at the box-and quickly discovered that it had every issue of National Geographic on six CD-ROM’s all for the low price of 32 dollars-well, I said to heck with it and tossed in in the cart. The S.O. gave me the raised eyebrow treatment-as in “what do we need this for?”- to which I responded that this was not up for negotiation, unless she was paying for the purchases today or would otherwise find a way to make not buying it worth my while. Of course she was disinclined to the latter option 🙁   , so home with us it went.

Its worth every penny. Once you load that software that comes on disk one-here are a few of the things it will allow you to do. It allows you to search by year in a very easy graphical format:

It also allows you to look at the various covers-month by month:

Now I might add-that this particular edition of the National Geographic (February of 1965) probably set me off on going to the Navy-as I can remember reading it at my grandmother’s house, where she had stacks and stacks of National Geographics on the shelves of her book cases. When ever we went down there in the months of 1966 and 1967-as a young boy of nine and 10, I can recall reading with awe about Operation Sea Orbit:

It is fascinating history. The program is very easy to navigate-and lets you see the pages of the magazine full sized on your computer monitor just as they looked in the magazine:

It has very easy to use search functions-like this search I conducted on “US Navy”:

You can zoom in on particular pictures and look closer at details. Take a look at what Hong Kong looked like in 1965:

It even has the maps and illustrations-like this full page on from the June 1965 edition showing me the aircraft of the USAF. I can remember being all of 9 years old reading this in person on my grandmother’s floor:

I guess it makes me a geek-but I thought it’s pretty cool