I just stumbled across his wishlist in a Word doc on my office machine. He's 11 years old, in 6th grade.

1. NXT Intelligence Brick (NXT is a robotics brand, I have no clue what an intelligence brick is, but some pretty funny lines spring to mind, one of them starting with, "Thick as a..."

2. Any good 50 cal muzzleloader pistol.

A note on that last one -- we shoot clays often together, and recently the black-powder crowd was on the club's 75-yard range with their toys. Man, were those some cool toys. We had quite a lesson. Sayings we take for granted come from those old old firearms. "Lock, stock, and barrel" is one of them. And when you fire a flintlock rifle, and the powder in the pan burns but fails to ignite the charge and fire the ball, it is called...(wait for it)...a "flash in the pan." All of know and commonly use the phrase "flash in the pan," but who knew the origin?

AJ