I dunno, they were kind of round and gray but with some sparkly bits.
Ooooh sparkly! I have lots of sparkly rocks. I’m inseparable from my rock collection! My faves are the bits of granite with pyrite bits. Shiny! I never knew that some my favorite rocks would end up in every kitchen of Southern California, though (except mine).
Maybe take them into the nearest university? You might have something special, Koxinga. (Round seems to me to sound like a geode, but I admit I’m quite undereducated in geology. I just like rocks.)
I was there when this interesting artifact was pulled out of the ground during the Jamestown Rediscovery excavation in the summer of 1999.
I was a student in the archeology field school that year, and we were standing around one afternoon, just getting ready to wrap up for the day-- when one of the lead archeologists, scuffing the earth with his foot, randomly kicked this silver doohickey out of the ground. He passed it around and we all took a good look at it. The first thought was that it was some random item of drug paraphernalia that someone had dropped back in the 1960’s or 70’s (with the little spoon on the end)…but the reality is much, much cooler than that!
I’ve got a replica of it somewhere…it’s one of the most iconic artifacts to come out of that (ongoing) excavation.
[ul]
[li]Visited the KGB Museum in Moscow[/li][li]Visited Star City in Moscow[/li][li]Possibly participated in the world’s biggest game of Tug of War in the back yard of the Swedish King’s palace (Drottningholm, perhaps.) Our side lost.[/li][li]Saw a ballet in I think either the Winter Palace or Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.[/li][li]Landed a multimillion dollar flight simulator in a piloting school on my first try (way before the Mythbusters did it.)[/li][li]Did a complete world circuit tour.[/li][li]Visited Komodo Island and saw the dragons.[/li][li]Have gone to a water park outside of Cairo[/li][li]Tested positive for tuberculosis (see last three items in list)[/li][li]Have met Richard Kiel and Douglas Seale[/li][li]Have visited Skywalker Ranch. Watched a movie in the cherry theater and saw Indiana Jones’ whip and hat as well as some of the miniatures from Star Wars (but I didn’t get to touch any.)[/li][li]I’ve been to at least four of the world’s top rated restaurants[/li][li]Was in Beijing the night of the Hong Kong handover (though there was a curfew so we couldn’t see or do anything)[/li][li]Flew TWA Flight 800 exactly one week before the craft exploded (assuming it was the same plane)[/li][li]Translated into Japanese for a British Intelligence high up at a jail in Tokyo who was meeting a girl who he’d saved/adopted from Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia or Armenia or somewhere thereabouts[/li][li]Attended a meeting with members of AIM in Tokyo.[/li][/ul]
And for all that, I’m really a pretty boring person.
If you ever get tired of being cbawlmer,
“**Theramin Prodigy **”
cries out to be your new doper name
Can you start a new thread about this? I must know more.
You are also becoming my favourite. 
I’ve handled many objects that are centuries older than me, including Japanese samurai armor and other cultural artifacts from the time period. I’ve also handled illuminated manuscripts from the 1600s and very expensive art pieces during my time in museum work/studies.
I’ve walked on a glacier and been 30km away from the arctic circle.
I once got a blow job off 2 hookers in a backstreet off The Reeperbahn, in Hamburg… oh, you said esoteric…sorry about that!
The only thing that comes close is I once got to hold a solid bar of silver at the Federal Reserve. That was pretty cool. At the time it was worth between 3 and 4 hundred thousand dollars.
I’ve handled and cared for one of only eight (or nine?) Northern Spotted Owls in captivity. I’ve held and handled bald and golden eagles, and assisted in restraining them for various veterinary and husbandry-related procedures. It takes three people to restrain an eagle and ensure that everyone walks out with intact bodies.
I provide animal care and husbandry for the mouse colony being studied in a research project that is currently on the extreme cutting-edge of breast cancer research, developing a technique that allows for tumor detection within hours of formation. That’s a neat thing to see happening, in real time.
Umm… really?
$400,000 at $12/oz (to take a silver price from about a year ago) is 33,333 troy oz. which (via Google) is 2,285.69143 pounds. Or a bit over a ton.
You sir are very, very strong. 
Too many, mostly during my New Mexico years. A few off the top of my head:
- Created installations and performed in a performance art group.
- Went on a vision quest.
- Soaked naked in a long-forgotten hot spring along the former route of the Butterfield stage line.
- Helped renovate an adobe house.
- Blew up televisions in the desert (and cleaned up the debris afterwards)
Anyone why has attended one of the Cleveland Dopefests at my hosue have seen two of the 8,000 Portuguese Water Dogs in the United States. By comparison, there’s millions of Labrador Retrievers in the country.
OK, elmwood reminded me of one thing: there’s a tiny, windswept island off the coast of Taiwan (Green Island) that has one of only three ocean hot springs in the world. Had a nighttime soak in this spring with a couple of friends, with it utterly dark out and no people around at all, but we had to vacate once the tide started coming in.
I can read financial reports in Chinese, but I don’t know how esoteric that should be considered, really.
- My grandmother knew a museum curator. For some reason the museum she worked for closed. She had most of the museum packed up in boxes in her house.
- I own a bible printed in 1611. (Not the first edition of King James)
- I saw a super secret Navy ship.*
*I’d tell you more, but there’s a black van sitting outside my house.
* Actually not all that impressive. I have the feeling this was some admiral’s pet project.
I got to ride on a steam train in elementary school. It was on a field trip. Afterwards we went in the roundhouse and watched them spin the engine around to its stall.
I’m currently sitting in a room with one of only three “original copies” of the Moseley Map, a gold ring found at the Lost Colony site, and a flintlock from a pre-Revolutionary rifle.
I’ve also danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, but that seems to be pretty common around here.
olives, I too am interested in this. What exactly is involved in pretending to be an amoeba? Do you get to engulf others? Sounds like it’d be a pretty good psychological device for assertiveness, which is something I could use. I think I’ll go practice engulfing pushy and hostile people and see if it helps! 
Where do I sign up for this vacation package?
Ooh, I didn’t think about that. I’ve got one of an estimated 1500 Dogos Argentinos in the US. We imported him, and for a while, his was one of the more noteworthy pedigrees in the country. I’m something of a rare-breed enthusiast.
I’m also one of approximately 4,000 federally licensed falconers in the US, that’s pretty esoteric.
I once pushed John-John Kennedy away from the water fountain at the National Zoo. It’s possible that this incident so traumatized him that it lead to his untimely demise. The Secret Service is still looking for me.
Or are you just dancing?
You are right. I was holding *gold *- AFAIK they don’t even store silver at the federal reserve. I have no idea where the silver came from. I don’t even know if the man giving the tour was kidding when he told me how much it was worth - I just believed him.