I recently purchased a potato-fragment gun from Albertson's for the bargain price of $2.00. However, when I brought this item home, unpackaged it, and attempted to load and lock, I was sorely disappointed. Not only is the loading mechanism a piece of crap, but this thing doesn't shot "bits of potato" a single centimeter. All it does is poke holes in a potato. So you ruin a potato in the process of finding that you were scammed out of two bucks. What a depressing trip to the grocery store. So the lesson is this: never buy firearms from Albertson's, and, in general, avoid and weapons that claim to shoot "bits" of produce.
All of them were pretty good, although I had a different translation for the Dostoevsky title, so I can't speak for that particular version. I really enjoyed The Sea Made Men, which Elly picked up for a couple of dollars in Newport. It is even signed by the author. The Gloucester sea captain whose memoirs it contains was better traveled than anyone I have ever met. It's pretty wild that now we fly across the Atlantic in 5 hours when they used to spend 30 days of being cold and hungry just to ship some cotton or tea.
If I were doing some high-level degree in psychiatry or psychology or something like that, and I needed a thesis, I would study the effects of prolonged exposure to Dairy Queen blizzards. My theory is that these things are more addictive than hard drugs. I am currently a slave to the 20 oz. chocolate ice cream with peanut butter cups. Every night I get a craving that doesn't go away until I drive the one block over to our local DQ and order "the usual." The fact that I only have to travel one block, and that I chooose to drive that one block only adds to the shame.