A guest blog spot by ISS Associate Editor Elaine Foxwell.

Guilty pleasures ... Aw, cmon guys ... admit you have them!

One of my friends rents a Jaguar for a week. He can indulge his love for luxury automobiles without the high cost of owning one. My son, a former Army Ranger, is hooked on Airsoft. He spends nearly every weekend running around the country in military gear playing at shooting guys with little BBs who are trying to shoot him back.

Whats my pleasure? Well, (no snickering here!) Im hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yup, a TV show about a high school girl who kicks a**  and takes vampire names. I love the whole mythology of vampire lore and how the show uses metaphor for many of the scary things we face every day.

The show has even been incorporated into university classes and was featured in a documentary titled Biological Warfare and the "Buffy Paradigm," published in 2001 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The paper draws parallels between Buffys chaotic life fighting unpredictable monsters and situations facing those dealing with terrorism.

Anyway, I have collected a few Buffy things: all the DVDs, of course, and some trading cards (at the risk of being called a Buffgeek), posters, a couple of action figures (hey, those were gifts!), and books and comics.

But my collection is nothing like that of my friend, Neal, nuclear engineer by day, comic book collector by nightor graphic novels as he always corrects me. I dont know how many he has accumulated over 20 years ... thousands, some valuable, some not. But he has so many they used to take up a whole bedroom. Eventually, his wife, Judy, got so fed up with it, she convinced him to move the precious collection into storage. I think it was a case of either they go or I go. At first Neal was positive his beloved comics would suffer in the hot, dusty, evil storage place (that was truly his attitude for a few days, very ugly!).

But an elegant, climate-controlled storage facility came to the rescue. Now it helps him indulge in his guilty pleasure in total peace. He loves punching in his secret code to enter his own little 10-by-15 domainvery X-Files. When the noise of three kids, a couple of large dogs, the stereo, TV, etc., gets too much, he sallies forth to his nice air-conditioned (remember we live in Phoenix) storage unit. He reclines in a comfy chair, turns on his camping lamp and indulges in reading super-hero stuff. He has even got the manager hooked on them; Judy told me she caught him making a list of starter graphic novels for the guy. I think Neals only regret is he cant sip his single-malt scotch there.

So, you out there, whats your guilty pleasure? Brave enough to post it to this blog?