Golden Rule Aftermath

I'm tired. Being the autocrat of an SCA event just takes the energy right out of you.

The event did come off pretty well, though. Final attendance was 134, which is more than I expected for the first time we've had an event on this date (we should have the last weekend of April as a regular date going forward). I also had several people tell me that they had a really good time, which justifies the mileage I put on my body getting it together. This is a testament to all the citizens of our shire who put in a lot of hard work to make the event possible and to the many volunteers who put in their time to help out.

Renting a dance tent turned out to be a good call, in my opinion, since we ended up with a dry, non-gravelly place to dance even though it rained for a couple of hours before dancing opened. We wouldn't have been able to dance if I hadn't gotten the thing,even though the cost of it means that, financially, the event was probably break-even at best. I'm not going to worry about that, though; we are a non-profit organization, after all.

The card games in the tavern after feast turned out to be a big hit, and I would like to very publicly thank my Lady Fjorleif for thinking of it and Lord Sean for running the tavern. I think the games definitely need to become a regular feature of our events. It was nice to see all the attendees stay at the hall after feast to socialize instead of scattering away to their own camps to chat around their camp fires.

The weather was mostly cooperative for fighting. During the day it was calm, mostly cloudy, and cool, which is ideal weather for SCA combat. We had three heavy fighting tournaments during the day, and I'd like to say a special thanks to Sir Griffin and Baron Malachi for arranging them. I didn't see much of the smiting, but it looked like they were having a good time beating up their friends over there. I'd also like to thank Lord Schreck for arranging a Youth Combat practice and tournament. I'd like to see Youth Combat activities take off even more at our events. Finally, with regard to Fencing, I'd like to thank Lord Corbin and Lady Ysabel for being all set to implement my hare-brained chess match idea. There was a surprising lack of fencers at Golden Rule, and they efficiently turned what I thought would be a big tournament into a small practice.

I think all the fencers must have gotten lured away into Her Ladyship Lora's archery tournaments. We had twenty-seven people sign up for archery activities. That's quite extraordinary, I think. It's also a testament to what entertaining archery activities she came up with.

Additional specific thank-yous go out to His Lordship Reinmar, Mistress Stephanie, Her Ladyship Fionnabhair, and of course Lady Fjorleif for handling troll, the hall, A&S activities, and the feast, respectively.

I would like to have included pictures in this report, but I don't think we even remembered to take the camera, and I certainly never thought of it while I was there. I shall have to get in touch with Sir Jean-Claude, who I know was taking pictures, so I can get some visuals both for the Saga and for the shire website.

Ciao

Skeptics' Circle 33

The 33rd Skeptics' Circle is now up at Science & Politics.

Lennon Speaks – Maybe – If You’re Willing to Pay

Reuters is letting us know that you may be able to hear John Lennon speak from beyond the grave, assuming you’re willing to give up ten bucks for the opportunity.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A controversial television seance airing on Monday will claim it has reached the spirit of John Lennon, but viewers will have to pay $9.95 to find out what the peace-loving Beatle has to say.

Basically, the program relies on the human behavior known as pareidolia and the honesty of an “EVP Specialist” – EVP being the supposed voices of the dead making themselves heard via radio, television signals, or recording media – who claims it’s “the real deal”.

The movies White Noise, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, and The Changeling all use the “phenomenon” in their stories when disembodied characters or ghosts speak through the static of a blank TV station or in the background of a tape recording. Alas, there are all kinds of perfectly mundane ways for radios, TVs, or even cheap microphones to pick up stray signals from mundane sources like CB radios, baby monitors, and other RF equipment, so hearing mysterious voices isn’t exactly astonishing. Furthermore, believers will interpret any garbled noise that sounds vaguely like a human voice as the one they’ve been hoping to hear.

Producer Paul Sharratt, who heads Starcast Productions and who calls himself a skeptic, said hearing the voice has made him a believer.

Sure. He also, according to the article, hopes “to lure an audience that now loves such prime-time network TV shows as Ghost Whisperer and Medium.” If a previous show organized by the same producers to contact Princess Diana is any indication, this new show should bring in several million dollars from the believers. In his shoes, I think I'd claim to be one, too.

Babylon 5 Geekery

Babylon 5 is probably my favorite science fiction series of all time. In my opinion, its story surpasses Star Wars, Star Trek, and every other SF tale told to date. Like many SF francises, it has a loyal following of geeks who like to obsess about the minutia of the series. We argue over unimportant things like how fast the ships can go, how powerful their weapons are, and whether a B5 telepath could smack down a Star Wars Jedi Knight.

You can learn some interesting lessons from the whole process, though. I sharpened up math skills that I hadn’t used for years and re-learned principles of physics and chemistry that I had mostly forgotten. I can easily tell you the difference between a material’s specific heat and its heat of fusion, and I can remember that you need to start correcting kinetic energy estimates for relativity if an object’s speed starts to reach a significant fraction of lightspeed.

Naturally, people have different opinions and heated arguments develop. The argument between fanatical Star Wars fans and fanatical Star Trek fans over which side has superior technology, culture, etc. has gone on for years. B5 fans entered the game late, but they quickly moved to establish their place with the “big boys”.

This is going somewhere; believe me. You see, the usual method for determining who has the more powerful weapon or the faster ship is to treat these television shows and movies as if they were documentaries of actual events (with a hat tip to Galaxy Quest). Scientific analysis of this “documentary evidence” let’s you estimate the power, speed, or other property demonstrated.

Now, I’m an analyst for the BabTech on the Net website, and we’re working on an update for one of our pages that includes an estimate of a ship’s firepower. In a scene from one episode, one ship melts a line down the hull of another with a laser beam. We can estimate the width of the beam, the length of the line on the hull, and the thickness of the hull to determine how much material melted. Assuming the hull to be steel (an extremely common construction material in modern warships), we can use the thermal properties of iron to estimate the amount of energy required to melt the hull. With this estimate of the energy and the amount of time it took to cause the damage, we can estimate the minimum amount of energy the beam is transferring to its target. The exact results aren’t important, but you can read the analysis if you like.

Another Babylon 5 fansite, the B5 Technical Manual performs a very similar analysis with a couple of key exceptions. After performing all of the steps I described above for analyzing the incident, he finds a result that doesn’t satisfy him, so he makes two additional assumptions:

As we know that the Omega's armor is NOT comprised of iron, and the general
consensus is that the Earthforce armor is at least 20X stronger than our base
material,....

Also, this is a standard discharge, not a maximum burst. Assuming
that a standard discharge is 30% of critical power,....

Without any sound justification, he just inflated his estimate by a factor of about 67. The results of a legitimate scientific analysis didn’t suit him, so he invented additional evidence to make the results fit his expectations.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have just shown you an example of the Intelligent Design / Creationist mentality in action.

Like the author of the B5Tech analysis, ID proponents don’t like what the evidence tells us about human origins, so they twist the evidence to support the conclusion they want or dismiss it without justification. Michael Behe, for example, claims that living organisms are too complex to have evolved naturally, but he has never produced any evidence to support his claim; he just makes dubious analogies to modern technology and arbitrarily rejects any amount of research showing how complex organisms could or did evolve.

In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not "good enough."
-- from the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial decision

ID proponents aren’t the only fanatics with this problem, obviously. You see the same attitude in global warming deniers, holocaust deniers, and fanatical trekkies.

The trick for you is to see how biased presenters introduce hidden assumptions, alter evidence, change standards, or fix analytical methods to achieve the results they wanted from the beginning. A good scientific analysis will define its assumptions and methods before presenting and analyzing the evidence, allowing you to judge the quality of their process before you judge their results.

No WoW for a While

I turned off my World of Warcraft account today. It was a tough call, because I enjoy the game, but I'm currently not enjoying it enough to justify the $15/month cost. Maybe I'll take it up again in the winter, but I've got too many other things that will be taking up my time for the next few months, at least.

Shameless Commerce

Having gotten nearly ten thousand hits in a year, I figure that there's an off chance this blog might actually help me pay a bill or two. To that end, I wondered how I might go about putting some ads on the site.

I briefly considered signing up for Google-Ads, but I rejected that pretty quickly. Their system selects ads based on site content, but it it does so rather stupidly. I'd undoubtedly end up with ads for World of Warcraft gold and homeopathic remedies coming out my ears, and I definitely don't want to support such people.

Fortunately, I discovered that Revival Enterprises has an affiliate program, so I can place ads on my weblog that are actually appropriate to my areas of interest. At the moment, the ads are kind of obscure, since I don't really want to emphasize them, but scroll down the right column for some fencing supplies and books.

Dungeon Escape!

Remember the old Dragon's Lair arcade game? Imagine the same thing in flash, with stick figures. There are hours of wasted time in this thing.

Skeptics' Circle 32 Posted

The 32nd Edition of the Skeptics' Circle is now up at Pooflingers Anonymous. It's a big issue, with lots of great stuff.

Cruising for Scientology… Again

My, my... two skepticism articles in one week. Truly the nonsense is flowing freely in the world this week. This little gem turned up during a brief browse of the Internet Movie Database.

Tom Cruise is attacking those who prescribe psychiatric drugs again in the May issue of men's style magazine GQ. The Mission: Impossible III actor, who embarked on an anti-drug tirade in TV interviews last summer on behalf of his Scientology beliefs, has launched a fresh attack on psychiatry, calling for prescription pill poppers to think carefully about the harms they're doing to their bodies. He tells the magazine, "I've always found the 'if it makes me feel better, it's OK' rationale a little suspect. I think it's appalling that people have to live a life of drug addiction when I have personally helped people get off drugs." In the interview, the actor claims he can get someone off heroin in three days through Scientology's detox programs.

-- IMDB News

Will celebrities ever shut up about fields in which they have no qualifications? The Scientology detox program is known as Narconon, and there is no evidence to back the claims that Cruise makes for it. You can get details from the Narconon Exposed website, but here are some of the basics.

• Narconon publishes its own studies of the effectiveness of the program without peer review. There have been no neutral clinical trials of the program’s effectiveness.


• The program was invented by L. Ron Hubbard, who had no medical qualifications of any kind.


• The program’s methodology of “cold turkey” detoxification, massive overdoses of vitamins, and vastly prolonged sauna sessions is inherently unsafe.

It would be interesting to see Narconon’s records opened up to thorough scientific scrutiny to see if they support the program’s claims, and a genuine clinical trial of the procedure wouldn’t hurt, either. Neither of these actions is likely, though, as Narconon is essentially a “faith-based” organization run by the Church of Scientology.

I don’t doubt that Tom Cruise absolutely believes his own rhetoric about psychiatry and Scientology, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s just blowing smoke; his beliefs stand on feet of clay. It’s almost like an actor giving medical advice because he plays a doctor on TV, but Cruise doesn’t even have that negligible level of qualification.

Jesus on Thin Ice

The news has been aflutter this week with the story of an oceanographer who came up with a hypothesis for how Jesus could have walked on water.

Doron Nof, a professor of oceanography, said a rare combination of water and atmospheric conditions in the Sea of Galilee 2000 years ago may offer a scientific explanation for one of the miracles recounted in the Bible. Nof said a patch of ice floating in the Sea of Galilee — which is actually a freshwater lake — would have been difficult to distinguish from unfrozen water surrounding it.
--USA Today

I really don’t understand why some people feel the need to try to justify Biblical miracles scientifically. Either you believe in miracles or you don’t; there’s just no point in trying to come up with some hypothetical freak circumstance that would make the miracle into a plausible natural event. Such hypotheses generally just diminish the event into something inconsequential, anyway.

In another example, a preacher told my youth group years ago that there’s a place in the Sea of Reeds where if a strong wind blows in the right direction, it will literally part the waters and make a dry path across. If the Biblical translation were a bit off – the Red Sea was really the Sea of Reeds – Moses’ parting of the waters would actually have been possible. The rub, of course, is that the water is never more than a few inches deep in that spot to begin with. Talk about a pointless miracle.

Any attempt to scientifically justify a miracle is pretty much doomed to failure. You could probably find ways to simulate any given miracle with a modern illusionist’s tricks or a wildly improbable set of natural circumstances, but that’s totally missing the point of the story, a waste of a scientist’s time, and an effective way to offend religious sensibilities for no good reason.

Biblical miracles don’t need rational explanation. In fact, there isn’t supposed to be a rational explanation: that’s what makes it a miracle. DUH!

What science can do is evaluate modern claims that a miracle occurred. The claims of faith-healers and psychics are certainly subject to scientific study. They may claim that their abilities go beyond the realm of known science, but that’s really irrelevant. Science can determine – through double-blind clinical trials and similar experiments – whether modern psychics, faith healers, and the like can actually do what they claim to do; figuring out how it happens would then be a subject for further study.

So, Professor Nof, could you please stop pointlessly annoying Christians with unlikely rationalizations of religious stories? Save your time and credibility for useful research, eh?

Scott Kurtz Understands Skepticism

Scott Kurtz, the author of PVPOnline, started a series of cartoons about administrative foolishness with the March 31 issue of his online comic. Before this storyline, I hadn’t actually thought of the character Max Powers as someone with a “woo woo” mentality.

I’ll stop with that little bit of description, since I don’t want to spoil the joke.

Spring Coronation

Spring Coronation has passed. All Hail King Godwine and Queen Francesca. For those who didn’t hear the story yet, Queen Diedre was kidnapped on her way to set up a shrine to house some saintly relics, and King Boru abdicated so he could go to her rescue.

I realize that it’s important business, but coronation is actually a pretty dull event if you’re not a peer, which means you have meetings to attend with the new crowns. There were also a couple of heavy fighting tournaments during the day, but that’s it. It’s probably not feasible to have much more going on, since those meetings tend to tie up the most productive people in the kingdom for most of the day, but I can see why people who aren’t peers don’t feel very motivated to go to coronation.

I would like to thank Duchess Katrina, the Honorable Lord Gareth, the Honorable Lord Reinmar, the Honorable Lady Lora Greymare (new award!), Lady Francesca, and of course my Lady Fjorleif for helping me organize the White Rose Ball. I felt rather overwhelmed by the ball, since there’s a lot more protocol and ritual to it than I realized, but with their help I think it came off fairly well (but only fair; thanks from crowns and others notwithstanding, I’m a bit disappointed with myself). I’ll add a special thanks to the Meridien Musicians Guild for providing live music, including two rounds of Hole in the Wall.

Next weekend we’ll be doing demos with the Shire of Loch Cairn at the Winchester Dogwood Festival.

Skeptics' Circle 31

Exercise your mind. The 31st Skeptics' Circle is now up at Terra Sigillata.

Gulf Wars XV: Photos from the Field Battle

Lady Ysabel de Saincte-Croix has sent me some of her pictures from the Rapier Field Battle at Gulf Wars XV.


She also sent along a few more pictures from the Rose Tourney, both of Capitan Ricarte Berenguer Halcon de Catalonia (known as "Hawk") and myself approaching my doom against the bearer of the Iron Ring of Gleann Abhan.

Free Plugs for SCA Supplies

I've expanded the SCA Links list in the sidebar to include some vendors who have provided me with consistently good products and service for my SCA equipment needs. Gipsy Peddler is a popular clothing vendor that makes doublets and gusset shirts that are legal for fencing in every kingdom to the best of my knowledge. Revival Enterprises sold me a particularly nice set of gloves that are serving me very well so far, and the very lovely lady in the picture also dances quite well (which is a serious prejudicial factor for me). Ageless Fashions sold me a very spiffy new doublet which will hopefully show up in some pictures here before long.

If you're looking to get into the SCA, particularly with a late period (1500's) persona and an interest in fencing, these vendors can definitely help you out.

Hoodia Gordonii: Fact or Fiction?

It’s interesting to see what ads will end up on your screen as you browse the internet. An ad for Hoodia Gordonii ended up on my sitemeter page when I was reviewing to see where my visitors were coming from this week. Hoodia is apparently a “Miracle Cactus” that reduces your appetite, helping you to lose weight.

Does it work? Well just listen to this little piece of anecdotal “evidence” that is sure to convince you…

“The San Bushmen of the Kalahari, one of the world's oldest and most primitive tribes, have been eating the Hoodia plant for thousands of years, to stave off hunger during long hunting trips.”

How does this mean that it actually helps suppress appetite? Eating almost anything that’s non-toxic would help the San Bushman stave off hunger during long treks through the desert; special appetite suppressant qualities aren’t required.

Does this plant do any more than just help fill your stomach? Is there any legitimate evidence that Hoodia capsules are more effective at suppressing appetite than a placebo of, say, cellulose? Well, let me direct your attention to the fine print…

“Please Note: The statements contained on this site have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Not exactly a sterling recommendation.

This particular gimmick product may have some merit, though. I was able to find a study result on PubMed that indicates that one of the compounds in Hoodia actually does have appetite suppressant properties.

“…third ventricle (i.c.v.) administration of P57, which reduces subsequent 24-h food intake by 40-60%, also increases ATP content in hypothalamic slice punches removed at 24 h following the i.c.v. injections.”

Granted, they’re talking about injecting this stuff directly into the brains of mice, but the fact that it does have a significant effect on subsequent food intake does suggest that the compound is an effective appetite suppressant.

What the study shows is that nerve cells in the hypothalamus of the brain have an increase in ATP content after being exposed to the P57 compound from Hoodia. ATP is the “ready fuel” for cellular activity (as opposed to sugars, which need to be converted to ATP before they’re ready to use), so a generous supply of ATP in the hypothalamus gland of the brain might logically convince you that you don’t need to eat anything for a while.

So Hoodia capsules aren’t necessarily a scam, assuming they contain effective concentrations of the active ingredient at a reasonable price. I think it’s important to show that legitimate products will actually survive the exercise of some critical thinking skills and a search for some credible evidence. Hoodia isn’t effective because it has the endorsement of San Bushmen; it’s effective because the chemicals it contains actually do reduce your appetite, a claim that science can test and show to be true.

News articles:

• CBS News
• BBC News

Gulf Wars XV: Ready to Rumble

Yes! At last we have freed the digital camera from the tangled mass of belongings stuffed into the van at the end of Gulf Wars, and I have downloaded its contents. Alas, battery trouble kept us from getting everything that we might have wanted to display on our own camera, so I will yet need to acquire some photos from Lady Ysabel and Lady Francesca before my picture collection is complete, but I can at least share some highlights of the war.

We spent our Monday at the war setting up camp, a thoroughly exhausting affair which kept us from doing much of anything that day. I did manage to put on my slob garb to go down to the main hall for dancing Monday night, but I didn't take the camera with me. That waited until Tuesday, the night of the Meridien Ball. Naturally we took the camera to that ball, as I was the host. Furthermore, my beautiful Lady Fjorleif provided the refreshments, which you can see on the table to the left, including the tray of truffles which I helped make myself (seen at right). I can only hope the dancers enjoyed this aspect of the ball, since I was far too preoccupied announcing dances and otherwise organizing the activities to monitor the depletion and replenishment of the snack bar.

Alas, our camera's batteries died before my lady could take more than one short film clip of the dancing itself. I do, however, have a link to the movie of the dancers doing the Korobushka (18 MB AVI file).

I do however have a marvelous segue from dancing to fencing, because one of our musicians for the ball was the lovely Lady Stephanie (seen at left), who I also faced on the fencing field. Lady Stephanie plays the vielle, a precursor to the modern viol, and she's a pleasure to watch as well as to hear. Furthermore, she's deadly quick and accurate with a rapier, apparently an extra benefit of bow work on the vielle. She's also not shy about making you feel guilty for ever winning a fencing bout against her, so steel your souls rapier men of the Knowne World.

Now that we're on the subject of fencing, we'll move forward to Thursday morning of the war and the Ansteorran Ladies of the Rose Sponsored Tournament. The principle of this tournament is that each Lady of the Rose (any Lady who has been Queen of one of the realms of the Knowne World at least once) may sponsor two rapier fighters for the tournament. As I have done for the past three years, I represented Duchess Katrina of Iron Mountain. Various other Countesses and Duchesses from around the Knowne World also sponsored fighters for the tourney, and the Queen of Ansteorra sponsored any fighters present who didn't already have a sponsor. Alas, there lies my one complaint with the tournament. Meaning no disrespect to Her Majesty of Ansteorra, I believe that sponsoring every fighter who bothers to show up somehow defeats the purpose of showing the necessary chivalry and courtesy to earn a Rose's favor. I understand that Her Majesty didn't want anyone to feel left out, but I think this is a tournament in which some people should be left out to preserve the feeling of exclusivity that it has traditionally had. You don't have to be a good fencer to enter, but you do need to be sufficiently gracious to earn a Lady's favor. That said, I didn't meet any uncouth fencers during my four rounds in the tournament.

As luck would have it, I drew Don Silvane for my first round fight. Why I always draw someone essentially untouchable for my first round I'll never know.



All I can say for myself about this bout was that I at least made him work for it, and that I remembered to properly call my tip cut as he and I agreed to do before the bout (he tip cut me on the chest, causing me to forfeit my right arm). This turned out to be my longest bout of the day, and I ended up leaving the field alive but armless. I fought two subsequent rounds against relative newcomers, and the bearer of the Iron Ring of Gleann Abhann finally slew me in the fourth round. Alas, the camera had no battery power left by this point, so I shall have to obtain some of the pictures that Lady Francesca took and post them at a later date.

Bright and early Friday morning, I rose and armored myself for the Ravine Battle. Upon my arrival at the field, I discovered that the number of fighters on the Meridies and Gleann Abhann side of the field was substantially smaller than the number of fighters on the Ansteorra and Trimaris side. In fact, I think the contingent from our Northshield allies outnumbered the combined fighters from Meridies and Glean Abhann. This did not bode well, although we raised our spirits by considering it to be a "target rich environment".

For those not familiar with the Ravine Battle, it's essentially a game of Capture the Flag (or Capture the Three Flags, in this instance). In the middle of the field are three flags with banners for both sides; the objective is to reach the flags and raise your own banner. Thanks to an ingenious little pulley-and-weight system developed by Lord Tormod (I think), the flags automatically fall to "neutral" if there's no one holding the rope to keep one side's flag raised. Fighters killed in the line of the battle can walk back to a staging area at their end of the ravine to be "resurrected" as reinforcements. The battle continues for half an hour or so, and marshals stationed around the field with digital cameras take pictures of the flag poles at approximately five-minute intervals. At the end of the battle, the marshals count the flags showing for each side in the pictures, and whichever side had the most flags raised in the pictures wins the battle.

As it happens, counting the flags in the pictures wasn't really necessary, since Meridies and Gleann Abhann never raised a flag for the entire battle as far as I know. We certainly never had one up after the first five minutes, as there were two enemy fighters in queue waiting to fill gaps for every Ansteorran or Trimarin fighter we "killed". Indeed, I pretty much gave up trying to actually reach a flag after fifteen minutes and started looking for ways to keep the other sides' fighters from getting bored. We formed up in spearheads trying to break holes deep enough through the enemy lines to actually reach a flag and raise it if only for a moment. I was often the point of one of the spearheads, and I actually made it through the front line a couple of times, but I never made it all the way to a flag.

Despite it being a forgone conclusion (or possibly because it was a forgone conclusion), this was actually the nicest and most fun Ravine Battle I've ever participated in at Gulf Wars. In past years there have been a lot of hard shots during the battle and some hard feelings after, but this year everyone killed me nicely, and I had a great time.

Saturday morning saw a reversal of fortunes for the Ansteorrans and Trimarins. The Kingdom of the Middle turned against their former allies, and the Ansteorran-Trimarin numerical advantage evaporated for the Open Field Battle. This is not a resurrection battle; any fighter "killed" on the field is out for the rest of the battle, which ends when only one side's fighters are left on the field. The winner of the Field is the winner of two out of three battles, and our side won the first two in fairly rapid succession. I personally died almost immediately in the first battle, but I lasted most of the way through the second.

The Field battle was not as nice as the Ravine battle, partly because a light rain started toward the end of the first fight, making the field a bit slick, but probably more because the evening of the sides made tensions a bit higher. The worst things I saw, though, occurred in the "friendship" battle fought after the war point was decided. I saw one fighter chasing another backwards toward the field pavilion, the retreating fighter obviously having serious trouble maintaining his balance; the retreating fighter actually fell as he got close to the pavilion and very nearly hit his head on an iron tent stake (a nearby lady fighter jumped in to catch his head before he hit). I'm sorry, but this is a game not a real fight; it's stupid and negligent to press someone who is obviously dangerously off balance; we almost had a very serious injury on the field that day. End of brief rant.

Alas, I'm all out of pictures, but I did attend a very nice ball hosted by Rose Eriksdottir on Saturday night. It was an extremely pleasant end to a very busy week, and I'm looking forward to exhausting myself again next year (when I expect to be Dance Master for the War, so there!).

I should have more pictures in a future post. Ciao.

Back from the Wars

Yes, I have returned safely from Gulf Wars, and a very fine time we had. The Kingdom of Gleann Abhan put on an excellent war, in spite of having to recover from a major hurricane. I might add the Kingdom of Ansteorra (essentially Texas) knocked everyone else silly with volunteer points and attendance, in spite of having their own hurricane (the oft-forgotten Hurricane Rita) to recover from. As Larry -- the owner of King's Arrow Ranch -- said, "It's nice to look at all this craziness and be able to say things are getting back to normal."

Alas, my camera hasn't been unpacked yet, so the full war report will have to wait a day or so.

En Route to Gulf Wars XV

I'll be writing very little this week, as I am already on the way to Gulf Wars. Over the weekend, we're staying with my sister-in-law in South Alabama, and on Monday we'll have a relatively short drive over to Lumberton, Mississippi to get to the event itself. I was going to put up some pictures of my niece, but I seem to be having some issues posting images with my sister's web browser. Maybe tomorrow.

The Kegging

As a few of you may know, I will be away in the Kingdom of Gleann Abhann for Gulf Wars next week. If I have the presence of mind to carry my camera about the site with me, I shall endeavor to have some good pictures upon my return. I will be running the Meridien Dance Revel again this year on Tuesday night, and my good Lady Fjorleif has volunteered to prepare some refreshments for the revel. One of these will be a ginger ale, which you can see being siphoned into a cornelius keg at right. That's the kind of keg that soda companies used to deliver their concentrates to restaurants before they switched to disposable plastic bags-in-a box.

This beverage will be much like any other ginger ale you might find in the grocery: sweet, fizzy, and non-alcoholic. Unlike some of the common brands, however, the gingery potency of this concoction may take your breath away.

As I can't resist the urge to mix my hobbies, I took the liberty of turning a screen capture from World of Warcraft into a keg label. I realize that you can't really see the label in this picture, but it's Grimbor taking a deep drink from a mug of Dwarven Stout. It seems like a moderately appropriate picture for any sort of keg. Of course, we didn't stop at ginger ale for this event.

No, we brewed up some of the real thing. At left, you see five gallons of Amber Ale draining into another cornelius keg. This brew is a donation to the Meridien Social on Wednesday night.

For those interested, it contains six pounds of spray-dried amber malt extract and four ounces of Cascade hops (two ounces for boiling and two ounces for finishing).

The nice thing about a keg system is that you don't have to add priming sugar and wait another two weeks for the beer to carbonate. You just hook the keg up to a compressed CO2 tank and keep the pressure on it for day or so to carbonate the contents. Naturally this keg also got a label; after all, I don't want my keg to get lost at the event.

Now all we need to do is finish loading the van and trailer. We started that process before the kegging, while we still had some light. The hecticness will continue until our departure Friday, after work. We'll visit my sister-in-law in south Alabama for a couple of days before heading on over to Gulf Wars on Monday.