Monday, January 28, 2008

Food Porn: Hasenpfeffer

William and Juliana visited over the weekend to help me straighten the house and cut up some firewood, not to mention socialize a bit (we had a fine game of Order of the Stick – Juliana won). For dinner, we decided on something a little exotic, so we prepared Hasenpfeffer.


That's just a cell phone picture, but as I've said before, you work with what you've got.

For those familiar with neither the dish nor the Bugs Bunny cartoon, Hasenpfeffer is a braised rabbit dish, and a darned good one, too.

We used a recipe that Juliana and William found on the internet. I suspect that it would work almost as well with chicken, by the way.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Ground Beef with a Side of Carbon Monoxide

Juliana found this little invention so fearsome that she encouraged me to make an article out of it.


While it's hard to tell at first glance, this device does not actually pump the exhaust directly over the patty. That would be bad, given the number of unpleasant compounds in car exhaust. However, the proposed device actually heats up metal surrounding the burger patty instead of exposing it directly to the fumes. Furthermore, this seems to be nothing more than a concept, not a physical item for which even a prototype exists.

It's still a pretty absurd idea, though.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Pictures from Saltare

Thanks to his Excellency, Sir Griffin O'Suaird, there are pictures from Saltare. I'll share a few here, more are available online.










Thursday, January 17, 2008

Another Milestone

The Saga received its 50,000th visit on January 17, 2008 at 7:30:18 am.

Woot!

Monday, January 14, 2008

Saltare 2008

Saltare 2008 has come and gone, and it turned out to be a really fun event. I don’t know how many of the attendees knew how much confusion there was behind the scenes leading up to it, but everything came together at the end, and I don’t recall speaking to anyone who didn’t say they had a good time. (Double negatives balanced right? Looks that way. Whew!)

I taught two classes this year: “Contrapasso Variations” and “Wherligig in Depth”. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may remember my series of articles on the reconstruction of Contrapasso Nuovo, which was one of the variations that I taught. That class actually went pretty well, although a couple of details did trip me up a bit, this being only the second time I’ve tried to teach it.

“Wherligig in Depth” was an exercise in the non-intuitive nature of some dance figures. You can teach this dance any number of times to rooms full of smart people, and it still won’t “click” with some of them. The figure for the second chorus – commonly called an “S-hey” in the SCA – is usually the culprit, although it’s not unusual to end up with problems in the other parts of the dance, either. I think making a full-hour class out of this one dance is a good start; we still had sets working on parts of it well after class time ended and most people had gone to lunch. Drilling over-and-over is the only way to overcome the mental blocks some people have against this one.

I have to give great credit and thanks to Lady Andreva Rigaldi and Lord Lorenzo Petrucci, who both picked up a lot of the organization for this event. In addition to teaching and making out the class schedule, they came up with an interesting variation on a Caroso Ball format for the evening. This involved some dance-partner auctioning as a fundraiser for the hosting shire, and that little brain-child brought in close to $160. I brought a pretty good price, too, if I do say so myself.

"Hellos" to all of the gang who shared the cabin with me and to our various party and dinner guests over the weekend. The cabin was a really good idea, I think, as it allowed us to have all manner of period-ish dishes and be a little social hub when class was over and the ball not-yet-begun. Henry Horton State Park really has some nice facilities, although there are some event policies that can make them a bit hard to work with.

We do have a bid from the Incipient Shire of Stagsgate for Saltare 2009, who will also be hosting Kingdom A&S this year.

Bad me did not take pictures, but I noticed Sir Griffin lurking with a camera quite frequently, so I may be able to come up with some from him.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Cute But Crazy

From Yahoo news...
Kumari Fulbright is shown during a photo shoot for a calendar in Arizona. Fulbright, 25, was indicted with three men Dec. 18, 2007, by a Pima County Superior Court grand jury on charges of kidnapping, armed robbery, aggravated robbery and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, the Arizona Daily Star reported. Fulbright, was Miss Pima County in 2005 and Miss Desert Sun in 2006, and sought the title of Miss Arizona during those years.

OK, it's a cheesey and gratuitous post. I found it amusing. I wonder if the photo shoot was for G. Gordon Liddy's "Stacked and Packed" calendar? That would certainly set up all sorts of "he can sure pick 'em" jokes.