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bumblebee's
back! | serious martini
incondite (in-kon'-dite) adj.
badly put together; crude. [From Latin inconditus: in-
"not" + conditus, past participle of condere
"to put together" from com- "together"
+ -dere "to put."]
Baby Momma :|
A surrogate film
made by an excellent cast,
with standard results.
Dangerous
Pathway
List
of Regional Pizza Styles
"A local gamer who belongs to our church hosts a quarterly
game night there. The last one was attended for the first time
by a young, Fluxx-owning couple active in our congregation (luckily
the ones who frequently watch our ten-month-old for us, so we've
seen them & played Fluxx since!). Everyone loved it &
no one wanted to leave when the night was supposed to end! Thanks
for making us want to own our own! : )"
-- Comments with an order for a Christian Fluxx bundle, from
Pastor Natalya of Tower City, PA
Trains, travel, moving,
a broken computer, etc
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Building Stuff with Alison,
Part 2 |
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 With
Origins
now just 4 weeks away, a lot of our attention is now being devoted
to preparations for this, our biggest event of the year. It's
been a long time since we ran our own sales booth at Origins
(having partnered with Paizo Publishing for the past couple of
years, and other
companies before that) but since we're back to doing everything
ourselves, we need new booth fixtures. We really liked the slatwall-mounted
hardware our products were displayed with in the Paizo booth,
so we decided to use that same technology into our new booth
fixtures.
Here you see Alison putting together the first of two slatwall
units we're in the process of constructing. The unit consists
of 3 strips of plastic slatwall material attached to a framework
of plywood and 2x4s. The whole thing sits on a folding table
bringing the product line to eye-level and providing us with
storage space behind and below (we'll be draping that table with
tie-dyes to hide what's under it). The pieces comes apart for
compact shipment and everything can be assembled using just a
set of wingnuts (i.e. we don't need any tools, which can sometimes
be an issue in convention halls controlled by unions).
These excellent new display fixtures will serve us well for
years to come. Alison did a great job of designing them and she
did most of the work in building them too... I just helped out
with stuff like sawing and drilling holes in various pieces of
wood.
Speaking of construction projects by Alison, here's an update
to my
report from early April about the new latrine for Franeland,
which she finally got installed this weekend. Since I opted to
stay home that day (I wanted to get some work done while I had
the house to myself) I'm going to let Alison finish up this article
in her own words:
"On Monday (since it was a holiday) I went with Kristin
and my mom to my parents' land in West Virginia. We used to go
out there a lot when I was a kid. We want to fix it up a bit
so that we can spend more time there, and perhaps invite friends.
I had built a new latrine - a structure to hold a toilet seat
over a hole. So we took the parts up there, and dug a hole, and
put the latrine together. Digging the hole was very hard, because
the soil was VERY rocky.
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"We also built a fire, and cooked salmon and chicken
for dinner. It started raining really hard while I was trying
to cook. We stayed in the shelter there (just a floor and a roof,
but it keeps the rain off). The fire was out in the open, however,
but I found a piece of sheet-metal and put it over the fire so
it wouldn't go out. I finished cooking when the rain let up a
bit. It was really cool watching the fire burn under the steaming
sheet metal during the pouring rain -- I wish we'd thought to
take a photo of it!"
 Thanks for reading, and have a great fortnight!
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Last weekend, while visiting Alison's aunt & uncle, her
aunt Gray served up a cake she described as a chocolate pound
cake. Alison liked it so much she asked for the recipe, and it
turned out to be almost exactly the same cake recipe as Wacky
Cake, a popular dessert in my family since before I was born!
Moreover, when they actually looked at the recipe, the original
name was there too! So I googled the phrase and look! It even
has a wikipedia
page! The entry seems incomplete to me, though... it doesn't
explain the strange name, calling it unique only because of its
vegan properties. But the recipe
page it points to does provide this info -- it even includes
photos showing the "wacky mixing method" (in which
you make 3 little holes in the dry ingredients to pour the 3
liquids into). But perhaps the most amazing thing I learned from
all this was the *reason* for the wackiness: it's about chemistry!
The bubbling action of the soda & vinegar is what makes the
cake rise, so you need to keep them separate until the last moment.
Thus, the batter is mixed right in the baking pan, which must
go into the oven as soon as possible after the chemical reaction
begins. (Dad probably explained all this to me when I was a kid,
but obviously I'd forgotten it.) |
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Three things I remember creating as a kid which I wish I still
had a copy of:
- A short story called Sir Brian the Brain, about a knight
who overcame his challenges using his intellect instead of violence
- A new final chapter to Charles Dicken's Great Expectations
(written as an English class assignment) in which Pip meets a
scientist who'd just invented a time machine, which Pip then
uses to go back in time to warn Miss Havisham about her linchpin
day
- A tiny homemade boardgame I created (probably my first such
effort) which was based on the
American Heritage series game about the Civil War, but used
a much smaller set of army pieces and was played on a very small
board, intended to be both portable and much more quickly played
than the original
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"Our enormously productive economy... demands that we
make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying
and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction,
our ego satisfaction, in consumption... we need things consumed,
burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."
-- Victor LeBeau, circa 1950, seen quoted in
the Story of Stuff |
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