hudebnik: (Default)
We got back from a camping SCA event at 9:30 PM Sunday, unloaded the car but mostly just piled things in the kitchen. Monday morning I put away most of the stuff in the kitchen. Walked dogs in the park. Cleaned and oiled my use-knife. Oiled my ankle-boots. Cleaned and oiled the treenware plates we used at the event. Emptied the dishwasher. Watered plants on the porch. Started a batch of sourdough bread. Eventually [personal profile] shalmestere got out of bed and we both did some gardening: she weeded things while I picked the first two wild strawberries of the season, and adjusted the bird-net over the cherry tree. While I was trimming dead raspberry canes in the back yard, the next door neighbor said he had a mail-order box that had arrived for us over the weekend, he went and got it, and we had a good conversation about working at Google Maps. His wife works at an organization that needs data about the footprints and heights of individual buildings, so they might be a good client for the Maps Platform.

Had a dream about reading and writing music/software that depended on writing words in cursive, rotating them 180°, and reinterpreting them: for example, "lookup" becomes "dpngooy", more or less.

pavilion

Jul. 3rd, 2023 07:00 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Spent a weird weekend at Northern Regional War Camp.

We had both taken a vacation day for Friday to pack for the event. There was yet another smoke plume from Canadian wildfires, and the air quality was getting bad in NYC, and predicted to get bad in the Hudson Valley, so we weren't sure until 10 AM on Friday that we would go at all, but I pointed out that it was an opportunity to test the brand-new pavilion that arrived mail-order from India a few days ago. So we packed things up and left Friday afternoon. Traffic was bad getting out of NYC, but clear thereafter. We reached the site (one of the numerous ugly but flat county-fair grounds the groups in the Hudson Valley tend to use for events) before dark and started setting up the pavilion.

The pavilion appears to be very well-made: solid cotton canvas, with solid machine seams everywhere, hand-sewn reinforced eyelets, steel D-rings (or I guess Delta-rings) at the shoulders to attach guy ropes, which are provided and apparently made of hemp (!). As advertised, it was shipped without poles, but it did come with steel stakes (in two lengths, presumably the longer ones for guys and the shorter ones for walls). There's no hole at the peak, but rather a reinforced pad, which means you don't need (and can't have) a spike from the center pole or a finial on the outside. We might do some surgery to change that, since the finial on the outside provides not only decoration but an attachment point for external storm guys.

First surprise: we thought it had 16 roof segments, and it actually had 10. Which makes it more difficult to lay out initial stakes before raising the roof, but not impossible.

The pavilion was intended to be set up with vertical perimeter poles: each roof seam has an eyelet near the bottom, and each wall seam an eyelet near the top, and the spike in the top of the perimeter pole goes through both to hold them up and together. However, the pavilion was shipped without any poles at all (as advertised), and we didn't want to add vertical perimeter poles for a variety of reasons (more stuff to transport, and we've never seen any evidence of them in any picture of a tent before the 16th century), so we had come up with a mechanism involving eye-bolts, washers, and S-hooks to hang the walls from the roof edge. Which basically worked, except the washers I had bought turned out to be too small, so they occasionally popped through the eyelets and the wall fell down. So that was a second surprise.

On our way to the site, we had stopped at a craft store to buy wooden ball finials to screw onto the aforementioned eye-bolts to (a) hide their obvious modernity, and (b) protect the fabric from the screw tips, so (c) I could pack up the pavilion with them in place rather than re-attaching them every time. The eye-bolts are 3/16" diameter (i.e. #10 gauge), 24 threads per inch, and the holes in the finials are 3/16" as advertised, but slightly too large to screw on: I can put them on but they won't stay unless I also use glue or wood putty or something. Third surprise.

The center pole we re-used from our oval pavilion (two hardwood wheelbarrow-handles held together by a 2' length of plumbing pipe) was too short for this pavilion (not completely a surprise -- I thought it might be the case), so the walls puddled on the ground (even where they weren't falling off the walls). And it seemed to me that if the center were any higher, and we continued not using vertical perimeter poles (so the guy ropes need to be at the same angle as the roof), the ropes supplied with the pavilion wouldn't be long enough.

With all this, the pavilion clearly wasn't habitable for the night, particularly with two hounds who might panic and run away if anything fell down, so we stayed in a motel.

Saturday morning I got up and went to the nearest hardware store for bigger washers, longer pipe, more rope, etc. I found a very nice hardware store with helpful, knowledgeable staff and almost everything on my list... except the pipe. They had the right length of pipe, but too narrow to fit over the wheelbarrow handles, and they had the right diameter of pipe, but only in 5' lengths, and they didn't have the capability to cut that kind of pipe in-house. So I tried another hardware store, and then a Lowe's, and nobody had the pipe. But at least I had better washers, and spare nuts, and more rope, and good scissors for cutting the rope, and tape for binding the ends of the rope. So I replaced the washers, and the roof is no longer falling down. I replaced one rope, as a test of feasibility, and concluded that we could do it, but (a) the manila rope is really nasty, unlike the lovely apparently-hemp rope that came with the pavilion, and (b) even with longer ropes and a longer center pole, the pavilion will take up too much real estate to be usable at Pennsic.

Which leaves us with three choices for Pennsic: (a) use our old oval pavilion, which is over twenty years old and showing its age; (b) use this one with vertical perimeter poles, which we would have to make; or (c) finish the new oval pavilion.

I have today off from work, so I plan to spend a good deal of it on option (c).

Da Weekend

May. 8th, 2023 06:46 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Spent much of Saturday at an SCA Crown Tournament, which was conveniently less than an hour and a half's drive from our home. Weather was lovely. We set up a musicians' gallery (inherited from Will McLean) facing the tournament field, and played three-part shawm music during and between bouts. Several people came by and thanked us for adding appropriate music to the event atmosphere, including the guy who was named Crown Prince at the end of the day. Had some logistical difficulties with the wind blowing sheet music off the stands.

After the new Prince was chosen, [personal profile] shalmestere and I had planned to go immediately home, but Deonna wanted to go to dinner together, and also wanted to stay for Court. So we watched Court, finished packing the cars, and went to a Thai restaurant -- which we picked because it was two miles away, but it turned out to be quite good. Drove home, tired and dehydrated. Got home about 10 PM, walked and fed the dogs, unpacked the car, and fell down boom.

An old friend of [personal profile] shalmestere's from the Chicago area was in town for a music workshop, and we agreed to meet her at the Cloisters before she flew home. She hadn't been to the Cloisters in over thirty years, so we were able to see a lot of our old favorites with new eyes. Again, the weather was lovely, and we walked around the various gardens of the Cloisters exclaiming over the useful herbs and beautiful flowers. We had brought a picnic lunch, which we ate while sitting on a stone wall in the park.

Then we drove home, made dinner, made some chocolate-chip scones, and watched a video of Saturday's UK Coronation. Still tired and dehydrated. But now it's Monday.
hudebnik: (Default)
So we're going to an in-person SCA event, "Barleycorn", next weekend. It's a camping event, with most of the activities taking place outdoors, so I'm not too worried about plague, but still... as one of [personal profile] shalmestere's T-shirts says, "People -- ew!"

We were approached some months ago about providing music for court, which includes the stepping down of one set of Viceregents and the investiture of another, which means the Royalty have to be there, which means a number of Royal hangers-on have to be there. I asked some questions about what they wanted where and when, and received no reply until after Pennsic, at which point (with 2-1/2 weeks' notice) I learned that we were not only to provide music for court, but provide background music throughout the day (not a problem, as that's usually what we do for our own enjoyment anyway) and "be in charge of music at Barleycorn... coordinate with other musicians to provide music throughout the event."

Gulp. There's only so much we can do (or feel like doing) on 2-1/2 weeks' notice, and we didn't do anything about this last week because Stuff Happened, but if you're a musician who plans to attend Barleycorn and would be interested in performing something, either at the Queen's Tea, at Court, or in the general background, please contact me or Rufina.
hudebnik: (Default)
Left Coopers’ Lake at 1:40 PM yesterday. First stop, pizza in Grove City. Stopped for the night near Delaware Water Gap, which on the way out had been a bit over four hours from home (really bad traffic). Had breakfast at an apparent local favorite spot, then drove home, arriving a little before noon (no significant traffic this time). Backed the trailer into the garage, unloaded the car, unloaded the trailer, re-loaded the trailer with empty chests and things that live there year-round, walked to the farm market for sweet corn, zucchini, etc. D. started a couple of loads of laundry. Retrieved hounds from boarding kennel half a mile away. Took rapid-read Covid tests: both negative.

I managed to get all the way through Pennsic without sunburn, but driving home (even though I was in the driver's seat most of the way, and therefore on the north side of the car) sunburned my hands to the "itchy" level.

At some point during Pennsic, D. picked up a class handout somebody had left behind, on Ptolemaic mathematics, so I read that when I needed a break from unloading and unpacking. Some of it is basic stuff about converting between decimal and sexagesimal, some is standard 9th-grade geometry involving similar triangles, and then they get into spherical geometry, which is much trickier, particularly when trigonometry hasn’t been invented yet. The workhorse tool seems to be something called Menelaus’s Theorem, which specifies a proportion among several arcs in a figure formed by the intersection of four great circles… except it isn’t really a proportion among the arcs, but rather among their chords. And even that isn’t quite right: it’s actually the chords of the double angles of each of these arcs. How did anybody come up with that? I guess the “double angles” part is a transformation between an angle whose vertex is on the opposite side of the sphere and one whose vertex is the center of the sphere, and the “chords” part allows us to work with nice simple planar triangles. Anyway, one can use this theorem to calculate the angle between equator and ecliptic at various times of year (at the equinoxes it’s zero), and thence the positions of sun, moon, and planets.

Then I picked up a book that’s been sitting on the coffee table since Christmas: Seb Falk’s The Light Ages: the Surprising Story of Medieval Science. And a good deal of the first chapter is about the same sort of astronomy: if you live in one place for years, you can observe the northernmost and southernmost places the sun rises and sets, observe the lengths of noonday shadows at various times of the year, and thence derive things like your latitude and the Earth’s axial tilt, which go into the aforementioned Ptolemaic calculations. Of course, everything is much easier if you assume the Earth is a sphere, and its orbit and those of the moon and all the planets are circles. I wonder how much more difficult it would be on a planet with a significantly eccentric orbit. Among other things, the warmest and coldest parts of the year might not correlate closely with the highest and lowest noonday suns, which would change the societal motivation for doing astronomy. And the obvious existence of a non-perfect circle in Creation would have interesting theological implications.

Last Monday we gave a concert in the performing arts tent, entitled “An Evening at the Salle des Ardents: Medieval Smoky Jazz”. All circa-1400 music. There’s a recording, which I need to retrieve from the recorder and edit on the desktop machine before posting it for public consumption. The opening number was a little chaotic, so I may substitute in a recording of it from a rehearsal, but most of the pieces went well and I think are suitable for posting. [Edit: see here. There are a number of wince-worthy moments in the concert, but a bunch of good moments too.]

To do before next Pennsic:

  • Buy and/or build a new tent.

    Roof panels are largely sewn together, but that's where they've been for several years; no significant progress in Covidtime. Then need to cut and sew together wall pieces, and build or commission poles, and make a bunch of rope attachment points and stake loops, and so on. [personal profile] shalmestere points out that we're much more likely to have a new tent by next Pennsic if we order it from a tentsmith.


  • Finish building new "birdcage" music stand.

    Parts are mostly cut out, but they need to be stuck together, and we need an upright and a foot.


  • Rebuild cooler chest.

    The ends are fine, but the lid and sides are permanently warped, so it never actually closes, which defeats its purpose of hiding a styrofoam cooler; in addition, one of the lid's reinforcing battens which had been loose for years finally fell off completely this Pennsic. Also want to attach handles to the ends, which would make it enormously easier to carry.


  • Lose enough belly to fit into my red linen pourpoint.

    [personal profile] shalmestere has a photo of me in it from eleven years ago today, but when I tried it on at Pennsic, it was nowhere near closing.


  • Make more braes and shirts

  • Repair existing braes and shirts

  • Make more points and aiglets



To do in the next week or two:

  • Repair the drinking jug I knocked off the top of the piano while putting away krummhorns from Pennsic ✓

  • Wash and put away clothes and dishes from Pennsic ✓

  • Put away stuff that was left lying around from Pennsic packing ✓

  • Replenish groceries ✓

  • Cook normal food ✓

  • Edit and post concert audio ✓

  • Hem, and attach a linen collar-lining to, the gown that [personal profile] shalmestere made me two weeks ago from one of her old dresses

  • Add eyelets to the tailed hose [personal profile] shalmestere made me a few weeks ago

  • Finish building the fleece harp-case we started several months ago

  • Contact harp-maker to say "yes, we're home from vacation now; feel free to ship the double-strung harp we commissioned two years ago" ✓

  • Get Rid Of Stuff

    I'd like to set us the challenge that every day we throw/give away one item that's been in our possession, but unused, for years. I figure after a month or two of that, we might notice a difference.


hudebnik: (Default)
Last night after dinner [personal profile] shalmestere brought a couple of pieces of wool into the dining room and asked me to stand up so she could try something on me. The "pieces of wool" are in fact an old, pale-blue GFD that no longer fits her. She cut off the bodice section and the sleeves, put shoulder seams in the skirt where the waist used to be, put arm-holes in the skirt where the hips used to be, and fit the sleeves back into the new arm-holes to make it a Greenlandish-style gown for me. Part of the bodice section is being recycled as upper-arm gores (since I have more muscular upper arms than [personal profile] shalmestere does); the lower arms, with their buttons and buttonholes intact, seem to work as-is. All terribly efficient, appropriate to "a dying colony on the edge of the civilized world". And it's old, new, borrowed, and blue, all in one item.

Before we leave for Pennsic in a few days, I need to do a bunch of narrow-work: one or two new dress-lacing cords for her, and several hose-points for me. I need to finish attaching a new valence to our extremely-old tent. And we need to pre-cook a bunch of meat-pies for lunches, and tartlets for breakfasts. It would be nice to make some wafers, although that's lower priority. We need to write and copy a program for our concert at Pennsic. And make sure we each have enough undergarments, hosen, shoes, and outer garments for the time we're there. And check instruments for strings, reeds, etc. And pack everything we need, and nothing we don't.
hudebnik: (Default)
A month or two ago Deonna, [personal profile] shalmestere, and I agreed to put together a main-stage concert for Pennsic, entitled "An Evening in la Salle des Ardents: Smoky Medieval Jazz". [personal profile] shalmestere, the Repertoire Goddess, started putting together a setlist, and she and I played through some of the pieces. Then Deonna drove down to visit us this past Friday, and we spent two hours Friday night and about six hours Saturday rehearsing, going through each of the pieces in the setlist to see what instrumentation worked and what didn't, what pieces need to be re-edited and re-printed, what pieces need the most practice, how long each piece takes, etc. And I think we made a lot of progress. We each have things to practice individually; [personal profile] shalmestere and I have specific things to practice together; we have another visit planned to rehearse with all three of us; we'll get in some more last-minute rehearsal at Pennsic; and the concert is scheduled for 7:00 Monday evening, August 8 at the Performing Arts Stage, just before the Debatable Choir. Be there or be square, man!
hudebnik: (Default)
177.0 lbs. (!!!)
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk, dried cranberries
lunch: bacon, chocolate-chip pancakes
dinner: potato latkes, yogurt, cranberry salsa
dessert: raspberry-chocolate crumble bar, ice cream

In bed about midnight; D. came to bed half an hour later. Not enough sleep.

About 5:30 or 6 PM our old SCA friend Katie came over: she was in the neighborhood visiting family, and stopped by our place to chat and "reset" after dealing with family stuff. It was a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation, but as she was talking to our dogs, Archie started peeing on the floor. He had had a lengthy morning walk in the park, but no afternoon walk yet. Anyway, I hustled him out the door while D. and Katie grabbed paper towels and wiped up the mess. He peed on the sublawn, then was perfectly content to come back inside to sleep on a nest while we talked some more. Around 8 or 8:30 Katie left, D. took the dogs out for another walk, and I went to the grocery for a few staples, then started grating potatoes and onions for latkes. We ate dinner around 9:30, which isn't optimal, but the latkes turned out well.
hudebnik: (Default)
I was taking some kind of class from Adam Gilbert [a fabulous early-music teacher currently at USC], in a nondescript white classroom. He left the room to get something from his office down the hall, and while he was away, I turned to Macsen (who was sitting next to me in the class) and tried to teach him some three-against-two rhythm exercises. He was interested until he wasn't. Then Adam came back to the classroom with a loaf each of five different kinds of homemade bread. I pulled out one of my own and joked that I'd missed the memo and only brought one kind.

Boy, this entry gets lots of tags that don't normally go together....
hudebnik: (Default)
Our Pavilion Mark 3 has been underway for a good number of years, and we're making another push this year in hopes of having it ready for Pennsic. It's an oval tent -- more precisely, two semicircles and a rectangular midsection. The roof consists of a three-piece cap (rectangle and two pie-slices) going down about 18" from the peak, and a second tier made up of two rectangles (front and back) and two truncated pie-slices, each made up of 8 narrow trapezoids, going down another 6 feet and a bit. The cap was sewn together years ago, and looks good. Eight of the roof-end trapezoids were sewn together years ago, and I finished sewing together the other eight yesterday.

And then I measured them. Each round end of the cap is about 25" in perimeter (at the seam, with a fair amount of flexibility in fitting by moving the seam slightly up or down, since it's a sharp curve). One batch of roof-end trapezoids is 27" along the top, which is fine because there's a seam allowance on each end of it. The other batch is... 36-1/2" along the top. I'm not sure whether I cut these pieces wider, or just did consistently narrower seam allowances, but it's way too wide to match the cap.

The right answer, of course, is to rip out the seams and do them again correctly. Seven flat-felled seams (with two or three rows of stitching per seam, of course), over six feet long each. Yuck.

The not-quite-as-right answer is to give some of the flat-felled seams an extra roll, using up an extra 2W of width (where W is the width of a flat-felled seam). This doesn't require ripping out anything, and requires sewing fewer new seams, since I don't think I need to give all of them an extra roll. But it does mean sewing some extra-heavy flat-felled seams, with six rather than the usual four layers of fabric; I hope my machine and needle are heavy enough for the task.

This will also narrow the bottom of this truncated pie-slice, but fortunately, it's too wide by roughly 10" too, so that's fine.

And then I need to attach the two truncated pie-slices to the rectangles for the midsection of the tent (which may get false seams in the middle first to make them look like period fabric widths), and somehow attach this whole second tier to the cap. Which will be fiddly.
hudebnik: (Default)
I guess the Decameron event two days ago had more impact on me than I realized, for I dreamed something that was very obviously a modern Boccaccio-style tale. There were several couples, all friends of one another, and all with Italian names that I don't remember now but I'll make some up. Lavinia was frustrated that her husband Alberto was insufficiently attentive to her in bed, and started a dalliance with Lucio, while Alberto started an underwater-salvage business with Chichibio, with whom he then became romantically involved, while Lucio's wife Beatrice sought solace in the arms of Chichibio's girlfriend Mona. Alberto and Chichibio travelled around the world on business, encountering various business setbacks, becoming poorer and poorer, less and less well-equipped, and the business stress strained their personal relationship until they returned home and there was another round of bed-swapping and everybody lived happily ever after.
hudebnik: (Default)
I was expecting, by now, to be en route to, if not at, the site for Musicians' Day, an early-music slumber party for thirty friends and acquaintances in a lodge in the woods, with a day of classes, hours of jamming, good food, a roaring fireplace, and all that stuff.

But when the first attendees arrived at the site (several hours before I could get there), they found another group already in the lodge, swearing that they had it reserved through Sunday evening, and had had it reserved since January. (We also were sure we had it reserved since January.) The organizer of the other group works for the Parks Department, and called the Park Superintendent on his private line to see what was up; he says the Superintendent confirms that he has the lodge reserved and we don't. I haven't talked to the Superintendent myself, nor have I been able to get anybody at the park to answer a phone in several days -- I've spent at least an hour wandering through touch-tone phone trees searching in vain for a human being.

Anyway, the event is cancelled on the shortest of notice. A good number of the attendees are probably still on the road driving to the site, and others may arrive tomorrow morning. #^*%^$^&%$*%^&
hudebnik: (Default)
Like most civilized Americans, I'm outraged and saddened by the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, and by the President's bizarre insistence on treating heavily-armed, overtly and proudly racist right-wing protesters waving Nazi flags as morally equivalent to the mostly unarmed left-wing counter-protesters who were the victims of a deadly automotive assault. And today, the President doubled down on his original tone-deaf statement, saying "before I make a statement, I like to know the facts" (as though facts had ever stopped him before).

However, much as it pains me to say it, he has a point when he says "This week, it is Robert E. Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next?"

Let's compare Robert E. Lee with George Washington. Both lived in Virginia. Both owned slaves. Both were considered by their contemporaries to be men of great personal honor. Both were talented generals who led their poorly-trained, poorly-supplied armies to surprising victories. Both committed treason by lending their military talents to an armed rebellion by a region that wanted to declare itself an independent nation. But Robert E. Lee lost, and George Washington won. Is that, by itself, sufficient reason to put up statues of one, and tear down statues of the other?

Of course not: people want to tear down statues of Confederate generals because they fought to defend slavery.

I'm not a Civil War historian, and I have no idea how strong a part slavery played in Lee's thought process when he decided to work for the Confederacy rather than the Union (I gather both courted him at the start of the war). In the murky depths of my memory is a possibly-apocryphal quote from Lee to the effect that "a country that can't stay together without war doesn't deserve to stay together". For that matter, I don't know whether Washington was thinking about slavery when he took his job leading the Continental Army. At any rate, let's suppose hypothetically that historians were to find solid evidence that defending slavery was not a significant part of Lee's reasoning, or even that he opposed slavery but chose the Confederacy for other reasons. Would that suddenly make Robert E. Lee worthy of statues again? I doubt it: anything that memorializes the Confederacy and its leaders would still be viewed as a reminder of black slavery and white domination, and a rallying point for people who would prefer to return to that world.

But we must remember black slavery and white domination, or be condemned to repeat them. I see tearing down statues as rewriting history. The fact is, these people were important historical figures, and were at one point considered great enough to put up a statue of. If our opinions of their greatness have changed, let's discuss the new context and new information that have led us to that change of mind. Even a statue of Saddam Hussein or Adolf Hitler serves to remind us that they ruled their respective countries for years, during which they did despicable things (and presumably some good things); removing their statues makes it easier to forget both their rule and their despicable acts. Sure, move the statue to a site not of honor but of historical context -- in fact, I think that's what Charlottesville was trying to do with Lee -- but don't just erase it.

(For those readers in the SCA, I'm also bothered when the list of Kings of the East is read aloud omitting Angus. The historical fact is that he served as King twice, and his subsequent conviction for murder doesn't change that.)

For a contrary point of view, see Talking Points Memo.
hudebnik: (devil duck)
I've spent part of the week moving boxes from my old office into my new office, unpacking things, finding places for things.... There are several boxes that never got unpacked from the previous office move (in part because I was moving into a smaller office and simply never found good places to put things, and in part because I realistically didn't need that stuff); I've found places for some of this, and thrown out some of it. Realistically, I'm never going to read that conference proceedings from 2004, or all those back issues of professional journals going back to the 1990's. And I probably don't need those photocopies of articles my grad-school professors assigned me to read: even if I did need to re-read those things or assign them to a student, I'm sure they're all on the Web.

Thursday evening I gave a talk to the Long Island Java Users' Group on the subject "Functional Programming in Java: Why and How". The Long Island Java Users' Group has, officially, 28 members, of whom about 7 were in attendance; I'm told this was the most well-attended meeting yet. So it was an intimate, informal affair: the pizza arrived about 2/3 of the way through my talk. At least three of the seven people in the audience had previously been to one of my Program By Design workshops, so they already had some grounding in functional programming, but may not have given much thought to doing it in what's not traditionally considered a "functional language". The last section of the talk was a preview of Java 1.8, which when it comes out in 2014 will have a number of features to make functional programming easier. Anyway, there were some good questions and good comments.

I spent Friday pre-cooking for an SCA business meeting hosted at our house. Hummus b'tahini, pasta with garlic yogurt sauce, olive tapenade, carrot slaw, roasted broccoli salad, larb gai, prosciutto-and-melon, and grilled lamb. ([livejournal.com profile] shalmestere was at work, but she did a lot of the house-cleaning Thursday and Friday, made a batch of comfort-food-from-your-childhood lemon cake, and did most of the plating.) There were maybe twenty people, the food went over well, no last-minute disasters, and even the SCA business discussion was tolerable. And we now have leftovers for weeks, and no room in the fridge or the freezer (which is why I'm not at the farmer's market this morning).
hudebnik: (Default)
Went to a meeting 12 miles away in Brooklyn. There are three ways to get there: the direct way, mostly on heavily-trafficked surface streets through unpleasant industrial neighborhoods; the out-of-the-way way, on the LIE and the BQE; and the even-more-out-of-the-way way, on the Belt and the BQE. The traffic reports for the Belt were promising, so we took that route. It took an hour to get there. Meeting went on for 2-1/2 hours, at the end of which we had agreed on two short paragraphs of policy. Meeting location is about 1/2 mile from the BQE, but it took us 25 minutes to get back onto the BQE because of one-way streets, streets that end abruptly, and a lack of signage. Took the BQE and LIE home; still took an hour in all.

SCA stuff

Feb. 7th, 2012 11:49 pm
hudebnik: (henry)
For a very thoughtful take on the current issue and how we got here, please read this post, in which [livejournal.com profile] cellio refers to the events of 1994. For those of you who weren't around at the time, let me tell you a story....

In 1994, the SCA's Board of Directors announced abruptly that, due to serious financial shortfalls at the Corporation, paid membership would henceforth be required in order to attend any event. There was a firestorm on the Rialto (an on-line discussion group, back when there could be a single on-line discussion group that included most of the Net-enabled members of the SCA). Some people pointed out that, since most of their groups' events were in public parks, they legally could not exclude anybody from attending such an event, nor could they legally charge admission. Others objected that requiring paid membership to attend even a first event would damage the SCA's reputation for openness, and make it look like a money-making cult (which some in the public already feared it was). Some were offended that the Board had issued this edict without even asking its thousands of members for voluntary help in its hour of need. Some pointed out that the Corporation provides services that benefit everybody at an event, so everybody should be expected to pay for those services.

I and others analyzed the Corporation's published financial reports to see why the Corporation was in such bad shape. Several people (including [livejournal.com profile] cellio, if I remember right) requested more-detailed financial reports from the Corporation, were refused, and sued the Board to open its books; the Board chose to spend some of its scant assets fighting this lawsuit rather than opening the books to its own members.

Several of us -- I think it was Arval, Cariadoc, and me -- suggested that instead of requiring membership to attend any event, the Corporation institute a "non-member surcharge" to cover what non-members actually cost the corporation -- which we estimated at perhaps 50c for a typical one-day event. The Board eventually decided to do this, but they set the non-member surcharge at $3-5 instead, clearly intending not merely to cover their expenses but to discourage people from participating without being paid members. Because you know, more paid members means more revenue, which is obviously good, right?

Many people (I think this started with Cariadoc, too) observed a distinction between the Society and the Corporation: the Society runs events and dance practices and calligraphy workshops and fighter practices and things like that, while the Corporation prints membership cards and magazines, pays the expenses of its Board of Directors, buys insurance that covers its Board of Directors and its bank account, keeps track of who's a paid member, hires lawyers to protect its Board of Directors and its bank account, etc. The Society runs on massive amounts of volunteer labor; the Corporation runs on dues checks and the volunteer labor of about a dozen people. It seemed that much of the money we paid in membership dues went to either keep track of membership dues or protect the accounts holding those dues. As the old saying goes, "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy."

And many people, most notably Cariadoc, pointed out that the more assets the Corporation held, the more-attractive a target it would present to lawsuits. There have been a number of lawsuits over the years, but I believe the Schragger case is the most damaging and expensive to date. There will be more, of course. Every time we create a new Official Office In Charge of Fnord-Twergling, we have made a legally binding commitment that fnords will be twergled properly, and the next time a fnord is mis-twergled, the Corporation and all the local officers will be liable again. What if fnord-twergling were handled between individuals instead, with no Corporate imprimatur and therefore no Corporate liability?

Once you've imagined that, let's imagine a step farther. What if there were no SCA, Inc. at all? What if there were no such thing as an SCA membership card? What if you could subscribe to a Kingdom newsletter by writing a check to the Kingdom for the cost of the newsletter -- or not, if you didn't want to subscribe to a Kingdom newsletter? How much would this impede our ability to run events, dance practices, calligraphy workshops, fighter practices, etc? If the Corporation ceased to exist, how much effect would it have on the Society?

driving

Jun. 29th, 2011 09:34 am
hudebnik: (devil duck)
Woke up in central Pennsylvania, drove all day, went to bed in Bloomington, IN, where dance symposium will start Friday.
hudebnik: (henry)
We spent yesterday at Beowulf: The Event. No fighting, no dancing, no fencing, just food and a tag-team recitation of Beowulf in its entirety (in modern English translations), although a few bits were also done in Old English to give the audience a feel of how that would sound.

The hall had been prepared to feel (if you didn't look too closely) like a Scandinavian mead-hall during a long winter night. Curtains were hung to block out most of the sunlight from the windows, and the overhead lights were off, so the only light was fire-colored (variously from colored electric lights and Sterno flames), and everyone sat on wooden benches around a long central "firepit". A structure of thick "wooden" beams (actually cardboard or plastic tubes, but painted with wood grain, knotholes, cracks, and runic graffiti) appeared to hold up the ceiling.

The poem started around 1:00 PM and continued, with potty breaks and a dinner break, until around 9:00 PM. Each of twenty or thirty different performers from five different Kingdoms took a segment, each in his or her own idiomatic style, so the event also served as a showcase for the storyteller's art. Most declaimed in prose, walking up and down the hall around the firepit, a few chanted or sang, a few accompanied themselves on frame drums or harps. The audience were encouraged to chime in when something especially dramatic happened, so there were sincere sighs and laments when an innocent victim got eaten, hisses when treachery was done, and cheers and foot-stomping when a good guy triumphed.

[livejournal.com profile] shalmestere and I weren't among the scheduled performers, although I had been asked to prepare one section as an "understudy". But we brought a Romanesque harp and a Parma-baptistry citole, and noodled around on the earliest repertoire we could summon to memory whenever there was a break between storytellers -- Cantigas de Santa Maria, Carmina Burana, etc. We, like most of the hundred or so people in attendance, abandoned our usual SCA outfits and wore some attempt at pre-1200 clothing -- in our cases, costumes left over from the St. Nicholas play we put on six years ago.

I don't know that this was the most "medieval moment" or the most enjoyable event I've had in thirty years in the SCA, but it was certainly in the top 5%. Once in a while one is reminded that things like this can be done.
hudebnik: (Default)
Let's see...
Dec. 18 we hosted an SCA business meeting cum Xmas party. Grilled lamb, carrot slaw, broccoli marinated in fish sauce and lime juice, artichoke quichelets, "heroin" wings, hummus, tapenade, and I forget what else. Lots of cookies, of course, and the chocolate fountain with dipping-stuff (strawberries, bananas, pretzel rods, starfruit, ...).

There were probably some mentionable meals in the following week, but I've forgotten what and when.

Dec. 24 we roasted a duck and served it with roasted brussels sprouts in balsamic vinegar and a baked wild-rice dressing with dried cranberries and hazelnuts. And Xmas cookies.

Dec. 25 we made beef Wellington, which (we learned) is a hunk of tenderloin topped with sauteed mushrooms and paté, wrapped in puff pastry, and baked. We actually made four single-serving Wellingtons, two of which are now in the freezer (we'll find out how well they survive freezing, perhaps for my birthday). Served with baby potatoes roasted in leftover duck fat. There was something else, but I don't remember what -- perhaps leftover carrot slaw? And Xmas cookies.

Dec. 26 was the Day of Snow, so we started a batch of "June-Bug Chili" [in which the distinctive ingredient is whole almonds, which do bear a disturbing resemblance to beetles] in the crock-pot in the morning, and ate it with macaroni and grated Cheddar. And Xmas cookies.

Dec. 27: the Day of Shoveling. (Not really: each of us did maybe an hour at most.) Lunch was chili, macaroni, and leftover broccoli from the 18th. Dinner is to be a casserole of leftover wild-rice dressing mixed with the meat I picked off the duck carcass last night. And Xmas cookies.
hudebnik: (Default)
Scene 1: night, a street in a residential neighborhood of New York City, lit by the occasional streetlight. A man and a woman are walking their greyhounds, and they notice a large styrofoam cooler left out on the corner for trash pickup. It seems in good condition, and reasonably clean, so they take it home and adopt it.

Scene 2: some years later, they take the styrofoam cooler to Pennsic, pre-loaded with a 22-lb. block of dry ice. It lasts for about five days, and they conclude that a cooler with dry ice is a Good Idea. If only it weren't so ugly and blatantly modern-looking...

Scene 3: on the way home from Pennsic, they stop at a pizzeria to re-enter modern society and make a list of projects for next Pennsic. One of them is building a wooden chest around the styrofoam cooler.

construction photos and narrative )

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