For future reference :-)
Love Speedy
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Saturday, May 17, 2025
Birthday Helmet
I'm not 100% convinced by these, mostly because my Birth Helmet will clash TERRIBLY with my Birth Siege Engine and I know this will also be true for A LOT OF YOU.
Still. Kinda cute :-)
Monday, February 24, 2025
Birthday Siege Engines
What better thing to post here than this, I mean honestly...
Note: I also want flowers and a non-appliance pressie. If you're going to give a girl an appliance, also have another pressie wrapped up. And yes, a siege engine IS AN APPLIANCE.
Thursday, October 24, 2024
OMFG
I'm out of practice, but what the hell! Let's go posting! And I'm even sober!
This afternoon I caught up with the lovely Mindy to go and see a lecture by the equally lovely Dr Ducky at the NLA, about Artist's Books and the confusion surrounding the cataloguing thereof.
Afterwards there was a table booked at a cafe nearby, and on several occasions we were asked how we knew Dr Duck. And the answer is this blog!
A conversation arose about items we keep, what holds memories, and physical objects vs digital records (and Dr Duck has spoken on said topics as well).
It all made me a bit sentimental for the blog, because the Book of Faces has become increasingly unsatisfying, Xtter is a dumpster fire, and while I quite like Insta as a visual medium, it doesn't lend itself to dialogue or long posts.
In mentioning it to my partner just now, I realised I couldn't remember the host, or if we paid for the blog - for a minute there I couldn't even remember my handle or which email address I used to use for it. Oof.
I whacked some terms into my email search function and came up with what looked like a link to the dashboard. And LO - it was, indeed, a link to the dashboard of this blog.
There is no way I'd remember my password.
THAT'S OKAY - you're instantly logged in!
Great security guys 😆
Friday, November 12, 2021
Daylight Savings Time
Just got a weird bug in my brain, as a result of a conversation yesterday, and wrote this in the comments of a friend's blog. And then realized that it's exactly the sort of crap we used to post on here. Which made me nostalgic, so I came and posted it here too...
---
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Time Capsule
So I mentioned before that I'd been contacted by time travelers. I wanted to do a follow-up on the latest developments, and it needed a bit more space than FB really allows... Viva ForBattle!
(Once more for the uninitiated; if you know the truth behind all this, please refrain from telling me. I'm carefully avoiding googling any of it, because frankly I'm enjoying the ride and don't want to spoil it. I'm actually feeling a little bad about spoiling it for you all instead of signing you up for it, but I figure it's a little late now...)
So back in December, I got a letter claiming to be from a law firm representing my great uncle Sherman Moser. Which would have to be a heretofore unknown brother of my father's father. They said that I had inherited something from his estate which they would send along shortly, along with some letters from one of their other clients. Sounded a bit like a scam, but whatever.
Then earlier this month I got another packet from the same firm, with a bunch of letters. These letters were dated and postmarked at various times between 1942 and 2010, and were written on the backs of what appeared to be period documents. They all fit together as pieces of a single tale: a time traveler was lost in time, and his partner was searching for him. She needed to know when exactly he was in order to be able to fetch him back. The information she needed was encoded on some sort of map, which would be left to me by my great uncle. All I had to do was keep the map and hand it down to my descendants, and she would pick it up from them later to get the info she needs. (Might perhaps have done better research on the likelihood of my having any descendants, but I've got a niece who's a Dr Who fan...) At this point I'm thinking this is too elaborate to be a scam; this has got to be some kind of awesome service that you can sign people up for.
Today part III arrived:
(Lurking Coz not included.)
Within was a radiocarbon dating report, putting the origin of some artifact at somewhere between 440 and 520 AD, an Italian newspaper article about a naked woman appearing in a restaurant out of nowhere, scribbling a letter on the back of a menu, begging the owner to mail it, and then disappearing again, and this:
It's a star map, of a portion of the sky around the North Star. Matches the description of an artifact mentioned in a newspaper article included with the very first letter. Said artifact my supposed uncle Sherman supposedly dug up in an archaeological dig. The big circle on the left panel could be the sun or a planet or the moon I suppose, since the ecliptic passes through that part of the sky. It's really quite funky and well put-together (doesn't _really_ feel 1500 years old, mind, but still...)
Don't know if this is the end or not - can't wait to see if there's more. If it _is_ a scam then a) it's the most elaborate one I've ever heard of, and b) when they finally get around to asking me for money, I think I'm liable to send them $20 and a note saying "well done!"
(Once more for the uninitiated; if you know the truth behind all this, please refrain from telling me. I'm carefully avoiding googling any of it, because frankly I'm enjoying the ride and don't want to spoil it. I'm actually feeling a little bad about spoiling it for you all instead of signing you up for it, but I figure it's a little late now...)
So back in December, I got a letter claiming to be from a law firm representing my great uncle Sherman Moser. Which would have to be a heretofore unknown brother of my father's father. They said that I had inherited something from his estate which they would send along shortly, along with some letters from one of their other clients. Sounded a bit like a scam, but whatever.
Then earlier this month I got another packet from the same firm, with a bunch of letters. These letters were dated and postmarked at various times between 1942 and 2010, and were written on the backs of what appeared to be period documents. They all fit together as pieces of a single tale: a time traveler was lost in time, and his partner was searching for him. She needed to know when exactly he was in order to be able to fetch him back. The information she needed was encoded on some sort of map, which would be left to me by my great uncle. All I had to do was keep the map and hand it down to my descendants, and she would pick it up from them later to get the info she needs. (Might perhaps have done better research on the likelihood of my having any descendants, but I've got a niece who's a Dr Who fan...) At this point I'm thinking this is too elaborate to be a scam; this has got to be some kind of awesome service that you can sign people up for.
Today part III arrived:
Within was a radiocarbon dating report, putting the origin of some artifact at somewhere between 440 and 520 AD, an Italian newspaper article about a naked woman appearing in a restaurant out of nowhere, scribbling a letter on the back of a menu, begging the owner to mail it, and then disappearing again, and this:
Don't know if this is the end or not - can't wait to see if there's more. If it _is_ a scam then a) it's the most elaborate one I've ever heard of, and b) when they finally get around to asking me for money, I think I'm liable to send them $20 and a note saying "well done!"
Thursday, October 01, 2015
Alas, Poor Yorrick!
Just noticed it's been a year since anyone posted on the old For Battle. *sniff*.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Torbjorn the Runecarver
There are apparently still a few people left out there that Coz and I haven't cornered to tell this story to, and who are therefore still wondering why the merest mention of Vikings sends us into fits of snickering in the corner. But it takes a little while to tell properly, so I thought I'd write it down.
Back in 2012, we got to spend a month in Spain, Sweden, and Norway. At the very end of our trip, we visited the town of Sigtuna, Sweden, which is famous for it's runestones. "Famous" turns out to be correct; its close to Stockholm, and the place is jam-packed with bus tours full of Germans and midwesterners, strolling the strip in their Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops, buying tacky souvenir horned hats. Once you get off the main drag however, it's a lovely little medieval town with quite a nice museum. And runestones.
The stones are scattered throughout the town - some whole, some broken up and re-purposed in churches or graveyards. There's a map you get from the Tourist Info office, but some are fairly-well hidden, so you have to track them down. Each is accompanied by a small plaque, written by some slightly-stuffy archeologist 20 years ago, explaining what they have translated of the writing on the stone, and what they know of its history.
I don't remember any exact text, but it went a bit like this:
"Stone of inferior workmanship, carved by Torbjorn in XXX to commemorate the building of a new bridge over the River Tun."
"Excellent example of twined knotwork or vines by Olaf Rolfsdottir."
"Crude piece without writing; attributed to Torbjorn."
"Beautiful interwoven dragon motif, carved by Hjarlmar Rockbiter on the tenth anniversary of his father's death, in his memory."
"The inscription reads: 'To honor his ancestors, Knut Erikkson had this stone carved by the hand of the Great Torbjorn' - poor spelling and bad penmanship."
It was never explicitly mentioned in the signs, and yet slowly a picture started to form; every single time he was mentioned, Torbjorn the runecarver copped some fairly harsh criticism from our unknown archaeologist / art critic... and yet Torbjorn had clearly also carved about half of the stones in town.
At which point you may be thinking "Heh; that is mildly amusing." But Coz and I had been on the road for over a month; despite having a fantastic time, we may have been a bit frayed around the edges. Whatever the reason, this struck us as the most hilarious thing we'd ever seen in our lives. Pretty soon we were rushing to the next sign and expounding pretentious critiques of his obviously inferior skills. We're giving each other the Torbjorn used-runestone sales pitch:
"Oh yeah mate, I _could_ do you one of those twisty things like Olaf Dragoncarver, but it'd be 6 months, and it'd cost ya. Now this baby here, this I did last year for Dave the Smith over in Uppsala, to honor his wife's father. Only she ran off with a tinker and now he doesn't want it, does he? Never put the names on; never had a day in the sun in its life. Now for you mate, because I like you, I could do this baby signed and delivered by Tuesday for - I'm cutting me own throat here! - for a mere 20 gold Knuts. Do you a mostly *cough* matched set if you like; put one on either end of a bridge and no one will be able to tell them apart. I swear it to you by Odin's left testicle. Praise your ancestors coming and going. Wattaya say? Only I'd move fast; had this guy up from Stockholm yesterday and he was very interested in this piece..."
By this point we're weeping tears of laughter, and having to hold ourselves upright on ancient historical artifacts to keep from falling over. The few other tourists who made it out this far have brittle smiles and are backing away slowly, because we've obviously overdosed on history and cracked. Which only makes us laugh harder, because we're imagining them as customers stunned by the full kilo-candle glare of the commercial juggernaut that is the Steve Jobs of runestones; Bloodeagle-Me-Own-Chest Torbjorn.
So there you have it; hundreds of years of proud heritage and culture, reduced by a pair of giggling Aus-Sceppos to a bad Used Car Salesman joke. I think we escaped confinement for our own safety only because the town policemen were superstitious, and didn't want to touch crazy people. If you mention vikings or runes and we lose it a bit, just smile and back away. And for goodness sake don't let us sell you any runestones...
Back in 2012, we got to spend a month in Spain, Sweden, and Norway. At the very end of our trip, we visited the town of Sigtuna, Sweden, which is famous for it's runestones. "Famous" turns out to be correct; its close to Stockholm, and the place is jam-packed with bus tours full of Germans and midwesterners, strolling the strip in their Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops, buying tacky souvenir horned hats. Once you get off the main drag however, it's a lovely little medieval town with quite a nice museum. And runestones.
The stones are scattered throughout the town - some whole, some broken up and re-purposed in churches or graveyards. There's a map you get from the Tourist Info office, but some are fairly-well hidden, so you have to track them down. Each is accompanied by a small plaque, written by some slightly-stuffy archeologist 20 years ago, explaining what they have translated of the writing on the stone, and what they know of its history.
"Stone of inferior workmanship, carved by Torbjorn in XXX to commemorate the building of a new bridge over the River Tun."
"Excellent example of twined knotwork or vines by Olaf Rolfsdottir."
"Crude piece without writing; attributed to Torbjorn."
"Beautiful interwoven dragon motif, carved by Hjarlmar Rockbiter on the tenth anniversary of his father's death, in his memory."
"The inscription reads: 'To honor his ancestors, Knut Erikkson had this stone carved by the hand of the Great Torbjorn' - poor spelling and bad penmanship."
 |
| A decorated "blank" (no writing) by the Great Torbjorn. |
At which point you may be thinking "Heh; that is mildly amusing." But Coz and I had been on the road for over a month; despite having a fantastic time, we may have been a bit frayed around the edges. Whatever the reason, this struck us as the most hilarious thing we'd ever seen in our lives. Pretty soon we were rushing to the next sign and expounding pretentious critiques of his obviously inferior skills. We're giving each other the Torbjorn used-runestone sales pitch:
"Oh yeah mate, I _could_ do you one of those twisty things like Olaf Dragoncarver, but it'd be 6 months, and it'd cost ya. Now this baby here, this I did last year for Dave the Smith over in Uppsala, to honor his wife's father. Only she ran off with a tinker and now he doesn't want it, does he? Never put the names on; never had a day in the sun in its life. Now for you mate, because I like you, I could do this baby signed and delivered by Tuesday for - I'm cutting me own throat here! - for a mere 20 gold Knuts. Do you a mostly *cough* matched set if you like; put one on either end of a bridge and no one will be able to tell them apart. I swear it to you by Odin's left testicle. Praise your ancestors coming and going. Wattaya say? Only I'd move fast; had this guy up from Stockholm yesterday and he was very interested in this piece..."
By this point we're weeping tears of laughter, and having to hold ourselves upright on ancient historical artifacts to keep from falling over. The few other tourists who made it out this far have brittle smiles and are backing away slowly, because we've obviously overdosed on history and cracked. Which only makes us laugh harder, because we're imagining them as customers stunned by the full kilo-candle glare of the commercial juggernaut that is the Steve Jobs of runestones; Bloodeagle-Me-Own-Chest Torbjorn.
So there you have it; hundreds of years of proud heritage and culture, reduced by a pair of giggling Aus-Sceppos to a bad Used Car Salesman joke. I think we escaped confinement for our own safety only because the town policemen were superstitious, and didn't want to touch crazy people. If you mention vikings or runes and we lose it a bit, just smile and back away. And for goodness sake don't let us sell you any runestones...
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Cocktails... for Science!
Experiments in home-extracted DNA as a cocktail garnish. I'm tentatively calling it a martidna - since people in this country seem to believe anything alcoholic in a martini glass that costs at least $8 is a martini - but that could use some work. Suggestions?
Friday, February 28, 2014
Sorry Guardian...
...and I realise that its puerile and immature of me even to notice, much the less snigger, but I completely fail to believe that this juxtaposition of photos and captions was accidental:
Just... no.
(I swear I did not make this up. Or photoshop it. Or anything. Screenshotted in the wild, from the sidebar at The Guardian.)
(I swear I did not make this up. Or photoshop it. Or anything. Screenshotted in the wild, from the sidebar at The Guardian.)
Saturday, October 05, 2013
Chrissie Pissie: a proposal
A thought I had at last year's Chrissie Pissie, and would like to bring up now in the lead up to the social season:
Can we shift the $15 surly santa presents away from 'gag gifts' towards 'stuff people would actually want in their house'.
Two reasons I can think of:
1. Less clutter in people's houses, more things they remember fondly. I really don't need more geek-themed coasters, cookie cutters or sound emitting devices in my life. I do however want cool coffee mugs, or some lovely tea, or a nice book, or a pot for a houseplant, or a cool kitchen gadget, etc.
2. More meaningful environmental impact. Each of those items takes energy, and water and resources to make. To then have them used once or twice is, in my books, not something that fits with the ethos of most of us.
I do however think that nerf guns/sports equipment that get used on the day and then handed to a child are an exception. But then, they'd get used more than once or twice, so they fit reason two.
Thoughts?
Can we shift the $15 surly santa presents away from 'gag gifts' towards 'stuff people would actually want in their house'.
Two reasons I can think of:
1. Less clutter in people's houses, more things they remember fondly. I really don't need more geek-themed coasters, cookie cutters or sound emitting devices in my life. I do however want cool coffee mugs, or some lovely tea, or a nice book, or a pot for a houseplant, or a cool kitchen gadget, etc.
2. More meaningful environmental impact. Each of those items takes energy, and water and resources to make. To then have them used once or twice is, in my books, not something that fits with the ethos of most of us.
I do however think that nerf guns/sports equipment that get used on the day and then handed to a child are an exception. But then, they'd get used more than once or twice, so they fit reason two.
Thoughts?
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Turkey day is approaching....
You have been warned! Batton down the hatches, loosen those waistbands, slow-cooked turkey is a-comin'! Get ready with your servings of grits and jell-o salad. We will once again provide the venue and the birds, and look forward to seeing you all there!
Turkenation is scheduled to commence around 1pm on Saturday, 30th November. Dinner will be around 6 or 7 pm as usual.
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
Finite Haiku
So a funny thing happened in my brain today. I wondered... given that haiku has exactly 17 syllables all up (5/7/5), and that the english language has a certain number of words/sounds, how many unique haiku exist? Well.. I'm still not sure, but I did some poking around to work out the worst case scenario.
The worst case scenario is that English is a living language, and that haiku is simply a collection of 17 syllables, each from a pool of all possible syllables in the language. While this is very simplistic, and throwing random syllables together is unlikely to produce words let alone meaning, it does future proof against new words that may turn up. And it does provide a maximum number.
So how many syllables are there in English? Turns out that I couldn't find any definitive answer, but I did find an article here http://semarch.linguistics.fas.nyu.edu/barker/Syllables/index.txt which again is kind of a worst case scenario. The author refers to 15,831 syllable candidates. This does seem rather large, but I'd be interested if someone else had any good sources on something more accurate.
So if we take this worst case of 15,831 syllable candidates, and we have 17 positions to fill, again using a worst case scenario that any syllable can follow any syllable, we end up with 17^15,831 unique haiku - which will include both the nonsense ones and also every possible sensible haiku.
It did take a while to find a calculator that wasn't going to fall over punching in that kind of number. Luckily, Wolfram Alpha was obliging and came up with 1.7*10^19479. A stupidly large number.
How stupidly large? Well... let's compare it to some other things. For the bridge players out there, there are 5.4*10^28 unique bridge deals. For the chess players, it's estimated that there are 1*10^120 unique chess games.
So I'd like to make the number more accurate, but I'm not sure how. Any suggestions? Maybe if I could find the average number of syllables in a word (not in a normal distribution, but across the english language), I could use that and the total number of unique words. Any other ideas?
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Sith Names
I was thinking on the way to work this morning - because, you know, youTube videos of babies with lightsabers should probably not be consumed before breakfast - and I've decided to join the Sith. I mean everyone was all trendy and jumped on the Jedi bandwagon, spawning headlines in the Telegraph like "Jedi the largest alternative religion in the UK" ("alternative" apparently being defined as "not bigger than Jedi".) So its time to move on to the new hip thing - Emo Jedi. And more importantly, I want to get in before all the good names are taken.
So the rules for geting your Sith name are apparently simple:
1) You pick a word you like the sound of that starts with IN. Like INvader, or INsidious.
2) You add Darth and lop off the IN.
The problem is that the prefix IN on a word often means "not", so you have to be careful not to end up with a meaning you didn't quite want. Some names I am considering:
Darth Sulator
Darth Fluenza
Darth Frared
Darth Spector
Darth Cur
Darth K (yo!)
Darth Fidel (apparently already taken by some guy in Cuba who got in way early.)
Some names you might end up stuck with, if you wait too long to join:
Darth Continent
Darth Competent (actually, this is my vote for the new head of our order. We could use some competence.)
Darth Complete
Darth Attentive
Darth Comprehensible
Darth Hospitable
Darth Ept
Darth Flammable
Darth Fomercial
Darth Seminate
Disney, you're welcome to use any of these you like. Darth Brooks does NOT fit the pattern, and is not allowed.
So the rules for geting your Sith name are apparently simple:
1) You pick a word you like the sound of that starts with IN. Like INvader, or INsidious.
2) You add Darth and lop off the IN.
The problem is that the prefix IN on a word often means "not", so you have to be careful not to end up with a meaning you didn't quite want. Some names I am considering:
Darth Sulator
Darth Fluenza
Darth Frared
Darth Spector
Darth Cur
Darth K (yo!)
Darth Fidel (apparently already taken by some guy in Cuba who got in way early.)
Some names you might end up stuck with, if you wait too long to join:
Darth Continent
Darth Competent (actually, this is my vote for the new head of our order. We could use some competence.)
Darth Complete
Darth Attentive
Darth Comprehensible
Darth Hospitable
Darth Ept
Darth Flammable
Darth Fomercial
Darth Seminate
Disney, you're welcome to use any of these you like. Darth Brooks does NOT fit the pattern, and is not allowed.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Pueblo Canyon Ruins, Sierra Anchas
All right, so even I have admitted at this point that Facebook has completely supplanted the blog as a method of keeping in touch, but I want to squirrel some maps and route information away to share with others (and myself, when I forget it 5 minutes from now.)
This weekend we did an awesome hike to a place called Pueblo Canyon Ruins, in the Sierra Anchas. The ruins are relatively hard to get to, so they have remained in pretty good condition; a fair number of rooms are intact, above-ground floors are still present if broken, and there are a fair number of pictographs that would at least appear to be genuine.
There is some graffiti damage (some of which is also apparently historical - cursive script in chalk dated 1911 that, given the climate - I can believe could be legit.) There is also a stretch of trail on the way in that is pretty scrambly. Not terrible; we did it with packs, dogs, and a man with a broken back, but I wouldn't try this hike with anyone who wasn't willing to scramble on all fours. Its supposedly about 8 miles round trip (sounds about right; took us most of 3 hours in and a bit over two hours back) and involves about a 1,750 ft elevation gain, almost all of which is stacked at the beginning. You can camp at the end but almost nowhere else, which means you're camping right in amongst the ruins so - duh! - for the love of whatever don't spoil it. Don't light fires back under the overhang, pack out your trash, and not to put too fine a point on it; crap before you come or be willing to walk a mile back to do it. (Can't believe some people. There was toilet paper in the middle of the trail at one point. If you appreciate it all this should go without saying. If you don't appreciate it, don't come. You won't enjoy it anyways.)
How to get there:
Hwy 188 south from Roosevelt or north from Globe, to the eastern end of Lake Roosevelt. Its about 3 hours from Flagstaff to this point. Turn north on Hwy 288 - also called the Globe-Young Highway. Pass over the Salt River. At about mile marker 265 you'll see a prominent marked righthand turn onto Cherry Creek Road (National Forest Road 203). This is a good dirt road for the first 20 miles, with a number of popular camping areas along it. You'll climb in and out of a couple of valleys, and cross a couple of streams - there aren't many places to go the wrong way, and they're fairly obvious. Somewhere around the 19-20 mile mark you'll cross a stream by a prominent private ranch and the road gets markedly worse. They say 4WD is required - I think the clearance is more important than the actual power to all four, as the road was reasonably flat, just scattered with largish boulders. We made it in our little Jeep Compass, which is by no means an offroad vehicle, but in places we were pushing our luck. At the 21 mile mark you pass a sign, and the cliffs to your left are starting to look pretty impressive:
Somewhere about mile 23 (our directions said later, but our odometer said about 23) you pass over a partially buried steel drainage pipe, and within the next 100 feet you'll see an old mining road heading precipitously up to the left, and down to the right. (The guides we were following said this road was "passable but not worth it." I think you'd be insane.) Just up at the next bend in the road there is a parking spot on the right, and a faded sign on the left. You should actually be able to see the ruins you're heading to ahead and to the left from here - high up the walls - but you'll have to have good eyes.
The trail:
The trail heads steeply up the mining road for maybe a mile, passing a wilderness area boundary sign, and eventually coming to a huge grey boulder on your left. It zigs right then left - no real branchings to this point, til it comes to a bit of meadow with a big white rock on the right with a (modern) spiral pictograph:
There is an easily-missed fork at this point: bear right to stay on the correct trail (left takes you up Cold Creek.) From here there are no more real choices. Climb up above the oaks and into the manzanita, from which you can see down to your car far below. You're moving north at this point, around the point of a ridge and into the next side valley (The main valley, and road you were on, heads north-south. This side valley faces east. You're coming northwest, onto the southern side of the V.)
As you come around the point into the side valley that is Pueblo Canyon, you can see the ruins about midway up the far wall. And you can see why you're making this crazy zigzag in the first place - there's no way up over there:
The bush-bashing happens in here - its scrambly, but just keep telling yourself that this is waiting at the end:
You don't really need a guide from here on out: there is one ruin on the southern wall (partially destroyed by a uranium mine) followed by a waterfall (apparently does NOT run year-round. We took all our water and didn't need it, but someone we met on the trail said they'd been there when it was dry. I reckon if you saw water on the road near the trailhead you're probably fine, but you have been warned.) After the waterfall you come back along the north wall of the canyon and get to visit all the ruins you've been looking at for the last hour:
This weekend we did an awesome hike to a place called Pueblo Canyon Ruins, in the Sierra Anchas. The ruins are relatively hard to get to, so they have remained in pretty good condition; a fair number of rooms are intact, above-ground floors are still present if broken, and there are a fair number of pictographs that would at least appear to be genuine.
How to get there:
Hwy 188 south from Roosevelt or north from Globe, to the eastern end of Lake Roosevelt. Its about 3 hours from Flagstaff to this point. Turn north on Hwy 288 - also called the Globe-Young Highway. Pass over the Salt River. At about mile marker 265 you'll see a prominent marked righthand turn onto Cherry Creek Road (National Forest Road 203). This is a good dirt road for the first 20 miles, with a number of popular camping areas along it. You'll climb in and out of a couple of valleys, and cross a couple of streams - there aren't many places to go the wrong way, and they're fairly obvious. Somewhere around the 19-20 mile mark you'll cross a stream by a prominent private ranch and the road gets markedly worse. They say 4WD is required - I think the clearance is more important than the actual power to all four, as the road was reasonably flat, just scattered with largish boulders. We made it in our little Jeep Compass, which is by no means an offroad vehicle, but in places we were pushing our luck. At the 21 mile mark you pass a sign, and the cliffs to your left are starting to look pretty impressive:
Somewhere about mile 23 (our directions said later, but our odometer said about 23) you pass over a partially buried steel drainage pipe, and within the next 100 feet you'll see an old mining road heading precipitously up to the left, and down to the right. (The guides we were following said this road was "passable but not worth it." I think you'd be insane.) Just up at the next bend in the road there is a parking spot on the right, and a faded sign on the left. You should actually be able to see the ruins you're heading to ahead and to the left from here - high up the walls - but you'll have to have good eyes.
The trail:
The trail heads steeply up the mining road for maybe a mile, passing a wilderness area boundary sign, and eventually coming to a huge grey boulder on your left. It zigs right then left - no real branchings to this point, til it comes to a bit of meadow with a big white rock on the right with a (modern) spiral pictograph:
The bush-bashing happens in here - its scrambly, but just keep telling yourself that this is waiting at the end:
You don't really need a guide from here on out: there is one ruin on the southern wall (partially destroyed by a uranium mine) followed by a waterfall (apparently does NOT run year-round. We took all our water and didn't need it, but someone we met on the trail said they'd been there when it was dry. I reckon if you saw water on the road near the trailhead you're probably fine, but you have been warned.) After the waterfall you come back along the north wall of the canyon and get to visit all the ruins you've been looking at for the last hour:
Monday, October 15, 2012
Turkinator 3: The resurrection
We have the technology. We can rebuild it.
I'm using as many of the old parts as possible to retain the spirit of the turkinator.
Also in keeping with the spirit of the event, no metric parts are being used. There is still a bit to do - still need to attach the lid, make the air vents, attach the handles and the chains.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Mr Nw has a new theme song
He drinks banana wine.
Available for free download:
http://mokolours.bandcamp.com/album/ep2-banana-wine
Friday, March 23, 2012
KidJesus
I think I surely must have told this story to every single person I've ever met, and yet digging around in the For Battle archives I can't see any evidence that I've ever actually scanned the photo in and shared it; shame on me. Alas its in an old picture from back in the dark ages, when dinosaurs roamed the earth on 1200 baud modems and people thought the world would end in 2000 for some arbitrary calendrical reason, not 2012 like any sensible person nowadays. Its called a "photo" apparently, and no matter how many times I put it in the DVD drive it still won't read. (And it turns out Jesus isn't above sabotaging the oldsters' computer to keep embarrassing photos from coming out on his 21st - century. I've just spent the last hour trying to make the damned (sic) scanner work).
Anyways, Coz' and my favorite favorite thing of all the amazing things at the British Museum was this set of mosaics from back before the sanitised authorised biography of Jesus outsold the previous umpty-eleven tell-all versions. I don't remember where or when it was from, though there should be another of those photo things around here somewhere with the details.
The text beneath, for those of you inexplicably having trouble reading this lousy scan of a lousy photo which hung on our wall for a decade collecting dust, (and taking into account that I can barely read the damn thing myself) reads:
"Jesus plays by the side of the river. Jesus making pools, a boy destroys one with a stick and falls dead."
"The Virgin admonishes Jesus, who restores the boy to life by touching him with his foot." (ed: read, "sulkily kicking him in the arse...")
(Something about Jesus striking a teacher dead to avoid having to explain why he didn't do his homework.)
I wish I could find the one where Jesus - having established a bit of a rep in the whole striking-people-dead department - goes round to play with a neighborhood kid. The kid's mom sees J and hides her kid in the oven, but J being omniscient knows this and turns the kid into a baked ham.
Anyone who has ever been or known a child knows that an omnipotent Jesus was a serious pain in the arse when he was a kid.
Edit: They're called the Tring Tiles, apparently.
Anyways, Coz' and my favorite favorite thing of all the amazing things at the British Museum was this set of mosaics from back before the sanitised authorised biography of Jesus outsold the previous umpty-eleven tell-all versions. I don't remember where or when it was from, though there should be another of those photo things around here somewhere with the details.
The text beneath, for those of you inexplicably having trouble reading this lousy scan of a lousy photo which hung on our wall for a decade collecting dust, (and taking into account that I can barely read the damn thing myself) reads:
"Jesus plays by the side of the river. Jesus making pools, a boy destroys one with a stick and falls dead."
"The Virgin admonishes Jesus, who restores the boy to life by touching him with his foot." (ed: read, "sulkily kicking him in the arse...")
(Something about Jesus striking a teacher dead to avoid having to explain why he didn't do his homework.)
I wish I could find the one where Jesus - having established a bit of a rep in the whole striking-people-dead department - goes round to play with a neighborhood kid. The kid's mom sees J and hides her kid in the oven, but J being omniscient knows this and turns the kid into a baked ham.
Anyone who has ever been or known a child knows that an omnipotent Jesus was a serious pain in the arse when he was a kid.
Edit: They're called the Tring Tiles, apparently.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Hold my beer, because I am going to overthink the Everloving Crap out of this.
Arguments both for and against DST always sound to me a bit like what they’re _trying_ to say is this:
There’s this minor inconvenience (DST | minimal useful daylight) that only affects maybe 10% of people, so why should the other 90% of us have to crawl over broken salted glass to appease these petty tyrants!
What they actually sound like to me:
There is a minor inconvenience A that affects everyone, but only 10% of people care.
There is a minor inconvenience B that affects everyone, but only 10% of people care.
The solution to A is the cause of B, and vice-versa. So 10% of people are going to be irritated either way. I don’t want it to be my 10%.
And then a small vocal percentage of People Irritated By A will argue loudly with a small vocal percentage of People Irritated by B, and meanwhile a few people are nodding both directions and 81% of us sitting on the sidelines are not sufficiently irritated by either to understand why it’s worth making a fuss over. And the core misunderstanding actually seems to stem from human empathy, of all things. It is natural for people to assume that others will feel the same way they do, so both sides envisage 90% of people suffering and 10% benefiting, and therefore it’s clearly an untenable argument and anyone can see that the other guy is just being selfish.
Wait for it; I’m just getting started.
Because I just did the same thing, when I had the above thought this morning, and realizing that is what actually kicked me out of bed to write this down. I naturally assumed that most other people felt the way I feel, and therefore when spitballing made-up percentages I chose 10% of people to be irritated enough to care, making 81% of people agree with me that it’s just not that big a deal either way. But it could just as easily be 90% of people who care passionately about either issue (making 81% irritated by both but presumably paralyzed by indecision, 9% still pushing one way or the other, and a mere 1% actually agreeing with me.) Its hard to find real opinion numbers – a recent US poll had “43% want to stay on standard time year-round, while 32% prefer to see the clocks remain on daylight saving time. Only 25% percent like the existing state of affairs.” But that’s seeking people out to ask for a preference, and “don’t care” wasn’t an option. The “final stage completion rate” of that poll was 17.4% – so that’s how many people cared about the issue enough to finish responding to a poll – but that could be high or low for a lot of reasons. Checking a handful of online petitions finds most struggle to get more than a few thousand people to even go to the effort of signing an online petition. But _that_ could just reflect the general opinion that online petitions are useless…
Anyways, I was interested in the realization that it is a form of empathy that causes each side of the argument to sound unreasonable to the other, and likewise a sort of empathy that makes people like me feel that both sides are being a bit hysterical. And that both sorts of empathy are very possibly misplaced, depending on the actual opinions of people, which I at least don’t know and couldn’t find much decent data on in a cursory google. Thought it was an interesting enough idea to share; do with it what you will.