Knickers

At the weekend, I decided that some of my old pairs of underpants were probably past their "best before", so did like most blokes of my age have become accustomed to do - went into Marks & Spencer intending to pick up a pack or two of y-fronts, like what I've worn ever since I stopped wearing nappies.

But no longer was I under the protection of St. Michael, patron saint of sensible underwear! Discarding boxers [which seem to have for no explicable reason undergone a revival - as far as I'm concerned, they're something only old geezers like my dad's generation would wear], trying to find something that sat in the old y-front/jockeys niche was a struggle. Most of the offerings were either things looking like cut-off thermal long-johns, or posing pouches. I still haven't dared try the ones I bought on - things they called "slips", though as far as I'm concerned, a slip is a satiny skirt-like thing a girlie wears under her dress.

Has the world gone mad?

Twenty Five Years On

Autumn 1978 was quite busy for me - and the 18^th was most important in my life. I decided to scrounge some coffee in the hour's gap between to lectures and suddenly a thunderbolt struck. Unwitting, I'd met the love of my life, and we're still here together today, despite much in the way of trials and tribulations. And the fact that it all happened, so far as I can tell, with pheromones going directly to our respective hind-brains, my complete lack of dating skills didn't matter (any more than it did when a certain other young lady decided to add a notch to her bedpost a couple of weeks previously, an event which made the Hawklords track The Only Ones off the Twenty Five Years On album significant to me).

To mark a silver "unniversary" we took a bunch of friends out to dinner, with enough diversity but enough overlap (most were gamers, most were in software, most had cats, most were people we'd known as students - but the mosts weren't the same in each case) that conversation could range free and wide. It was a wonderful evening.

Alas age shows, in that although only 4 bottles of wine were consumed amongst 10 of us (ok, 6 drinkers and 4 drivers), and the after-dinner coffee back at our place ended not that long after 00:30, I felt pretty wrecked the next day.

Season's End

Yesterday I commented about my ride to work; by the time I was getting back home, the low chalk ridgeline southwest of the village was already rising to obscure the sun - I'd been out all the daylight hours. Soon it'll be back to the season where I leave the house in the dark, and get home again in the dark; time to break out the SAD-hat for light therapy.

This morning was much the same as yesterday, only more frost/heavy dew making the fields all grey-white for the first mile; and less mist, though one tendril did cross the road at one point.

Next week is forecast to be colder, and there's mention of snow in the north - so I expect we'll see rain down here, which may mean that today will have been the last cycling to work day of the year, unless the weather is crisp like this on 24^th December, when it is traditional to go home at lunchtime.

More Gloranthan musings

If Kallyr Starbrow exists in any campaign I run, I think she will have to be an follower of Rigsdal One-Eye-Open, not that funny foreign Polaris chap.

Season of mists...

First real frost this morning, greying the grass at the far side of the front lawn, and covering the windows of the car on the drive - though a quick wipe with the hand showed that it was as much dew as frost, clearly hovering in that latent heat gap at 0C.

As I left the village, Urth was just turning its face to the day, the houses just dropping from the face of the sun, and the mist starting to rise again from the fields. Climbing the first rise, where just a couple of weeks ago I would see the sun blaze back at me from around where my shadow fell on the white line at the roadside, with its reflective micro-beadings, the land was still all in shadow. There was frost on the verges all the way, though the forecast had suggested that the wind would keep temperatures up overnight.

As it was, it was a simply wonderful crisp morning to cycle in.

A revelation

Thinking further about the Ehilm/Elmal thing. I just figured where Elmal is - it's the Orlanthi name for the Buserian Lightfore or Praxian Sun Daughter. The night-watchman, who patrols the skies while the Sun is absent.

MGDV as one might say.

A dragon wing of string and sticks

A while back, I lamented a lack of possible takers for a HeroQuest campaign. Mentioning this to Peter and Janet, when I saw them the other day, for the first time after the rebuff from local players, they expressed a qualified interest, but in the face of a different problem to the one I had considered. Not that the kids would be up and demanding of attention, but that it would be likely that Lizzie, the elder of the two, would want to join in (having demanded to be let play, and having played a little bit of D&D 3e already).

Certainly when she puts her mind to it, as a bright 10 year old girl, she can be surprisingly grown up in the way she acts, especially when she is wanting to associate with the grown-ups, rather than stepping down to the level of her little brother.

It strikes me therefore as something that might offer an intriguing possibility. If I were to run a fairly standard Sartar/Heortling based campaign, where we now have a lot of data about the people and the society, playing up the culture game aspects, it would be possible to do things like turning the character generation into a story-telling/role-playing hybrid, talking her through the childhood and initiation/coming-of-age of her character. It would be an opportunity to tell the tales of the people, in a form that children might be told them, and let her make the decisions for her character in a role-played manner.

It would be work for me - I'd need to do the job pretty damn well - and it might just bore her to tears, but wouldn't it be something if we could pull it off!

[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]

The Seasons Turn

Bright, calm morning, and a brisk cycle to work, setting off a little before sunrise, and keeping a good pace in the cool. Maybe another couple of times to go this year. The waning gibbous moon was high in the northwest, in the place where the summer sun rides; and in one stretch, there was a layer of mist a few feet thick, a few feet off the ground, sitting on the fields, like ariver in the little valleys between the rolling uplands.

[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]

Long in the tooth

Well, actually yesterday would have been a cycling day , weather-wise but I had to go to the dentist to have a check-up, which would have taken rather a long time under my own power. Fortunately, I got a clean(-ish) bill of health. There is one filling that's got a polished wear spot on, and a tooth nearby is sensitive to cold (checking this involved putting a little swab soaked in some alcohol/menthol stuff on the tooth and watching me in agony) - all of which I blame on certain of my colleagues driving me to impotent grinding of my teeth.

Some discussion of a confusion over patient records - someone suddenly seemed to have acquired a perfect set of teeth. Short of a rebuild, this would suggest having not been subject to NHS dentistry on piecework rates during the 1970s, which got me a couple of new fillings every six months from a guy who displayed his rugby blue more prominently than his dental certificates.

Perhaps I'm a bit obsessive about teeth as a result - it has certainly shown up in my recent fiction.

[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]

Such Aladdin's Caves of Air...

Here are the answers to yesterday's questions. Most of these could have been googled - though the last one in the classical section is one where you would have had to know the answer in broad before that would have helped, and this page is now the only place that would help on the final question.

Classical (Before the fall of Constantinople)

1. Q. Dante and Aeneas are linked by a person and a place. Who? And where?

   A. Virgil, and the Underworld

   The poems referenced are Virgil's Aeneid, book VI, in which Aeneas visits the underworld whilst yet embodied; and Dante's Divine Comedy, in which Dante, still embodied, is led through a descent into Hell and the ascent of Mt. Purgatory by the shade of Virgil. As a theological note, the function of the pagan underworld of the Aeneid is more akin to that of Mt. Purgatory, though its location matches that of Dante's Hell.

2. Q. Who was the Golden Ass?

   A. Lucius

   The poem is The Metamorphoses, by Lucius Apuleius, a work more commonly known as the Golden Ass. The viewpoint character, also called Lucius, is transformed into the eponymous beast.

3. Q. "Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce, courage the greater, as our strength diminishes..." Who died, and his body later buried at Ely?

   A. Byrhtnoð

   The poem is The Battle of Maldon or Byrhtnoð's Death - date and author unknown.

   The words

   "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.... "

   are spoken by Byrhtnoð's old comrade Byrhtwold over Byrhtnoð's body, as the Danes under Sweyn Forkbeard, son of King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark [yes, that Bluetooth] are closing in on the last of the English. After the battle the Danes probably carried off Byrhtnoð's head as a battle trophy, but his body was recovered by the monks of Ely and buried there - there's a carven stone there in the cathedral today that reads

   Brithnothus Northumbrior Dux, Prælio Cæsus a Danis A.D. DCCCCXCI

4. Q. Where in the Divine Comedy does Dante explain that surface brightness of an extended source is unvarying with distance?

   A. The Moon

   The reference within the poem is to Paradiso, Canto II:46. In this canto, a number of hypotheses as to the mottled appearance of what ought be a perfect - as being heavenly - body are discussed. Dante refutes the suggestion that the darker areas are simply further away by referring to an experiment with a candle and three mirrors, the middle one set back from the other two.

Tudor to Victorian

1. Q. "Thou art more lovely and more temperate" than what?

   A. A summer's day

   The poem - Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII

   "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
   Thou art more lovely and more temperate:"

2. Q. If the Lamb is Innocence, what beast is Experience?

   A. The Tyger

   The poems are Blake's - the Lamb, in Songs of Innocence, and the Tyger, in Songs of Experience.

3. Q.

   "There was a naughty boy
   And a naughty boy was he,
   For nothing would he do
   But scribble poetry"

   - Whose self-assessment?

   A. John Keats, the poem being his A Song about Myself.

4. Q. Who was the Red Cross Knight, and where did King Arthur meet him?

   A. The knight referred to almost exclusively as Red Cross is George, who later in the poem goes on to slay a dragon and hear the prediction that he will become patron saint of England; they met in the dungeons of the castle of Duessa, where Arthur rescues him from captivity.

   The poem is Spenser, The Faerie Queene, the meeting in Bk I, Canto VIII

   There are a lot of red-cross knights out there - Galahad (though I don't know of a poem), Hugo, son of Sir Uwaine, (Sir Uwaine's daughter by Thomas de Berverley (George Newcomen) - which dated 1925 is out of period), the Red Cross Knight by Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) - his poem of which I have no further detail, but is out of period, and Sir Lancelot (Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott) a poem from which Arthur himself is absent - but the epithet is only applied occasionally (once per poem) to those knights in the texts I do know.

Modern (20th century)

1. Q. What is done in Madingley on Christmas Eve?

   A.

   "And things are done you'd not believe
   At Madingley, on Christmas Eve."

   - Rupert Brooke, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

   This is from the middle section of the poem in which he libels most of the villages and towns in south and west Cambridgeshire

2. Q. If "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down" by the end, what is cruel at the start?

   A. April - "the cruelest month"

   - T.S. Eliot, the Waste Land.

3. Q. Who tells you "That's the way things are."

   A. Your father

   The poem is from Roger McGough, The way things are, and has the refrain

   "I'm your father, and that's the way things are."

4. Q. If one invented a cure for the common cold, what other cure would be required?

   A. Another cure for complacency

   The poem is by the late Robert Calvert, The Recovery, and celebrates the return of the sense of smell after a filthy cold. This was a deliberately recherché question. The poem appeared in his 1978 collection, sold as merchandise on the Hawklords 1978 tour, Centigrade 232, and can be heard under the final section of the track Psi Power from the Twenty Five Years On album, from which, at time of writing, we are a few days over 25 years on from. (Doesn't time fly when you're having fun!)

Oh, for a Muse of Fire...

Today is National Poetry Day, and as I won the it last year, I'm having to set a little quiz on poetry for the guys at the office; and I'm posting it here for the hell of it. As the theme is Britain, almost all of the questions are on the works of poets writing in this country, the exceptions being some of the Classical section. To make up for that, a couple of the questions relate to very local events indeed.

Ten fairly straightforward questions, and a couple of obscure ones to stretch you, and bring the count up to a round dozen in three sets of four.

Answers tomorrow.

Classical (Before the fall of Constantinople)

1. Dante and Aeneas are linked by a person and a place. Who? And where?
2. Who was the Golden Ass?
3. "Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce, courage the greater, as our strength diminishes..." Who died, and his body later buried at Ely?
4. Where in the Divine Comedy does Dante explain that surface brightness of an extended source is unvarying with distance?

Tudor to Victorian

1. "Thou art more lovely and more temperate" than what?
2. If the Lamb is Innocence, what beast is Experience?

3.     "There was a naughty boy
        And a naughty boy was he,
        For nothing would he do
        But scribble poetry"
   
   

   - Whose self-assessment?
4. Who was the Red Cross Knight, and where did King Arthur meet him?

Modern (20th century)

1. What is done in Madingley on Christmas Eve?
2. If "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down" by the end, what is cruel at the start?
3. Who tells you "That's the way things are."
4. If one invented a cure for the common cold, what other cure would be required?

Acid flashback, man!

Caught a real nostalgic gig at the local Corn Exchange last night - Keith Emerson & the Nice, on the first date of their new tour. Yep, you read that right. c1970 keyboard rock rides again, down to the smoke machine, psychedelic light show and honest-to-God Moog Synthesizer, festooned with patch cables!

The first part of the set had the old hands, plus a young guitarist, doing old Nice numbers, then the old guys were substituted by a younger bassist and drumer to play a selection of ELP tracks, then absolutely everybody on stage for the finale and encore.

The down-side was that the voice mixing was mushy - could hardly make out a word anyone said or sang; and while the box we were in had the best view of the stage, it seemed also to be filled with the biggest prats in the audience, fooling around, throwing paper darts, and bootlegging, rather than just sitting back and letting the music wash over (or through) them like the folk in the body of the hall.

Certainly one of the loudest gigs I've been to for a long time, with the ears still noticing it a bit this morning - albeit nowhere near as loud as Motörhead were on the Bomber tour 25 years ago, where I was in the mosh-equivalent with the press of the crowd forcing me against the side of the speaker stack.

Wind and weather

Only two more weeks after this before daylight saving ends, and it gets dark at 17:00; 12 working days. And in the last 12 only one day of cycling as we get rain - and now strong winds, fragments of equinoctial gales, as well. The most annoying thing about the office having moved out of town - and 10 miles from home not six - is that on the days in spring and autumn where it starts wet and ends bright and sunny, I can't fall back to my old strategy of catching the bus in and walking home :( - yesterday's weather was like that, with showers in the morning, but bright autumnal sunshine in the afternoon (blinds down to keep it off my screen), albeit breezy, that would have been gorgeous to walk home in from town, with a stop for a pint at the half-way point.

Conan the Republican

It was back in '91 that a Shadowrun supplement had a throwaway about one Senator Schwarzenegger. Being born outside the US, that really is the only possible next destination for the new Gubernator.

Not Dead Yet

Another one of those weeks where miracles need to be performed on a daily basis at work, and then just too much to do in the way of hobby activities. On one strand I've been upgrading my network-facing machine at home from one I got 4 years ago to a more recent second-hand machine, which means a ton of stuff to do in the way of hardening it (not helped when Norton AV LiveUpdate doesn't play nicely with WinXP). Still to come are setting it up with all the external network stuff, installing all the hardware and software from the old box, swapping the network around, and decommissioning the old one.

Then, in the time I'd normally spend blogging, I've been advising my friends at Mhorann Games on the web-site they've put together. At the moment it looks slightly better than a "My First Website" - and at least there are no broken links now - but the table driven layout has its problems. If I were doing it myself, I'd be using .pngs with transparency for the banner and the buttons, and CSS layout, for reasons explained on sites like A List Apart. [That piece was written over 30 months ago. There's no reason to be molly-coddling old browers in Q4'03!]

Later

The Norton LiveUpdate issue turned out to be a proxy problem of some sort - at time of writing, both XP machines were going out through a copy of the Privoxy proxy server. Moving the new one to have the modem, LU seems to work OK. Although the modem seems to need to be on at boot time for XP to notice it's there. My older XP box has the same problem with my Visor in its synch cradle - have to see if the new one is better behaved. At least having an industrial strength OS kernel, however wrapped in consumer glitz and entry-level limitations, the frequent blue screens seen with the Mailwasher spam-filter on Win98.2 are a thing of the past.