Scalpel....forceps...duct tape...

Last weekend my minion Lindsey learned the painful lesson that laptop computers do not like to drink mead. She quickly drained said laptop and let it dry and suprise of suprises, it worked long enough to pull most of her files off it before the screen went blank.

She came over to the house tonight, and having nothing to loose, she let me take it apart to see if I could possibly make things worse.

Thanks to the internets I discovered a step by step guide to disassembling a Toshiba A15. Of course, this guide did not take into account stickiness and its detrimental side effects. I cleaned all the surfaces I could. Just as in High School biology I pointed out the various guts, indicating their function and condition and how they were most likely being damaged by my large, paw-like hands. There was a bit of bother when we removed the keyboard and the cable connecting it to the computer simply popped off without the piece of plastic that should have come with it. But really, she's in art school. What use does she have for a keyboard anyway? We live in a point and click world. Words just get in the way.

When I was done I re-assembled the device with only one mystery screw left over and a slight gap in one of the corners where I am sure ants will be moving in over the next few weeks to enjoy the sweet goodness we couldn't reach. We could not test my efforts as the entire system needs to completely dry out again for a day or two. Lindsey has kindly released me from any liability if my actions somehow let the magic smoke escape from her computer. I personally blame evil laptop pixies, but that just me.

Have we won yet?

The 'War on Abstract Concepts (tm)' is making great strides. Thanks to better international cooperation Canada was able to quickly deliver wrong information about one of its citizens to the U.S. The U.S., in turn handed him over to our friends, the Syrians who tortured him for a year before informing us that "Uh, this guy doesn't know anything dude. I mean, we broke him and guess what, nothing".

And for those of you in the 'Well this is just an isolated case' crowd, its seems we did it with three other Canadians as well. Hell, Bush doesn't even deny the secret prisons any more. How far does this insanity have to go?

Have you had enough yet? Don't forget to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. I beg you.

Remember Wierd Al?

I do, and he's got mad rap skillz... or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

Super cool...The Shire housing development

Many people have stated how they hate me because I live at Bag End, which they seem to think is a very cool place. They are right to hate me, it is cool. But if you're willing to relocate a little West I have JUST the place for you. It's so cool even I want to go see it when its done. I give you The Shire!

Sometimes I don't want to think

Driving up to Michigan Ren this weekend I had my ipod on random play. Given my obscure tastes the music covered a fairly wide spectrum from Thomas Dolby to Mozart. But somewhere south of Detroit Moby's "God moved on the surface of the water" came up.

I had used this music for the video slideshow of our volunteer work in Biloxi and New Orleans last year. I realized that it was just over a year ago that Katrina hit and things went terribly wrong down there on so many levels. Due to work, I didn't see any of the tv retrospectives, but I also turned off the radio, and avoided the paper. In short, I subconsciously blocked the date out.

Why?

My brother has sent me several articles about New Orleans but I haven't read them. I haven't visited the websites for Common Ground and Hands on USA, the groups we worked with in quite a while.

Why not?

Didn't I care anymore?

But as I drove down the road I found myself crying almost uncontrollably. The same feelings I had when I sat watching the Gulf coast be destroyed were bubbling up. The same sense of powerlessness. The same anger, the same frustration I felt at being unable to figure out some way ANY way to fix it somehow. To make it better. It's those feelings that I had been trying to avoid, because they utterly destroy me every time.

I pulled myself together to handle the Mad Max rush that is Detroit traffic and by the time I got to the Michigan Renfair site I was feeling better. I still had the heavy feeling in my chest. If I hadn't heard that song I would have felt a lot better, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves of life's tragedies. They define us, they drive us. They slap us across the face and yell at us to wake up and pay attention to the bigger world around us, to do something. Even if it makes you feel like you got kicked in the chest.

In my happy place

Last weekend was a big one. The opening of Ohio Ren and of course, labor day weekend. With three days to sell we had to pick up some sales and I'm happy to say that we did very well. Both Ohio and Michigan beat last years sales. But not all was well in Corset Land, oh no.

On Sunday my brand new sexy credit card maching refused to work. It wasn't just my machine though, my neighbor at Angus Harvey Kilts was also down. A call was made to tech support and we were informed that due to a power surge the server controlling our machines "blew up". There was no ETA for its return. What followed was six hours of me stressing as I tried to make sure I could still take cards. This is the second weekend I've had this thing and it cocks up. This is not what I want.

It came back online late in the day and worked fine Monday, but this shit will not stand. I'm going to try and get some answers as to why there was no backup system in place.

By Monday end of day my blood pressure was back to normal and the great sales really helped. I had help from a new minion named Sam since Heather and Diane were unavailable. She did a great job and worked her ass off.

I did manage to help my friend Alex get some sales and production help. His hats have been selling like hotcakes and his stock was pretty well decimated by Sunday. He needs to stay home and focus on making new stock. It's gotta be tough working a 40+ hour work week and then going home to make stuff.

Internets

I just got an email from a friend who lives even further in the boonies than me. Apparently he just got DSL and is giddy with joy:

"It's like Santa got the Easter Bunny to bring Halloween candy to the kids in the boondocks too..."

Congratulations my friend. Drink deep from the well of the internets. And to insure you waste ALL your free time, point your browser over to youtube.com

Ahhhhhh...Can't you just feel the productivity leaving your body?

Back to business

Michigan Renaissance Fair, second weekend. Lots of people to help out. Diane, Heather, Lindsey, Rossana and a new girl samed Sam.

Despite unpleasant weather we managed to have another kick ass weekend. It was made even better by the fact that we could actually take credit cards!! My current machine went wonko about two weeks ago and would not work. Thousands of dollars in sales were left unprocessed. It got so bad I actually had my minion Diane driving around her neighborhood in her pajamas trying to get a signal for this stupid machine. I am eternally in her debt. In the end, I told my merchant account provider in no uncertain terms that they had failed me for the last time. (Alas, my Jedi powers are not sufficiently developed for me to shoke these bastards over the phone).

I contacted a new company called Merchant Warehouse. I recommend them highly. I called on monday and was set up with a new machine by Friday. The new hotness is called the Way System (waysystems.com) and its pretty sweet. Essentially, they grafted a credit card swiper onto a cell phone. It's small AND it gets signal at the Michigan sight. I pray it works at Great Lakes but I won;t get to test it for a while. For now, I'm up and running. I was able to manually enter the previous weeks sales info so I will soon be seeing my money. Shameless plug, if you are interrested in a merchant account or taking credit cards, contact me and I'll put you in touch with the guy I worked with. For every person who signs up I get $50. Let me say though that even if I weren't getting a kick back, I would STILL recommend the Way system and Merchant Warehouse (which had the best price for the unit bar none).

There is no rest for the wicked though, we're off to the Ohio Ren Fair site in a day or so to clean up and repair our booths and do planting etc etc. I managed to rent out my tent to a nice fellow who is new to the show. This should help defray the costs of buying the tent. Money coming in is a good thing.

Funny

So, who's killed more people, God or Satan? You might be suprised.

Having...Trouble...Breathing

I think you will agree that the above product, which can be purchased from CostCo of all places for a mere $18,500 is an object so cool, that it may well be worth selling off a kidney for. That's the only way I could afford such a mind-numbingly cool thing such as this.

I spoke with my wife about this but the conversation didn't go well.

"I need $20,000"

She closed her eyes slightly as if she had experienced a small brain aneurysm.

"I'll bite, what for?"

"A pirate ship."

"Didn't we agree that putting 'Pirate ships for sale' into google was a bad idea?"

"This is a Pirate ship...in a tree!! Can there be ANYTHING COOLER??? I ask you, can there??"

"We need to replace the fridge."

I was taken suddenly aback. "The fridge? What's wrong with the fridge?"

"The milk is now a solid block of ice and the ice cream is now a chunky soup."

"Can't we just put the ice cream in the fridge and the milk in the freezer?"

"The door doesn't close right anymore. It makes a horrible rattling noise, it may be possessed"

I eyed the icebox suspiciously.

"Where's our Bible?" I asked.

"We don't have one."

"I could have sworn the Mormons dropped one when they ran screaming from the house a few weeks back."

"That was the UPS man with a package"

"Whatever. This demonic Frigidaire has me concerned."

I went to the bookshelf. What did we have that might dispell evil? I pulled out a book and waved it in front of the fridge.

"What's that?"

"Al Frankens 'Lies and the lying Liars that tell them.' it's all I could find."

"What about those ancient tomes in your study?"

"Good heavens woman, I want to dispell an appliance gremlin, not open a portal to an alternate dimension of evil. " I waved the book a few more times and felt satisfied.

"What was I asking about again dear?" I asked.

"Something about taking me to a movie."

"Movie? Why, yes! Something with Pirates....that's the ticket."

War, but not the bad kind

I just got back from the Pennsic War. This is an annual trip I have made for the past 20 years or so. It's the largest SCA event in the world (at about 12,000 people) and you have to attend it to fully understand it.

This year we were blessed with great weather (a rarity) and a general lack of drama in our camp (a very good thing). The biggest event for me was the resurection of the Hell Party. We ran this party for 6 years before discontinuing it about 4 years ago. But last year's parties were so dismal, so completely devoid of energy or fun that with the help of my campmates we resurected the party with pretty good results.

The party has a slight historical petigree. It was roughly based on church or 'Mystery' plays in the middle ages where the institutions of the church were mocked with slapstick comedy and bawdy humor. Our party featured several carnival style games; Bobbing for Bourbon and the cock-ring toss. We also had a whip-chick area with a stocks and St. Andrews cross. We served great beer and a concoction called Swamp Gas (composed of Mountain Dew and Everclear). We also set up a stage and brought in entertainers.

The one day of bad weather was of course, the night of the party. The grey skies turned black and the rain came just after the first act on our stage. In the rain it was almost impossible to arrange my entrance with the stage manager. In the end I just game in hoping the crowd would notice a 6'2 guy painted red with horns and a pitchfork. They did. I ascended the stage and my makeup began to run into my eyes, blinding me. And then, the three propane torches giving light to the camp, blew out leaving everything in darkness.

This was one suck-ass opening.

I got off stage and did a quick intro by the fire, stumbled 'back stage' and got the worst of the makup out of my eyes. When the rain let up I used some scrap paper on the end of my pitchfork to re-light the torches. The party began to pick up steam. We brought out a fire eater. After that, it was time for our secret weapon. We snuck a generator into our camp (not permitted by campground rules) and used it to power a snow machine that blew fluffy soap-based flakes over the crowd. It was amazing and the crowd loved it. More people crowded in. We sold t-shirts, cigars and indulgences for donations to help defray the cost of the party. This was my biggest worry. Running an event of this size takes a lot of cash. My friend Ed personally fronted about $1200 bucks to make this happen. If the weather had been just a little bit worse, the party would have failed, and more importantly, we would have been left with huge expences. In the end, the donations covered the cost of the party and allowed us to make a donation to the Tuchux Breast-Cancer charity (The Tuchux are a loose affiliation of barbarian types who have gotten a bit of a bad rap over the years).

It was an enormous undertaking. And none of it could have happened without the hard work of everyone in my camp. From locating and picking up long-disused props to setting up the games, the stage and the whipping area to selling tshirts, setting up and running the bar.

I think we reclaimed the 'coolest party' award in the eyes of the attendees. As usuall, I ended up taking a shower at 4am to try and get the red paint off. And the next day my back informed me that lugging 150lb kegs can be hazardous to your health. I spent much of the next 2 days in a bit of a haze. Doing the party just burned up a massive amount of my personal energy reserves. It wasn't just the physical part of helping run the party, but all the stressing out I did in the days before it. Now that its over I am more relaxed. People are already asking me about "Next Years big party". Sorry, I am giving absolutely NO thought to this right now. The Michigan Ren Fair is open and the Ohio Ren starts soon. My garage and shop are disaster areas. It's back to work.

But it was one Hell of a party.

Beer

Beer
Originally uploaded by stevepack.

This is a small beer trailer we liberated for the upcoming 'Hell Nite' party. Our plan is to tow it around Pennsic while playing ice cream truck music at full volume.



This weekends sales have been slow. This bums me out. The weather has been great and a decent crowd today. Bah! Sacrifice more kittens!



I am eager to get back to Pennsic. Lots to see and do.

3.2 MILLION firecrackers

I am unworthy.....

A quick bit of fun

Go ahead, push the button.

The Impossibility of Unknowing

I did not write this, but I believe it states in the clearest way, my feelings about the times we live in. It comes via DailyKos.com:

Fallujah. Signing statements. Abu Ghraib.

Waterboarding. Stress positions. Free speech zones.

The theological and historical differences between Sunni and Shi'ite. How levees are constructed. Why levees fail.

These are things I knew nothing about until George W. Bush.

I've always considered gaining knowledge an indisputable good, but these pieces of the world I've come to know in the past six years have the feel of being forced into me under threat. They now carry with them a weight and a darkness.

The Ninth Ward. Haditha. Guantanamo Bay.

How much sweeter to have picked up these nuggets of geography and history as I always have, serendipitously led through a leisurely stepping stone process of one book or conversation suggesting another, and yet another, and now a couple of twists and turns ... you start out here, reading Faulkner and next you're drawn to learning about cotton production and before you know it, you're at civil rights.

Instead, in all cases above, I'd begun my acquaintance because of headlines and horrors and a screaming, driving voice in my head: There's something wrong! There's something very, very wrong! Learn about it! Fast!

The jumble of panicked facts I feel I've had to jam into my brain to qualify as a reasonably informed citizen makes my skull feel swollen, as though I've had to take a crash correspondence course - sometimes several at once - at the same time I'm in a sprint for my mental life.

There's a loss in that, a taint on the previously enjoyable process of innocent inquiry. I've found fascinating, for instance, the original historical split between the Sunni and Shi'ite sects of Islam. Yet if subjects are filed in the brain under a color-coded system, this tale is filed under black and blue (and red for blood). The accompanying score is Adagio for Strings.

The tone is completely different for, say, my recent thirst for jazz, which arose through my son's budding interest and the two of us watching Ken Burns' marvelous series over a course of several days, eating life-threatening amounts of junk food while sprawled on couches in the living room.

Some nights I go to sleep under this administration and wonder: What new horror am I going to have cram into my head tomorrow morning? What new form of torture? What unfamiliar town or province?

My brain's been hijacked and my eagerness to read news killed. I know too much now compared with how much I knew in the innocent 1990's. And there seems no way to un-know it or bleach it clean of the flavor of its original acquisition. (I still see the infamous picture of the hooded prisoner standing on the box, arms outspread at Abu Ghraib, on a background of baby blue because I first encountered the photo and the terse, stunned narrative of horror over at Billmon's Whiskey Bar.)

Certainly of all the atrocities and diminishments since Bush took office, having personal fact-flavor problems seems unworthy of even a footnote. Arguably, I should have removed my head from my sorry American provincial ass a long time ago to learn more about Islam or the precise wording of the Geneva Conventions. Still, the knowledge of foreign cities, dodges of the law, how Abramoff's money came to be laundered ... all of these facts feel IV'ed into me on a timetable set by an administration I despise. That seems a final, intrusive indignity, small as it is.

When I was 20, I was in a serious car accident. I fractured my back, collar bones, four ribs. I'd ruptured my kidney, I'd had a chunk of flesh the size of a Girl Scout cookie ripped out of my knee. I was hospitalized more than a month, and I'd been proud of being reasonably stoic and properly grateful to have survived.

The day I was released from the hospital, I went home and took a shower, the first in nearly six weeks. As I lathered up - a luxury I can still savor in memory after weeks and weeks of bed-bound sponge baths - my fingers found, underneath my arm and along my shoulder blade, embedded pieces of gravel and glass that had not been properly debrided. I realized they were going to be a part of me forever because my flesh had already healed over them. And finally, I lost it, completely. I stood in the shower and wept for twenty minutes; it was some sort of symbolic final straw for me, this discovery of physical objects in me from the accident, minor though they were in the overall injury scheme. I think what grieved me the most was that they were on the hidden underside, the most tender part of my underarm and back, and that although they were harmless, I'd spend a lifetime remembering, every time I bathed, the precise stretch of road they came from and how they got there.

I feel like George W. Bush and his policies are gravel and glass in my brain. Forever.

There's no debridement of the image of the little girl in a dress, crying in horror and crouching over a pool of her parents' blood after they were killed at a checkpoint. There's no erasure of Gonzales' calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint." There's no rewinding of the tape in my head that juxtaposes the president playing guitar at a birthday party while people floated face down in the streets of New Orleans.

I find myself longing for ignorance, and that's a weakness and betrayal of everything I'd believed until George W. Bush came onto the scene. Again, this is a minor personal complaint and I'm sure I'll recover, eventually. My real concern is that this is less than you can say with certainty about the effects of this administration on this country and the rest of the world.