...Throw Rocks at Them - and here's why:

 

When I announce that I've just successfully applied caulk for the 1st time, I DO mean C-A-U-L-K...stupid males in my house with their every 7 seconds (mutter, mumble)

Sat down today & transcribed his letters fromm boot camp (have gotten 4 in the last three days) to email to send out to the list of interested parties.  Need to sit & write him again.  Sigh.  the house is so very quiet without him.

Ok, so skimming through a book on Tudor cooking (Brears, Peter.  Tudor Cookery.  Swindon: English Heritage,  1985.) found the following piece of information:
"A much more popular introduction from the New World was the turkey, a native of Mexico and of Central America, which had already found its way onto English tables by the 1540's.  One of Sebastian Cabot's commanders, Sir William Strickland of the East Riding village of Boynton, claimed to have brought the first turkeys into this country [England], and therefore adopted a white turkey cock with a black beak and red wattle as his family crest."

Cabot sailed to the New World in 1527, well within period. 

Out of curiousity, I checked Fairbairn's "Crests of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland" and found the following two blazons for Stricklands (p 458)
"STRICKLAND, a turkey cock, sa., membered and wattled, gu." and "STRICKLAND, Bart., Yorks., a turkey cock in pride, ppr.  A la volante de Dieu." (This, I think is the one being referred to by the cooking book)

Huh.  If I can find more than the one reference, it would make an interesting article about New World flora and fauna in period heraldry...Oh, Cormac....

Yah - it helps if I post the link to the coolness.  Sigh.

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/which-fantasy-writer-are-you

I really enjoyed taking this quiz (for once).  I found the questions to be thought-provoking and fairly insightful.  Much fun, and I'm pretty please with my result. 

The quiz is broken into four chapters and an epilogue.

 

( here's some more info on the structure of the quiz )

 

Your result for Which fantasy writer are you?...

Ursula K Le Guin (b. 1929)

7 High-Brow, -19 Violent, -9 Experimental and 27 Cynical!

These concepts are defined below.

( An explanation of the score breakdown  )

All sorts of fun.  I enjoyed judging particularly, and I think I learned more about Pentathlon from that than from my own entries.  As always, watching Caitlin de Wintour perform is a joy and an inspiration.  She can do more with two lines thatnother actors can do with whole speeches.  I look forward to participating again.  Many of the entries on display in the gym were truly amazing - the bog particularly stands out, but I'll post more after I go back today to look at them in more detail.
( 09 review and 11 goals in detail )</div>
I look forward to reading the judging sheets to see what else I can work on.

Other thoughts:
I'd love to be part of a two year Pentathlon Support group where people who know they're going to enter Pentathlon can chat, share projects and knowledge, commiserate, nag, etc.  I think it would be interesting to help each other and have company on the journey.  To this end, I have started a yahoo group called Caid_Pent_Support & now need to talk folks into joining it with me.   Any takers? 

These are five things that public_shaylan  associates with me and what I have to say about them. If you comment, I will give you five things, and then you can pass it on.

PATRON!, - Well, there was this one night at a GWW…Shaylan stopped by our camp for a visit with someone, but he was asleep & not very chatty (other than the cursing), so we ended up with a bottle of Silver Patron that we split as we wandered all over the war site visiting various parties….No matter what nayone else says I only drank half of it, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it :)

Zen Avocado Prophet – A friend & I were on a trip some years ago, and about an hour north from Solvang, an urgent need for coffee lured us off the freeway into the Village of Arroyo Grande. A farmers market was just about to start, so we wandered in there for just a bit. There were artichokes the size of my head, nectarines, apricots, olallieberries, fresh toasted tortilla chips, and...avocados. One particular booth sold only lemons and avocados, and the man running seemed to be utterly at peace with himself and the world. As we examined his avocados (bacon avocados, a slightly older variety than haas, with less oil but a richer flavor and soft enough to spread like butter, YUM!), we talked about our utterly vague plans for the day, and he looked right at us in his zen-prophet way and said, "If you really want to hang out and relax, you need to go to Avila, just past Pismo Beach." Something in the way he said it, maybe the way he made sure to look both of us in the eye, maybe the Obi-Wan peace he exuded...we had to follow his advice, so we drove north to an exit past Pismo marked Avila. The road wound down along a river canyon, ancient, with natural hot springs and lined with fruit farms, curving gently back and forth under the trees until it emerged into a cliff-lined hollow facing the sea - Avila. Apparently the town used to be just where the old oil pipeline ended, a bit rundown, an old dock...recently, townsfolk have worked to redevelop the place, to bring it back to life. We drove all the way to the end of the road, almost onto the pier at Port San Luis, there at what seemed like the end of the world. As we stepped out of the car, we heard the bark of a bull seal echoing off the underside of the dock. No waves really, just the gentle slap of bottle-green ripples against the moorings. About halfway down the pier, a fishing trawler had pulled up to a small floating dock. On this dock, the bull seal and his harem had decided to take the sun. We watched the seals sun and swim and interact for some thirty minutes before strolling all the way down to the end, past the fisher folk selling wares caught that morning, crab, link cod, halibut, clams, etc. There, at the end of the world, we stood and watched the sea, heard the warm call of her, so much gentler than the wild waves of the southern beaches, and thanked the avocado prophet for sending us here.

Singing – reference Patron above – she & I spent large portions of our wandering that evening singing endless verses of a decidedly off-color song (a mark of her amazingness is that she managed to teach it to me in my inebriated condition)

Wanderer – I even do it without the help of tequila.... During the summers, when my dear ones are off with their father, I feel a little lost at home, so I go wandering off to have adventures in as many places as I can reasonably afford until they come home.

putting the beautiful views into beautiful words – I like to talk about my wanderings :)
</lj>

So, here's the thing. I propose the following "scientific" experiment -

Given: Something like a lottery is essentially random and cannot be predicted by any known means.

Hypothesis: Using a pendulum to find next week's lottery numbers is no more or less successful than using quick pick. You can't "scry" what is essentially random.

What I wonder:
1) What would the rate of success be if one scried for lottery numbers over a 4 week period? How often, compared to quick pick, would one match 2 or more numbers?

2) If more than one person scries each week, without discussing their weekly results, how often will each weeks scried numbers match between individuals? Will they match at all?

The Process:
1) Twice weekly for a period of 4 weeks, use a pendulum to select 5 numbers & 1 mega number for a given lottery. Keep track of conditions of selection (after meditating, w/o meditating, etc) & try to keep those consistent.
2) Twice weekly for a period of 4 weeks, buy a quick pick for the same lottery for which you are scrying. Again, try to keep the purchase conditions consistent - time of purchase, location, etc.
3) Record the numbers scried, the numbers quick-picked, and the results of the official draw twice weekly
4) Keep track of the relative success of each attempt - How many numbers matched? How many numbers repeated? Was there a "lag" of matching from draw to draw?
5) At the end of the experiment period, compare numbers between participants. Did the scried numbers match? If so, how often? If one person was more successful than others, what quantifiable differences were there between methodologies?

Expected results with possible variations:
1) No verifiable pattern between quick pick and scried results (some successful results and some not successful, but nothing in a consistent pattern) - hypothesis confirmed
2) negative pattern (absolutely no successful results at all across the board) develops between scried results and quick picks - hypothesis tentatively confirmed, but more data needs to be collected
3) positive pattern emerges of successful results - hypothesis tentatively questionable, but more data needs to be collected

Why? Because I have way too much time on my hands to think about fribble. :)

...driving up to the window at Starbucks & acting as the impromptu backup singers for the barrista who just couldn't get "Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer" out of his head.

:) I love the holidays.

i have seen beauty
stars and circles endlessly
entwined and repeating
echoing the deep bowl
of heaven
in all its vibrance
yet rooted to earth
pierced by spears of sunlight
a passionate worship
a stone hymn
a loving reflection
of the endless glory
that is the Creator

Inspired by Isfahan - http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/isfahan_htm/isfahan_movie_index.htm

Thanks, Sasha, for the link :)

...that the holiday season is going horribly wrong. Ready?

On sale at Borders: an electronic Menorah, and a dreidel that plays the song so that you don't have to sing it.

Snort.

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual non-same-sex marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

Not currently, but was in one for 15 years.

(gakked with my thanks from eowyna )

As was demonstrated in an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade.

The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic, to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.

It's all about old school with me, so I'll throw in Marbury vs. Madison (1803).  Yay for judicial review.

answer in a comment & repost a blank one to your blog

( and away we go... )

Realizations from a longish conversation with an acquaitance on another site - feel free to ignore

( CRA and the free market )
Well, even if I didn't "win" my discussion with my acquaintance (a hard-core laissez-faire free-marketer who believes that any state interference with the market is anti-democratic), I really learned a good bit about the lengths that some segments of the body politic will go.  Fun stuff.

Ok, so I drive alot & have planty of time alone in my car to wander down mental rabbit trails.  This one actually seemed interesting, so I thought I'd share:

1) Prior to the development of writing existed a fairly rich oral culture.  The nature of an oral culture is that knowledge and information are essentially mutable.  Stories originally presented as fact are adapted depending on the perspectives, needs, & experiences of the storyteller & the audience.  For example, many common "mythological" tales that seem utterly fantastical can be traced back to a plausible historical event.

2) Once writing developed (& became accessible to the masses as opposed to only the priesthood or the elite), knowledge became fixed and much more difficult to change.  Essentially, the idea that "It's written down, it must be true" came to dominate human perceptions.  In addition, the perception developed that in order for something to become accepted as truth, it had to be written down and disseminated as text.

3) With the advent of the internet, can it be argued that we are coming full circle to more of a pre-literate perception of knowledge and fact?  Online, knowledge is far from fixed.  It changes day to day and moment to moment.  For example, when citing a web article in a piece of reserach, one must put the date of access, just in case the information changes in future editions of that page.  In addition, in emails, "facts' that are clearly biased and often outright lies are passed from reader to reader as truth, and as such somehow gain a standing that they would not otherwise have.

So, anyway, there's my noodling.  I'd love feedback on this one.

Well, at least I'm on the interesting side.  More to work on for me :)

( meme-age )