What we've been doing for the last nine months

All right, it's actually been closer to eleven months since I last posted. However, we've been doing something extra special for the last nine of those eleven months.

Namely, one of us has been waddling around like some kind of penguin/walrus crossbreed.

She was so cute. :)

Anyway, today was the day.


What this picture doesn't capture very well is the fact that he's moving at least as much on the outside as he did on the inside for the last few months. He's big, strong, and active, and kept trying to wiggle in such a way as to get all that unpleasant light off his face.

Now, for the sake of privacy it's been our policy not to reveal the names of our little ones online, so we won't be sharing the rather manly-sounding Irish name we gave this little cub. We need an online pseudonym for him!

The trouble is, we haven't had him around long enough to come up with a good name based on his personality. Even with the Happy Boy, where he got his online pseudonym when still less than a year old, we still had some personality clues--he was usually quite happy and playful, even in unfamiliar settings and around complete strangers.

But we have no such clues about this new little guy, aside from the fact that he was somersaulting like a gymnast inside mommy for the last several months. The only other clues we have are from his vital statistics:

• Born at 1:04 am.
• Weighing 9 lbs, 10 oz...
• 21 inches long...
• Had a "strong, lusty cry" before even making it all the way out of mommy. His APGAR score was 10 within ten minutes or so after birth, so he's healthy as a horse...
• And apparently, mommy tells me he feeds like one too.

So I'm open to pseudonym suggestions in the comments (assuming I have any readers left after 11 months), based on what little we know about him. But to open up the bidding, until I get a better suggestion, I'm referring to him as "The Chunk".

Have at it. :-)

Boom The Cannon!

It's been a while since I've posted a sample of my eldest daughter's literary attainments online.

(Heck, it's been a while since I've posted anything online.)

But one never quite knows what one is going to get with the Pillowfight Fairy. In years past we've seen diagrams for schemes of airborne sheep rustling, to pictures of dungeons ("Warning: bad people only") to some surprisingly dark bus-stop nocturnes.

One of the fun parts of being a home-school daddy is seeing the progress that your kids make. I look at those earlier efforts, which were done over two years ago, and I marvel at how much progress she's made since then.

But she's still my daughter of course. And naturally, that means her poems involve artillery.

Yup. She was assigned today to write a poem, of her own composition, in cursive. Here's what this little second-grade daddy's girl came up with:
Behold! Ye launch a cannonball! For freedom! And messes!

That. Is. My. Daughter.

A Quartet of Fun Videos

Ok, so I haven't been blogging much lately--and I haven't been blogging as many of those long, wordy, overly-sincere disquisitions on What's Wrong With the World And How To Solve It.

I suppose you could look at it like this... it is, after all, that time of year when we're supposed to give thanks for the blessings in our life, right? Well then, perhaps my readership should Give Thanks that they don't have to sit through another of my 5000-word manifestos today. :)

And I'm thankful that I don't have to write them just yet.

Instead, I've been collecting some fun videos I've been seeing online lately, and thought I'd pass them on. No doubt you've seen some of them already, but perhaps you haven't seen all four.

So, we'll start with one that's hit the internet lately in a really, really big way. It's shown up on a lot of people's blogs, including that of my sister-in-law (although that's not actually where I first saw it). Behold: the Muppets do Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

And, as usual, Animal steals the show. But Beaker (who, along with the Swedish Chef, is my favorite Muppet) puts in a pretty good showing, too.

(Oh, and my sister-in-law has some wonderful Thanksgiving-day pictures of my three kids, and their two cousins, playing in a pile of leaves. Take a look here.)


Ok, here's the next one, which has been all over the TV lately, so most people have already seen it. But if there be any more Luddites out there like Tonya and me who don't watch TV, then you might not have seen it yet, in which case you are welcome to treat this post as a public service. With a hat tip to The Anchoress (where I first saw it myself), I give you Cop vs. Kitty:

You know, I'm glad that this wasn't my cat Pasha doing that. What's cute with a three-lb kitten would, with my arthitic yet lovable 15-lb lardbutt, be downright tragic.


Ok, here's the shortest video of the bunch. I had been web-surfing a few nights ago, when the Pillowfight Fairy came over to the computer and saw some random link about albatrosses (the seabirds with the 7-foot wingspans). So we clicked it, and watched some video on them.... and then clicked on some more, and some more... and eventually we were watching all kinds of nature videos. (By the way, the ones of albatrosses landing on ground, as opposed to on the water, are good fodder for seven-year-old humor. Apparently, albatross stall-speed is faster than albatross running speed, so their landings tend to involve plenty of unintentional mayhem. Especially when they land on a beach crowded with other albatrosses.) Well, we went from albatrosses to frogs, to insects to...

...to this one that was temptingly captioned, "Frog vs. Dragonfly". What we expected was another of those videos showing nature in all its gory glory, red in tooth and claw (or whatever it is that frogs have). What we got gave everyone an unexpected and surprisingly hearty laugh.

Geez. That's not much better than what Pasha could have done.


Ok, here's the fourth one, which is the longest video of the bunch. I was reading along on the Wired website, on a story entitled Thanks a Lot: Pop Culture's Finest Moments of 2009. Now, I'm never one much to put the phrases "fine" and "pop culture" in the same sentence, unless the sentence is something like, "That's a fine load of pop culture you've managed to land us in this time." Nevertheless, I was bored, and there was a cool picture of Superman next to it, so I thought, "meh..." and clicked. (I was actually more intrigued by the picture of Dr. Horrible next to the story immediately underneath it. Apparently, there's going to be a sequel to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog! Huzzah! I say.)

There's actually some interesting stuff on that list of pop culture. But the one that caught my eye was for an episode of the latest Batman animated TV series, Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Now, the title itself does nothing for me, sounding too much like that of a soap opera. But the Wired write-up of this particular episode made me cock my Spock-brow:

After decades of taking the animated Dark Knight deeper into the shadows, Warner Bros. lightened things up with this bright series, which is resiliently clever. Nowhere is its broad, demographic-crushing appeal more brilliant than in this musical episode, which features the vocal acrobatics of the resurgent Neil Patrick Harris as the Music Meister, a villain who can send humanity into a trance by singing (mostly about himself). Ranging from outright cheese to subversive comedy, “Mayhem of the Music Meister” found Batman hitting the high notes, literally, while beating back a horde of ballet-dancing supervillains and superheroes, all while sampling iconography from Milos Forman’s Amadeus to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Best animated hero worship of the year, hands-down. —Scott Thill

O.M.G. An episode of Batman... done as a musical? All the superheros and supervillains singing and dancing? Subversive cheesiness? I. Am. So. There. So I clicked on it, and had a big dopey grin on my face for the next twenty-three minutes or so.


View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I especially liked Batman's deadpanned line at the end of the "Death Trap" song about halfway through.

I remember, as a kid, that occasionally the powers-that-be would do something weird like this in one of the cartoons that I watched at the time, and I always found it hokey to the point of being totally embarrassing. Why do they do stuff like this? Don't they know how dorky it is? And then I grew up, and discovered that these were often the only episodes of the cartoons in question with anything like a long-term redeeming quality. By the way, this includes the "Kill the Wabbit" Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd episode, which in hindsight (and a bit more immersion in the lore of Wagner) becomes freakin' brilliant.

Anyway, this is the kind of episode that I once would have totally embarrassed me by its sublime dorkiness. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. :)

A Sign That Our Daughter's Moral Training Is Not Complete...

From the Adrenaline Junkie (Age 4.9):

"Sometimes I feel like... like... like I don't have enough things."

Where the Heck do They Learn These T hings?

So the Happy Boy, still aged two, just ran up to me.

And, of course, being two, he made absolutely no attempt to stop.

Whump.

"Ow", I explained, somewhat annoyed. "Why did you just do that?"

And my two-year-old boy, who's not yet speaking in complete sentences, looked straight up into my eyes, and sweetly explained:

"Torture Daddy."

Where the heck do they pick these things up? He's two, and he already has a firm grasp of the term torture.

And although he can't pronounce it yet, it appears he also has down the concept of "mortification of the flesh", as we just caught him intentionally (and happily) running headfirst into the cabinets....

A Tale of Time Travel

Saw something recently that tickled my funny bone, in an intellectual sort of way, and thought I'd share it with y'all.

Background: My wife has somewhat unusual tastes in entertainment fare, when compared with most of female-kind in this country. She's one of those types highly-sought-after by us geeks, who actually enjoys science fiction. She once went to a Star Trek convention, and was mistaken for being in costume. Yup, she had just dressed in what for her was normal street-clothes, which happened to consist of a very 80's-style red jumpsuit with black turtleneck and black boots, and she just happened to be mistaken for one of the women in Khan's posse....

Okay, she enjoys more than just science fiction; she has enough girlyness in her that she occasionally watches the 5-hour BBC Pride & Prejudice miniseries that we have on DVD. Still, she doesn't usually go for the really weepy stuff. She likes explosions.

And big muscles.

(Hmm. Makes me wonder... How'd she wind up with me? Must be the potential for explosions....)


...


Ahem. Anyway, her favorite sci-fi sub-genre is Time Travel. Yup, she loves stories where people go back in time and accidentally cause themselves not to be born. Or they become their own parents or something. Pretty much, the more convoluted the story, the more it makes your mind bend just thinking about how they got themselves into this mess, or how they're going to get out of it by the end of the hour, and she's there. She was a big fan of the time travel stories on Star Trek; she was a big fan of Dr. Who; and she loved Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (a judgment with which I heartily concur).

So of course, I had to share the following news with her when I saw it online the last few days. It gave her a bit of a smile. Hopefully it'll do the same for you.


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But first, I have to pose a time-travel thought experiment.

Suppose someone builds a time machine, and uses it to go back into the past. What would happen?

Well, there are two schools of thought. One is that the timeline doesn't change, because everything the time traveler does when he gets to the past already happened. If the time traveler loses his wedding ring in the past, his contemporaries from his home year will be able to find it exactly where he lost it. In fact, someone may have found it already, in the intervening years between when the time traveler lost it in the past, and when he started out on that journey in the future. Under this school of thought, the time traveller can't do anything that wasn't already done before.

A good movie that appears to take this approach is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. ("Trash can... remember a trash can!")

The other school of thought is that the time traveler can in fact change the past, and by doing so will change the future. This is the school of thought on display in the Back to the Future movies. Marty has to fix the past before he goes home to the future; otherwise, since he accidentally broke up his parents, he would cease to exist.

Oops.

Well, just for kicks and giggles, let's assume that the latter of these scenarios is true--that a time traveler from the future can change the past to something different from what happened in the time traveler's history. What then?

Since I'm a geek, allow me to go to the diagram.
Let's say the above diagram represents a time-line. Now, let's say that a time travel experiment is started up that makes changes in the past.

So far, so good. The trouble is, since the past has changed, that means that the timeline diverges; from the moment in the past that the time travel experiment makes something different happen than what went before, the time line has changed--and the remainder of the original timeline, the one on top in these diagrams, never happened.

So really, only the bottom timeline exists anymore. And it is identical to the first timeline, up until the point where the time traveling object appears (seemingly out of nowhere, as observed by people in the past). From that point on, the timelines start to diverge.

Now here's where the fun begins. The timeline is now proceeding differently than it did before. This may in fact cause changes to the circumstances of the time travel experiment itself! What happens then? Well, that experiment will then be run at a slightly different time, and send its payload to a slightly different time in the past, causing yet another timeline to form (and voiding the remainder of the timeline we just constructed, too). And then this timeline will cause changes to the circumstances of the time travel experiment, causing yet more changes in the past....
Now, it seems to me that these alterations to the past timeline would accumulate; they wouldn't necessarily void each other. If the first experiment puts a bowling ball back through time, that changes the timeline; then the next iteration puts a nectarine through instead, what then? Well, since the timelines are identical up until the point in time that the time travel causes them to diverge, it means all the old alterations would still be there as well--including the bowling ball. (Though I'm certainly open to the idea that someone with greater powers of logic than me will come along and contradict this point. If I'm really lucky, maybe he'll come from the future!)
So what's left? Well here's the catch. Ever heard of the "Butterfly Effect"? Any change to a chaotic system, no matter how minor, causes little changes... which cause bigger changes... which eventually cause the system to look completely different than it would otherwise have been. This has long been a bugaboo in the world of weather forecasting. The problem is that weather systems are so sensitive to initial conditions, that missing the tiniest cause--like the flap of a butterfly's wings--will eventually cause the predictive model to yield wildly inaccurate results. The addition of that butterfly's wing flap could result in a hurricane showing up at a different time and place than it otherwise would have, for instance.

But don't we have the same thing in time travel? One minor change sends out eddies and ripples into the timeline, which grow--uncorrected--until the future looks nothing at all like it would otherwise have been. And this huge loop of time-travel changes, with each iteration changing the past, and in turn changing itself, would be dumping an awful lot of unpredictable, disruptive factors into the past.

Eventually, something is going to break. Rather, one of these changes will--through random chance--cause a tornado to hit the time travel research lab. Or will cause the wrong congressman to win the election, who decides to cut the research funding. Or will cause a giant fire-breathing turtle to appear and devour the lead scientist.

After all, this time-travel cycle can happen an arbitrary number of times, and is guaranteed to go on until the cycle is broken--by some sequence of events that stops the experiments. Then, you have a stable timeline, with no more loops.
Now, this timeline will have a lot of seemingly-odd, highly coincidental events in it, that to an objective observer just seem to conspire to shut down the experiment. Like that out of season tornado, followed by that crooked election, followed by that fire-breathing turtle. The observer might be tempted to think that God doesn't actually want us to discover time travel, right?

Either that, or God has an absolutely wicked sense of humor. And He's into slapstick.


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So what would these "highly coincidental" events look like in real life, that would prevent time travel from happening?

Well, it might look a little like this.

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

...

With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

Incidentally, I loved the comments on this article. I got a particularly good laugh from this one by HyMinded:

11/05/09 at 11:10 pm

The bird's briefing:

The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station.

...


But what's really funny to me--partly in a "ha-ha" kind of way, and partly in the Spock-eyebrow-amused kind of way, is just how many serious scientists are taking this kind of reasoning seriously. After all, my little exposition up above seems pretty tongue-in-cheek to me, but apparently no one can find the logical flaw in the thing that can break the whole argument down. Take a look at this article from Time describing the same incident, and tell me if that isn't the case.

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.

...But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the [Higgs Boson] in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons...

In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."

Yeah. That and the fire-breathing turtles.

What I've Been Doing All Summer

Don't have a whole lot of time to post now, but I know that there are a whole bunch of people out there who've been wanting to see this. I might update this post a little later with more details about my little girl's Wood Elf outfit...

Behold, the Adrenaline Junkie's Halloween costume:

Assume a Perfectly Spherical Woman

No, that wouldn't actually be anyone I know. It's a little like that Perfectly Frictionless Ice that they keep asking you about in physics class--it doesn't exist in the real world, but assuming it does actually allows you to solve the math problem.

Well, I'm not sure this counts as an end to my months-long blogging hiatus, but I thought I'd pass along a bit of a Public Service Announcement:

The 2009 Ig Nobel awards have been announced! This is usually the scientific highlight of my year, and this year has some good ones. Perhaps not as good as last years study of how the analysis of archaeology sites--and our reconstruction of ancient history--can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo, but pretty good nonetheless:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine...

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.
REFERENCE: "Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila," Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M. Castano...

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.
REFERENCE: "Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism...

And here is the one that inspired the title of this post:

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.
REFERENCE: "Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins," Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature...

You know, I've always kinda wondered about that myself. I suppose I'd just assumed their physics resembled those of those old Weebles toys from way back when I was a kid.

For obvious reasons, there are some fun pictures at the Ig Nobel site (and elsewhere, all over the 'net) of this last one being demonstrated:

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.”

Well, of course you need two. After all, only half the population is female...


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As I said, I'm not sure this post heralds the end of my blogging hiatus. I actually like having that extra time in the evenings to do stuff. And I am doing stuff! Some time, of course, is spent doing the chainmaille that will become the Adrenaline Junkie's Halloween costume (which is shaping up to be totally awesome); but I also started up an exercise routine about last May or so, that has knocked about 10% off my weight. And it has just been plain nice to be able to sit around and not worry about whether I needed to get online to feed the beast tonight.

But I'll eventually get around to that post on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems I've been meaning to do for aeons.

Building the Home Armory

Ok, so I haven't blogged since sometime in May--and even then it was a bunch of odd limericks.

But, things haven't been slow around the house. We have in fact been busy with a bunch of other stuff--everything from lawn work, to new exercise and diet stuff (which I might blog about, if another bout of blog ennui doesn't set in), to dress-making, to...

Yup, my new (and rather expensive) hobby:
Dressing my toddler in maille.

What you see in the above photo is my little kid wearing his hauberk for the first time. It wasn't actually the first time I'd tried to get him in it; this was just the first time he actually cooperated. And let me tell you, you think it's hard getting an uncooperative toddler in his PJs? PJs are a cinch next to that thing. If he doesn't want to wear it, it ain't going on.

Well, I actually got him in it, and took a few pictures, and was feeling very, very happy. So! I pulled down one of the helmets and one of the swords I'd made way back in late 2007, and got them on him. Let me tell you, he was noble, he was gallant, he was cute as a button! So I tried to take another picture, and the camera chose that exact moment to tell me that the battery was dead. Figures. Immediately after that, he pulled off the helmet, dropped the mighty blade Årþørsgrößtetüðpik, and ran off to go do one of those things that toddlers are always running off to go do. The moment was lost. Sigh. I've never since been able to get him back in the whole get-up.

But! Some time after the camera's battery was re-charged, I corralled his four-year-old sister and dressed her up in the whole getup. Behold my midget valkyrie:

With pineapples on her PJs. Very apropos.

Hm... That's very nice and all, but at some point I'm going to have to make a coif with mantle. That neck looks pretty vulnerable.

Ok. Well, one thing about making maille is that you never know in advance how it's going to turn out; and when I tried it on the kids, I discovered that it needed a fair amount of adjustment. The seams under the arms pulled a lot of slack out of the chain pattern, and made the armholes too tight. And the neck was too big. The trouble with toddlers (one trouble with toddlers, actually) is that they have really big heads (proportionately), and really narrow shoulders. Any neckhole that's big enough to go around their heads, is also big enough to slip off their shoulders and make it look as if they're wearing strapless gowns. And let me tell you, strapless gowns would be a big hit on a medieval battlefield.

But one other thing about making maille is that you can always go back and change it after the fact. It's not like cutting cloth, where after the cloth is cut you can never put it back the way it was; with chain, you just add more until you have what you want. So, I started doing ad-hoc modifications until I had it the way I wanted it. I added some width to the arms, I built up the neck, and I added a slit in back (with clasps) so that the head could make it through the newer, tighter neck-hole.
And here the little knight is, doing something a little more studious than his normal dragon-slaying maiden-chasing routine.
And here he is looking for dragons under the dining room table. Nope, no dragons here, but there are some maidens lurking about in the shadows...
And here's the full get-up by itself.
I've actually added a few rows to the torso since this picture was taken, so it's a bit longer now. I'm thinking I'll keep adding a little at a time for now, until it gets to just above the knee, or until I run out of rings. Gotta protect the family jewels, and all.

And in case you're wondering, it's made out of "bright" aluminum--it's an aluminum alloy that contains some magnesium and some other stuff to slow it's tarnish rate. It's very shiny. The shirt weighs something less than four pounds. If it were made of stainless steel instead, it would weigh three times as much, and my little knight would be pinned to the floor.

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Ok, so that project is pretty much done, aside from the constant after-tweaking that we arteests can never seem to resist doing to our works. Now what?

Well....

That picture of the mighty blade Årþørsgrößtetüðpik? Well... it's not looking like it's in too-good of a shape anymore. After all, blades made of cardboard don't last very long. Årþørsgrößtetüðpik and her sister blade Uncalibur-ated are more than a year-and-a-half old, which for cardboard blades is something like 173 in dog-years. It was time to get some new swords.

But the thing is, you don't want your kids injuring each other, so you need to find something either really lightweight, or really foam-like. Now, there are various piratey-looking swords out there, but they don't actually look right with chainmaille. You want straight swords for that kind of work--nice long ones, so the combatants can swing at each other while yelling taunts from Monty Python ("Tis but a flesh wound!" "What are you going to do, bleed on me?") (Which reminds me of another bit of our cultural corpus I'm going to have to introduce them to someday....) Now, Nerf has a few foam swords out, and they are long, straight ones... but they have neon yellow and blue hilts, and look like they are straight out of some Manga comic (which they probably are).

Nor could I find anything online that looked right.

So?

So I took a trip to the local hardware store, followed by the local fabric store, then came home, and....

Is it just me, or does my wife look more enticing than usual tonight? There's just something about a woman with a big-ol' honkin' sword....

(Now, if I could just get her in maille, well... I'd be in absolute Valhalla.)

Basically, I got a length of half-inch PVC pipe for the core, which I cut down to a decent length for blade-plus-hilt. I also got a length of wood with a square cross-section of 1.25", and cut that into pieces for the hand-guards and pommels. To make the blade, I wrapped the PVC pipe in thick foam padding, then wrapped the padding in duct tape; I inserted the hand guards and bolted them in place; then I wrapped the hilt in duct tape, put the pommel on the bottom, and bolted that on.

The first sword I wrapped a bit too tightly. The foam is a wee bit too compressed, so it hits a bit harder than the other two. Somehow, the Pillowfight Fairy figured this out, and now, of the three swords, she wants to use that one all the time. Go figure. We don't let her.

(Incidentally, that's the one that Tonya is wielding in that picture above, with that smile on her face that says "The Beatings Will Now Begin". No wonder I think it's so sexy....)

Ahem. Anyhoo, these swords are an absolute blast to play with. The two girls and I had them outside earlier today, and they ganged up on me. You know, I may be bigger, stronger, and more coordinated than they are, but there are two of them; and when they figured out that "We can attack him from opposite directions, at the same time!" I really had to do some scrambling.

I also showed them how to do a decent parry. Now, that's a good Fathers' Day activity.

Tonight as I was taking the pictures that follow, the girls were smacking each other silly--including one instance where the girls simultaneously raised their swords high up in the air, and then whapped each other clean on top of each other's heads. It was almost as though they'd choreographed it....
Obviously, they have to treat them as two-handed swords. The swords are a little too heavy for them to use one-handed. I suspect, if they keep playing with them like this, that will change pretty quickly....

It was rather funny. At one point the conversation sounded like this:

Fairy (echoing Daddy from earlier in the day): "You need to learn how to parry."

Whap.

"See?"

Somehow I can't see this last picture without thinking to myself: "Luke... I am your father."


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Ok, so what's next?

Well, I still have a few (hundred, maybe thousand) rings to add to the torso of the Happy Boy's hauberk. After that, I have a new shipment of rings coming from The Ring Lord with which to make an outfit for the Adrenaline Junkie. I've got this cute little idea planned out for a wood-elf outfit for her, to be made from aluminum rings that have been anodized to look like bronze (but weigh only about three-tenths the amount), and from overlapping metallic scales of green anodized aluminum.

And as I said, this is a very expensive hobby. I need the Junkie's outfit to take a long time to make... so that our finances can recover before I start making the Fairy's outfit. She's actually wanting something in pink.

Did Valkyries ever wear pink?

I think not. (Gag.)

Meine Gesamtkunstwerkpoesie ist Verpfuscht

Funny how having a hobby like chainmail leads the minds in weird directions.

I had a bit of a slow workday today, and my mind began to wander to about the third maille project I have planned after I finish the one I'm working on now. My daughters have decided they want maille dresses, of course; so I have to think of ways of making maille dresses for them that actually look right. I mean, that's one heck of a novelty item, there; it's not likely they'll be wearing these things to church some bright and cheery Sunday morning. So I don't just think about the maille outfits themselves, I think about the whole ensemble.

Q: Why the heck would a girl be wearing chainmail?
A: Because she's a warrior maiden, darn it!

So, the next question becomes: what kind of warrior maiden?

Well, I have a cute little wood-elf outfit in mind for the Adrenaline Junkie, when I get done with the hauberk I'm making for the Happy Boy. But after that, for the Pillowfight Fairy?

Gotta be a valkyrie. Definitely gotta be a valkyrie.

Well, as I said, it was a slow day at work; and as I was sitting there in front of the glowing box, my mind started to move onto valkyries. And then I started thinking about Wagner's Ring Cycle, and about Brünhilde, and...

See, now, this is the way my only-sometimes-coherent mind works:

...and then I started to think of a limerick about Valkyries.

?!?!?!?!

Yup. Bet you never thought of that one before. A limerick, of all things, for crying out loud? Wagner in his grave has just rolled over.

Well, yes. After all, there's something subtly humorous about the Ring Cycle. It's so big, and so grand, and so darn serious, that it walks very close to the edge of self-mockery. And it only takes a little push before it tips over--like that glorious "Kill the Wabbit" number that Warner Brothers did back in the sixties, that youtube has quite lamentably taken down for copyright reasons. I mean, photographs like this one do tend to lend themselves to parody and ridicule, precisely because the people therein take themselves so seriously.

So--the limerick! Take a good long look at the photo at the link, try to ignore the fact that the bearded guy is Wotan (a bass) and not Siegfried (a heldentenor), and...

...well, it works best when read out loud, very dramatically. Think William Shatner dramatic.

The young heldentenor, he swünz,
At the song of great Hilde von Brün's;
With her spear, shield and armor
So nothing can harm her
Magnificent, iron ballünz.

[insert sound of record scratching...]


...


Ok, so much for my Gesamtkunstwerkpoesie. By this point I was in the rhyming mood. I was also approaching Vogon territory, but I was having fun.

So!

Well, I suppose I should have stopped, but I didn't. So somewhere from the depths of my head (depths of my head?) I coaxed this one out, on a topic near and dear to my wife and me right about now:

A tutor who tuted the flute
Tried to tutor his toddler to pooot.
But the bairn loved the swooshie,
And quite feared the flooshie,
So the toddler pooot tut'ring was moot.

And no, this limerick was not autobiographical. Not even in the slightest.

Y'all are lucky that I decided not to rhyme flusher with gusher. I was tempted to, but that might have been pushing it a little too far. And the whole flusher/gusher thing isn't autobiographical, either. Nope. Not at all.

Once upon a long time ago, I blogged a limerick I had thought up, and my sister-in-law (who had just had a long-distance online haiku contest with a friend) quipped:

This makes me think that a limerick contest with Tim would be inadvisable.

I appreciate the sentiment, of course... but the more I write these things, the more I think that limerick contests are probably inadvisable under any circumstances.


...


Which brings me to the third one. At this point I was almost but not quite rhymed out. And I was definitely in Vogon territory by now. So I thought of one that my mother most likely would approve of, as would my wife. The sentiment here should be well considered by anyone who decides to do limericking on the internet:

Don't advertise smut with a bugle!
With naughtiness one must be frugal.
Though your meaning be mean,
Your words must be clean--
Lest you draw all those perverts with Google.

So that's probably it for one day. I'll try to be more productive at work tomorrow.

P.S. Here's a little fun one I saw somewhere. Do I have any commenters that can interpret this one for me?