Well, Saturday was pretty damned busy anyway. Friday was a usual workday, aside from hauling my behind out to Amherst to grab the kid (which I don’t mind doing at all – we had some nice bonding over college and work gossip and our friends Valentine Wolfe’s new record), with a stop at the Appomatox Court House National Historical Site (again, me and my National Parks…) to walk around, enjoy the site, and *own* the Pokemon gyms for most of the weekend.

Saturday started with me trying to run some errands, which I did, but my farmers’ market connection wasn’t around at the town square (missed you, Jerry!), which was unfortunate, but I’ll live. We then spent most of the rest of the morning at the Celtic Festival, where the entire family except me (Andrew made his performance debut, and looked pretty damned good, if I do say so myself) did the Irish dance thing to an appreciative audience, and I got to chat with a couple of friends I haven’t seen in a while, and also have some pretty good pub-style curry chips from a food truck called the “Frying Scotsman”, enjoy some of the Highland Dance competition (this is not the Irish my folks do, but rather a Scottish form) where one of Mary’s college friends did pretty damned well, and see a bunch of other neat stuff like the British car show and a bunch of Irish Wolfhounds.

After wandering about a little bit, I made my way out a bit before the rest to drag myself and my gear (and a couple of capos because Scott forgot his) down to North Raleigh NC to do a show with The Blibbering Humdingers at HonorCon. Like I’ve said, The Royal Manticoran Navy aren’t necessarily our crowd, but there’s a lot of crossover (partial because HonorCon is local to S&K), and for some reason, the shows we do here, while small, tend to be a little *silly* and a bit unforgettable.

This year was no exception – we played for two solid hours, ran through a good bit of our repertoire, including some new tunes we haven’t actually really recorded yet (but will be on the official full-length release of Fantastic Geeks and Where to Find Them), including the highly-regarded “Elegy for a Nerf Herder” and the first public performance of the still-in-process-of-being-written “Little Lego Loki” (thanks, btw, to Mark and Samantha for the video – they pretty much put up the whole show if you care to go digging). I haven’t actually listened to all the recordings yet to see how it carries on phone videos, but I wanted to send a hearthfelt thanks/shout-out to Perry(? – apologies if I got the name wrong) our soundperson, who made us sound awesome, which is sometimes a real challenge in a hotel ballroom/convention space!

Other little notes to make; first, I find it kind of awesome that David Weber, the author whose books this whole event and Fan Club (The aforementioned Royal Manticoran Navy) are dedicated to, gleefully dresses up in the official uniform of the organization when participating in these things, and that at the host hotel bar, I had a very good bottle of Foothills Brewing Company’s People’s Porter, which was provided in response to my order of “whatever’s darkest and most local”, which I find is a pretty good way to order a beer in most places where I’m not particularly familiar with the brewing landscape.

Having energy after the show, I decided that rather than crash at S&K’s place, I’d just drive home (it’s only about two hours, even in the rain…) and sleep in my own bed, which would let me not rush so much early on to get to the scheduled Sunday performance at the Celtic Festival, which ended up getting cancelled due to rain (oh well), so I made meatloaf at the college kid’s request (apparently the dining hall can’t do meatloaf right), and watched the beginning third of Stranger Things series 2, which is awesome, then crashed early as I usually do on Sunday evenings while I mentally prepare for dealing with the frustrations of working a job I’m kind of down on right now, while my lovely spouse, who didn’t do nearly as much driving as I did over the course of the weekend, took the kid back to college.

So yeah, busy. Next weekend looks quieter – I think I’m supposed to run a D&D session at some point, and we’re working out logisitics of maybe going to see The Long Losts, who are scheduled to play a venue in town, and maybe, just maybe, get out to see Thor: Ragnarok, though there are some promises made that might need to be kept first. Oh well.

For those of you following along elsewhere, you’re already aware of the major events of my week. But for the rest of you, after being mostly down for count this past weekend with a quick-onset bug of some sort, I started the week okay, but got knocked down again Tuesday during the day , and gave in again and spent the day Wednesday sick, and am still kind of shaking it, working Thursday but giving ceili class a pass.

Also, as someone who recently dropped a lot of weight, I don’t recommend what I did* this week as a means to drop five pounds in forty-eight hours.

Besides being the official premiere day of Stranger Things 2 on Netflix, I have things going on this weekend, and I think I might even feel up to them. The Central Va Celtic Festival is this weekend, and much of the clan is dancing with HOI Saturday and Sunday (I’m running out west Friday afternoon to grab the remote one). This event’s always a good time.

But, I’m going to be missing at least some of it, because the call of the wrock star life is pulling me down to Raleigh NC for a Saturday night gig with the Humdingers at Honorcon. Being a “military sci-fi” con (dedicated largely to David Weber’s Honor Harrington stuff), these folks aren’t our usual crowd, but there’s a lot of fandom crossover, as one would expect. S&K are doing some panels and vending all weekend, but we’re playing a celebratory shindig Saturday evening. Last year’s show was a bit of fun, if I recall correctly, so I have high hopes for this year as well. Plus, we’ll have some new tunes to play.

Anyway, that’s what I got going on. The tunes below are very 80s, which surprised me a bit, until I noticed I wasn’t on “shuffle” so much as “80s rock” on Pandora. Oh well, it’s appropriate for the return of the gang from Hawkins, Indiana this weekend.

1. “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” – Tears for Fears
2. “Our House” – Madness
3. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” – Simple Minds
4. “Nobody’s Fool” – Cinderella
5. “Seventeen” – Winger
6. “Summer of ’69” – Bryan Adams
7. “Lay It Down” – Ratt
8. “Cum on Feel the Noize” – Quiet Riot
9. “Armageddon It”- Def Leppard
10. “Highway to Hell”- AC/DC
11. “Girls Girls Girls” – Mötley Crüe

_______________________

* – colloquially known as “shitting out my life essence”. See why I put it down here as footnote?

As most of you know, I am a huge fan of America’s National Parks. I visit numerous parks every year (I’m fortunate to have many nearby, including the amazing Shenandoah National Park), and make use of NPS facilities weekly (I regularly walk the Petersburg Battlefield Park on lunchbreaks or after work, due to it’s proximity to my office). I grew up appreciating nature, with scouts, uncles, and whatnot; and have always had an eye toward conservation, and being a historian for a while made me a big fan of folks like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. One of my career ambitions as a federal employee is to at some point work for the Department of Interior (particularly the National Park Service); I almost see doing such a thing as penance for all these years I’ve spent under the Defense umbrella. I’ll make it happen someday.

Anyway, many of you by now have seen the headlines about the proposed fee increases for entry to some of the “busiest” parks, including the big guns like my beloved Shenandoah, and the big western parks including Yellowstone and Grand Canyon.

I am, not surprisingly, opposed to this.

Now, most of the park system is free to access (odds are you have some hidden jewels near you to discover, like I did with Great Falls Park a few years back), but the larger ones do charge a reasonable access fee per vehicle ($20-$30 currently at peak season), to recover some costs. However, the current proposal put forth by Interior Secretary Ryan “$12k Charter Flight”” Zinke, would increase fees at these parks to $70 per vehicle, all while the current administration’s budget is looking to cut the NPS’s budget by double digits and permanently eliminate over 1200 full-time positions within the agency, as well as shrink National Monument/Park areas by hundreds of thousands of acres and auction the areas of to oil and mining companies

Of all the the thoroughly awful things the current administration is doing (I’m not even going to bother listing them, because it’ll get longer by the time I finish), this one really hurts. As a nation, we have some tremendous natural beauty and grandeur within our borders; access to such resources should be open to ALL Americans, regardless of financial situation; decreasing access by increasing fees reduces availability of these great public resources, with their opportunities for education, reflection, recreation, relaxation, adventure, and spiritual fulfillment, to the people who probably need it most. We ought to be encouraging Americans to get outside and look around, to enjoy, respect, and preserve nature, not fence bits of it off and auction the rest to folks who’ll despoil it.

The good thing is, we’ve got some time to make our voices heard on this one – the Department of Interior has this issue up for public comment through mid-November, so I recommend you go to the comment site linked here and make your voice heard on the issue – let’s get the nation on record that we don’t want to see our nation’s natural public spaces cut off from significant portions of the public!

-not always a fan of this FB group as they sometimes get mean, but they’re mostly on the money here-

Just getting the obvious joke out of the way…

Anyway…I saw a trailer for the currently-in-general-release, 11% Tomatometer™ rated Gerard Butler vehicle probably two years ago (it was originally supposed to be released last year, but got kicked down the road a couple of times to avoid such quality product as Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice), and promptly forgot about it, maybe being reminded once or twice, thinking it was a Sharknado-level SyFy original about extreme weather disasters and “action meteorologists”. Twister meets Independence Day, were I pitching it to Joel Silver or something.

Everybody else pretyt much forgot as well, given it’s performance. That said, I read the review that io9 posted and got a bit of a laugh, as it’s apparently not terribly good as a disaster movie, action movie, or any kind of movie, actually. Apparently after this, plus stuff like Gamer and Gods of Egypt, the guy really needs a new agent. He was a lot of fun in 300, and probably dservers better.

The thrust of the linked review is that it’s a ton of footage of people looking at screens, while the audience themselves watches the “action” on screens itself….it’s kind of meta, but also kind of true to life, given my experience, and expressed by this particular comment from from Kinja user OlyOink:

My 7 and 8 year old sons would probably love this movie if their habit of mindlessly watching other kids play video games on YouTube is any indication…

Yep. This is what kids do, and those of us of a certain age are all about telling them to get off our lawns while tying onions to our belts. In as recently as the last two weeks, The Washington Post wrote a piece about this…the conclusion in that article was pretty much the same one I and my Gen-X friends have come up with, is that our children are asocial aliens and have no sense of what’s actually funny or entertaining*.

And the world keeps turning.

____________________________

*- to be fair, my teenage son found “internet classic” Macaroni and Beef hysterical to the point of choking on laughter when I shared it with him a while back, so there may be some hope.

once again, as the spam folder fills up, I recycle the contents into *art*, or something thereabouts. The poems below, as always, are actual extracts from the spam comments this blog receives, arranged according to my whim. Occasionally, I hit on some deep stuff, addressing such varied topics as:

correspondence:

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social actualization and media criticism:

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even more media criticism

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meta commentary:

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This has been my latest attempt at amusing myself with the stuff left behind. Hope you enjoyed it.

So this is the week where it really felt like autumn dropped. I rode some on my trail along the river (staying off the last couple of days -they’re doing some power line work back there and it’s hard to ride with trucks in the way), and froze my behind off, but I got the exercise (making up for the fast food I ate last weekend) and as usual, it helped my mood a bit, which has been deteriorating, particularly about work – it’s hard to sit and watch a project die on the vine, and feeling like Pandora when nobody’s listened to your warnings for the last year.

I have what looks like a hopefully quietish weekend – the rest of the Humdingers (along with a bunch of other cool folks) are doing the Geek Gala down in Charlotte NC this weekend – I’m hanging back, mostly because I’m having a hard time justifying eight hours or so round trip for a 40 minute non-paying gig (this is mostly a -VERY COOL- nerd flea market/craft show thing – S&K are gonna make bank selling merch and crafts, but I don’t have much to add) and a couple of ad-hoc filk circles, and honestly, it looks like I could use a free weekend, given what’s coming up in terms of work, gigs, dance dad duties, and general other stuff. But, if you’re in the area, you should totally check it out!

So, I’m going to do the usual stuff – groceries, some biking, farmers market, library, maybe some guitar rehearsal with the backup ‘Riffs guitarist if I can pin him down, though tonight, my plans are to sit down with a cold beer and the Spider-Man: Homecoming Blu-Ray that’s been sitting in the house taunting me the last couple of days because I’ve been too busy to watch it.

Oh, I’ve been talking with some very talented musical folks about a cool collaborative project we’re trying to get off the ground again – folks you might have heard of like a certain wizard rock combo, and guys namedJonah and Mikey – but I’m not gonna say any more right now, but I think it’ll be fun.

Anyway, that’s about it from here, except for this latest sign that we are, as I’ve said previously, a nation and culture in decline: apparently, “real” men don’t do wussy things like wipe their ass after they take a dump.

Oh – tunes. Reasonably okay today; #6 is great, not just because it recalls 10 Things I Hate About You, but because Kay Hanley has a great voice and deserves more credit for her totally jerkin’ Josie and the Pussycats.

1. “New Slang” – The Shins
2. “T-Shirt Weather” – Circa Waves
3. “Let’s Get Rocked” – Def Leppard
4. “Stinkfoot” – Frank Zappa
5. “Funeral” – Band of Horses
6. “I Want You To Want Me” – Letters to Cleo
7. “Oh Come On” – The Julie Ruin
8. “Call Me” – Blondie
9. “Stripped (Revamped)” – Depeche Mode
10. “Home Sweet Home” – Mötley Crüe
11. “Don’t Dream it’s Over”- Crowded House

One more musical thing – my friend Metricula, one of those acts playing the aforementioned Geek Gala, is putting out her first record, Songs for Gamers today! This is long overdue; go listen, you’ll dig it.

And yeah, SEVEN DAYS to Stranger Things, season 2!

I spent my weekend a bit to the west of usual, hanging with the kid at college (it was allegedly “Family Weekend”, but there wasn’t a whole lot of actual events for family going on). We spent some time hanging out, wandering around campus, watching a bit of a field hockey game, visiting with Josie, the campus cat, and attending a pretty good production of Avenue Q the Sweet Briar theater department put on, along with the usual getting the kid off campus so she can eat legit fast food and replenish the dorm room pantry with beverages and cup noodles.

We stayed at a mid-budget Hilton property in Lynchburg, which itself was pretty standard, though Lynchburg itself was pretty frustrating. Besides having Jerry Fallwell’s name on everything, it was also Liberty University’s homecoming weekend, so the place was extra full of people, many of them rude and decked out in full-on alumni gear. There was a lot of rudeness and “I need to speak to your manager”-ness, plus the town itself is really laid out poorly. Merely being there made me angry.

When I said as much on social media that morning, I evoked some questions, though it should be noted that *I* did not conflate rudeness with overt Christian presentatation, though one of our family’s dear friends, an alum of SBC herself and a generally much more pious person than I, jumped right in and made the connection for me.

Anyway, it was nice to see the kid and hang out and meet her friends and generally get to be kind of the cool parents (this was actually a discussion we had with the kid…our alleged coolness is something that comes up, for whatever reason), even if it did occasionally feel like we were a bit in the way – school is a busy thing (especially at this point in the semester), so we tried out best not to overstay our welcome – I think we succeeded.

We did solve the mystery of Mystery Flavor Oreos, so you can all just give that up now (the linked article has it right, btw).

One thing that did percolate through my mind a bit this past week, which I think is contributing to all the recent depressive episodes I’ve been alluding heavily to in this space for the last couple of weeks, is the fact that I, like so many other people in this country and the world, amd suffering from some flavor of outrage fatigue, though I think it’s more just the realization that much of western civilization (especially the parts happening in North America) is a civilization in decline. This weekend alone, we took steps backward in terms of inclusivity, equality, and the ability of people to take care of themselves, and not engage in large-scale military conflict (when the Secretary of State is quoted as saying diplomacy will continue “until the first bomb drops”, it doesn’t exactly add much confidence). Who knows what’ll happen this week. When not talking about removing basic rights from large swaths of people, the news was talking about the latest Hollywood sexual harassment scandal, at least until the next mass shooting happens or the next natural disaster that man’s hubris has had a hand in shaping comes along; it’ll only be another couple of hours, given the pattern.

I’m just really working on coming to terms with the fact that the peak years of American society have likely happened already, and the decline is already underway. There’s not a lot I can do about it. I’m not the only one who’s noticing. I hope things get better, but it’s been going for a while, and those with influence to shape things aren’t in a hurry to do much, to be honest. I dunno, it’s just something I think about, and it’s been popping up a lot lately (especially since I’m currently working in a part of the machine that’s not doing it’s job in a particularly efficient way, which is doing wonders for my psyche, as you can imagine).

Also, apropos of nothing (or maybe a perfect example of what the last two paragraphs were talking about), here’s a prescient comment from commenter Arnheim on this Jezebel story, which, I kid you not, is about public discussion on Sunday morning news shows about the Secretary of State’s testicles:

He has yet to hit Cobra Commander levels of outright, “BWAHAHAHA, I HAVE THE WEATHER DEVICE” villainy, so we’re not entirely through the looking glass yet.

The thread then began to devolve into parodies of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, as things are likely to do given this absurd political environment we live in. It should also be noted, as my friends in the band Foot Pound Force will gladly tell you, it was the Weather Dominator, not the Weather Device.

Oh well.

Work frustration is hitting hard. Apologize for being blah this morning. It’s also overcast and raining. I can blame that, right?

So yeah. This weekend I go out to SBC for parents’ weekend; we’ll see how that works out. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Playlist this morning is interesting; a lot of the usual suspects, but some new stuff I got to hit the Pandora “thumbs up” on which I hadn’t heard before, but really kind of liked (numbers one and three, particularly):

1. “Fill in the Blank” – Car Seat Headrest
2. “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?” – Frank Zappa
3. “Now Is The Time” – Damone
4. “Life on Mars?” – David Bowie
5. “Take Me To The Backseat” – The Donnas
6. “Is There A Ghost” – Band of Horses
7. “Elodie” – Ten Fe
8. “Langt Nord I Trollebotten” – Lumsk
9. “Cry Baby” – Kitten Forever
10. “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)” – Cinderella
11. “Budapest” – Jethro Tull

Okay…because Eleven, here’s the new Stranger Things trailer (only two weeks to go!):

In case you hadn’t heard the news, on Wednesday, “the international Day of the Girl’, the Boy Scouts of America announced that they’d be making a change to allow girls to enroll in the program, starting with Cub Scouting, and eventually allow girls to earn the Eagle Scout award.

Based on the information provided, the units involving girls will be single-gender at the den level in the Cub pack, at least to start (I wonder if this has to do with requirements of the BSA’s Youth Protection program?), but for a lot of folks looking for the textbook “Scouting” experience (Girl Scouts is a great program in a lot of ways, but the goals are a bit different) for their daughters, this is, at this point, good news.

I’m sure those who know me are not surprised that one, I have opinions on this. I am, after all, an Eagle Scout, merit badge counselor, and several-times-over Assistant Scoutmaster. I am also a big supporter of Scouts For Equality, and have been more than a little frustrated with the national BSA’s regressive policies over the last couple of decades (it’s very different, and much more political, than what it was like when I was a Scout), and have struggled with my involvement, at both the local (depending on the unit – they vary widely) and national level.

The organization is crawling into modernity, finally allowing LGBT youth involvement in the program, though, like SFE, I continue to struggle with the overtly Christian/Theist interpretation* of “A Scout is Reverent/Duty to God” in place (GSA really does this better), and the continued bans on LGBT Adult volunteers.

In spite of the GSA being a little upset with the decision**, I think it’s a good call overall, though I wonder how it’s going to fall out within BSA and the International WOSM organization.

My feeling is that we’re not too far off from a schism in the US organization. the BSA’s released information indicates that it’s up to the units as to whether they go co-ed; I expect the more conservative elements who are already kind of segregating themselves off on their own anyway, will resist making the changes, and double-down on what they’ve been doing, and the more progressive, welcoming troops (relatively easily identified these days) will develop more ties with the international Scouting organizations, which tend to be co-ed these days anyway, and have been for a long time. Ten years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the current BSA to become two different organizations, with the conservative factions splitting off to do their own thing, and the co-ed groups remaining affiliated with WOSM; that’s my hope anyway, but who knows, really. It’s probably going to get potentially ugly before that happens.

Anyway, I applaud this move in theory – we’ll see how it works out in practice.

___________________________________________

*- while the units I was involved with as a Scout – and I was with several over my tenure- weren’t overtly religious or particularly political (though pretty progressive generally – one of our assistant scoutmasters was a gay single dad, and nobody batted an eye, in the late 80s!), my modern experience as an adult volunteer has been different; I’ve sat through overtly Christian holiday programs that would make the theoretical Mohammed the Weblo Scout and his family feel terribly unwelcome, and have been advised while sitting on Eagle Review boards -an activity I quite like generally – that word from national is that there’s only one make-or-break element on an Eagle board, and it’s the God thing – if a kid even hints at being non-theist it’s a no-go, full-stop. That, unsurprisingly, made me *very* uncomfortable.

** – Girl Scouts does a lot of things really well; better than BSA in pretty much all ways socially, and their program is valuable and provides a great foundation for developing girls’ independence and ambition (in certain focused areas, particularly business***, but they’re getting pretty good with STEM as I understand it), it doesn’t do the traditional “outdoor” stuff well at all – in fact, the stringent adult volunteer training requirements make it *very hard* for a unit to organize even a simple overnight without hours and hours of GSA-sponsored training involved, so most groups, unless they’re very motivated, don’t go there.

*** – After being associated with the GSA for several years as the spouse of an adult volunteer (who was once even cookie mom, which meant hundreds of boxes of cookies stacked in my living room for weeks once upon a time), they’re definitely focused on one particular image of womanhood, very closely resembling the hard-charging entrepreneurial working girl/CEO, to the point that it sometimes feels like Girl Scouting, at least at the upper ranks, with the focus on that sort of thing (there are numerous merit-badge equivalents that directly apply to cookie sales – at least as many as the outdoor stuff), that it sometimes feels like a saleswomanship training program at best, cheap labor**** for the cookie business masquerading as a youth achievement program at worst.

**** – Seriously, while Girl Scout Cookies are in all ways the preferable option for fundraising over the Trail’s End Popcorn the BSA tries to sling (oh, how we hated it…), the actual fundraising potential for the local units is abysimal, I think it’s less than a quarter (that’s the 25¢ coin flavor of the word) of the $5 a box sales price gets directly back to the girls. Also, yay! double-nesting footnotes!

I haven’t called this occasion out in a while, though it’s definitely something worth disucssing more often.

To quote the official website of the celebration:

Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM.

The day itself derives from the celebration of the birthday of Ada Lovelace herself, who, back in the early 1800s, worked with Babbage on the Analytical Engine, and was the person who really recognized the potential of such equipment beyond simple calculation, and is credited with creating and publishing the first computer program (an algorithm to generate Bernoulli numbers) to be run on the machine, as well as really start the thinking about how “computers” and technology could be applied by humans and the affect of such application on society.

I heard a bit about her this morning on The Writer’s Almanac on the way into the office Monday morning (which always reminds me of things to think about) on the commute Tuesday morning, and it got me thinking, with some sadness, how few actual women there are working in my particular Information Technology department – my agency’s IT shop is very much a boy’s club beyond a couple of non-technical program management types, and I think the culture and potential of our organization is so much the poorer for it.

I’m definitely of the opinion that we’d do a better job with a bit more diversity around these parts (I’m not in much of position to do much about it right now, but if I ever find myself there, I will); it feels an awful lot like a men’s locker room these days, and some different perspectives would most certainly improve our thinking and processes beyond the virtual towel snapping, especially since I know a lot of women in technology in more social rather than professional contexts, and I see the work their organizations are doing, and I’m honestly envious, both in terms of the cool stuff they’re doing and the environments the get to do that stuff in.

So, here’s to all those women doing pioneering work in STEM fields, and here’s to the intention of doing what we can to empower them to do even more, and to inspire the next generation of girls to code, calculate, and innovate!