the Internet is down at our hotel, so I'm typing this on my cell phone. The entry will this be rather short. I had a lovely birthday with my family. We walked around the Sandwich Heritage Museum this morning after a lovely breakfast and laps in the pool. Leah and I went kayaking this afternoon. Dinner was lovely chorizo sausage with peppers and onions, fresh corn and mixed berries for dessert. We had great conversations and good wine. I got to read two Jewish folltales to my cousin once removed. All in all, a glorious day.

one of the Scout leaders said to me today,

"I don't really know that much about you, but when your spaceship lands I'm drinking the Kool-Ade, and following you on board even over a bed of hot coals."

When I explained that the hoit coals could be arranged and that I'd done it before, he was even more enthusiastic. Excellent! Perhaps my first convert.

Somewhere between the two dormitories, I lost Clio today. She's was running around campus this morning for 40 minutes or so, and I had to go work at the scout camp. She came back just as I needed to be heading out the door. Thank you gods.

I've misplaced my new Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide. Part of me just wants to go out and buy a new one, since I've now been looking for it for a week. But I'm resisting doing that. I spent some money on positive things yesterday, and I'm not really looking to replace something I already own — even if it is definitively lost. Anyone seen it?

I've been teaching ecology and conservation classes at the Boy Scouts camp this week. Clio's been coming with me. For the most part it's been fun, but a little slow. The group of kids I have are great, and I'm having fun, but part of me would prefer being out in my kayak.

On Sunday, lovelips and I went to the farmers' market in Coventry, CT. They say it's one of the best and the largest in New England. Even the Boston Globe says so. It's also on the grounds of Founding Martyr (St. Sebastian in Tricorne) Nathan Hale's homestead, so you get your dose of revolutionary democracy at the same time. I like it.

They taught pickling in three workshops, of which I attended two: one on bread-and-butter pickles, and one on brine pickling. The brine pickles are considerably less work, since they only involve loading the jars, letting them ferment on the counter for three days, and then storing them. The bread-and-butter pickles involve considerably more work, such as boiling jars and lids, measuring vinegar carefully and all manner of strange alchemies. I want to try it, but not at 11:40pm on a worknight — especially not the same week that lovelips's mom is coming for an overnight visit.

All the same, the brine pickles seemed pretty easy. I had some pickling cukes from the markets this week, so I measured out my water, and added sea salt: 1 tablespoon sea salt to 1 quart of spring water = 1.8% salinity. So 1 tablespoon of sea salt added to 1 pint of spring water = 3.6% salinity, and adding just a little more salt gives you about a 4% salinity, which is perfect for brine pickles according to Rosmari Roast, of Walk in the Woods, Inc.. I loaded up two clean jars with wedges small and large of cucumbers, added in some herbs and peppercorns, and then poured the brine in over them. I added 1 oak leaf to each jar; the tannins in the leaf are supposed to help the pickles maintain crispness. You then loosely screw the lids in place, and give them 2-4 days on the counter to ferment in the jar. When they begin to smell sour, screw the lids down tightly, and store in a cool, dark place.

I also made refrigerator pickles with what remained of the pickling cukes, but I really want to learn some canning techniques this summer for the rest of the season's vegetables. And next summer, I really want a garden of my own.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are GSEs or government-sponsored enterprises, may be technically insolvent. They have about $5.5 trillion in outstanding mortgages between them and only $80 billion in equity. Technically, the US government guarantees these loans but only implicitly. If Congress decides to guarantee them explicitly, the government will have debts equal to our GDP, give or take a few hundred million. If Congress decides NOT to back these mortgages, they may render 4-10 million families homeless as their homes are foreclosed.

Standard&Poor's, Moody's, and other rating agencies have been saying since Reagan was president that they would downgrade the creditworthiness of the US government if the US ever explicitly guaranteed Freddie and Fannie mortgages. Guess what, folks. That reckoning may be about to come due/true.

I would *strongly* advise anyone against major purchases at this time, or locking yourself into purchase plans or layaways of any sort for the next few months. Even frivolous stuff would be inadvisable- it is reasonable to ask "would I buy this if there were two more zeroes just in front of the decimal point?"

This condition is likely to persist until after the election at the earliest, and more likely to continue into the new President's next term. Hang onto your hats, everyone. And your wallets.

Two of the concepts that I rather like about the new D&D 4e world-building assumptions are "points of light" and "the world is old".

The first assumption is that there aren't any nation-states. Every border in the world doesn't naturally and obviously abut the border of another nation-state. There aren't necessarily frontier guards and passports needed everywhere, because the 'borders' of civilized areas just sort of fizzle out into wilderness that doesn't really belong to anyone, and is therefore dangerous: dangerous to be in, dangerous to control, dangerous to try to hold; and dangerous to enter, visit or travel through.

Instead, we have 'points of light', which I take to mean city-states, independent towns, freeholds, and the like. A band of people, Big Men or leaders, and some take-charge middle-managers with some connections to the divine or the arcane, have established a zone of relative safety within that vast and howling wilderness of midnight. The leadership holds a rough circle of territory about 15 miles in radius, because that's the distance that their pocket army can cross on foot in a day; in mountainous country, maybe they've got less. Could be that you have twelve or fifteen of these pockets strung together along a river or a road network, and that's called a 'kingdom'. Leave the road or the river's safety, or leave your village at night, and bad things are likely to occur. You will probably be eaten by a grue.

On the other hand, we have the assumption that "the world is old." By my count, there's indications in the Player's Handbook that there's been a human empire, gone about 2-4 centuries; a dragonborn empire gone about two thousand years ago, a tiefling empire, gone about a thousand years back, and in between a dwarven empire, a Feywild empire, and maybe a multicultural shindig stuffed in there somewhere. And way back in history, there was a war between gods and Primordials (hmmmm, it's nice to see that people have been reading thier Greek myths, and Exalted), and a time when the Giants had the dwarves as slaves, and a time when the Fey were all one race, but divided in three (Eladrin, Elves and Drow).

In essence, you have six or seven thousand years of history squeezed into this worldview, and it's all gone to shit. The assumption in D&D4e's basic mindset is that you're living in the times between the civilized, successful, prosperous empires, when collapse has taken civilization down to some of its root layers.
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The D&D 4e world has hit elements of 3. Political collapse, and there may even be some 4. Social Collapse. However, there's still faith in humanity (and humanoidity), and that somehow we can pull through this and hold the line somewhere. Out in the wilderness, though, there are probably pockets of Cultural Collapse (5.) and they've become something dark. Twisted. Monstrous.

It's a pretty excellent worldview, and if I wind up developing a gameworld for 4e, I think you can probably guess at some of the roleplaying themes and tropes I'll be playing with.

As lovelips mentioned, she had some difficulty with her car yesterday. It appears that her radiator was low on antifreeze, so the nice folks at the garage up the street put in some new goop, and they're holding it overnight to double-check that there's no leak anywhere. They also changed the oil, and reset the diagnostic computer, to the tune of about a hundred bucks.

I took the car up about noon, as they have a small parking lot and couldn't take it before then. I could have picked it up tonight, but they highly recommended letting it sit to confirm that it isn't a radiator leak. The pressure test didn't reveal anything, but they had to put in a gallon of antifreeze and they thought that might indicate a problem somewhere.

After I dropped off the car, I walked home. ( Read more... )
The road east-west, though, between Putnam and Pomfret (for that matter, between Providence and Hartford) is more likely to remain open. I had a discussion about Putnam, CT this morning with a local businessman, who acknowledged that too much of the town's commercial real estate is in the hands of long-distance landlords, while the town administration is ... not hide-bound, but not particularly forward-thinking. On the other hand, the town has the best core commercial district in thirty miles (two gallons of gas for a fuel efficient vehicle), with reasonably good brick buildings (in need of some work, but at least temporarily solid) from the early-middle of the last century. It's got recently updated bridges and flood control systems, and a functioning water system mostly gravity-powered, and a power plant to handle lights and some local services. It's ethnically diverse but not racially charged, and it's not a hotbed of political or religious extremism. It has some old mill buildings to support both squatting and localist businesses, and a two-days-a-week farmers' market. There's a bike/footpath into town, too. Lots of potential here, if we're reduced to bicycling and walking.

Once again, we had no poets show at our poetry reading tonight. On the other hand, we had an audience. Five people showed up hoping to have a cup of coffee and be entertained, and the baristas directed them to me. Can't disappoint an audience!

So, I read or recited about a dozen poems, some from Bashō, some from John Keats, a few dozen lines from Beowulf, and so on. In between, we had a conversation on great writers: Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Robert Fagles the translator, John Chapman (who first translated Don Quixote and The Iliad into English), James Joyce, Jane Austen. I was reminded again that I don't have much memorized by female authors, and I need some in my book of tricks. In all, the night was rather like having a mini-feature of the Dead Poets Society, without an open mic at all. One of them recited a dozen lines or so from Casey at the Bat, but the rest — while recalling that they'd been made to memorize something or other in high school or college — actually didn't remember what they'd learned and memorized so long or so recently ago.

In many ways, this was a small taste of what I wish my feature on July 29 at Reflections Café could be. I'd love for it to be a roiling, rollicking conversation among poets, reciting some of their favorite works by other authors, discussing meter and form and lack thereof, pattern, diction and performance. There's a video team coming in to record us, and I think that could be totally awesome and... and... mythic. Rich and wondrous and beautiful, and far more of a poetry jam than anything else we've seen on TV so far.

I made up a cleric today in the new D&D4e rules, in between running interference/mediation on my school's technology policy and re-writing a massive chunk of our indicators for NEASC accreditation standards. It was a useful mid-day break, especially since lovelips's car broke down shortly after lunch, while I was in the middle of trying to referee a debate between our old dean and our new dean without either of them actually being there. Tricky.

So a cleric of Pelor was just the thing!

I had one rules question, which my friend Barak was able to referee me through quite nicely, related to the new cleric power Channel Divinity. There are many versions of this power, but a cleri