Sky Castle

I give you Max Weinberg, drummer for Springsteen's E Street Band, and his son Jay. This performance was in 2009:

Talented, good-lookin' Jewish guys. ♥♥♥ :-D

I finished my last-minute reading of Hugo short fiction items and did my voting on Saturday morning. I think that there were a LOT of very good "shorts" this year.

I am re-reading The Story of the Stone by Barry Hughart, which is the second of the Master Li and Number Ten Ox books. I also tried (really, I did) to read two Very Serious books, which turned out to be nearly unreadable and almost useless for their intended purpose. *looks shifty*

From the fab Magnetic_pole.

( Read more... )

We've been playing our second Numenera campaign for about a year now. Numenera is a rather open-ended system that encourages the GM to reward creative play: anyone can try to do anything, and there is essentially one scale and one mechanism for doing just about any sort of task. If you're trained (or the higher-level version, Specialized), you just have an asset (or assets) toward making the roll. The scenario is an ancient world situation (think Vance's Dying Earth, but with more Steampunk-ish elements), and the current campaign is ocean-oriented. We have a ship (and more recently have also acquired a small submarine), and most of the characters have seafaring or other aquatic backgrounds.

( cut for long )

Music and lyrics by Bill Staines; performance by Priscilla Herdman

"You can trust the moon to move the mighty ocean
You can trust the sun to shine upon the land
You take the little that you know
And you do the best you can
And see the rest with the quiet faith of man."

Dedicated today to myself, because I need to calm down and move forward.

Over the winter, we got a "lamb share" CSA from one of the vendors (Cabin Creek Heritage Farm) at the Takoma Park Farmers Market. We liked it, but they don't have lamb over the summer. The Mr. is particular about his beef and doesn't want it to have been frozen, so we went for "mini pork share" this time.

( Cut for CSA details and cooking description/rough recipe )

On The Dark Side - John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band (as featured in the movie "Eddie and the Cruisers")

If the song sounds vaguely familiar but somehow you don't think you ever heard it, you may be thinking of songs by Gary "U.S." Bonds, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, or … Bruce Springsteen. They're all exemplars of the Jersey Shore Sound, which for some reason always feels very hamische (like home) to me. In the comments on this one, in fact, someone complains that Springsteen stole this style from Cafferty and Southside Johnny.

The weather has been finally getting really hot, in the mid to high 90's for a few days, and I knew that I had to get better ventilation into the hive for those weeks when it would be close to 100.  The hard part of it all is that I have to replace the bottom board to do so.

There might have been other ways? But I've did this both years when I had my last hive, and I liked having the bottom board be sealed when the colony was small and needed fewer entrances to defend.  It was obvious, from watching the bees coming in and out each day, that they had good numbers to defend themselves, now.  Plus, the girls might need more room, so I prepared a super with another eight frames for them to build on and fill that would fit above the deeps that I was leaving for them to keep full of honey, pollen, and brood.

( Read more... )