A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

Ideas are dangerous things. In 1996, I was an extremely intelligent, but extremely inexperienced, teenager.  The combinaton of intelligence and inexperience is important in this context, because it creates a target audience for a certain type of book, inviting the reader to believe they're part of some hidden knowledge.  I read a lot of what I suppose could be called "conspiracy" books - Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh's Holy Blood, Holy Grail , von Däniken, Sitchin, the whole nine yards.  I've re-read many of them since, and found them almost universally full of steaming garbage.  I've also watched them become increasingly mainstreamed - HBHG  as Da Vinci Code . von Däniken and company explicitly in Ancient Aliens. Then there is Graham Hancock. A quick history - Hancock was a moderately successful journalist working in a variety of difficult, dangerous places on difficult, dangerous topics.  He actually wrote a very good, and very successful, expose of the glo...

Hidden between Leander and Burnet, well off the beaten path, is Flanigan's Wine and Spirits .  Flanigan's storefront is  located in an old brick building in Bertram, with their production facility across the street.  Immediately upon entering, the first thing you notice is the spectacular decor - they have done a remarkable job of simulating a late-19th Century through Depression-era saloon-hotel, with alcoves, nooks, and private tables scattered across two stories and false doors giving the illusion of hotel rooms, a grand ballroom, and a much larger interior than is actually the case.  A large fireplace and common space dominates one side of the main room, and a bar runs the length of the other, with tables between. I have been to Flanigan's repeatedly, and each time have taken a slightly different approach.  The first time we were there, the proprietors, Kevin and Kathleen Flanigan, were quite busy, but got to us within fifteen minutes; the second, we arrived...

 In cooperation with the incomparable Lindsey Pickard, the following are the tasting notes from Bourbon Madness Night, also known as "what happens when your extrovert friend organizes a small party and then gets sick and can't show up."  All of the following are what I was sent as messages as we were going through my bourbon stockpile.  It is worth noting that there's some synesthesia even when she's sober.  I'm sharing all of this because she did a pretty good job of expressing flavor complexity in a way that I wouldn't normally manage, even if she will probably go "oh God" and hide under something as soon as I post this. She established fairly early on that bourbon's default color is apparently a dark green, like a hunter green or a rifle green, which led to some re-tasting to see what else was in there.  Where possible, I have linked back to my own previous reviews of the same material.  I have lightly edited and reorganized to group produ...

Outside of Summersville is a small distillery and winery, Kirkwood Winery and   Isaiah Morgan Distillery . which sells rye, moonshine, and bourbon in addition to an exceptionally wide selection of sweet wines - although they no longer sell mead, to my great disappointment.  Their distillery looks pretty much what you'd expect from a still in West Virginia, and they play up the country moonshiner angle as much as they can.  The entire operation is rustic wood and low-slung cabin and barn construction, a far cry from the slick, industrialized-genteel kinds of places that you find in Kentucky.  I cannot speak for anyone else, but I find the big distilleries a little impersonal, and therefore appreciate the smaller places.  There are other reasons for this; buying two bottles of Jack Daniels, for instance, will make no difference, but buying two bottles of Isaiah Morgan (or   Black Patch , or...) feels like you've helped keep someone in business. We picked up t...

In a rather sketchy-looking light-industrial park behind a Wal-Mart in Madison, Alabama, there is a hidden gem of a distillery.  Black Patch Distilling Company  is a veteran-owned and operated small family-business distillery.  Those who were here for the Hye Rum  review probably remember that I like to get the site description out of the way up front, so here goes: Black Patch is in the back of an industrial park in Madison, which is like Huntsville's boring cousin.  Madison isn't bad , but it's like the Hollywood version of the boring nerd girl everyone neglects while noticing her cool sister Huntsville.  Driving up on Black Patch, it doesn't look like much.  We didn't even think it was a distillery until we saw the logo. Personally, I find the logo a little on-the-nose, I don't like the Corinthian as a helmet, and I was a tad leery of the vet-bro vibe.  There is nothing about owning a DD214 that automatically makes you less of a jerk, or makes ...

As I've said before elsewhere , I've stayed at a fair number of luxury hotels at this point.  I've stayed in the cheapest rooms available in some, and expensive rooms in others, and my standards have drifted some over the years.  What I have never done, until now, is felt disappointed in a hotel that I had looked forward to staying in. The   Hilton Palacio del Rio   was a disappointment.  I was primed to enjoy my stay, and there are touches to it that I   really  like.  At the same time, though, the construction of the hotel dictates that its rooms are basically those of a large, well-maintained Hampton Inn.  To understand why I was primed to enjoy it, and what that construction dictates, I will have to tell the story of the Palacio del Rio, and of how I found out about it. In 1967, Conrad Hilton faced a problem.  Simply put, there was no Hilton luxury hotel in convenient distance of the 1968 Hemisfair - the World's Fair held in San Anto...

As I discussed   elsewhere , my wife and I went to San Antonio for her birthday, and for one of those days went on a tour of alcohol acquisition in central Texas.  I've already covered the meaderies we visited - Rohan in La Grange and Texas Mead Works in Hye - and here I will cover the other three stops. Hye Cider Company   is, by a quirk of brewing, the oldest meadery in Hye - a cyser is a hybrid made with pears or apples and honey in various proportions, and Hye Cider stocks mostly cyser rather than purebred cider, which uses primarily fruit sugars for fermentation.  That is hardly its only claim to fame, but it is worth noting because my first memory of Hye Cider Company is a few years ago, watching honeybees trying to collect sugars from their countertop.  Their entire sales area is open to the outside world, which can impact tasting flavors depending on the season.  Colder weather tends to suppress some of the aromatic components of taste, while hot we...

Over the years, my wife and I have become drinkers.  Perhaps more importantly, we have a defined palate.  We have a   preferred Washington bourbon provider  (Heritage Distilling Company, for those who don't want to click through, in various spots in the Pacific Northwest), a   preferred Washington cider provider  (Finnriver Cider, in Chimacum, WA), a   preferred Texas meadery  (Dancing Bee, in Rogers, TX), have made elaborate side-trips to stop at   a meadery we like   (Redstone Meadery, Boulder, CO), and have even occasionally made borderline-dangerous U-turns in the rain to stop at   meaderies we spotted from the road   (The Meading Room, Sonoita, AZ).  We have a  preferred import brand of mead  (Dansk Mjød).  It's so far-gone that we currently have something along the lines of twenty stored gallons of homebrew and are considering getting a still. Especially when it comes to mead, in other words, we have s...

Over the July 4th weekend, my wife and I took a trip to San Antonio and environs to celebrate her birthday.  We stayed at the   Emily Morgan Hotel   on Alamo Plaza, in one of their Alamo-view rooms.  I narrowed the choices for this stay to the Emily Morgan and the   Menger ; both are excellent historic hotels with their own stories, and my choice boiled down in the end to the fact that I have a Hilton Honors account and the Emily Morgan is a Hilton hotel. The Emily Morgan is on the north side of Alamo Plaza adjacent to the courthouse and post office, and consists of two wings of fourteen stories each, in a V-shape, with a bell tower or lookout on top of the junction of the V.  There is a pool on the second floor; while it was open, we did not use it.  We also did not take advantage of the hotel restaurant, Oro, or the bar or room service, so I cannot comment on any of these amenities.  We stayed in Room 407, on the southeast corner of the south wi...

Mother Neff State Park is a small-to-medium park located between Waco and Gatesville in central Texas.  Like much of the modern Texas State Park system, it owes its existence to Civilian Conservation Corps labor in the 1930s, and many of the CCC structures are still on site, including as a rental cabin which we did not use but could be useful as a getaway. We went there as part of our continuing program to acclimate the kids to hiking.  The hiking trails at Mother Neff range from extremely easy mowed trails across level grassland to short periods of moderate-difficulty trails across rocky ground.  The overall difficulty, and trail length, for taking the largest and most-difficult currently open trail loop, is easy, about four miles, with plenty of opportunities to stop and look around, so it is an excellent entry-level hike for children, dogs, et cetera, and in March-April it is generally temperate and cool enough not to become a grueling exercise in self-flagellation....