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Been thinking about this one for a while. This is a post -- a rant, maybe -- about parenting, so I'm prepared for the very real possibility that I'll be offending some of my readership. Therefore, let me start by laying my cards on the table: I think you're all appallingly bad parents, every one of you, and your children are hideously deformed meat beasts... except for a few of you, who are excellent and have stunningly gorgeous Small People. But the rest? Osamas bin Laden infested with tiny Gollums, the lot of 'em. So feel free to be offended; it's your right.

Now, with that disclaimer out of the way, on with the rant.

A friend of mine posted a while back that she strongly dislikes parents who don't spank their children. My first reaction was probably unprintable, although it had Darwinian aspects to it, ie "feel free to do whatever you like to disadvantage your kids; it'll give mine a leg up in the coming Apocalypse". But then I remembered how I used to titter at the freakazoid hippy parents I knew in my ill-spent and frequently-wallopped youth, the ones who couldn't bear to so much as raise their squeaky voices as their snotty offspring ran roughshod over them. Not giving your kids a good thumping every now and then, it seemed pretty clear to my ten-year-old mind, was a good way to produce feral lunatics; BAD idea. And after all, I got my share of whacks with the cane, the belt or the back of my Dad's hand, and I'm no worse off for it (apart from the twitching and the nightmares and the brain damage, but I lived in Albury in the 1970s so I know what to blame for those). Seriously: it wasn't a problem for me, then.

But opinions change. For example, I used to think the Windows 95 UI looked pretty schmick, and now... not so much. We don't hit our kids -- well, not when we're in our right minds -- and we feel strongly that it would be the Wrong Thing to do so under any circumstances. Even an ear tweak is right out, thought admittedly I had to have that explained in very loud and unambiguous monosyllables after the first and last time I delivered one to the Elder Daughter of DOOOM, because it hadn't occurred to me that it might be a problem. But I know better now. Anyway.

I had to think for a long time about why hitting is bad, especially considering that a fair amount of shouting is par for the course around here when the EDoD is being the Entitlement Queen of Hell and I'm tired and shagged out after a long day's Javascripting. And the best I can come up with is this:

I don't hit my children for exactly the same reason I don't hit my wife.

That's pretty much it.

I've mentioned before that I dislike using the word "children" in reference to my own family members, even though it never bothered me to be called a child back when I was one. Ageism is the last great legal discrimination, sticking around when even Atheists are starting to demand equal rites, and I'm acutely aware of how much of it my 11-going-on-22-year-old daughter has to put up with. Adults will quite happily ignore her when she speaks to them, even when her grammar and vocabulary are clearly superior to theirs (which is about two thirds of the time, even in "elitist" Canberra) and there are a whole bunch of things she is physically and emotionally capable of that the law or convention says she can't do, like travelling on a plane alone or making her own purchases without parental supervision. She's a vassal, basically, and it irritates her, and by osmosis me too.

So the ideal I work from is that she deserves the same rights and respect that I'd afford an adult. Admittedly, she's more like a drunk and disorderly adult at times, because at age 11 she's not always completely rational or informed, but coming back to that point I made above: I wouldn't hit my wife, even if she were drunk and irrational, so why should I hit my daughter? It's a change in viewpoint, a different way of looking at the world. Once you see it like that, you need some fairly heavy-duty self-deception to continue waling away at your kids. Slap your kids for disobedience? Fine, then do it your spouse too. Otherwise, not so much.

The difficulty is that kids who get spanked are more easily controlled, and since we treat our Small People with respect they don't always technically earn, there are times when they get the better end of the deal and we get the worse. That means we have to compensate: we spend much more time reasoning with the EDoD and the Batpup than we would if we could just hurt them to make them compliant. Often, this doesn't work, and it's a rare week when I don't feel like introducing Ms EDoD to Mr Fist. But I don't. It would be wrong.

Along with that, there's the emotional component: I want to hit her, when I'm angry at her, because it would feel good. That is so utterly the wrong reason that I'm not even going to dignify it with more paragraph.

Life is made trickier by her absurdly high intelligence, but considerably easier by her emotional intelligence: she has approximately the same ability to compose herself and reign in her emotions as I has developed by about age 25; she is quite, quite remarkable, and I wish I could film her doing it because you'd be astonished, even those rare ones of you with the good quality munchkins. If she and I are arguing, it usually turns out that she's right and I'm wrong, so I have learned stupid amounts of humility. But when she's wrong and she realises it, she's better than me (and most people I know) at switching her ego into neutral and, if not quite admitting it, certainly removing the self-righteousness from her emotional makeup and letting herself calm right down.

So what we have is neither the cowed, defeated, often-spanked extreme, nor the undisciplined hippy egomaniac opposite extreme, but something else, right off the continuum: an Elder Daughter who responds (eventually) to reason, will not allow her emotions to override her brain for too long, and who is better equipped for adulthood than I was when I was twice her age. And her younger brother and sister, growing up with the benefit of our hindsight and experimentation, will no doubt be even more stable and well-prepared. This, I think, makes the occasional screaming fits worth it, and means I'm not going to be splashing out and buying any extra bullwhips and cats-o'-nine-tails any time soon.

So: non-spanking parent, and proud of it. Other parents are entitled to their own views, but I know we're right about this one.

The BatPup and the EDoD are going to get insane quantities of loot tomorrow.

I've been fairly slack, concentrating on frivolous frippery like floors instead of trawling the shops for pressies, but I did put together one present I'm proud of. The BatPup has lately started noticing the logos on cars -- Toyota's stylised T shape, Holden's lion, Mitsubishi's triple diamond, and so on -- so since I work right near a bunch of car yards in Woden, I popped around and asked them if they had any stickers, fridge magnets and the like with the logos on them. Some of them were very generous: the spotty lad from Commonwealth Motors gave me a sticker, a poster and a balloon; the bloke from Toyota had a keyring, as did one from Ford; and the guy from the scooter shop gave me an actual Vespa logo taken from an actual Vespa; and more besides. So the BatPup will have a collection of knick-knacks to play with, which should pique her interest and help make "spot the make and model" the driving game of 2009. Meanwhile, I couldn't think of anything for the EDoD, but I'm sure I will by Hogswatchnight, so that's OK. And anyhow, the Beloved has been her usual inhumanly legendary self, so they'll have more stuff than they'll know what to do with tomorrow. They won't feel hard done by.

Meanwhile, my back and neck are killing me for some reason, so I shall pop some more Nurofen and go beddy-byes. I'm up to January 11 in my LJ tagging now, so I should have it all done before much longer, but not now. Must sleep.

Can't blog now, busy teaching EDoD to fear her Daddy's mad Monopoly skillz...

PS She says "I'll beat you", but we'll see about that...

Wed 11/06/2008 22:57 11062008139

Just for something different, a photo-essay (ooh! wanky!) about the weekend. It started with a celebration of our Demiversary, involving much icecream (well, frozen custard, but KISS) and continued with fireworks at Gerrie's and a day of nesting. We now have curtains in the living room (nearly done except for some extra fiddling to get them to sit properly) and the family room (half done; awaiting hems) and a complete set of woollen curtains in the EDoD's room, which she loves. She also loves the newly-discovered floor: I helped her tidy up, because I figured that one explanation for her recent shoutiness might be that she didn't have a place to retreat to when her younger siblings (or older parents) got too painful. Now she does, and it's done wonders: she was just gorgeous today, much more relaxed than she has been. I tidied the BatPup's room too -- less of a chore, since she doesn't have her big sister's talent for chaos -- and she's getting the same benefits.

Of course this means I got nothing much else done, but that's life. Better to help my family stay sane, I think.

The BatPup got it into her head that she wanted to go to "a Evil Feast", which we took to mean a medieval one. (If we were wrong and she really wanted to have dinner with Pol Pot, Robert Mugabe and Dick Cheney, well... dang.) So we went along to the Baronial Day and the Pot Luck Feast yesterday, with... mixed results.

Initially, it was highly painful. The Elder Daughter of DOOOM was particularly DOOOMy, having just returned from two weeks in the bucolic hamlet of Lower Lumbago with my parents, during which time she was doted upon in a typically grandparently fashion so that by the time she returned it was clear that she was the Entitlement Consort to the winner of the Entitlement Crown Tourney, had been declared Entitlement Crown Princess and was looking forward to her Entitlement Coronation any moment now. But a quick trip to a bakery for breadular comestibles helped all three of us get our heads together, and things improved dramatically after that.

Over the course of the evening, I found a good balance between using the EDoD as a babysitter and simply letting her swan off doing her own thing. She was happy with the mix too, and in the end spent plenty more time than I expected looking after the BatPup as well as Master Pertand Handsome's^[1] two gorgeous daughters. This enabled me to get something to eat and spend some time chatting with people. I tried to convince the monkeys to eat as well, but not even bread and roast chook caught their attention. Fortunately, the bakery trip and a bit of yoghurt kept them from collapse.

I now have the stirrings of a plan for a future Evil Feast Kit: supplies to enable more relaxed feast-and-tourney attendance with my manic monkeys:

Food Stuff

Yoghurts, which both daughters seem to like and be willing to eat even when there's fun to be had

Orange juice

Cheese

Bread

Butter for bread

A bread knife!

Base Camp Materials

Picnic rugs

Face wipes

Spare underthings for the BatPup, who is well on the way to toilet-trainedness give or take some occasional accidents

A groundsheet for sleeping on

A BatPup-sized blanket -- she can quite happily sleep just about anywhere that's dark and not too cold, regardless of noise

Really, that's about it. The monkeys can get sufficient nourishment even if the feast itself is not to their liking, and if the BatPup wants to go to sleep the groundsheet and a blankie will do nicely.

Time to update the feasting kit, methinks...

---

[1] Names changed to protect the guilty, although not very much.

The lurgy struck yesterday and I spent last night gasping for air and tossing like a waldorf salad, so I called in dead this morning and planned to spend the day in bed. The Beloved, however, had other plans.

Every Thursday, the local homeschooling group get together for group activities of a generally educational nature¹. Today's particularly inspired idea was a Taking Stuff Apart Day. Knowing my penchant for disassembling computers, the Beloved suggested I come along and maybe find some piece of hardware to dissect.

I knew just the piece.

Years ago, when I was brain-loose and fancy-free, I had a good but certifiably insane friend who I will call Chloe. Now Chloe, apart from being stark staring insane but unbelievably cute to make up for it², was also an Honours student at the ANU, and as such lacked (a) money, and (b) the equipment she needed to do her work. I, meanwhile, had a spare laptop I wasn't using, a sad old thing with Windows 98 and 16Mb of memory and no (count 'em: zero) USB ports. Still, it could run Word, which was all she needed, so I lent it to her.

Her RSI flared up almost immediately.

Lacking even a rudimentary ability to put 2 and 2 together, I later lent the laptop to the Beloved, who was also doing Honours.

Her RSI also flared up.

Suspecting (finally!) that the crappy keyboard and the crappy screen might have something to do with this, I sheepishly took the laptop back and left it in my shed. We christened it The Craptop, and never spoke of it again.

So today, the Craptop came out of the shed and made One. Final. Journey.

If you examine the photo at the top of this entry, you will see the Craptop, in all its glory and a very large number of pieces. Laptops are never very useful for spare parts at the best of times, and a Pentium 1 made by a company that even Wikipedia has never heard of³ isn't any use for even the most basic frankensteining. So it became an educational experience. Armed with screwdrivers, pliers and my Clever Tool (the best present I've ever got, and it came from thelancrewitch, of course) we took the bugger apart.

The second photo demonstrates the best part of the dissection: the discovery of sheets of polarised plastic film, part of the laptop's display, which make eerie optical illusions when you look at things through them. That's the Elder Daughter of DOOOOM, in case you didn't notice.

I went home and collapsed in bed, but I and the Craptop had entertained several kidlets, and that made a successful morning by any standard. Mission accomplished, and good riddance to the Craptop.

---

¹ That's a joke, actually. With homeschooled kids, everything is educational. You could no more get these kids together for non-educational activity than you could herd cats with promises of broccoli. They just get together and do stuff, and the education happens whether their parents like it or not.

² These two qualities go together entirely too often. Or maybe it's that we avoid the insane ones unless they're cute, so all the ugly insane people have to join the Liberal Party so civilised people never see them.

³ Slight exaggeration, but I can't remember what it was now so it hardly matters.

Went to see the EDoD riding her recalcitrant pony in circles at the pony club get-together, then had a moderately edible lunch at the new cafe. Afternoon was spent fixing things that needed fixing, lamenting the impossibility of finding time and resources to fix other things that needed fixing, and getting each of the three munchkins to go to sleep.

Sleep methods employed:

The Boy Wonder: cuddles, a phone playing soothing, spooky music, and darkness. The Boy likes going to sleep with music, usually classical. I set a transistor radio to ABC-FM and duct-taped the dial so it can't be fiddled with, and it frequently does the trick when nothing else will to get him off to dreamland.

The BatPup: Mummy Milk didn't quite work, but a couple of Three Batpups stories got her most of the way there and Empty Garden, The Minstrel Boy and My Old Friend The Blues finished her off.

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM: feeling very disconnected and emotional (oy, vey) but concentrated Daddy and Mummy time and the spare mattress up in our bedroom did the trick, so she finally drifted off to sleep not long ago.

We need to try drugs, I think. Strong ones.

Now I'm going to try to get teffania's minions up and running with Gratian, then I'm off to sleep.

We seem to have settled into a new pattern. I come home from work and play with my assorted munchkins until dinner time. After dinner, the Beloved brings the Boy Wonder upstairs to boob him to sleep, and I take the BatPup off to her room and we watch an episode of Kipper and have "stories and songs". The stories almost always involve The Three BatPups, her absolute favourite storytelling engine. I'm running out of songs to sing, but fortunately she has a few new favourites, of which number one is undoubtedly Elton John's Empty Garden; if we're watching songs on YouTube instead, she's also inordinately fond of Gotye's Heart's A Mess, mainly for the animation. After she falls asleep, around 9ish, I come out to discover that the Beloved has fallen asleep with the boy, so I spend some quality time with the Elder Daughter of DOOOM (Doctor Who and Futurama are usually involved) and then I have the evening to myself. Being largely braindead by this stage - around ten PM - I usually just do the washing up instead. Then I go to bed.

As ruts go, it's not too bad. I hope the Boy Wonder will reprise his earlier trick of going to sleep unattended sooner or later though, because conversation with one's Beloved is an underrated thing...

In other news: I found my old database of the original flurf.net website, pre-2007, and I'm writing some code, in Lisp of course, to read it and translate it. When that's working, I'll stick the backdated blog entries here and on my blog site, but that's a low-priority task. Much higher priority is translating my PHP/PDF code for Mr Death into LaTeX; that's coming along nicely.

Right, enough. Bed time.

Did not get up and go to the Dawn Service today. This was in keeping with the pattern for the week, in that we did not get up and go to the Torch Relay Breakfast yesterday. Instead, we slept. Well, that is to say, I slept. My Beloved took the Boy Wonder and the BatPup downstairs and kept them entertained at about oh-fuck-hundred hours and let me sleep until the sound of murder and mayhem woke me at about 9.30. Have I mentioned how much I love my Beloved lately? Lots. Lots and lots. As they say in Lisp, '#1=(LOTS AND . #1#).

I attempted to repay this inestimable debt by taking the three munchkins off to the park. By some fluke of nature, I have here a photo of the Elder Daughter of DOOOM and the BatPup in the same frame! The Boy Wonder, being in the wrap at the time and strapped to the front of the photographer, could not be included. This appears to be some kind of conspiracy, because it is frankly impossible to photograph the three of them at once without one of them grimacing evilly, one covering herself in paint and/or mud, and one falling over and drooling on the scenery. And they run away to throw gravel at each other before you can take more than a couple of shots.

The rest of the day was spent dealing with assorted insane munchkins and trying to get other stuff done. It appears to be impossible for both of us to achieve anything simultaneously: in this case, the Beloved was working out her plans for the usefulification of our useless front yard, so I did the munchkin wrangling. The Boy Wonder slept for a little while here and there, but the BatPup didn't. The EDoD isn't a mad fan of babysitting, so she's pretty much irrelevant in these calculations (although I believe she helped out with the gardening today). As a result, there I was, bouncing babies and playing with toddlers and getting nothing actually done.

Ah well, could be worse. There could be zero achievement and no cuddles. I'm not too unhappy with taking it in turns to be drooled on, I guess.

So very tired...

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM's habit of ignoring lunch in favour of her twin hobbies of Flirting With Lads and Running Around Like A Mad Aleck led to a major sugar crash and borderline hypothermia, leaving her puking and shivering on Saturday evening as we were due to leave. The medical marvels of Agaricus got her sorted with careful sips of water and plenty of warmth, so we took a chance and headed home, and she was fine. Gods willing she'll remember this next time she decides to leave her dinner and lunch half-eaten over a period of days... but I doubt it. There's evidence that the day they were handing out self-preservation she was hiding behind the door.

She was lovely at Festival itself, by the way: quite pleasant and considerate all the time. Since we returned she's been the entitlement queen from hell, but that's probably the usual social dynamic we always get. When I stop feeling sick and headachey, maybe I'll do something about that. Or lobotomise her with a spoon; one or the other.

I mentioned to Taryn, one of the duty stewards, that I think the EDoD won't be the only one to let cold feet and lack of nutrition lead to a health crash. Hypoglycaemia and hypothermia may turn out to be the officially sanctioned Plague for this year's Festival. That would be interesting.

Discussions with assorted people lead me to believe that next year's Festival won't be at Glenworth. While the site itself is gorgeous, it really doesn't work for any more than the half-sized Festival we had this year. I think the barony of Rowany will reason thus:

• If we have small Festivals over a few days, the problems of all-pervading damp and the swampish campsite will be bearable.
• But the response to this year's Festival will be such that next year's will probably be back up around the thousand people mark again, so the "Plan B" area of the site will be too small and any future Festivals would need to be held at the "Plan A" area.
• The Plan A area is a flood plain with leeches and a tendency to be knee-deep in water if the weather isn't utterly ideal.
• Silverdale was good.

In other news: I caught up with a few people, including bar_barra and alpha_angel, but didn't get to meet mayela_delarue, which is a shame. anthraxia invited all of us to Adelaide in April for her and evildrakey's disbaronment, but I don't know if that's going to be even remotely possible. Still, it'd be nice; maybe we'll try. And the picture here shows Llewen with a fellow camper; the caption is a very old running gag.

I've begun trying to teach the Elder Daughter of DOOOM some programming again. I toyed with the idea of teaching her Python, but in fact she really liked the Common Lisp I was showing her last year, so we've stuck with that. We're going a little faster now though, since I think she was getting bored. Here's what we did tonight:

(defvar family-tree 
  '(pa nanny ((bat beloved (edod batpup boywonder)) 
	      (bigweebro mrsbigweebro (cutie1 cutie2)) 
	      weeweebro)))

This is the family tree of her Nanny and Pa and their three offspring. Big Wee Bro has a lovely wife, Mrs Big Wee Bro, and two lovely daughters. Wee Wee Bro has a tendency to hang around with wee slips of gels, but hasn't managed to convince any of them to assist in the overpopulation of the planet, so he gets an entry all by himself.

(defun father (tree) 
  (car tree))

(defun mother (tree) 
  (cadr tree))

(defun children (tree)
  (caddr tree))

These are the EDoD's first-ever functions: given a family tree, they return the name of the father, the name of the mother and the list of names of the children.

So: (children family-tree) gives you ((BAT BELOVED (EDOD BATPUP BOYWONDER)) (BIGWEEBRO MRSBIGWEEBRO (CUTIE1 CUTIE2)) WEEWEEBRO), which is what you expect (it converts to uppercase for Hysterical Raisons; don't worry about it).

The bulk of the lesson was then in how to extract multiple pieces of information using these functions, and glue them together. I introduced her to list and append, which along with the already-familiar car and cdr and the much less useful cons are pretty much the primary toolbox for list manipulation, old-school style. Step-by-step, we wrote this:

(defun describe-family (tree) 
  (append (list (father tree) 'and (mother tree) 'love) (children tree)))

Result of application on the list of our family: (BAT AND BELOVED LOVE EDOD BATPUP BOYWONDER). Which is (a) true, and (b) not bad for half an hour of leisurely programming.

Next time we'll try something different: a function to print out her times tables. After that, we might revisit the family tree and see about a bit better formatting, so we can get something like "BAT AND BELOVED LOVE EDOD, BATPUP AND BOYWONDER". The insanely powerful format function will get a couple of lessons all to itself, methinks.

The earliest date that I'm sure I was referred to as "Bat Dad" was at a family Christmas party on what was probably Saturday 21 December 2002.  The Elder Daughter of DOOOOM was, at that date, one thousand, nine hundred and ninety three days old.  If you take the date and add another 1,993 days, you get Thursday 5 June 2008, which is therefore our demiversary: the date upon which I will have been a Daddy for exactly half my daughter's life.  So on Friday the sixth of June, when I will have been her Daddy for longer than I wasn't, I plan to take the EDoD out for celebratory frozen custard, because that's a pretty good milestone, I reckon. 

The Elder Daughter of DOOOM wonders why we don't mind her riding a horse, when we're so implacably opposed to her ever going within spitting distance of a motorbike. Here's one reason. Horses don't generally get up to 250km/h without a hell of a tailwind.

I took the EDoD and the BatPup to the open day of a local organic produce grower this afternoon. Here's the BatPup posing with a mutant lettuce:



( More after the cut; warning: more piccies than usual! )

I'm planning to teach the Elder Daughter of DOOOM some programming this year. I gave her a bit of a rundown of Lisp last year, but ran into some trouble because (+ (* 1 2) (/ 3 4)) doesn't look an awful lot like the 1×2 + 3÷4 that she's used to. So I figure Python is the next bet. To that end, I've been translating a short game from the book that taught me to program, from the original BASIC. It's not a big job -- it's a very small program -- but I have a question I'd like to ask any Pythonistas who may be watching. This isn't a big thing, and I could work around it any of a dozen ways, but I'd like a quick, simple method that won't confuse my daughter or make the program less readable. Here it is:

In BASIC, which is focused very much on keyboard input and plain text output, there's a command to print some text, sensibly called PRINT. So if I say PRINT "Hello, world" then I'll get the traditional greeting, right there. And Python has the same thing, although it spells it print. But BASIC has the logical inverse, a command to take in data rather than to print it out: this is the INPUT command, as in INPUT x,y which will ask for two numbers, comma separated, and place the first of them in the variable x and the second in the variable y. Does Python have anything like this?

The solution I first thought of went something like this, from memory:

f = open('/dev/tty')
raw = f.readline()
x,y = line.split() # space-separated, not comma, but that's OK
# something to convert x and y to integers

I have a nasty feeling I'd be using a list comprehension somewhere to change the strings to integers, which is not something I want to expose the EDoD to at this stage. Obviously I can put it into an importable library file, and probably will because there'll be a lot of this sort of thing over time, but really I'd like something simpler.

Now, C has a sscanf function, which one uses like this:

int x,y;
sscanf(line, "%d %d", &x, &y);
/* do something with x and y now */

... so maybe there's an equivalent in Python? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

---

ETA: I think this will do nicely; I'll stick it in a library file to keep the implementation from messing up the pristine purity of hurkle.py:

def input_numbers():
    return [int(x) for x in sys.stdin.readline().split()]

Usage:
x,y = input_numbers()

Thanks to catsidhe and uniqueid!

The things we couldn't survive summer without:

Kipper the Dog videos, downloaded via BitTorrent: carefully rationed, one ten-ish minute episode per night. A Daddy/BatPup ritual.

Ditto Futurama for the Elder Daughter of DOOOM, although it's not regular enough to be a ritual yet.

Fans!

The wading pool, formerly known as the birthing pool, which we fill with water (in flagrant defiance of water restrictions; sanity is more important) every Friday and use to water the plants on Sunday or Monday. It requires a locked back screen door, which means the BatPup can't go and play in the back yard while it's up; that's why it has to be taken down during the week when I'm not around to keep watch. But the alternative would be to run the risk of finding a BatPup face down in the pool, which would be notably non-optimal.

More fans! I got a cute little cooler from Nanny for my b****day, that has a couple of cannisters you fill with water and stick in the freezer. The fan uses the ice to make really really cool air... yummy! Nanny does good presents.

seagoon and naturalredhead. Their party last night was lovely; just what we needed.

My brother and his wife, who love our daughters and didn't mind looking after them so we could go last night. Shame my parents had to move to bloody Temora. Dagnabbit.

More and more fans! Fans everywhere!

Empty mineral water bottles, regularly refilled from the bath tap and put in the fridge. We plow through them, so we have upwards of a dozen on the go at any time. We have odd daughters who consider cold water to be the ideal drink and don't think much of (or about) soft drinks and cordials. The Beloved and I are in agreement with this.

The hammock. We borrowed this thing from one of thelancrewitch's friends: it's a frame like you get with those single-person shower tents, with a strong spring hanging from the centre and a cushion inside a large sheet of pretty fabric. The Boy Wonder lies inside and bounces happily; it tends to send him off to sleep rather efficiently.

Also: fans.

The final of the May Crown looked like a three-way between Duke Ædward Stædfæste, Baron Hrothgar æt Gytingbroc and Sir Hugh the Little. But Ædward did something deeply disturbing to his elbow, and had to bow out. The final was a best of three, and Hugh attached a mop handle to Hrothgar and cleaned the field with him. And so, for the first time in ages, we have virgin crowns! Woot!

The big controversy for the day was King Alfar's decision to go for a sudden-death tourney: one death and you're out. For a lists of thirty fighters, this would have made sense, but for seventeen, many of them here from far away, it was just pitiful. I saw what looked like some ugly, ugly fighting as stickjock after stickjock realised this was their only chance and they'd better focus on winning. Nasty stuff. And it was all over in a little more than an hour, from invocation court to investiture of the new Crown P&P. I didn't like it, and I hope it doesn't get done again.

Apart from that, it was a good day. The EDoD and the BatPup had fun running around, and the EDoD's best friend "C" enjoyed herself too. I got to sing Are You My Daddy to auntyyolly, who I gather had nothing to do with sabotaging her Beloved's elbow. (I asked, and he said they'd planned a quiet, stay-at-home reign, which makes sense and would have been a Good Thing for this kingdom. It's not like anyone could call them lazy, so it would be a Salutary Lesson and no mistake. But then the elbow fairies attacked and the rest is hysteri.)

One of the highlights of the beige, portaloo-avoiding marathon that men call Festival is the Children's Battle (some call it the Children's Crusade, but that name has unpleasant connotations so I avoid it). auntyyolly only has to run it once more for it to become an SCA Tradition ™: basically, it's an opportunity for the underage munchkins of the kingdom to beat up on any knights foolish enough to volunteer. This year, naturally, I wrote a song about it. The tune's an original, which you can download in MIDI format if you like. I'll have the sheet music as a PDF as soon as I can figure out why KDE NoteEdit doesn't talk to Lilypond (translation: Linux stupidities, as usual). Here it is:

Are You My Daddy

The children held the valley, the children held the fort
The knights held a meeting and they wouldn't cut it short.
So the children stood and taunted, the children stood and cheered
Till the knights stopped talking and they finally appeared.
And the children said...

    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    Is what they said.
    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    Are you my Daddy?
    And -- oops! You're dead!

The knights tried it frontal, they tried it to the side
They tried their raps and snaps and taps, they tried it and they died
The children threw their missiles, with quite unearthly skill
Their swords in mighty concert flew and gave the knights their fill
And the children said...

The knights were all outnumbered, out-angled and outclassed.
But knights are pretty sneaky when it comes down to the last
They couldn't win by prowess, so they won by bribery
With bags of gold to buy it, they acquired victory!
And the knights all sang...

    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Got your fort right here!
    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Who's your Daddy?
    Try again next year!

Must strive for balance, I suppose, so here's what was good and bad about Festival.

( Cut for length and namedropping )

It's a shame my phone isn't fitted with ChortleVision, but I think this photo captures the moment just as well...

The BatPup gets pushed around by her big sister