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You know the story: another day, another thread on the Shambles. From the outside, this one looked quite amiable and irrelevant. But if you can read between the lines with knowledge of the major players, it becomes cause for... SNARK! And sure enough, over on the LJ of one of the people who knows who she is, much merriment and justified sniping ensued. But it occurred to me: why let it be random? Why not have a place for snarking especially about the Shambles, with a rule that the only people who can comment there must identify themselves so that we all know who's listening? Then we can really let go and say what we think. (Which is not so different from what we do now, but this way it has a name.)

So I give you: shambles_snark. Come on over, join in (I need to moderate memberships, at least initially), and introduce yourself. And then... SNARK!

I wanted to write another filk about the SCA, particularly about the somewhat lax standards it allows. I started out trying to filk the theme from Kimba the White Lion, something about "TSCA the (something) (something)" but I got stuck: "Who's got purple kittens on his coat of arms / Who wears jeans and Adidas in court ..." and then nothing. Then celsa posted her filk and my angle changed. This is much less cynical. It's to the tune of Mad World, either the Tears For Fears version or the Gary Jules version; you pick.

Known World

All around me are a hundred faces
Swords and maces, courtly graces
Brightly flicker in the candle's traces
Going Dreaming, going Dreaming

They cheer now, raising up their tankards
No evasion, no evasion
Hide my smile, I want to say it's crazy,
Far too hazy, even lazy

But I find it right and proper, I find it just the thing
We got our basic structure from The Once and Future King
It's written on the cover, and it's there for you to see:
"To dream the Middle Ages just exactly as they
Should be, should be"

Children learning even though they hate school
This is still cool, this is still cool
Play at being king and queen of misrule,
Bright eyes glisten, bright eyes glisten

When I started I was very nervous
Just a newbie, just a newbie
Found a way to figure what's my talent
Now just watch me, now just watch me

And I find it right and proper, I find it just the thing
We got our basic structure from The Once and Future King
It's written on the cover, yes it's there for you to see:
"To dream the Middle Ages just exactly as they
Should be, should be"

Someone just created an LJ community for weight-loss surgery people (users? victims? afficionados?) within the Society for Creative Anachronism. While I understand that the SCA is known for its blessedly relaxed attitude to modern standards of personal appearance (they say you can't do a nude calendar of SCAdians because they don't make paper that wide^[1]) it still seems an odd combination. Imagine the Venn diagram: there's a very small circle for people who plan to have or have had weight-loss surgery, and another very small circle for people in the SCA, and no doubt the intersection of those two circles is non-empty, but still: it's a funny combination.

It got me thinking. What if there was one forum, for everyone? You could self-identify by tags -- I'd pick SCA member, bard, SF fan, chorister, pedant, parent, home-schooler, cybernetic were-turnip, former president of Zimbabwe -- and then the only posts you'd see would be from people who matched some number of your tags. You could set it to "all", and get a very small but precisely-tailored community, or to different values of "some" to get progressively larger groups. It's the ultimate "us vs them" environment, except that it makes it clear, surreptitiously, that every one of "them" is an "us" in one way or another.

To make it interesting, you could have a huge collection of themes and styles, and let people vote on the appropriate style according to their tags: I could vote with my SCA member and chorister tags to have 6 point Comic Sans in shades of magenta and puce, and in any group that had those tags, that design would reign supreme... at least until more people with those tags voted for something else. The changes would be subtle for the "some" groups and more marked for the "all" groups, so you'd get visible feedback to tell you where you were. If you could merge themes in some way (colour scheme from here, font from there, images from somewhere else) then you could evolve the designs democratically, which would be interesting.

Could be interesting. One blog to rule them all, into which everyone posts. Like a merger of the friends page and the tag cloud. I wonder if anyone's thought of that before...?

(Edited to add: the domain taglog.com is owned but unused, but vennlog.com is available. If only I had time to work on this...)


^[1] Not sure who "they" are, but they're rude bastards.

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.

Took the BatPup and went along to the Arts & Sciences evening at the Baron & Baroness's place tonight.

The Baron told me some more of his strongly-held opinions on the unsuitability of Linux for ordinary users, and I began to see the pattern: he's had a run of bad luck with drivers and so feels that only Windows is going to work without pain.  I managed to impress him with the Add/Remove Programs feature and Aptitude/Synaptic, because his biggest experience with Linux was with Fedora, which either lacked or didn't sufficiently advertise such features, leading him to believe that installing any software at all required a familiarity with makefiles and command lines.  Showing him how easy it was to install and configure some software may have convinced him that Ubuntu, at least, is not a complete dead loss.  However, unlike most people I know, he's had uniformly good experiences with Windows, and even with Outlook and Exchange, so he'll never be converted now.  The damage is done, poor poor boy...

Meanwhile, I gave our Rapier Marshal a tutorial on WordPress, and she did her first blog entry.  She was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is, once you've fixed your password, so I expect she'll get to work pretty quickly and use it as intended.  This is a Good Thing, since writing reports is a chore and anything that makes it easier must be worth it.

Also, helped the bookings officer for the upcoming College War add a booking form to the College site.  It's only a simple fill-in-the-form-and-it-emails-the-bookings-officer sort of thing, but it's better than nothing.

Meanwhile, the BatPup played with people and charmed their socks off, from the looks of things.

A good night, but it's now late and I need my ugly sleep.

(A brump, in case you wonder, is a brain dump, a virtual vomiting of many disconnected thoughts and impressions all in one go. You probably won't have heard the word, since I just made it up. Although that's not 100% reliable, since I've made up a number of words over the years — I'm an incurable neologist — that other people have sworn blind they already knew. Parallel evolution? Perhaps.)

My nursing home simulator has been coming along slowly — more slowly than I or my boss would like, although I did have a week off doing other bug fixes, and there have been an assortment of complications. Right now it's happily prescribing and administering drugs to my simulated geriatrics, and I'm playing around with the dark nooks and crannies of the medication management software, finding things that my more experienced cow-orkers never knew, or had long forgotten, about how things work. My boss cheered me up mightily by saying out of the blue that he thought this was a valuable tool, because it was allowing us, the programmers, to see what looked like real live data, instead of the weeks- or months-old anonymised data dumps we usually had to rely on. Just looking at the Administrations page and seeing a live history of administered drugs, rather than the garish "overdue" alarm clock icons we get normally, was an odd but encouraging sign.

Meanwhile, I'm working on other stuff. Canon Lore is in a pretty good state now with teffania Canon at the helm, but I have a bunch of bug fixes I need to send to her. The LaTeX work for Mr Death looks like it won't be hard at all, if I knuckle down. And there are one or two other little projects, backburner tasks, that mainly exist to keep me from getting stuck on one problem for too long.

This Saturday is the Boy Wonder's ½th birthday. Six months — really? It seems like a week ago the loungeroom was crowded with a plastic wading pool and my son arrived, asleep and happy, as the city slept. And now he's too big for his bouncy hammock and eerily close to crawling by himself, which suggests that walking, talking and dropping out of college to become a bass guitarist can't be far away. He'll always be my baby boy, though, even when he's towering over me and asking for the keys to the hovercar.

Sunday, of course, is Mother's Day. Why does the SCA keep scheduling weekend events on Mother's Day? They're working on fixing some bugs in the laws at the mo'; I'll have to remember to suggest that they change the rules on May Crown Tourney so that people with real live families can have a slightly better chance of getting a weekend to themselves. The Queen will approve; her Mum is good value, and — ten years ago at least — was a bit of a spunk too, now I think of it. (And her dad was a colour blind psych lecturer who repainted their house by himself, and it showed; strange family, but nice.)

Oh, Saturday is naturalredhead's birthday party. Must mention this to the Beloved. Hey, Beloved! Saturday is naturalredhead's birthday party! There we go. Not sure if we can go along; depends on munchkins.

Ummm... that's all I can think of. Sorry, nothing to make schizophrenic Republicans froth at the mouth today; they'll just have to amuse themselves. Hey ho.

It's Anno Societatis XLIII. Do you know where your persona is?

As I mentioned back during the Fiat Lux effort, it's possible to sing the Agincourt Carol to the tune of the Banana Boat Song, a fact I originally learned from bar_barra, I believe -- but somehow I never got around to trying it myself.  But I was out on a long walk with the BatPup today, and she wanted songs, and she's very insistent that they must be new songs, so I dredged what I could from memory.  Later at home, I found that the full version makes the Boy Wonder giggle uproariously, which is just about the best sound in the world.  So if you fancy putting on your best Harry Belafonte and joining in, here are the properly adjusted lyrics:

The Bananacourt Carol

Our king went forth to Normandy (Deo gratias Anglia)
With grace and might of chivalry (Deo gratias Anglia)
There God for him wrought marv'lously (Deo gratias Anglia)
Wherefore England may call, and cry (Deo gratias Anglia)

Deo! Deo!
Deo gratias Anglia
Deo! Deo!
Redde pro victoria.

He set a siege, forsooth to say (Deo gratias Anglia)
To Harfleur town with royal array (Deo gratias Anglia)
That town he won, and made a fray (Deo gratias Anglia)
That France shall rue till Domesday (Deo gratias Anglia)

Then went our king, with all his host (Deo gratias Anglia)
Through France for all the French's boast (Deo gratias Anglia)
He spared no dread of least, nor most (Deo gratias Anglia)
Till came he to Agincourt coast (Deo gratias Anglia)

And then for sooth that knight comely (Deo gratias Anglia)
In Agincourt field he fought manly (Deo gratias Anglia)
Through grace of God the most mighty (Deo gratias Anglia)
He had both field, and victory (Deo gratias Anglia)

There dukes, and earls, lord and baron (Deo gratias Anglia)
Were taken, slain, and that well soon (Deo gratias Anglia)
And some were led in to London (Deo gratias Anglia)
With joy, and mirth, and great renown (Deo gratias Anglia)

Now gracious God he save our king (Deo gratias Anglia)
His people, all his well willing (Deo gratias Anglia)
Give him good life, and good ending (Deo gratias Anglia)
That we with mirth may safely sing (Deo gratias Anglia)

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 now have five landed barons or baronesses on my friends list: anthraxia and evildrakey, dormant_dragon, mr_bassman and now sleepy_ermine. Oh, and one ex-landed Baroness: mmy_me. Prompted by a post from one of these, I find myself wondering: what do you do to differentiate between "Me On LJ" and "Me In A Pointy Hat"? I know some of these simply never post about anything related to baronial life, and others do but keep it intentionally vague. Friend-locking is also a useful trick.

My thoughts are that the only hard and fast rule would have to be: never speak as either leader or representative of the barony on your LJ. If you think the King Is A Fink, say so as Fred Nurk, not as Baron Froderick von Flintschtone OP. Never say "my barony thinks the King Is A Fink"; never ever say "my barony ought to think the King Is A Fink". That way lies madness and hate mail.

But what happens when you do post stuff, proceeding carefully and obeying all street signs, and someone takes your personal opinion as official edict (or worse, baronial policy)? Does it make you want to delete your posts and hide in a hole? Or is it just another opportunity to break out the Clue Bat (no relation) and give someone a new perspective, kinetic-energy style?

I ask out of pure curiosity, by the way. I'm not planning on staging a coup and overthrowing the barony. No, not at all. Stop building those fortifications, sleepy_ermine, you're perfectly safe in your tiring, frequently thankless, very well executed job, I assure you...

ETA: And what about ex-royalty (eh, auntyyolly and mr_cvb)? Do they have the same trouble? Do people read "I like kittens" on King Corny's LJ and assume it means he'll be banning ferrets for the duration of the reign?

From the Politarchopolis Seneschal, Owain “I Love Show Tunes But I’m Still Butch” Cantor ap Hugh:

Unfortunately we are now in the position again of scrambling to get an event up, after the Steward of Casual War had to pull out because of mundane life commitments. No blame can be attached on this: it’s a sad fact of this pursuit that most of us can only pursue it half-time and the rest of the world is all too ready to get in the way. The citizens of Polit being who they are, however, I had a volunteer to take over about half an hour after I asked - thank you Llewellyn de Guerre! The issue now is whether the calling of the Australian election for the same weekend (23-25 November) might force some people to stay away. As I write, we have called for expressions of interest from the citizens of Lochac and will decide on Friday 2 November whether we can pull it off.

So Casual War is on again this year, on the same weekend as the Harry/Hermione landslideelection, but there’s a twist: they need at least a dozen more people to confirm that they’ll be attending, or they’ll have to cancel. Cost is $35 per day or $80 for the whole weekend from Friday to Sunday. That covers food and accommodation at Warrumbui, the legendary Lutheran flying saucer perched amid lovely bushland half an hour from Canberra. Last year was a lot of fun, and I regretted not staying longer. This year, Seraphina had been planning a bawdy bardic circle, so provided Llewellyn likes that idea (and knowing him — duh!) it should be a lot of fun. If you can make it, or at the very least promise to try hard to get there and be willing to cover costs if you can’t, please let the bookings officer, Mathilde Hastings, know as soon as possible.

Edited to add: They got the numbers!  The Casual War will go ahead!  Excellent!

Crossposted from fLog.

Finn got a beak! Finn got a beak! Yaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!!!!!!

(Of course, peerages are all well and good, but nothing beats a Court Barony (which Finn also has, I might mention). Court Baronies give you all the entitlements -- a hat, a prefix and an adjective, plus a place in the Order of Precedence that only a crack Research Herald can recall off the top of his head -- without the one thing that makes peerages really undesirable: the meetings.

That said, sometimes the royals just have to give people a peerage because to do otherwise would show that they're Just Not Paying Attention. In Finn's case, this is clearly the primary reason. I mean, duh! Finn = Pelican! How could they have missed that? She's like the ISO Standard Hard-Working Member Of The Barony! Come on! Imagine how embarrassing it would be to be a king or queen and not give Finn a Pelican! Really! What do they do with their time???

So a great wrong has been righted, a peerage has been conveyed, and we can all say "What? Didn't she have one of those?" And also: "Congratulations Finn!"

And Persi is now the only non-peer in the household.

For the moment...)

May Crown was a spectacular event, really. I couldn't believe it when I glimpsed the site through the trees as the EDoD and the BatPup and I approached: they set up a dozen shade pavilions around the lists, which people were free to make use of -- and we did! We sat with elissande and her lad, and across from the lovely D-X chaps and chapettes. (And yes, they were lovely - Mr The Renegade has started bathing regularly every month whether he needs to or not, so married life obviously suits him.) It all looked v. v. speccy, and was well run.

The big disappointment, I think for everyone involved, was the godawful sudden-death tourney format. See, in general you get two chances in a crown tourney: you don't bow out until you've been killed a second time. This reduces the effect of superdukes like Stæddie Æddie, who can otherwise take any fighter out of commission with one shot. Imagine, for example, that you are a good unbelted fighter like the sweet-smelling Adam the Renegade or the sexy and popular Miles de Colwell, or a belted fighter who's not yet won a crown like Asbjorn or sir_phil. Any of these could reasonably expect to win your average bout, unless they were unlucky with the random list draw and came up against a superduke like Ædwarde or Corny or Alfar. And if losing a single bout isn't the end of your hopes, you can still progress, because it's bloody rare to randomly draw two superdukes in your first two rounds -- there may even be processes in place to ensure it never happens.

But the sudden death format meant that most of the mid-level fighters were out by the second round. The final was between Hugh, who was fighting like a demon, and Hrothgar, who was either fighting better than he ever has in his life or else just got lucky in the draw.

And that's what I hated: that luck played a huge part in the determination of the winner. Hrothgar was lucky to get as far as he did; Hugh was lucky the elbow fairies took Ædwarde out of commission; and, to be frank, I think King Alfar was lucky that people like Asbjorn didn't bill him for the wasted plane trip.

Hey ho; six months of Hugh and the incredibly-easy-on-the-eyes Theresa won't be such a burden, and at least they're not old ex-royals back again. And they have a cute li'l baby too, who will be entertaining in court. Maybe the BatPup can be a Munchkin-In-Waiting!

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.)

My Beloved thelancrewitch is looking for advice on combining breast-feeding with SCA garb. Anyone who happens to read my LJ and not hers and has any experience in that area, please pop by and offer your advice.

Meanwhile, we're thinking of possibly doing middle-eastern/Persian, because it makes hot weather (like the new Festival site) a lot easier to cope with. I have my eastern persona name worked out: al-Shayk Khalid ibn Harun ibn Bilal al-Xu'ffasch -- that's Baron Khalid (sounds like Karl), son of Harun (sounds like Eric, my in-persona father), son of Bilal (sounds like my mundane name), known as The Bat (if DC Comics is to be believed, anyhow).

Forgot to mention: after Beigefest's insanities, which included entirely too much struggling with my seven-year-old dome tent, the Beloved agreed that that tent I was drooling over might be a reasonable purchase for next year. So, given that I had a little extra cash in hand as the result of a windfall, I popped back to buy it... only to discover that the former price tag of $430 was no longer relevant. It now costs (drum roll, please...) $199 $299. Yes, that's right, less than only slightly more than half price. So I'm rather glad I wasn't convincing back then, because twothree hundred kangaroubles hurts a lot adequately less for a palatial nylon pleasure dome.

It wasn't in stock, but it'll be available soonish. The EDoD and I may even pop up to Spring Waaaaarghh on the October long weekend to give it a test run. We shall see!

Said I would, and I did. Here you go. To the tune of Science Fiction/Double Feature from The Rocky Horror Picture Show:

Henry Tudor was young
When he was writing songs
But they mostly stuck around;
And John Dowland wrote smut
His tunes are all un-cut
And full of quite lascivious sounds.
Then things went astray
With old Josquin de Prez
With his Masses from popular songs
Then in a deadly rush
They all got told to hush
Invention is inherently wrong!

Bardic Circle? (no! no! no!) Won't permit it!
Filk's a sin! (oh oh oh) So don't commit it!
You're better off to (oh oh oh) sing in choirs,
And keep your folk songs (oh oh oh) far from our fires!
Woh oh oh oh oh
At the late night choral Laurel singing show

I know Mistress Tangwystl
Would reach for her pistol
If you ask her to sing something rude!
And it's simply not done,
To expect to have fun
When Duke Baldwin's in a musical mood.
All the peers we respect
Are quite direct:
It's Latin or nothing, they say.
If you want to sing
Some original thing
Don't do so in our SCA
In a...

Bardic Circle? (no! no! no!) Won't permit it!
Filk's a sin! (oh oh oh) Don't commit it!
You're better off to (oh oh oh) sing in choirs
And keep your folk songs (oh oh oh) far from our fires
Woh oh oh oh oh
At the late night choral Laurel singing show.
Keep your voice low
In the late night choral Laurel singing show.
Why do we go
To the late night choral Laurel singing show?
I just don't know
It's the late night choral Laurel singing show.

From comments by wenchilada and others, it appears the sad old alcoholic who whinged about the Bardic Circle got around to other campfires as well at Festival. Her complaint, such as it was, is that some of the singing was entirely too modern, and doesn't belong at Festival or in the SCA. She also said that bardic circles were better "in her day", but you can put that down to the amnesia of the old and infirm, so never mind. Let's have a look at her main assertion.

There are two kinds of singing in the SCA. The Winebar Warblers are the ones doing part-singing, your standard choral stuff. Most of it is authentic to the renaissance period or a little later, so well within the acceptable range for what we call period. It's generally religious, modulo a little John Dowland smut, and requires that you know (a) your voice part, and (b) how to read sheet music. It sounds gorgeous, and adds a huge amount to the atmosphere of an event. It would be tragic if it ever disappeared from Festival, because a lot of branches don't have the minimum number of competent sheet-music-literate singers to get it started, so for many people Festival is the only time they get to hear or sing the stuff.

The other kind of singing is done by the Bardic Bellowers. They sing folk, generally; at best it's seventeenth century stuff, but mostly it's "perioid", done in an attempt at period style, with varying success, by SCA people, or else filk, which is songs written Weird-Al-style to existing tunes. The canonical example of perioid is Silfren's Uislenn; the canonical filk at the most recent Festival was celsa's version of the Hunters & Collectors not-a-one-hit-wonder, Throw Your Arms Around Me. Bardic singing is much more accessible to more people; there's no sheet music, just words written down or remembered, and it's always in English. But it's not as lovely to listen to at a distance. You have to be right there taking part in the bardic stuff, whereas for the warblers it's often very pleasant to stand at a distance and let yourself be transported by the harmonies.

Two very different styles. Now: which one belongs in the SCA, and which one is the abomination?

People like the alcoholic woman would have us believe that the bardic stuff doesn't belong. Even Llewen the Unruly, he who wrote The Miracle and popularised a modified version of Graham Pratt's Black Fox as The Foxy Song, is now saying that the bardic stuff shouldn't be done at events, even at Festival.

These people are wrong.

The SCA lets you in if you make a reasonable attempt at pre-17th century clothing. Does that mean you need pre-17th century hairstyles too? Pre-17th century eyeglasses (ie none)? Pre-17th century underwear? Diseases? Bigotries? Religious arguments? No, obviously not. Is that because the SCA has appalling low standards? No! It's because the SCA has appealingly low standards. That is: the SCA has found the sweet spot, between the twee Disneyfication of the Renn Faires and the strict anal retentiveness of the serious historical reenactment groups. You can join in at your leisure, dip your toe in the water, and if you like what you see you can come back for more. We welcome newcomers, we welcome dilettantes. We like it that way, and the result is that we have a considerably greater membership than the other organisations for a considerably lower personal cost.

So why should music be any different?

There was a time when Llewen, to pick a name at random, sang folk and silly stuff. Now he's a winebar warbler, taking himself as seriously as his awestruck fans do, and that's his right; but he's forgotten where he came from. If the warblers had been the only game in town in 1983, would The Foxy Song be the unofficial Lochacian anthem now? More importantly, would his magnificent voice have been sending shivers up people's spines for most of the last few decades? As a court herald, maybe; but not as a singer.

Or how about Silfren? She used to sing. She got criticised once too many times by the anti-bardic minority, and now she's a fencer who feels unwelcome when she opens her mouth. How is that justice?

And me: I hardly belong in this sort of company, but it's my blog so what the hell. I started with filk because it was easy to do. Now a lot of my best stuff is original: Songs of the West, When Sarah Smiles, Oh The Baron, My Son I've Been A Rover. I can guarantee this: I would never have written those, I would never have joined university choirs and learned the warblerish side of things at all, I would not still be in the SCA, if the bardic circles of my early days had been banned, or if they had been even half as restrictive as the old whinging woman believes they were.

I don't think the current crop of new singers will stick around if things get more restrictive. That would be a great shame. So I don't intend to let it happen. There will be the warblers, and good on them. Any time I get a chance, I'll join in, as I have done in the past. I almost ran down the hill to join in when the Abbotsford hard-rocking music fiends started on Laudate on Sunday night, but I had a circle to run so I didn't. But I will always love the bardic tradition, and I will defend it to the death.

My name is Karl Faustus von Aachen, and I am a Bard. Deal with it.

I know I said I wasn't going to bother, given the amount of work I have to get done before Festival, but I did a new version of The Known Words this past week. It's sitting at the print shop now, ready to be turned into fifty spiral-bound little miracles. I'll be selling them -- I hope! -- at Festival for $10 a pop, with the proceeds going to syridian's clever idea for a baronial defibrillator machine.

It's a nervous time. Did I get everything right? Are all the songs in the book listed in the index? Are all the songs listed in the index in the book? Are there appallingly stupid typos that I forgot to fix? Will the pagination work OK, so that King Henry, Stickjock and My Son I've Been A Rover (the only multi-page songs in the book) are positioned properly so you don't have to turn a page to keep singing? One miscalculation can mess up all that sort of careful planning.

But they're good. Seventy sixfive songs, I think; a combination of filk, folk and period, by legends and unknowns, all good stuff. (Well, all good except for My Lady's Eyes, which is turgid tripe, but it's in there because people keep asking for it.)

So... wanna buy a song book?

( And here's the contents, if you want more convincing )

Billy Joel does a song called Scenes From An Italian Restaurant, which contains another song inside it, Hamlet play-in-a-play style. The song is about Brenda and Eddy, a couple of Greasers (think Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta) who got married. It came to me that the names could be trivially changed to refer to a certain Duke and Duchess, and then the rest of the song just sort of wrote itself. The premise is simple: suppose the King and Queen skipped town with all the money in the kingdom coffers; who would you call to take over? Yep. So here it is: the song starts at 3:10 or so in the video, if you fancy following along. Maybe I'll filk the outer part too some time, but this'll do for now.

Yo-yo and Aeddy

Yo-yo and Aeddy had their Duchies already
When the King and the Queen ran away.
Something to do with a loft for two near the beach in Calais...
Nobody knew how to sort it,
Oh, and all of the funds had been "misreported":
We never knew they were gone till the cops all arrived.
Surely, Yo-yo and Aeddy would step in to help us survive!

Yo-yo and Aeddy took over already, with the Officers all in a tizz:
Yo-yo was good with the reigning and ruling and all of that biz,
And everyone looked up to Aedward,
Strong as an oak and he's not just dead wood;
We're better to have them in charge in our moment of strife...
Oh, so there we were, crowning Yo-Yo and Aeddy for life.

So, they planned a republic with fair elections
And a couple of brave new frontiers;
A competent team that they picked from the cream
Of the crop of the best volunteers;
But it started to fall when the lawyers got called,
And they just didn't count on the Peers...

Well they ruled for a while in their very cool style
But it's always the same in the end:
A tourney was fought and was won by the sort
Who you knew would be back there again
And the King and the Queen took up their routine,
And the Duchess and Duke said "Amen".

Yo-yo and Aeddy had kept it all steady
And we managed to prosper and thrive;
It was kind of a shame that it's only a game,
But they both had their lives.
But next time it falls in a big heap,
Yo-yo and Aeddy will once more dig deep.
Trying to keep them away would be hard to contrive:
Oh, and that's all I know about Yo-yo and Aeddy:
Any disaster, they're hangin' round ready,
And there we'll be, crowning Yo-Yo and Aeddy for life.