Sherwood Forest Faire (see previous post) is in the middle of its second season, and I’ve been back five of the eight days they’ve been open so far. (They are open weekends through April 03, plus Friday, March 18.) While not without blemish, my experience has been a whole lot of fun, and in many ways an improvement over their great inaugural season. Read on for specifics:
Category: Autobiographical
While nobody cares about the boring minutiae of my life, perhaps this can serve some purpose as a writing exercise.
Teeth
Completing the set of digital medical imaging, here’s a set of dental X-rays. (Sorry it’s one big wide image; that’s as it was sent to me.) At least now, if something goes terribly wrong during my forays into Mad Science, the medical examiner can look to my blog for help in figuring out who I was.
The X-ray source for these images was a handheld emitter, which I didn’t have a chance to oogle as much as I’d have liked, but which I believe to be not unlike the Aribex Nomad pictured to the right. Technologically cool, and great old-school Buck Rogers styling.
Sherwood Forest Faire
A new fair has sprung up in this great land of ours, and against all odds it shows every outward sign of being exceptionally good. Sherwood Forest Faire is running Saturday and Sunday through April 04 of this year. I attended the opening weekend (27, 28 Feb 2010), had a great time, and plan to go back at least one more weekend if schedule and weather permit went back on 20, 21 Mar 2010, and had an even better time despite cold weather.
More gushing praise, links and even a few pictures after the jump.
CAT Scan
More fun and games with medical imaging. I got a lumbar discogram followed by a CAT scan. I was able to get a CD of imaging data from the latter. Gallery of images and some animated 3D visualizations after the cut.
Nuke-u-lar Magnetic Resonance Imaging
You may recall with some indifference my immediately previous post, wherein I mentioned how impressed I was with some paltry digital X-ray images. That, dear reader, was the impression of a younger and more easily awed version of yr. humble narrator.
For I have now been imaged, in the nuclear magnetic resonance manner, known to the vulgar as an MRI.
Beyond the jump are images: 156 of them, with inline thumbnails (so please use discretion and have patience if your link is slow). Despite my earlier unseemly levity about the JT sign, all said images are impeccably safe for work.
Throckmorton Indeterminate
Technology is freakin’ amazing.
Thanks to some lower back pain, I got a hands-on experience with digital radiography today. For five bucks — that’s five US dollars — they gave me a CD with the Dicom image files to take home.
Am I going to share those images? Converted to JPEG format on this very website? You bet I am, after the jump.
Media: The Eagle (Bryan / College Station)
Sat down this Saturday afternoon at TRF for a nice plate of bees (right), and had a lovely chat 
with Michelle Casady of The Eagle (Bryan / College Station). We talked about renaissance fairs, and what might possess people to go to them, how many times we’ve been (“Is there even a number that big?”), and the details of our attire. (“My costume is itching me. Do I have to wear this? I don’t wanna wear this.”)
Despite her persistent questioning, I kept quiet about the fact that pretty much every other shop has an opium den in the back, not to mention the place being a non-stop orgy after closing. She wrote a nice article for her newspaper, one that may well lure more unsuspecting victims into the louche and depraved life of the regular renaissance fair patron.
What’s in Your Pouch?
It’s renfaire season again. (Pause for cries of “Nerrrrrds!” and “Huzzah!”) If your home fair is as mine, they issue instructions to “prepare thyself for merriment!” But the promotional materials I’ve seen have been a little sparse on the topic of what exactly that preparation entails. Lack of sufficient preparation for merriment is indeed a common and heartbreaking problem.
If you’ve always wanted to know what an experienced fair-goer might carry in that odd little leather pouch on his belt, the mystery will be revealed after the jump.
There are moon-letters here.
Did you hear the one about the Aggie who had a truly first-class library of science fiction and fantasy?
The denizens of Texas A&M University take a lot of stick, some fraction of which they may perhaps deserve. As I’m a Rice alumnus, you may believe me when I say I’ve heard (and repeated) my share of the dreadful jokes.
But this post is about one of the places where not only have the Aggies excelled, but have done so within the realm of unqualified, unabashed flat-out geekishness — one of my personal favorite sorts of excellence, and one I deeply admire.
Wherein the author both tests WordPress and inaugurates the site…
Is this thing on?
I’ve been henke@insync.net for a long damn time.
To the best of my ability to recall, my first email address was something or other @lanl.gov. This would be around or about 1987. After a four-year (somewhat overlapping) stint as something boring @rice.edu (Go Owls!), I wallowed in low-grade snark and minor infamy as henke@netcom.com and henke@scaly.ssc.gov. This would bring our timeline to approximately 1993.
After that, it was a move to Houston and henke@phoenix.net. I have fond memories of the phoenix account, notably the improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of my email stream stemming from the inability of stupid people to spell “phoenix”. This was about the time spam was becoming a real problem, so although I was a frequent poster to UseNet, I munged addresses.
That brings us to 1999 (party as though it were same) and henke@insync.net. As of this writing, that account it still active. As of the dawn of 2010, it will not be. Alas, the fantastic, local, hacker-run insync.net was too good for this troubled world, and was gobbled up by texas.net lo, these many years ago. While the original domain still stands, I’ve grown tired of shelling out the Croessian sum of twenty bucks a month for a simple email forward and POP mailbox.
Thus, I’ve hired hostmonster and registered the domain ‘mythopoeic.org’, at which I’m dhenke (as there’s an ahenke also, with whom I desire email parity — while I’m still Henke of Clan Henke, that’s only for formal occasions).
While hand-crafting HTML (and/or XHTML) with a plain old text editor has long been my habit, I have come around to the view that time spent on that sort of attention to detail is time that would serve both my readers and myself better were I to spend it on content. And, Hostmonster had an easy way to install WordPress, so, well… here we are.