The Tenth Day of Christmas

It's the tenth day of Christmas today. In the Middle Ages, people would have been gearing up for the biggest festival on Twelfth Night. In the Current Middle Ages, people are doing just that. With any luck, my Christmas presents to myself may arrive in time for Twelfth Night, or maybe Distaff Day.

Sorry, people who are in the SCA or used to be have a tendency to speak of dates in Medieval holidays.

I woke up today much later than usual today, and the Mummers Parade was on TV! It's been ages since I've watched the parade on TV!

While I never went downtown when I was a kid to see it, I have watched the Harrowgate String Band strut their stuff on Frankford Avenue!

This is a photo of the Frankford String Band, which I've also seen strut in person.

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Last night, I saw the final episode of Doctor Who with David Tenent, and it was good!

Previous doctors have met their ends suddenly, and without warning. Well, Tom Baker's Doctor could tell it was coming, but didn't use the information to his advantage. I don't want to give away any spoilers (well, I really do, but some of you may not have seen that episode yet), but this time the Doctor has a lot of warning (the Ood have been trying to get hold of him for ages to let him know), and even after the deed is done, he still has a chance to see old friends before he's gone.

So, anyway, we have a new Doctor! Geronimo!

By the way, Geronimo seems to be the new Allons-y.

Somehow, it just doesn't have as much class.

Anyway, Doctor, "Your song is ending, but the story never ends."

Heroes is back tomorrow night with an all new two hour episode!

The holidays always inspire lots of reruns, but it's wonderful go get back to real TV! You know, new stuff! January will see lots of shows returning with a new season.

One of those shows coming back is Chuck, and you can get ready for the new season by watching a series of back-to-back reruns on SyFy Thursday evening starting at 5 pm here.

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Speaking of TV, I have a spooky story for you that I was reminded of by TV (Ghost Hunters, to be exact).

John keeps telling me I have to tell you more about some of the things I've done in my life, and this is one of the odder ones, so here goes:

My aunt and uncle used to be involved in N-SSA. I know I've mentioned that before, but for those of you who haven't read about it before, it's a group of Civil War reenactors.

Jean asked me to go to some of their events, and the first one I went to was at Lakehurst Naval Air Station. If you ckick the link, you'll find that it has a different name, now.

We arrived on Friday evening, and had enough time to pitch our tents and get set up before it was dark. There wasn't much to it, just a line of tents of the participants, and, at right angles to that, Sutler's Row. Sutlers are merchants. Yes, this was a shopping opportunity, too!

This was my first skirmish, and I got to meet a lot of people and sit in one of their tents and sing Civil War songs. It was lots of fun.

The next morning, I woke up to a strange, droning sound. I dressed quickly and got out of the tent to find a heavy fog. Somebody told me to look up and pointed up at the sky in a direction that was behind the tent. I kept saying "I don't see anything" (due to the heavy fog) and they told me to keep looking.

Suddenly, out of the fog, about 30 feet up, there appeared an airship! It was right there, so close it startled me!

It went right over my head, and then another one appeared, and another and another! I don't know how many airships there were, but they kept coming in overhead, one after the other!

I was told that they had been waiting something like two weeks to land. In order for an airship to land, the air has to be very still, and we'd had too much wind for a while.

Later on that day, there was a special tour that had been arranged for us visitors to the air station, and a bunch of us went off on a military bus. We got to see lots of things. One that stands out in my memory was the flight lind (which we didn't actually get very close to, and they wouldn't let us off the bus).

I do remember a lot of planes parked on the ramp with their wings folded up like this:

They were painted in the Naval design, and the place above doesn't really look like the ones I remember, but the wings fold the same way.

But the big event was Hangar One!

Hangar One is unbelievably BIG! The gentleman who was giving the tour told us all about it at length. There was a lot to talk about, and he gave us all the details. At that point in time (I'm told there are bigger ones now, but I don't know why), it was the biggest open interior structure in the world. It was intended to house airships, and could hold quite a few. It was also so big that it sometimes developed it's own local weather patterns, and they had known it rain inside the hanger, even when it wasn't raining outside. When we saw it, it was empty.

I missed a lot of what the guide was telling us because I kept being distracted by the oddest thing I'd seen so far (I was 16, and still in high school). The scene looked peaceful, and nothing seemed to be happening, but right in front of the hangar was something that is hard to describe.

I could see the scene as it was, but I could also see something else. It was like there was a huge photographic slide that I was looking at it through. The slide was moving (as in video), and I could see it just as clearly as I could see the ground in front of the hangar.

But what was in the slide was not calm and peaceful, it was turbulent and full of fire! An airship was there, and it burst into flames! It was very chaotic, and it just went on and on with flames bursting out of the airship and consuming it as if gradually fell the last few feet of it's landing.

Finally, the guide came to the end of his tour of the hangar and asked if anyone had any questions. I asked him if anything unusual had happened at that particular place, pointing to the spot where I was still watching the airship burn. He said "Oh, yeah. That's the exact spot where the Hindenburg crashed and burned!"

This is what I was looking at:

This is the first photograph that I've ever seen of the Hindenburg fire that's in color. It's even more impressive when you're looking at the real thing. Fire tends to overload film and increase the contrast, but when you see it for real, it's a lot brighter and redder. It looks a lot scarier, too! And this photo was just the beginning. The fire spread and engulfed the whole airship, and I got to watch the whole thing in horror and fascination!

Ghost Hunters, by the way, really amazes me. It takes one of the most exciting topics I could imagine, and makes it so boring that I can't see how they could possibly do it! They dismissed the area where I saw this by saying it looked spooky, but nothing was happening. If you see that episode, by the way, the spot they show has changed a lot. It's well paved and decorated with a marker. It wasn't when I saw it. It was just an empty patch of land.

My sister, Lynn, came along on this camping trip, and she swore she'd never go to another one again!

The incident that inspired this was making a sandwich and finding a bug in it when she ate it! She started screaming bloody murder about finding a bug in her sandwich and my then-uncle, Art, told her not to complain because it could be worse. She demanded to know how it could possibly be worse, and he said "You could've found half a bug!" That was when she went nuts and insisted she'd never go camping ever again!

I had lots of fun that weekend, and hated the smell of black powder when I first smelled it. On Sunday, we had a shooting competition for muzzle loaders, and I got to sit behind the line and watch it with Jean and some of my new friends. A sutler came by selling ice cream, and I at a small tub of vanilla ice cream that was black powder flavored (from all the smoke in the air). After that, I enjoyed the smell of black powder.

Well, enjoy the last little bit of your holiday!

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Addition:

I found a trailer for the new season of Doctor Who, and I thought you might like to see it:

Hi, Jean and Harry!

My sister got an email from my aunt and uncle, (Jean and Harry) who have moved and wrote to let her know. She forwarded it to me, and I sent an email to them with my information, and they checked my blog!

Unless Harry's interested in science fiction, I expect him to be bored with this pretty soon. But I think Jean will be interested in the knitting and what's going on with the family.

Jean and Harry met because of a different historical reenactment group, the N-SSA (the North South Skirmish Association). They reenact the Civil War. I used to go to the events with Jean, and that's how I met Harry, too. He was in Hampton's Legion. Every once in a while, I see a car or (more usually), a truck or van with a Hampton's Legion sticker on one of the windows, and I feel nostalgic.

I may not have mentioned to them that I went to some N-SSA events after I stopped going with them. 

One day, a friend of mine, Randy, showed up all happy. He said that he was tired of me knowing all about everything, and he was sure that he had found something that I didn't know anything about at all.

He went into a long description of guys getting dressed up in Civil War gear and going and shooting muskets and cannon in competition. I said, "Oh, the N-SSA!" He looked a little confused, and said something about "Yeah, I think that's what Doug said."

At the first event I went to with him, we were signing in, and I looked over my friend's head, awestruck and said "Oh, wow! A Gatling gun!" Someone really did bring a Gatling gun!

Anyway, I went to a few skirmishes at Ft. Shenandoah in the Virginia hills out West from here. As usual, it was loads of fun! I love shooting black powder!

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I thought I was going to have the glow-in-the-dark Christmas stocking done today, and I probably will have it done later today. But no photo yet. Tomorrow.

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My TV watching (Fringe and Eureka) was interrupted last night by a phone call from John Ellis. That's always a happy interruption!

If you click the link for John, you'll see information about some of the things he's done. I also worked on Invader and New Genesis. New Genesis had the working title of Twilight of the Dogs.

He wanted to alert me to the fact that we will be doing covers for new Steve Canyon DVDs real soon now. Well, I knew that, but it's always fun to talk to him. He was trying to see how many Steve Canyon episodes he could fit on one DVD without losing quality while he was taking to me. There is some new technology he's trying out. Unfortunately, it all went horribly wrong while he was talking to me and he had to hang up to go fix it.

You can see the cover I did for the first Steve Canyon DVD at the site above and order a copy there, if you want.

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I've been thinking for a while that I might like to write a biography. As biographies go, it doesn't have much in the way of a plot.

But then, I thought it might be interesting to somebody if I wrote a little bit of a biography one day a week. Just a post about something that happened to me.

When I was 17, I thought about what I might want to do with my life. And I thought about all the fun things that I could do if I wanted to. And I resolved to have an exciting and fun life. I think I've done well at that goal, and I'd like to share the fun.

So, what I want are opinions. Does this sound interesting? Do you want to read about it?

Let me know.

Have a great Wednesday!