We grew a pumpkin this year! It appears that the squirrels did some sampling.
I made an apple pie with fruit from Lapacek's, including a Wolf River apple. It spent a little too long in the oven - look at the Maillard reactions! - but it still tasted delicious.
Piper sleeping on my lap.
The first female monster cereal mascot. Perhaps the first lesbian one as well. Will the Sheridan Le Fanu estate sue?
What do you get when you cross lutefisk with a hit of LSD?
A trip to Stoughton.
Hopefully a local reads that.
I've had Norway/Norwegians on the brain for a little while now. Next week I am off to Gamehole Con to spend a few days drowning in Lovecraftian chaos as I play Karsten Ekelöf, a Norwegian bacteriologist and physician who goes Beyond the Mountains of Madness. BtMoM is a Call of Cthulhu adventure that takes place in the Antarctic. Here's a bit of his backstory:
Karsten would join the Bratvaag Expedition led by Dr. Gunnar Horn.
Ostensibly an expedition to hunt seals and study glaciers and the Arctic seas, its secret mission was to claim Victoria Island for Norway.
The expedition first stopped at White Island where they improbably discovered the remains of Swedish explorer S.A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition. The official story is that only skeletal remains were found but Karsten and company stumbled upon corpses that still had flesh attached to the bones. Karsten examined the corpses and was horrified to discover that it appeared as if much of the adventurers' flesh had been eaten away as if by necrotizing bacteria.
The remains were stowed aboard their ship and Karsten examined tissue samples from them in transit to Victoria Island. Although he was not surprised to find that they were awash with foreign bacteria, he was shocked to discover that the invaders were unlike anything he'd seen previously.
They had strange tentacle-like protrusions and organelles unknown to science...
So there I was contemplating this Norwegian brew and what to do for a picture for this review and my mind started wandering. I thought about Nordic Noir TV shows but discovered that the ones I've watched are mainly Swedish and Danish with the odd one from Finland and Iceland thrown in. Where are the Norwegian TV producers?! Surely Oslo is as crime ridden as Stockholm. You can't tell me that there aren't maniacs living in the fjords or that the Norwegian forests are bereft of fae.
Then it occurred to me that I've been listening to a lot of Wobbler, a progressive rock band from Norway, lately and I have dragged them into this. Heck, they're probably the kind of guys who would drink this variety of beer anyway.
The brew at hand is Of Wood and Smoke by Haandbryggeriet located in Drammen which appears to be an exurb of Oslo. Thankfully some of it made its way to Madison at some point. The date on the bottom of the can was "12-7-202~~~" - the last digit was all smooshed so I guess its date of origin shall forever be a mystery. But, given that December was noted, I take it that this is a winter release.
This jibes with the beer, a hearty brew that was aged in akvavit barrels giving it a potency of 8% A.B.V. Of Wood and Smoke is an amped up version of Haandbryggeriet's Norwegian Wood, a smoked lager with juniper. This stouter iteration is apparently smokier and juniperer, in addition to having a higher alcohol content due to the spiritual comingling.
With the temperatures around here finally providing some much-needed relief from summer, I figured it was time to put this beer to the test.
My pour produced a big tan head which had shrunk a bit before I could take a decent photograph. Holding my glass at just the right angle, I could see that the beer had a deep ruby hue. I didn't notice any bubbles because I just couldn't see that far into the liquid. There was just blackness. Taking a whiff, I first caught booziness, that sharp alcohol smell. Apparently they weren't playing around with the akvavit. Luscious smoke then wafted into my nose and I attempted to discern what variety it was. Ultimately I failed but suspect it was from a fruit tree like apple or cherry. However, that impression may have been influenced by the inviting plum scent from some of the non-smoked malts.
My initial sip revealed a smooth booziness, as if the surely rather large malt bill was able to add enough sweetness to take the edge off of the akvavit. (I'd say the brew had a medium-heavy body.) Just as with the aroma, smoke came next followed by a moderate malty, caramel sweetness. I also tasted some milk chocolate. There was a mild fizz which struggled to penetrate the Maginot Line of malt.
On the finish I tasted a boozy heat which was joined by some lingering smokiness as well as bit of that caramel sweetness and a dash of the juniper. Everything resolved into a mild, slowly fading akvavit burn.
This is a really nice beer. I suspect it was past its prime but I liked it anyway. The smoke was just delicious and the sweetness wasn't anywhere near cloying. The hops and juniper were very much in the background keeping things from becoming a treacly mess and adding only piney/spicy accents. The akvavit I've had was flavored with caraway but I didn't detect any here.
Of Wood and Smoke is surely amongst the most boreal brews I've encountered. The smokiness was wonderful and it kept me warm on a chill autumn evening.
Junk food pairing: Until I can find some locally-produced lefse chips, I will recommend you pair your Of Wood and Smoke with a bag of Sørlandschips Original Spansk Paprika potato chips. The earthy paprika will go well with all of the malt flavors here and the oil will be swiftly cut by all that akvavit.
With my adventures up north done for the year, I settled in to enjoy the autumn close to home. The two maple trees down the street regaled me with their gorgeous colors on my walks to and from the bus stop.
Speaking of bus stops, reconstruction of an arterial street near us was finally finished and, in addition to a fancy, new bike path and pleasantly smooth pavement, I got a new bus shelter.
I feel like an aristocrat when I’m inside it on dark, rainy mornings, which are becoming increasingly common, as it has a light. An amenity! A minor one, I grant you, but it’s just weird to me after having spent years and years of chilly, wet autumn dawns waiting for the bus in dark, spartan shelters.
This new public transit Xanadu was situated slightly farther away from the corner than the old one and, as Fate (or a devious streets planner with a wicked sense of humor) would have it, right next to a walnut tree. There was a recent dry morning when I was standing there and one of the fruits fell, coming within an inch of my head. Lesson learned, though I suppose it would have been a good excuse to call in sick had I taken a walnut on the noggin.
"Sorry, Boss, but I cannot work today as a walnut fell on my head and I think I have a concussion."
No doubt my boss would have suffered damage to her eyes from rolling them so much.
Walking out from our driveway one day, I noticed this suggestive mushroom sprouting from the mulch on the north side of our house.
Of course my inner 12 year-old giggled maniacally. I believe this is commonly known as a stinkhorn mushroom and some mycologist endowed it with the highly appropriate botanical name of phallus impudicus which translates as "shameless phallus".
On a recent bike ride I ran across these skeleton flamingos.
Despite being well out of flamingo habitat range, Madison has a thing for them. Well, the yard decorations, anyway. Back in September 1979, some UW students decided to pull a prank and put 1,000+ plastic pink flamingos on Bascom Hill.
The incident became a part of local lore and the plastic pink flamingo became an icon, of sorts, of Madison. And so you occasionally see a yard full of them, there’s a flamingo mural on the side of laundromat in the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood, and the bird features in the annual holiday lights display at Olin Park, amongst other appearances.
********
In my spare time, I prepped for Gamehole Con, Madison’s premiere gaming convention as I was to run a few sessions of the Call of Cthulhu role playing game.
One scenario takes place in the 1950’s and begins with the players driving down a county road in a torrential downpour. They seek shelter at an isolated rural diner/gas station and take comfort in its endless supply of cheap coffee but, unbeknownst to them, there’s a nasty alien entity lurking in the woods. Although just a ball of light, it is a mindless, unfeeling devourer of the vital energies that animate living beings. There are some locals at the diner, some of whom are harboring dark secrets.
I tried to make a spooky atmosphere with people sometimes catching a light zipping through the trees from the corners of their eyes. The players eventually run into this refulgent killing machine and hilarity ensues.
The other scenario took place in the small town of Blackwater Creek, MA in 1926. A recent archeological dig had uncovered the resting place of a small fragment of the evil god Shub-Niggurath. This hideous remnant of malevolence infects one of the townsfolk who retreats to a nearby cave. She transmogrifies into a horrific creature from whose body flows enough Shub-Niggurath amniotic fluid to fill a creek. Hilarity ensues.
A couple years ago I started my own tradition of serving kringle to my players. The kringle is a Danish pastry shaped in a ring of sweet-filled dough. Early one morning I walked over to Lane’s Bakery to pick up my order. This involved traversing the lesser used parts of the convention center grounds until you get to an ill-lit gravel street. From there things get brighter but it’s a bit of a spooky walk in the antelucan hours.
It was clear and chilly out but at least this afforded me a good glimpse of Orion. You know it's autumn when you see the hunter in the southern sky.
I bought a highly seasonal pumpkin kringle, no frosting. While I love sweets, I find that, as I've gotten older, I want to taste the dough more, I want my tongue to revel in the delicious results of those Maillard reactions instead of being subjected to a mindless blast of sugar. Frosting only serves to obscure the grainy goodness.
The kringle was wonderful but the trip to Lane’s was bittersweet as the bakery was to close in December after 69 years. It was genuinely sad to hear the news of the impending loss of a Madison institution and this now leaves me without a source of fresh kringle within walking distance of the convention center. The only place I can think of in the area that makes the ringed goodness is a bakery in Stoughton, about 10-12 miles south of Madison.
It's easy enough to find kringle in grocery stores as the Racine Danish Kringles brand is ubiquitous. However, I taste margarine or imitation butter flavoring in their dough. Perhaps I ought to check out some grocery stores I don't usually shop at to see what's on offer. There are surely other brands on supermarket shelves around town.
In addition to running games, I played them as well. A highlight was the Blade Runner role playing game. The movie is an all-time favorite of mine and I was really looking forward to trying it out. I was not disappointed.
I played the role of the chain smoking, grizzled veteran cop. My fellow players and I investigated the “retirement”, a.k.a. – murder, of a replicant, i.e. – a synthetic person. Our sleuthing led us around to various locations in the Los Angeles of the future where we met a slew of suspicious replicants and various human members of the criminal underground.
The game was really well done with nice, high quality supplements.
The dice were funky too with one side having an eye, a recurring motif in the movie, and an origami unicorn, something made by Gaff, one of the cops in the film.
The game had an intriguing storyline, well fleshed out characters, and some genuinely thought-provoking thematic material. Really fun.
In the dealers room someone was selling appropriately themed coffee and I bought a bag of Kraken. Who doesn’t like tentacled sea monsters?
When I wasn't gaming, I was to be found spending time hanging out with friends and BSing. One night someone in my cohort told us that there was a group of well-heeled gamers from (present day) Los Angeles at the con. Apparently they like to game in style as they had brought a butler with them who had catered a particular gaming session with a portable build your own taco bar. A butler at a gaming convention filled with unwashed masses of gamer dorks is as incongruous a pairing as anchovies and ice cream. Plus there was just something intuitively wrong about a group of rich white guys bringing a black butler to the con. The whole idea just had bad 19th century vibes.
When I heard this tale, I realized that I had run into the guy in an elevator. Anyone not clad in a black t-shirt or in costume at a gaming convention sticks out like a priest at a brothel. He must have had a good haberdasher back in L.A. because he was dressed to the nines making me look like a serf in contrast. I had greeted him as I stepped into the elevator and he seemed in good spirits as he flashed a smile. Recalling the encounter, that old TV show Soap popped into my head about that rich white family who employed a wise-cracking black butler.
I hope his employer treats him well and that he was generously compensated as being a non-gamer at a gaming convention is surely like being trapped in one of the circles of Hell.
During another late night BS session, a friend revealed that he was contemplating running the epic Call of Cthulhu scenario Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
It's a sequel to the H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness which chronicles a 1920s Antarctic expedition that, like everything in Lovecraft's tales, goes horribly wrong. In Beyond, players are sent on another expedition to the icy wastes to try and discover what happened to the first one. No doubt it is a tale of great woe and I fully expect my character to go insane and/or die.
Beyond is a massive scenario that takes days and days to go through but my friend would like to try to condense it into 3-4 long sessions at next year's Gamehole Con. He asked if I and another friend of ours would be anchor players who would commit to all of the lengthy sessions and help out other players as needed to keep the game moving forward.
We did.
And so, if this plan comes to fruition, it will be an epic, chilling adventure next year. Plus it has the added bonus of delaying having to find a bakery near the convention center for a couple years.
I had a blast at Gamehole. Many characters died heinous deaths in the games I ran and the games I played were great fun. Plus I got to hang out with friends deep into a few alcohol-soaked nights where we BSed and those of us who knew my late brother indulged in some warm reminiscing.
********
A week or so after the convention I was off to West Chicago to meetup with a couple friends who were to accompany me to the lovely Arcada Theater in nearby St. Charles to see a concert by Martin Barre.
Barre was the guitarist in the progressive rock band Jethro Tull for 40+ years before being unceremoniously booted by band leader Ian Anderson back in 2011 or thereabouts. Since then he has assembled his own group, recorded 5 albums, and performed many a concert. He is currently on the "A Brief History of Tull" tour.
It was a great show! Despite being in his 70’s, Barre had a lively stage presence. Although I couldn't play a guitar if my life depended on it, I regard him as one of the best guitarists ever to come out of the rock world. He always seems to play the right notes, to play what a song needs instead of demanding to be heard strictly as a virtuoso. As a jack of all trades kind of player, he can do big, heavy riffs like "Aqualung" or judiciously add color to an otherwise acoustic song like "Velvet Green".
We got a good overview of Jethro Tull’s catalog with “My God” being a highlight. It opens quietly with some gentle acoustic guitar adorned by piano. But when those big slashing electric guitar chords came thundering in, well, they sent a chill up my spine. The flute solo in the middle was replaced by some of Palladio, a contemporary classical piece by composer Karl Jenkins and it fit seamlessly.
The band's playing was tight, energetic, and everyone seemed to be having fun and this is what live music is all about.
********
Before heading back to Madison the next day, I bid my friends farewell and went to see Anatomy of a Fall which was playing at the cinema in St. Charles. I hadn’t seen anything to indicate it was going to open back home so I jumped at the chance to see this French film by Justine Triet that had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year.
Sandra is a novelist who lives with her husband Samuel in a chalet up in the French Alps along with their son Daniel and his dog, Snoop. As the movie opens, a woman has come to their home to interview Sandra. But while they are chatting, Samuel cranks up some music upstairs where he is remodeling the top floor. Sandra and her interlocutor agree to reschedule the interview for a quieter time.
Daniel and Snoop go for a walk and, upon their return, find Samuel's body lying on the snow in front of the house. Daniel screams prompting Sandra to come out of the house where she sees her husband’s body.
Samuel is pronounced dead at the scene and Sandra is accused of having pushed him out of a window. She hires a lawyer who is also a friend and goes about defending herself as she consoles her traumatized son.
One of the great things about this movie is that it sends you down dead ends and leaves you wondering. It’s a murder mystery, but only just. We don’t see things from the point of view of a detective but rather watch as life continues for Sandra and Daniel. As a courtroom drama unfolds, we learn about Samuel and Sandra’s marriage troubles. The movie left me alternately convinced of Sandra’s innocence and thinking that she may have done it through scenes of her in the throes of grief and ones where she is cold, almost emotionless.
And those courtroom scenes were interesting. I don’t know how true they were to the real French judicial system but they mirrored the scenes in Saint Omer, another French film about a woman put on trial for murder, that I saw back in January.
Prosecutors are apparently given free rein to hector the accused and their witnesses are allowed to be openly hostile to them. And here no one stops Sandra when she answers a question only to go off on tangent filled monologues for minutes at a time. French trials seem to be able to change into free form routines.
I was fed revelations about Sandra and Samuel’s marriage in small bites almost throughout, which was addictive, and pushed me towards thinking she was guilty only to have the movie offer me something else to get me going in the other direction.
The truth about everything here was elusive whether it be how Samuel died or how strong or weak his marriage to Sandra was. I found myself questioning everything. I loved how the movie, largely through Sandra’s lengthy discourses on the stand, talked about the intricate complexities of marriage as well as those of self-assessment. Samuel’s death gives Sandra cause to reassess her relationship to him as well to reflect on her own feelings, thought, and behaviors.
I adored Anatomy of a Fall. I loved the way it weaved an intense look at a failing marriage into a murder mystery that did its best not to give much in the way of definitive answers.
********
In preparation for Halloween, my Frau got her costume together. It was of the creepy dead girl in the Japanese horror movie Ring.
Speaking of Halloween, a friend sent me this photo which he swears was taken in Chicago.
********
Bonus photo. This is a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott that I saw on a visit to St. Louis several years back. Their bid for freedom began at the Old Courthouse there in 1846, though I suppose it was quite new back then.
I recently listened to an episode of In Our Time, a BBC Radio chat show about various topics, mainly historical. This one was about the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have never read it but knew the gist of the poem and, of course, its most famous stanza:
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.
It was a thoroughly interesting show and I learned quite a bit. I didn’t know that Coleridge was friends with William Wordsworth and that the poem was inspired by some comments from the man who wandered lonely as a cloud. One panelist noted that Coleridge tweaked his work for a long time after completing it, if not the rest of his life. There are something like 18 distinct versions of the poem due to his tinkering. Panelists also discussed the piece’s place in the Romantic movement, Coleridge’s life, and so on. Very interesting stuff. I am now determined to actually read the thing – one version of it anyway. Until then, I will have to be content with Iron Maiden’s song based on the poem.
********
I found the rarest of things in the wild – a pay phone.
It’s located at a mall in the suburb of Monona. I go to the barber shop there and arrived a couple minutes before they opened one day and so I took a short stroll and discovered this remnant of a bygone era.
No, it didn’t have a dial tone.
********
After our trip to Milwaukee, I had a short 3-day work week as Thursday saw the Frau become a gaming widow once again when I left for Gamehole Con, a tabletop gaming convention held here in Madison every fall.
Several friends from the Chicago area come up for the occasion and tradition dictates that we all gather for some curry-laced gluttony on Wednesday night at Swad, an Indian restaurant in Monona, not too far from that pay phone above. This is the 9th incarnation of the convention yet no one recalls when we started this gastronomic pre-con pilgrimage.
Some highlights of the weekend.
Anyone wanting to wield a foam weapon and attempt to pound the crap out of their fellow congoer had plenty of chances.
In the dealer room I spied an Oktoberfest board game which looked like it was right up my Strasse.
I am not sure exactly what this game entails. Perhaps some of the meeples are shaped like big-bosomed Fräuleins clad in Dirndls. A resource management game where you have to acquire steins of bier und pretzels?
I ran two sessions of Trail of Cthulhu this year. It’s a pen and paper role-playing game based on the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft designed by Chicagoan Kenneth Hite. The scenario on Thursday took place in the fictional northern Wisconsin town of Four Pines. When the northern lights flash in the sky, the residents must choose someone to go on what they ominously call the Coldest Walk to appease the creature in the woods which is the Wendigo, a loathsome fiend of Native American lore that is infamous for its foetid odor of decay and its appetite for human flesh.
Only it’s not.
It’s really the Great Old One Ithaqua!
(Anyone reading this lose 2 sanity points.)
I like to add a little Wisconsin flavor to the story and so, when players go to the local tavern, some old duffs tell their characters lumberjack and Ole & Lena jokes and there's a band playing old timey Scandinavian folk music - usually Hardanger fiddle tunes - which I provide via a laptop, if I have one at my disposal.
My own tradition (OK, it started last year) for running these games is to provide kringle, an oval shaped Danish pastry filled with stuff, for my players. For this game, I had one of the Bavarian cream persuasion. My other scenario on Saturday took place in Alabama and so on Friday I took a nice walk over to Lane’s Bakery to grab a pecan kringle for my players.
My walk took me under one of the old Quann Park bridges – single lane!
It was a lovely fall day – by far the warmest weather we’ve ever had for the convention. I took a scenic detour into Quann Park which is home to a rather large community garden.
People were out raking leaves and littering their lawns with Halloween decorations. The mall that houses Lane's was busy as the new Black Business Hub was being built in the parking lot. The Hub will be an incubator for black-owned businesses and a center where entrepreneurs can network.
The morning doughnut and coffee rush was over and Lane’s was left with a small group of old duffers having their kaffeeklatsch. I was in luck as they had a pecan kringle for me and it got paired with a vintage 2022 bottle of sweet tea for that extra little bit of Southern verisimilitude.
The second session went very well. It takes place in Alabama in 1936 and the players were investigators sent to the town of Rosa in order to retrieve a diary that had been stolen. It was written by an 18th century necromancer and its recovery was imperative lest the tome and its descriptions of hideous magical rituals that would put Aleister Crowley to shame therein fall into the wrong hands.
The game was a hoot. One player, a woman from Chicago, was a blast. She was familiar with Cthulhu role-playing games and was simply an enthusiastic participant. Great fun!
When I wasn't running a game, I was a player.
I played a round of CHEW: The Role Playing Game. Apparently it’s based on a comic book set in an alternate world where the bird flu has decimated the world's fowl populations and killed millions of us humans as well. And so the F.D.A. is now the most powerful law enforcement agency in all the land. Agents have the job of investigating “food crimes like chicken trafficking, egg dealing, and putting food-powered criminals behind bars.”
In our game, a rich guy died after drinking coffee out of a weird chalice. As we are investigating his death, his body begins to become bloated and expands. Eventually it blows up into this hideous coffee blob creature. My character’s super power was to be able eat rotten food and learn the weakness of any creature. And so I ate the rotting remains of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish from a nearby garbage can to learn that the coffee creature could be defeated by adding cream. Lots of cream. This seemed appropriate considering we were in the Dairy State.
I also played a round of Unfathomable, a board game.
This was a rare cooperative game and much fun. You are on a ship sailing across the sea when you are beset upon by Deep Ones, a race of amphibian humanoids that live beneath the waves, who want to stop you. Your characters have differing abilities and skills which you use to prevent the creatures from killing passengers and sinking the ship.
But some of the players are actually human-Deep One hybrids and are traitors seeking to sink the ship! I ended up being one of these. At first I was sneaky, not wanting to reveal that I was compromised. Then I threw caution to the wind and just went on a rampage of sabotage and mayhem.
What fun!
Truth be known, I played many fewer games this year than in years past. Normally friends would register for very few events so we’d have a lot of time to wander into the games library, borrow a game, and play for hours. This year most of my friends had rather full schedules. On the plus side, we had some wonderful late nights in the hotel lobby drinking beer and BSing. Also, I got a chance to hang out with a couple people who are friends of friends that I have kinda sorta chatted with in the past. This year we were able to have longer conversations and get to know one another better.
A friend of mine, who runs Call of Cthulhu games (like Trail but with a slightly different set of rules), revealed that he is writing a scenario which would be played out in real life up north at his cabin in Mountain in the northeast part of the state. (I have written about visiting there previously.) Furthermore, he was considering running a scenario called Beyond the Mountains of Madness, a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness at Gamehole Con. Lovecraft’s story chronicles the fate of an Antarctic expedition and I believe that Beyond allows the players to be members of the crew sent to figure out what happened to the previous and highly ill-fated expedition.
Beyond is an epic story and it would probably take the bulk of the 4 days of the convention to run. While the entry fee would be steep, all proceeds would go to charity.
Every Gamehole has a touch of the bittersweet to it. All of my Chicago friends that come up for the occasion were also friends of my dearly departed brother. Plus he attended the first couple years of the convention so there are always those moments where I think, “He would have loved this!” or “He should have been here for that.” And every year I have one of those moments where I think I see him. He, like many a gamer, was an overweight white guy and there are times when I am scanning a hall full of overweight white guys that a face that looks like his sticks out and that part of my brain that does facial recognition has a few neurons misfire.
Still, the con was great fun. It's barely over and I am already contemplating the games I will run next year.
********
Bonus photo. Here’s Grabby sitting on her perch in the dining room taking in the sun.
With the
change of seasons there's colorful leaves, cooler temperatures, and Piper
hanging out underneath the bathroom sink.
It's all
warm and cozy down there as a heat duct runs underneath it.
********
Let's start
with food because who doesn't like food? Wisconsin leads the nation in
cranberry production. I believe we grow more than half of the national
cranberry crop and wouldn't be surprised if there was a national strategic
cranberry reserve somewhere up north. I bought a bag of the fresh stuff and
made pork chops.
Beer, stock,
onions, cranberries – it was tasty! Oh, and some rosemary too.
Regarding
those changing leaves, there are two maples a block over that turn a brilliant
red every year. They're really nice to see on my walk home from the bus stop in
the evening.
I spent
Halloween down in Chicago visiting my mother. We went out to eat at Psistaria
Greek Taverna before trekking across the street to New York Bagel & Bialy.
There was a line out the door of the bagel joint when we got to the restaurant
and when we left it. They do a brisk business. After that we made a quick stop
at a liquor store so I could get some Chicago beer that's not available in
Madison.
The scariest
thing of the whole trip was the traffic on Touhy Avenue where it seemed like
half the city was trying to get to the Edens in record time and wanted to let
everyone know they were in a hurry by frequently honking their horn.
Speaking of scary things, I got in a scary read this Halloween season – Spiral by Japanese horror
author Koji Suzuki.
It's the
second book in the Ring series. The first book, Ring/Ringu, was
made into a Japanese film of the same name and remade here in the States as The
Ring by Gore Verbinski and starring Naomi Watts. Back in the late 90s and
early 2000s I watched a lot of Japanese horror films, which were in vogue at that time. They
were all total creepfests punctuated by moments of sheer terror and Ringu
was the first of them that I watched so it has a special place in my
horror-filled heart.
Spiral was good. It picks up the day after
the events of the first novel. Knowing the events of Ring, this one
lacked the novelty of its predecessor but it was still spooky and there were a
couple spots in the story where I was genuinely frightened but couldn't stop
reading because I just had to know that the protagonist survived.
All in all,
a good fright.
If you dare
dip your toes into contemporary Japanese horror, Ringu is a good place
to start. I recall watching Dark Water and Juon and being scared
s*itless by both. One of them has an elevator scene that scared my Frau and I
so much that we simultaneously reached for each other to cling for our dear lives.
********
Last month a couple friends and I took a trip to
Milwaukee to see The Hu, a hard rock band from Mongolia that we'd been wanting
to see for some time now. They're not just a hard rock band who happens to hail
from Mongolia; they are a Mongolian hard rock band that incorporates some
traditional instrumentation from their homeland.
You get your
bass, electric guitar, and drums but also the morin khuur, a 2-string bowed
instrument, a tovshuur which is a 3-string Mongolian lute thingy, and some kind
of woodwind that looked and sounded like an oversized recorder. Plus they
sometimes throw in some Tuvan throat singing which, to best of the knowledge of
this non-singer type, involves singing more than one note at a time.
While they
played a lot of hard rock, there were also a few songs that were gentler and
more folky where the electric guitar added color instead of big chords. They
sang in their native tongue but it didn't make a difference. Their performance
was full of energy, great melodies, and big, thumping beats so we didn't really
need to know what was being sung.
Our next
goal is to see the German-Nordic experimental folk band Heilung in concert.
They like their primitive beats, to dress in (faux?) animal skins, and to don
antlers. They draw inspiration from runes and the paganism of their ancestors
that royally kicked some Roman butt in 9 C.E. at Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
Hopefully they'll make their way to the Midwest sometime soon.
********
Last month I
attended Gamehole Con, a tabletop gaming convention held annually here in
Madison. It's always a great time. Friends from Chicagoland come up for the
occasion to join my Cheesehead comrades and me in 4 days of gaming gluttony.
Most of the
time we played boardgames. A group from Milwaukee brings their games library
over – we're talking hundreds and hundreds of games – and you can check them
out for free and play them to your heart's content. We generally play a mix of
games new and familiar.
I played
Raiders of the North Seas for the first time.
As you can
imagine, it involves taking the role of Vikings and attacking various harbors, monasteries,
etc. But instead of slaughtering monks like at poor Lindisfarne, you roll a
couple dice and take pieces off of the board.
We also played a game called Red Cathedral which
involves – quelle surprise! – building onion domed churches.
I found that
the pictures in that circle looked very familiar. While it took me a while, I
eventually figured out why. They were done in a style that was just like that
of the illustrations in a book of Russian fairy tales that were drawn by Ivan
somebody or other.
Take a look
at the game board:
Now here's a
picture of Vasilisa whom I presume had a run-in with Baba Yaga seeing as her
hut is in the background. I am unsure, though, as I woefully ignorant of
Russian folklore.
Another
highlight of the weekend was the last game of the convention that we played on
Sunday before the remaining Chicago folks headed home – 1775: Rebellion.
It's pretty
neat as it involves cooperative play as well as competitive.
A friend
and I were the Continental Army and Patriot Militia, respectively. We were
teamed up against a couple of our pals who took on the roles of the British Regulars and the
Loyalist Militia. The French and the Hessians made guest appearances as did the
Native Americans.
The
situation was looking very dire for us rebels as the game entered the last
round of play. Miraculously, though, we fought the British scum to a draw.
When I
wasn't involved with a boardgame, I was playing or running a role-playing game.
Friends from Chicago run Call of Cthulhu games – horror role-playing based on
the works of H.P. Lovecraft as the Cthulhu Masters Tournament. The game they ran this year took place at the Isle
of Wight Festival in 1970. As rock music played in the distance, we were tracing ley lines,
being kidnapped by cultists, and had our sanity strained to the breaking point
by unearthly beings hell bent on unleashing havoc upon our world.
In other
words, your usual Call of Cthulhu stuff.
I ran a
Trail of Cthulhu game. Trail is very similar to Call but with some different
game mechanics. My scenario took place in northern Wisconsin in the fictional
town of Four Pines in April 1934. The players/investigators head north from
Chicago and enter a town that sends one of its own out into the woods when
the Northern Lights appear to appease a mysterious creature. They discover that
the creature is the Wendigo of Native American lore which haunts the forests of
the north and eats people. Only it's not really the Wendigo, but the Great Old
One Ithaqua!
I made sure
that the town tavern had some folks playing Hardanger fiddle (a Norwegian
violin with 8 strings) tunes as well as some lumberjack songs on accordion for
that authentic feel. I took the songs from Folksongs of Another America:Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 compiled by UW-Madison
folklorist Jim Leary. As the players hung out at the tavern, I had the locals
telling lumberjack as well as Ole and Lena (i.e. – Norwegian) jokes. E.g. –
Ole went
to the doctor for a physical. After Ole was dressed the doctor came in and said
"I am sorry Ole, but you are very sick and have only a few weeks to
live".
Ole went
home with a heavy heart to tell Lena the news. After Ole told Lena he sat in
his easy chair and Lena went to the kitchen. Soon a heavenly aroma came from
the kitchen. Lena was making his favorite cookies! "Lena must really love
me" he thought. Ole went into the kitchen and started to take a cookie.
Lena slapped his hand away and said "Get avay! Dese cookies aren't for
you, der for da funeral!"
Unfortunately,
I didn't keep things on track and we weren't able to finish the game in our 4
hour time slot. Still the players enjoyed themselves as did I which is the
whole point.
********
Bonus photo
time. Here's my father-in-law in warmer times showing off a sail he painted for
a regatta.
