When it Snows in Cowtown (in June), Leave Cowtown.

Saturday, othelianna and I day tripped down to Rhuddglyn to take in Avacal's June Coronet tournament. For you non-SCAdians, this is one of the two bi-yearly martial arts tournaments that decides who gets to be Prince and Princess of Avacal for six months. I'll cut right to the chase: HE Steinn Vikingsson (bork107) and HE Gemma Delaroche (justgemma17) won. They are the current heirs to the Principality Throne and will get to reign from August to February (which means they get to wear their pointy hats at Estrella!).

The event itself was on a very nice campground north of Brooks which I can't help but fell like I've been to before, but honestly can't remember when. They've had events there before, but I'm not sure that I was traveling to camping events back then. We got there in time for a delicious lunch made by Tosh (chili and sour dough bread), then we wandered over to the eriks joined minyata and cat_cetera on the ground and watched the fighting.

These were the cleanest fights I've ever seen in the SCA. I'm not sure what happened at May Crown to change everyone's attitudes, but the difference between June Coronet and November Coronet was like day and night. And this wasn't just my perception - I overheard a lot of people saying the same thing.

Hell, the closest thing I saw to a sketchy fight was a knight holding back with a squire to give him more then a ten second fight. The squire still lost though.

On the other hand, I saw a lot of verbal exchanges between the competitors that amounted to "was that good, I'll take that if you think it was a solid shot". They were bending over backwards to make sure everything was fair and honorable.

I hope this sticks.

After the fighting, Fáelán ran an archery tournament that I quasi-supervised. As I was hoping, he had all the work done and I basically just had to show up and help with inspections. He's not ready to be a marshal yet, but with a little practice I'm sure he will be.

I was prepared to run a tournament without any help whatsoever, but I'm glad that my contingency plans were not needed. It gives me a plan in place for the next time we have last-minute archery.

Court was fairly short. There were awards for people I recognize but don't really know that well. Notably, sadbwawho was elevated to the Order of the Pelican and Fáelán got his Gilded Griffin (Principality service award).

I got to chat with a few folks while I was there and it was nice. Sadly, I only got to talk to about half the people that I wanted to while I was there. They were generally busy when I walked by, or I simply couldn't find them.

Maybe they're all avoiding me. :p

The sun was setting, so othelianna and I climbed back into the car and headed back to Cowtown.

About the weather: We left Calgary and it was snowing and miserable. Pretty much as soon as we passed the city limits the weather cleared up. All the way to the event and back (and while we were there) it was sunny about 1/3 of the time, rainy about 1/3 of the time and cloudy 1/3 of the time. Basically, keep-your-cloak-nearby weather, but nothing particularly onerous. We came back to Calgary and as soon as we hit the city limits, hit a wall of torrential rain. Seriously, WTF? There were numerous puddles sufficiently large that I was worried about hydroplaning.

manyra: Good event. I had fun.

The Disaster Zeitgeist

othelianna and I were philosophizing on our way down to Coronet. We were talking about the current trend to panic over potential pandemics (SARS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, etc.). My take on it was such:

I think society is recognizing on a low, quasi-subconscious level, that we're heading for a fall. The constant talk of climate change, potential pandemics and peak oil has got us all convinced that something bad is going to happen and it's going to happen within our lifetimes. It's like we're living in a golden age and we're all genre-savvy enough to know what happens to people living in a golden age.

Averting it is likely to be hard. We've probably already missed the boat on climate change and peak oil, but we don't want to admit that. We want a quick fix. Something that's bad, but not necessarily bad for us personally. A nice pandemic that wipes out half the population (but misses our friends and relatives) would be good. It's like we think we can't have a double helping of all the bad things that could happen. "God would never follow up the pandemic of 2010 with climate change. We're only supposed to have one tragedy per generation".

It's not a rational feeling, but humans en masse are not rational beings.

The SF author Brian Aldiss called this sort of thing a "cosy calamity". I think it's why zombie uprisings have become the latest fad in horror stories. Dealing with zombies is action packed and kind of romantic (in a save the damsal sort of way), plus it leaves the Earth relatively unharmed. Dealing with the very real problems of what to do with a continental infrastructure built on the idea of $.50/litre gasoline when the middle class can no longer afford to fill up their cars is much harder and doesn't lend itself to beheadings.

A pandemic also has the attribute of being not our fault. It's random in a way that climate change or peak oil is not. Sure, the world went to hell, but at least it wasn't anything humans did.

We want to be in a world where a few exceptional men and women (like ourselves) can provide a quick and permanent fix to our problems. We don't want to live in one where we have to rely on 6 billion Bubbas making responsible choices forever to keep everything from falling further into hell. Since we know we live in the latter and not the former, we start to think "but with if something took out all the Bubbas"?

Yet Another Useless Poll

[Poll #1413031]

An Observation on the Current Global Financial Mess

If a company is to big to be allowed to die, then it's too big to let live.