Lance Lawson for Christmas

I wanted to experiment with posting something and having it appear later. So this is the Christmas Entry for the Blog. So here it is Merry Christmas. Solve it yourself with Lance Lawson.

 

 

Sprucing up Stuff

With work on the books progressing i took a bit of time to try an fix a couple nagging things on the blogs. For some reason I could not get new gadets working on this blog. I do have to put up a link to the yarn man blog. I did find the other half of the first story. So I have both of those gizmos up on that blog. When I get a link it should be easier to find.

I did get a good deal of work done on the Clown Brigade's Blog. The calendar was not working on it and I didn't have a followers gadget up on it. So now all of that has been put right. We still don't have access to the internet in our offices. So that slows us up a bit on working on the blog. On the up side when we are on line everyone in the Brigade can blog.

I have to figure out where I put the camera. I have some pictures from our installation of new Soildiers. I am told Walt looks cute in his new uniform.

Any way I will check back when I have some pictures.

December 23rd Video Post

On another note for things that were not mentioned in the video thing. The majority of the text for Section 3 of the Clown Handbook has been finished. This means that a bit of editing and a couple pictures is all that is needed to finish it off.

Getting on with section 4 through six will be the next goal. Still, those section do not have to be done this minute. Actually they do not have to be done until the summer. So there is much more time to work on them. And now that we know how long it will take to do a whole section we know we have time.

Kettles Again

 

We were out on the Kettle again this week end. One again back to the Century III Mall. Here I am juggling on the kettle. One of the kids figured out how to get the samera to take action pictures. You will note that the picture is clear and crisp. That mean that someone who knows how to take pictures was using the Camera. It was Apprentice Brimage. She is Seven. 

  

Here is Walt. He was making inflatible wildlife. At least that is the politically correct way to refer to balloon animals these day. They got a lawyer and you know the rest of the story. 

Here was the rest of our crew thsi week end. Sergesnt Thurman is in the back. She is doing wicked stuff with scarves these days. She has only been at them a couple weeks and her routines are pretty impressive. In fron are Apprentice Brimage and Apprentice Brimage. They are sisters hence the same last name. Being that I don't like using you people first names on the old blog the five Aprentice Brimigaes that are in the Brigade is going to be confussing as time goes on. Actually now that I think of it one of them is still a Cadet.

This is Apprentice Brigade trying on a coat. We are starting to think about getting a real uniform for the Brigade. So we will need a coat. Being that we are supposed to be on a boat during out shows this may be the way that we go. By the way this is the Apprentice Brimage that knows how to use my camera better than I do.

And the cyber kettle is up to fourty bucks. That is fourty bucks more than I thought i was going to make the Corps on the Cyber Kettle. Cool Beans.

We will be out there this weekend if you still want to catch the dog and pony show. Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

 

 The blogger this is acting odd tonight.I am having a hard time getting pictures to wrap around the words. Well all this stuff will hopefully show up on the blog thing. I will have to get Oliver working on it. 

Anyway I have found a new problem no one else on the planet is having. These binders I have been putting the book in keep breaking. I suppose I could be more gentle with them. But I hate the three binder which are strong enough to last a couple months before I break them.

Well so I did what i always do when something is not going my way. I head to the hardware store. So to fix my binder thing I had a couple pieces of plastic cut and get some chain.

 

I tried the metal ring things and I broke them so I moved onto the chain thing. If I had my way I would keep the book in a box and take it out a page at a time as I need it.  This is fairly close to that.

I suppose I could go paperless. It would save tree if I didn;t use all the composition books. And I wouldn't need to wrestle with the printer and such. That would involve me changing the way I do things. I don't have the attention span required to do that.

Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

400 or So

While I was figuring our how fast the various ships in my story can go I have come to a depressing conclusion. The first book is going to have to be around 400 pages long. In order to set up the plot for the next book

Anyway it takes a US Navy Carrier group two months from the Solar System to the Wolf 359 System. This is pretty fast if I say so myself.

Incidentally Wolf 359 is the star New Columbia orbits around. That is important to the story.

Well just checking in and being cranky

Make Up

Someone emailed me asking how you learn to put on clown makeup.

Ummm someone teaches you.

Anyway the first layer is usually a thin coat petrolum jelly. This makes it easy take off later. If you are using a gluer on nose you do not put it on you nose where your nose will go.

In the picture we see Apprentice Wilson having her make up put on. In our Brigade most folks do a couple shows before they learn how to put their make up. For this reason someone has to help them the first few times.

You will not that her hair is pink. She like me colors her hair in clown face. This is done first. That way you can wipe off excess paint with a wet rag. We use a temporary hair color called Color Bomb to do out hair.

Any way you then put on the color in this case white. When you put on the white you leave the spaces for the mouth and anything large. After the white is on you powder. This can be done with a sock full of baby powder or a powder puff.

After that you put on the color. In her case she had a red mouth and large outline of blue star around her one eye. After that we lightly powder the colored bits. At this point you spread around spirit gum on the inside of the nose. You then place the nose on the face and then take it off. You then take off the nose. You let the glue dry in the nose and on the nose. after it is dry you put the nose back on. The stuff is like a kind of contact cement I guess.

If you are using a wig you put it on at this point. You will also note the Apprentice Wilson was not in her costume. We tend to like to put out make up on while wearing a tee shirt. That way the costume goes on over and you don't get make up on it.

We I hope that is helpful. Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Savage Chickens

Clown Handbook

The Clown Brigade's Writhing Committee has finished up another meeting. Tonight we were working on Section 3 - Basic Clowning. My wife was working on putting together the various spiritual proficiencies.

In our next couple meeting we will have other member of the Brigade try out the new material. This is a big step for us. One of our biggest problems is that there is not enough material on this subject. So much of what the Circus taught was passed down from one person to another. So this does us little good in starting a new program.

We spent the better part of the last six months mapping out what needed to be done. We have to divide up everything into areas of study. Now is the hard part writing all those areas.

I am up to 20 bucks on the old kettle thing. Thank you nice person. That leaves a hundred bucks or so to go.

Just checking in trying to be a good blogger. Be safe out there everyone and keep your stick on the ice.

Some Random Pictures

Well as promised I said I would post some pictures when I remembered to put my camera in a place that I could do that. Like before I am still crazy busy with the book and all sorts of other things. If I ever make money on the book I am going to hire someone to spell for me. They will follow me around and type things into a computer that are spelled correctly and has all of those punctuation things everyone goes on about. Well any way here are some pictures I pulled off the camera.
First up this is Apprentice Wilson. This was at out Christmas party and she had just made a giraffe. She tied it to a helium balloon and wanted me to take a picture of it floating. All of those pictures were blurry. Still, this one is cure.


This is an actual knitting picture on the blog. Yes i know I am using a machine. That is the difference between clown knitting and the rest of the world. WE need to get stuff done. I suppose you could say that it is goal oriented. Anyway this was the trim for a scarf that Walt has been working on for a while. Actualy he finished it a long time ago. He has been waiting for my to do the trim on the machine for a while. Well with the knitting in Homestead I left a machine in Homestead. Hopefully I will get these things done quicker that I have in the past


This is Apprentice Wilson on Stilts. This is first time on stilts and she is doing it on her own.
And yes she does look impressed with herself as she should be.
This is a picture from today. This is another long neglected project that we just had to get out of the way. This is the Clown Brigade's library. Well it is the start of it anyway. These books are some of the books that I clown will need to study while they are in training. Today we put card in them so that they can be checked out and we can keep track of them.

This is the front door of our officer, meeting and storage space. It is the old Quarters in the Corps. Walt made the sign. We think it is terribly funny.

This is the pipe tone organ half taken apart. I am still working on it. I am very hopeful that I will be able to stick it back togather.

Well I don;t know how many pictures the blogger thing will let me post. So I will not push my luck. Be safe out there and keep your stick on the ice.

Pipe Tone Organ - Ballington Booth

I forgot my camera at the Corps so there will be no pictures in this post. This is especially sad because I have been taking pictures recently.

The book continues to dominate my time. I think I have found a solution to one of the problem that has been nagging me about the entire thing. The book has a fair amount of time traveling in it. Because of the way the series is there are multiple overlapping story arcs that take place over centuries. These arcs intersect the main story at various places. Some of them last the entire series while other only a couple books or one book.

It is a bit like watching Hill Street Blues. The only difference is there are no cops lot of aliens, time travelers and some of the story lines take place out of sequence or backwards. Well, really it is not much like Hill Street Blues. When I am working on the book I often watch shows on the Hulu. And I went through all of Hill Street Blues again. That was a really cool show.

Anyway, the over lapping story problem that I was talking about. I have figured that each book has a single even that all of the other arcs are trying to effect one way or another. At first I was putting down the dates and times as part of the chapter title. This did nothing to show the relationship of what has happening. So I will label the chapter that contains the main event as such I will then list all of the other chapters as before or after that single event.

So I chapter would have the chapter title and then how many days or years before the main event they take place. And when it get closer to the main even they will be listed in hours or minutes. I am not sure if I should call this the main event. I really need to come up with a good name for the Ground Zero event of each book.

On the up side the book kind of makes seance when you read it cover to cover. That is if you can understand my misspellings and such. In another couple weeks I might even be able to let someone read it without being horribly embarrassed by my errors.

On a random bit of something I have been watching some of the anime shows on the Hulu. Some of these are twisted. There is one with a fourteen year old vampire that wants to enslave an adult through the whole blood sucking thing. This guy is impervious to her charms and so she is in love with him and they are fated to be together. I may have missed something, still, that makes my plot look strait forward. Not to metion the whole underage thing. Maybee I missing something and she is really three hundred and just is traped in a 14 year olds body. I don't know if that makes it any better. Perhapse one of my readers can explain it to me. I suppose vampire things have never been my thing

We found a piano looking thing long forgotten in a storage space of our corps. Much like the accordions that we are trying to make a band out of. It turn out that it is something called a pipe tone organ. It does not actually have pipes. It has metal reads just like an accordion. The ruberised cotton that make up the bellow is shot. So I am replacing it with vynal. It is not going terrible well. still I think i can get it working. If that pan out we will have a period instrument that will go along with out stage show. We will see if our music sergeant can strangle a tune out of it when I get it in one peice. The mechanics of the instrument appear intact. This is since it was built around the turn of the last century.

It looks as if it was well used when it was in service. So I have had vission of bonnet clad Salvationist standing on a corner in Homesetead trying to save souls sing about Christ and preaching a little fire and brim stone. Well it look as if we will be able to revive that just a bit. We don't have bonnets. Ummmmm....... and we will be clowns who are soilders pretending to be soilders who are clowns. Hmmmmmm....... I suppose we will at least have the Jesus stuff and the instrument. I really should try and time up some sort of normal hobby.

Wait I have the knitting. By the by I also have some pictures of recent knitting on the camera. And my knitting is clown stuff. And my knitting group had an average age of 11. So apparently I can take the most conventional thing on the planet and turn it into something weird.

On the up side we did gat a computer for the clown room. So if we can get on line there might be live bloggin from our knitting group. That could be cool.

Well it is time to get back to Brigadier Mason and Fleet Lord Jefferson. Be saf eout there and keep your stick on the ice.

If you can read this you are not the President

As we count down the day to our new President is inaugurated it does make me a bit sad. It was a bit fun having a President that cannot pronounce words and said silly things. Obama is many and unfortunately comic relief is not one of them.

The last President that I remember taking seriously was hmmmmmmmmm.........

I have not been alive for a President that I could take seriously. How has this country survived these last three decades? How did we defeat the Soviet Union? I America so awsome it does not need a serious leader.

I suppose Reagan was fairly serious. Still, there were those television shows with the monkey. And first Bush let's not go there. And at least Kennedy was chasing Marlin Monroe around the Oval Office.

President Elect please don't boink your interns. I am not sure what it will be like to have a President that will be loved by the world and respected by a bunch of people. I mean I have seen movies of FDR and Truman. I listened to Tony Blair so I can imagine what an articulate leader might be like.

Still it looks as if all the funny buttons and tee shirts have to be put away. Leno and Letterman will have to make due with making fun of Britney Spears. Oh well the party could not last forever.

Arianna Huffington

She is on the Daily Show talking about how people should be blogging. So here I am blogging. She was promoting a book that the staff of her blog wrote. My blog does not have a staff. It would be spelled better or have commas if it did. I suppose I have Oliver. Still, Oliver is part of my computer's staff.

I would blog everyday if I had a staff. Any way she said blogging should be spontaneous and off the cuff. So they wrote a book about with a staff of fifty people.

Well i suppose I should not complain about it. I have stack of book as tall as me that I have not read. The chances I will purchase this book are slim to none. Still, I bloogged about it quickly and off the cuff. There you go.

Oh an put something in my kettle PLease Please Please, Thank you Be safe out there and keep you stick on the ice.

A New Doctor

I am not ready for a new Doctor. I have been so engrossed in the book that I have not noticed that there was going to be a new Doctor. I was just getting up to the fact that we are loosing Donna as a companion. Sure she went out in a way that no one else had. Still, I think she was my favorite and to loos her only after one series is sad.

Tenant has been a good Doctor. Personally I always liked the older cranky doctors. I am not sure I am the one to guess about the next Doctor. I know that among most sci fi people this is some kind of sport.

The thing that has gone partly unnoticed is Russell Davies leaving the show. If something is going to change the character of the show it will be the producer.

Anyway it will be interesting to see what happens next year.

Moving on I have gotten through another round of editing the book. I have found just over seven hundred things that need changed. Most of these things are missing comas and little stuff. There were a couple continuity things and a couple things that really need rewritten. And yes i counted all the errors. That may sound weird or strange.

Also I have found 154 things that now need to be an entry in the Lexicon of this series. By the way the Lexicon thing is an encyclopedia for this series. Their is a nine foot long flow chart with the time line of the stories {I think that is really cool}. Of course it has the names of each character and their relevance to the story. I am about half way through adding all the new entries to the Lexicon. Which by the way, who even edits that thing will be clincally insain by the time they finish.

This is crazyness. I suppose I should have been a poet. Their stuff is really short. Well usually

A good time was had ketteling this week end. We went out Black Friday and Saturday. The Brigade did a great job. I continue to impressed by how well the young ones do at this. We are going to having our Christmas party this Sunday. We are going to an all you can eat pizza buffet. That should be fun.

Be safe out there and put something in the cyber kettle. Thank you and good night