Visionaries--Part One--Chapter Six

[Alkari]

Alkari does her best Jemler impression and whacks Evie with a very large mackerel! 

Cymbals - eunuchs - dancing girls - male queens of Torenth ...  who knows where this fic will lead to? 

[Evie]

Alkari does her best Jemler impression and whacks Evie with a very large mackerel! 

Don't you have that backwards?  I'm the one with the mackerel launcher macro that's more or less permanently aimed at jemler....   

(And for those of you who have no idea what we're talking about, you really need to show up for Sunday KK Chats!  )

[Rahere]

An entire new angle on the word "symbolic"...sorry!

[Evie]

"cymbal" = "symbol"?  Right then.  I'm off to build a mackerel launcher just for you, or perhaps a carp catapult, just for the halibut....

* Evie looks guiltily around for DesertRose, hoping not to get thwacked upside the head with a large fish herself for escalating a punfest

[Rahere]

http://huntercatapults.co.uk/

[derynifanatic64]

http://huntercatapults.co.uk/

This website is temporarily out of order.

[Rahere]

Go back and look again, more carefully, you missed something relevant.

[Evie]

* Evie glances at website

* Evie looks at header more closely and does a double-take

ROFL! 

Nice site. Rahere, though I was thinking more along the lines of a trebuchet or ballista for that "catapult" rather than a simple slingshot.  Have to love that manufacturer's name, though.... 

[Alkari]

Perhaps one of Evie's next projects will be this:-  http://mikeandlace.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/medieval-catapult.jpg?w=470

Not sure whether it would be more useful at home or at work.

[Evie]

Alkari, a former acquaintance of mine had a similar tabletop catapult which she used to pelt people with chunks of bread from her seat at High Table.  She was Queen of our SCA Kingdom at the time.  (Obviously not a "Stuffy Peer" sort of gal!)  She also used it to fling grapes down ladies' cleavages if they were wearing low cut gowns.

[Alkari]

Why is it that I could imagine Duncan and Alaric appreciating such a device?!   And not just when they were misspending their childhoods

[Rahere]

Beware to trebuckets manned by women - that's what caused Parliamentary Democracy.

In 1218, tbe Crusader Simon de Montfort was besieging Toulouse when the local womenhood let loose and terminally flattened him. Normally, one might have expected him to survive somewhat longer, in which case what happened next wouldn't have happened.

His eldest son and heir was a mere 8 years old, and faced a problem: King John was still more than somewhat narked at losing the Angevin Empire at the Battle of Bouvines (he also lost the Crown jewels in the Wash, teach him to empty his pockets first...) and in particular with Old Simon, who had profited from it considerably. In general he forbade his Lords to owe allegiance to the French, and had put Simon's Earlship of Leicester in the freezer - the sons were forced to split the holdings between them. The elder, Amaury, was not a chip off the old block and lost the French holdings: the younger, Simon, was and got his own back, virtually taking the Monarchy over in England. If Dad had survived, Amaury would have had the lot some time after John shuffled off this mortal twist, he'd have lost the lot and the UK wouldn't have had its first Parliament.

As for myself, I pack a totally illegal wrist-rocket, with laser sights...

[Rahere]

My childhood involved an onager, targeting apples.
The worst one ever, though, was a steel rule and paperclips while an industrial trainee. The person I was waiting for was on the phone forever, so I idly started twanging the rule on the edge of the next desk over. When that got boring, I decided to see what would happen to the pitch if I added some weight, like a paperclip. One twang and the paperclip was no more. Searched for it, not to be found, use another. Same thing happened. And another...and another...
At the other end of the open plan office, a buyer was working on a quote when a paperclip magically appeared in the middle of his paper. Then another - and, well, you guessed it, slowly his colleagues discovered the teleportational paperclips. Until the fuss reached me and I went to see what was happening...

[Rahere]

Anyway, how large are the mackerels in the land of Gwynedd? Texan? If not, using a trebuchet with one loaded would probably send it into orbit. However, as the orbit decayed, it would cook nicely on re-entry. How generous! Perhaps you could wrap it in foil and add some beurre maniée before launch.

News flash from NASA: we would greatly prefer you to emulate http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=Z1Zf5i56HmM. The threat that we could turn Iraq into Halloween Groundhog Day should resolve the fundamentalist question nicely.

[Elkhound]

Any of you familiar with Harry Turtledove's Videssos Cycle?  There's a scene in one of those books where an officer at a dull briefing is amusing himself by launching strawberries off of a miniature ballista.