An Announcement Concerning Breakfast

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Ladies, gentlemen, aliens, dragons and life forms of uncertain existential definition — I was going to write a post tonight but we stayed up late talking (among other people) to the Correias.  (Yes, yes, collaboration was discussed — no, it won’t be SOON, but yes, it will happen.)  So, my mind isn’t on.  I promise a very nice — well, very silly — post tomorrow.

In the meantime, there’s  a all-Huns-present breakfast tomorrow at nine at City Cafe but “not the one downtown.”  However, if you want to make sure of getting there with us, meet us in the main lobby at around 9 am.  We have room for seven people, or maybe five, if our kids go (we don’t know yet.  Robert was alcoholic-beverage-crawling with flies, so he might not be up to it.  Marsh… who knows?)

So, tomorrow, nine lobby, be there or be … whatever shape you are.

I’ll post tomorrow, now I’m going to turn into a big, round pumpkin.

65 thoughts on “An Announcement Concerning Breakfast”

      1. Midnight was “pumpkin time” at our house ever since our oldest daughter began to date — in 1984-85. Either be home by midnight, or sleep on the non-existent front porch. Never used it for sleeping — that was always referred to as “crashing”, or if you’re really out of it, crashing and burning. Military families — they’re so crazy!

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      3. It was entirely clear to me; my immediate family doesn’t use the term much (though I suspect all of us would have gotten it straight off the bat) but a lot of my close friends do.

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  3. While I’ll travel a bit for a meal with my fellow loons (3 hours to Llano yesterday for Lunch) I think getting to there might just be a bit too far (but one day I will visit the Peoples Republic of Colorado)

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    1. Analysing Punkinate as following the same derivation as Caliphate and Sultanate I can only protest that if I am to be governed by a member of the genus Cucurbita I am not sure the Pumpkin is the optimum ruler. (Although it must surely be preferable to Zucchini in this regard.)

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      2. I grew up in the south, which meant white squash and crook-neck (yellow) squash. My wife introduced me to acorn (winter) squash, and we both tried (but didn’t much care for) spaghetti squash. Of them all, acorn squash is my favorite, but I wouldn’t want to be governed by it.

        A closer view of the situation brings to mind another word that might fit, and be quite appropriate — pollenate.
        (ducks, runs, and hides in a deep, deep, DEEP bunker!)

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          1. Now I have an image of a Dalek flying around with wings, “Pollenate! Pollenate!”

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        2. For casual eating acorn is good, and yellow squash is tasty if not overcooked, but if you want a tasty pie you need a sweetmeat Hubbard squash. On the other hand, I didn’t plant any this year but instead have volunteer squash growing out of the compost heap that have leaves the size of my chest and flowers larger than my hand. Faced with this I, for one, am ready to acknowledge my curcurbite masters. Though long may they circulate, and possibly conflate or dictate, they will, forever and eternally, be oblate. Unless they are zucchinis.

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        4. If you are governed by the squash, you wouldn’t have to eat the squash. In fact, it would be illegal. Besides, I tend to think of squash rulership involving things like having to put up with vines everywhere– otherwise similar to King Log, which isn’t half bad.

          Though it’s possible that a squashocracy (ask Sarah. It’s probably a word- though I may have misspelled it) would look like a anarchotyrany, which is most emphatically not good. Hrm. That will require some cogitation. One assumes a rulership by pumpkins does not require being conscious. There is also a certain messianic expectation of the Great Pumpkin returning. Oh, dear… this could be a place…and a story. MAKE IT STOP!!! *wimper* :)

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          1. So… you’re saying that Linus just had the details wrong, and The Great Pumpkin was the Savior of Pumpkin-kin? (runs)

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            1. I was thinking more like the Great Pumpkin is like Barbarossa or King Arthur. So, I guess the savior of SquashyCivilization, not of souls. Besides squash souls are a bit stringy. :P

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            1. Gotta watch that fighting okra. It’s fisety. I mean, if we didn’t have okra, we wouldn’t have mercenary defenders– then where would we be?! :) ;-)

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                1. There’s a college ball team called “The Fighting Okra”. Thats what I was refering to. Yes, they are slippery, but you have to be to do the dirty work. :) :)

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  6. Sarah, it was my true pleasure to meet you three Hoyts in the flesh this weekend. Dan especially has earned my respect and admiration for his amazing skill at conflict resolution and the staving off of bloodshed and mayhem during the hybrid publishing panel. (That said, the witch was evil and I would have paid good money to see you take her out.)
    Unfortunately, something that required my personal attention came up unexpectedly so I had to drive back to Huntspatch late Saturday night. Sorry to have to miss breakfast.

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            1. It boggled the mind, to sit and listen to it. Just… totally stunned. I know I’m a newb, and this is only my third con, but… can you SAY things like that in public?

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              1. What – her “we keep slaves” comment? Or her encouragement of others doing so?

                Or her invitation for authors to enroll in her servitude?

                There are, I find, times when I suspect some people of role-playing, acting teh Evil so folks will see what it looks like. Then I ponder Obama’s (un)Affordable Care Act and think about things being hidden in plain sight.

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      1. I’m afraid that I must conclude that Hoyt 4, aka Marshall, is simply your imaginary friend, created to keep Dan and Robert from ganging up on you. After all, you do lie for a living.
        fyi, for those who weren’t there, one of the pro authors, might have been Correia or Williamson, started his talk with, “hi, I’m … and I lie for a living.”
        Caution for regulars here who have never been to a convention, but are thinking of giving it a shot. I highly recommend either LibertyCon in Chattanooga or Con*stellation in Huntsville. Both small, friendly, and notoriously conservative while very socially flexible. Any small “L” libertarian or rational anarchist would feel right at home. The same cannot always be said for cons in other areas, and whatever location the truly big cons are just too overwhelming for a newbie.

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        1. No no, he’s real. However, compared to his brother, he doesn’t seem to be able to get a word in edgewise, and has an extremely low vapor pressure – prone to evaporating from the immediate vicinity whenever the Hoyts go to do something as a group.

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        2. What about FenCon for newbie fen west of the MS?

          By the way the puppy is home. We have found NEMO!! He’s a tough guy. All of us including Nemo are trained.

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    2. Oh, this is gonna be good! (phones in popcorn stock order to broker)

      Zombie shapeshifter dragons! Genetically engineered government agents! The politics of magic! Were-fairies!

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      1. Porridge — oatmeal, cream o’ wheat or grits — allowed a mother to stop breastfeeding before the child had replaced its milk teeth. The thesis seems to be that vegetables and meat were probably too tough for toddlers to chew, so momma had to proffer the teat for the first half dozen years of childhood. This reduced fertility and kept tribes small and vulnerable.

        It seems likely that the prolonged nursing has something to do with endowing human females with theor (IIRC) unique trait of having full-time protruding mammary glands even when not nursing.

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        1. The thesis seems to be that vegetables and meat were probably too tough for toddlers to chew …

          And yet most animals manage it just fine, as do our own youngsters once their baby teeth come in. I don’t buy Mr. Moffat’s thesis; it would require early man to be not only quite different from modern man in terms of how their teeth are put together, but also quite different from most other mammals.

          I think Mr. Moffat has taken a very simple cause-effect relationship — agriculture made food more reliable, enabling families to have more children without them dying of various malnutrition-related factors — and invented a completely spurious factor (tooth softness? really?) to put a complicated twist on what would otherwise be a very boring, and more importantly a NOT book-worthy, thesis.

          No, the growth in family size in agricultural times had much more to do with the ready availability of calories than with tooth softness.

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          1. The Innuit would traditionally wean their babies with pre-chewed food, supposedly most hunting and gathering groups were supposed to have followed that path, so that pap and gruel would not be absolutely necessary to tide the babies over to solid food. There was some book on that – in the 80’s? – that tried to explain that that was the basis for kissing, The Innuit only had access to grains and cereals when they traded down a long chain of intermediaries.
            I have to agree with Robin. Introduction of Ag allowed larger families, because of more stable food supplies.
            I wonder if this isn’t some sort of ‘directed’ research based on a pre-conception like the idea that breast feeding is good, and should be done much longer, like our ancient, uncorrupted ancestors did.

            And then there was a press release about an article in Nature from May saying that Neanderthals appear to have started weaning their children at about 7 months and appear to have fully weaned at about a year, and they suspect that humans weaned earlier.

            http://phys.org/news/2013-05-science-teeth-neanderthal-weaning-habits.html

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            1. At the same time the introduction of agriculture also REQUIRED larger families to help care for the fields. It may have also been one factor in the introduction of slavery. All advances have that double-sided effect on society. There are always trade-offs, even in our modern world. Unfortunately, there are some that have blinders to this truth — often self-imposed.

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              1. Studies of patterns of post-Confederacy tenant farming have found that a large family was a critical element in “winning” tenancy of the better farms/fields. Several factors affecting this probably including the pool of “free” labor as well as the ability to support a large healthy family indicating prior farming success.

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  9. Sarah, are you planning something special for the blog on Usaian Day? We could have a virtual BBQ.

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      2. I’ve got a tree in my back yard that needs to come down. We can cut it down and use it to heat the tar (also to use to barbecue the whole auroch that someone promised to bring). It’s maple, so it should also add a bit of flavor (flavored tar?).

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