Hooptedoodle #162 - A Plague of Narcissism?

What is this lady doing, then? Is she trying desperately to get a signal on her mobile phone (is she, like me, an EE customer?)? Perhaps she has a solar-powered pacemaker for some serious heart condition? Is it some strange new Japanese golf club, to get you out of a bunker?

No - of course, everyone knows, she is taking a selfie - how wonderful. She even has a BlueTooth-enabled selfie-stick, so that the photo looks more as though she had a friend who might have taken it for her. Everyone, it seems, is taking selfies. It is the thing to do - which may mean, unfortunately, that one day fashion will dictate that it is no longer the thing to do, in which case we shall very quickly have to think up something even more stupid.

I was very shaken to read in Yahoo News (which comes, I regret to say, as part of my email service) that there is a growing crime-wave associated with selfie-sticks; it seems that there are organised gangs, no less, in popular tourist sites, who will take the opportunity to steal the phone from the end of an innocent selfie-taker's stick, and make off with it. OMG. [If you, too, are shaken by this story, please remember that the number of selfie-takers who are impacted by this dreadful development is still very small - thus far....]

I have never taken a selfie. I cannot imagine wanting to take one, to be honest, so I have mentioned to potential gift-purchasers that they should not bother getting me a selfie-stick - even a BlueTooth enabled one. With luck, people will one day say of me, in low whispers, "do you know, as far as we know he never once took a selfie - unbelievable. Mind you, we have no photos of him at all, so it may be that he was dreadfully ugly..."

The whole idea of selfies seems to me to be consistent with the popular wish to be a celebrity - look at me - my photos are all over Facebook - how cool is that? I even tell everyone when I'm going to be on holiday, and where I keep the spare front door key. Awesome.

For the novice, or would-be, selfie-taker, here is a very useful flowchart from those wonderful people at the DoghouseDiaries, to give a guide as to when it is appropriate to take a selfie:

Two thoughts occur - one more serious than the other.

Firstly, I am reminded of a very sad story from many years ago - supposedly based on fact. An unmarried schoolmistress reached the end of her long career, and decided to spend a hefty portion of her retirement sum on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the Far East. This would take a few months, and would involve solitary travel to some of the most exotic locations on the planet. In support of this, her work colleagues clubbed together and bought her a very nice, up-market, compact camera, and a mass of film for it, so that she could have a fitting record of her wonderful trip.

She went on her world tour, and when she got home she found a great pile of developed films (remember them?) returned to her from Kodak, which she had posted off for processing from many points throughout her journey. Sadly, she had never really understood the viewfinder on the camera, and she had toured the Far East taking photos with the camera reversed, peering the wrong way through the viewfinder, trying to make sense of what was out there. She had many hundreds of out-of-focus pictures of her right ear, taken at huge expense at the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City and many other wonderful locations.

Would this lady have been better or worse off in the age of the selfie-stick? Discuss.

Second thought. My mother has a big padded envelope which contains ancient photos of relations and ancestors going back to the 1870s - fascinating. Not only is this a family record, it is a fabulous insight into fashions, social history, transport and all sorts of things. Some of these pictures are faded and battered, a few are in a pretty poor state, and it is my intention to scan them all very soon, so that I have some proper form of back-up if they all turn to dust. That got me thinking. How secure is a digital back-up, in the long term, anyway?

In an age when so many digital pictures are taken - throwaway, worthless pictures, most of them, who is it that is serious enough or organised enough to set up proper archiving to ensure that we will still be able to find and read these pictures 150 years from now? Will our descendants in the 23rd Century have a useful equivalent of my mother's envelope? Will they have any record of what their long-dead forebears looked like? Even the odd selfie from Margate?

A Matter of Honour - The Professor and the Field Marshal

I have to record that the kicking-off point for this post was a recent entry in the blog of the worthy Old Trousers, which is invariably entertaining, and often usefully informative, so my thanks for that, Mr Trousers. [I must add here that I do not have the self-confidence to handle these noms de blog with ease – I pondered whether it would be more matey to address the gentleman in question as just “Old” – for short – but decided against it]

His blog post, you see, made me aware that the long-awaited Blücher game in the Honour series is due to appear very soon. [Again, this gets me near to the edge of my natural comfort zone, since I would be very nervous about the risk of appearing enthusiastic]

It’s a demography thing, really. The dates of the beginning of the post-war growth of miniatures wargaming, along with the inevitable passage of time since then, mean that of recent years we have lost a few of the pioneering heroes of the hobby, and there have been appropriate tributes published – without stopping to check the back-obits, I would recognise that Paddy Griffith, Terry Wise, and Don Featherstone all made a big contribution to my own fascination with tabletop warfare, and there are many others – some of them still alive! – to whom I also owe a great deal. I don’t really do eulogies – not because I am unappreciative, you understand, but because somehow it seems silly when I try to write one. It feels like saying “me too”, but not quite loud enough for anyone to hear.

It is entirely correct that we recognise these key individuals from the past, but I have to say that there is also a list of more recent people that I take very seriously – among so much that is good and positive, there are a few thinkers and rule-writers who particularly strike a chord with me, who can be relied on to give well thought-out games, or at the very least to talk sense. This is all very subjective, and anybody might object to my personal list, or feel I have overlooked someone far more important – they would almost certainly be correct.

Dr Sam A Mustafa

I invariably find the works of Frank Chadwick, Howard Whitehouse and the guys from the Too Fat Lardies worthwhile; I also got a lot out of the commonsense approach of Doc Monaghan’s Big Battalions, and of recent years, of course, I have become quite a fan of Richard Borg. To me, one of the most impressive of the lot has been Dr Sam A Mustafa, the man behind the Honour series of games, and he is my subject for this morning.

Dr Mustafa is a historian and a teaching professor at a US college, so his authorship of wargames is a sideline – by his own admission, the time he has available for the hobby stuff is limited. I first came across him when I became very keen on his Grande Armée Napoleonic rules, and on the later, beta-test prototype Fast Play Grande Armée, which was an unsupported variant which was available for download online for a while.

Let me put this into context – “very keen” in my case does not mean I actually adopted GA as my rules of choice, but I found much that was fresh and sensible in there, and some of the ideas were a big influence on subsequent changes to my own in-house rules. I particularly liked the fact that the rules were aimed at a size of game which I found most enjoyable (i.e. big), and I liked the abstraction or suppression of fiddly bits which were mostly a distraction in a big game. Examples were the disappearance of musketry volleys into a simple, combined close combat phase, what seemed to me to be a novel, practical approach to skirmishers, and the removal of explicit divisional artillery batteries from the game – such artillery was now just an adjustment to the combat effectiveness of each division. Yes – I know – this stuff doesn’t suit everyone, but for big games I found all this very sensible. I had some issues with the Command and Control rules, but then I always do.

In particular, a feature of the Grande Armée booklet is a series of explanatory panels which explain the rationale behind some of the less orthodox rules, in terms of the realities of Napoleonic warfare – I consider these notes to have been worth the price of the booklet, just as an educator and something to get me thinking.

In time, Dr Sam launched his Honour series, and the first product I became aware of was Lasalle. A couple of things about Lasalle: I was a little disappointed that the rules book was of a newly-fashionable format which I call “Big Shiny Books” (BSB), I was surprised that the game was almost a step back towards Old School from GA (it was, after all, aimed at smaller battles), and I had a personal problem in that I could have used my existing armies – organisation and bases – absolutely as they stood, apart from artillery – 3-model batteries would not be an insurmountable obstacle, obviously, but I was reluctant to start dabbling with a very expensive ruleset which required immediate tweaks, right at the outset, to suit my armies. The key word here is “expensive” – BSBs are always too thick, too heavy, packed with irrelevant pictures (to amuse those with a short attention span?), overpriced and far too costly to mail to the UK from America. You can, of course, download a simpler pdf file, but then you have to pay for the ink, the paper and some kind of binder. Hmmm. In fact I did find a cheap secondhand copy of the hardback version in the UK, on eBay, so I own it but – like the gentleman accordionist – I have not yet played it (though I intend to).

What I was really excited about in the Honour series was that a grand-tactical companion game, Blücher, was next in the queue. Well, after some announcements about delays, Blücher was eventually shelved because, said Dr Sam, they couldn’t get it to work well enough, and so they had cut their losses. If you can have degrees of devastation, I was certainly a bit devastated. I took the huff sufficiently to pay scant attention to Maurice and Longstreet and the next products in the series, though I heard they were excellent, and by personal choice I steer clear of user forums (which always seem to me to be dominated by points-scoring exchanges between opinionated guys who don’t know very much), so I was very pleasantly surprised when the Trouser man recently announced that Blücher is back in the plan. Yes!

It looks good – it features an integral mini-campaign system called Scharnhorst, and a whole pile of other goodies, and it is expected to appear in February. There are copious downloadable samples and illustrations on the Honour website, and there is a series of excellent introductory podcasts done by the man himself. The original intention was to have a series of four podcasts, ending before Christmas, but they generated so much interest and so many further questions that Mustafa has produced a fifth, which may well be the start of an occasional series. I listened to all the podcasts last night. The first four are interesting to anyone who might be thinking of buying the game, of course, but the fifth is a beauty – though he apologises for going into detail, Mustafa spends some time explaining the design features of the game, including some of his personal philosophy on what works and what does not work in a wargame of this type, and an extended discussion of activation mechanisms – this, admittedly, is just the sort of thing I find interesting, but if you are with me on this, I recommend it highly – you’ll find it here.

That’s probably quite enough about that – the book will be expensive, that is for sure, and the add-ons (packs of unit cards for specific campaigns and so forth) will all be a further expense, but it looks very promising. It is designed to be playable using printed unit cards as well as with miniatures. I hope it will be available through a European retail outlet, or the postal costs will leave the poor old camel with a badly broken back!

Hooptedoodle #161 - Feathered Visitor

Apart from gale force winds last week, we have been very lucky with the weather here - there has been plenty of snow further south. Our garden bird feeders are still very busy, and we are getting geared up for the RSPB's national Garden Birdwatch this coming weekend.

Right on cue, we have seen a visitor in the garden that we haven't seen for years - a Brambling. A kind of finch, can be mistaken for a male Chaffinch if you are in a hurry. They are not specially rare, in fact, but we haven't seen one here for about 10 years or more.

So warm greetings to the Brambling (who won't go on the feeders - just cleans up the scraps the others have dropped, but there are plenty of them) - ideally, we need it to reappear during the observation period of the Birdwatch, so we can record it on the sheet, but we won't be too upset if it doesn't show!

ECW Campaign - another new General

This is General William Forbes Geddes, commanding the troops of the Scottish Army of the Covenant serving in Lancashire. "Big Willie" was born in 1592 at Seton Grange, Haddington, youngest son of Alexander Geddes - a wealthy landowner and salt merchant - and his wife Margaret Fallon. A professional soldier since he left school, where he was noted for his prowess in both Latin and wrestling, Geddes is a strange mixture - considered a "hard man" and pretty much humourless, yet he is very highly regarded by his troops, because of his reputation for ensuring that pay and provisions are supplied promptly and in full measure. Unusually tall for the day, he is also gifted with remarkable physical strength which is legendary - at the Siege of Heidelberg (1622) he is said to have  thrown a Spanish officer into the river Neckar on one of the rare occasions when he lost his temper.

This casting is by Art Miniaturen, and my humble paintwork is of interest (to me) only in that it is the first time I have made exclusive use of the (cheap) Deco-Art "Crafter" acrylic paints. No particular problems - coverage is not quite so dense as with the more exotic brands, but it's OK, and anything which makes it possible for me to stay away from the GW shops has to be good.

By the way, if anyone noticed a short-lived post earlier this week, it featured a YouTube clip which refused to run properly in Blogger, so I scrapped it. Fair enough - sorry about that.

Hooptedoodle #160 - Customer Service Message

Random image

I received a rather worrying email from Peter, who was unable to read my Blog yesterday - something had gone wrong and the text was unintelligible (even more so than usual, apparently). I have checked with my technology people, and it seems that the fault may most likely have been with Peter's web browser. However, I'm obviously concerned if I am putting stuff out there which can't be read, so I do take this very seriously.

If you cannot read this post - and by that I mean cannot read it at all - then please send me a comment, describing what you can see, and we'll attempt to get things fixed straight away. I can only assure you that customer comfort and satisfaction are always absolute priorities in our Job Mission statement. If you wish to read terms and conditions of use, or see details of the standard Prometheus in Aspic service level agreement, then we suggest that you go and pour a stiff drink and write them yourself.

Hooptedoodle #159 - Feeding the Neighbours

Breaking the ice on the drinking water is always a popular move

We have always been very fond of the birds in our garden - there are plenty of them, since we have a fair-sized wood just over the garden wall, and we try to keep the feeders stocked in the winter months. Watching them has given us an immense amount of pleasure over the years.

This Christmas, the Contesse was presented with a more sophisticated lens to go with the new camera she got last Christmas (I'm not very good at the imagination thing), and her photos of the visiting birds are suddenly a lot better - so much so that I thought I'd share some of them. Nothing too rare or exciting in the varieties that turned up, but it's nice to see them close up, enjoying a meal on some of our more pleasant days (i.e. before the gales started). We have an extensive menu of lunch specials on offer, including niger seeds, sunflower kernels, suet, nuts and some extremely disgusting dried mealworms. The customers seem to approve. The only question we would like an answer to is, where have all the greenfinches gone? Two or three years ago they were among the most common visitors, but we see hardly any now. The answer, I'm almost certain, is simply that they are dining in someone else's garden, but I would be upset if something more dramatic had happened to them.

Anyway, here's a selection of what constitute common-or-garden birds on the East Coast of Scotland around New Year time.

Blue Tits on the nuts

Handsome male Chaffinch

Coal Tit

Collared Dove - won't go near the feeders, but will hoover up anything dropped
on the ground

I love these little guys - Goldfinches - you either get none or you get a crowd

Great Tit

The enigmatic Nuthatch - spends most of his life hanging upside-down; a
pretty bird, but aggressive. One of Nature's failed prototypes?

The dumbest bird in the garden - a cock pheasant who survived the Christmas shoot;
I read somewhere that they are terribly inbred - most pheasants in Britain
today are descendants of a very small number that were imported originally,
which may explain the low IQ. It has to be said that the females are even more
daft than the males - they forget where they've laid their eggs, for a start.

Robin (yes, yes, all right...)

My favourite of the lot - a female Greater Spotted Woodpecker - sometimes we get
an entire family group on the feeders together, which is spectacular

ECW Campaign – Week 4

Barnabas Pobjoy, the formidable mayor of Midlawton, more than a match
for the unfortunate Lord Porteous

Some aspects of the week are also covered in the account of the Battle of Midlawton; what follows here is a summary.

The Parliamentarian army assembled in the area of Pacefield, and marched northwards towards Midlawton, where they were surprised by Lord Porteous, with all the troops he had available, but without the expected reinforcement under the command of General Sir John Darracott. The resultant Battle of Midlawton (28^th March 1644) is recorded in the histories as one of the great disasters of the Royalist cause – Porteous’ losses in killed wounded and missing were about 40% of his strength, he lost all his artillery and a number of his most able brigade commanders, and the wreck of his army fell back, as best they could, to Lowther. On reaching that town, with his army still strung out behind him in disorder, Lord Porteous announced that he was unwell, and retired to his quarters, leaving Lord Sefton in temporary command. Sefton had the challenge of doing what he could to organise some kind of army out of the bits, as more stragglers returned to their units.

Ralph Molyneux, Lord Sefton - commanding the Royalist
"Army of North Lonsdale" during the indisposition of Lord Porteous

Word soon reached Darracott, at Woodhouses with the supporting force seconded from the Marquis of Newcastle, of the catastrophe at Midlawton, and he ordered his troops forward to the fortress town of Erneford, to cover Porteous’ retreat.

Sir John Darracott - commander of the forces from
Northumberland

The victorious Sir Henry Figge-Newton handed over command of the Army of Parliament to Sir Nathaniel Aspinall (who was the actual field commander during the battle) and retired to Pacefield, to meet up with the Scottish Covenanter forces under Gen William Geddes (“Big Willie Geddes” to his men – Gen Geddes was a giant of a man, apparently – “six and a half” feet tall).

"Big Willie" Geddes - in command of the Scottish forces
seconded to Parliament

Aspinall duly took possession of the town of Midlawton (a situation he cannot have expected), including a portion of the baggage train of Royalist Army, with one of the treasure chests and much of that army’s correspondence and records, and he also acquired 4 good field pieces in working order, plus a mass of other abandoned weapons and ammunition. The mayor of Midlawton, Mr Barnabas Pobjoy, was keen to place his town at the disposal of Parliament, subject to some guarantees about the behaviour of the soldiers. He found Aspinall to be a rather more combative negotiator than Porteous had been, but he was also famed for his intolerance toward looting and any other ungodly activity in his army, and a gallows was promptly erected in the town market to emphasise what was expected of the soldiery. General Aspinall made it clear that the gallows would also be used to deal with any official or citizen of the town who caused any trouble or provided information to the enemy.

The Midlawton Town Guard (trained band without firearms) was taken into the Parliament army, and Aspinall appointed a new officer of his own to command it.

A large proportion of the losses on both sides at the Battle of Midlawton consisted of men who had gone missing – some of the Royalists were bona fide prisoners, but a great many had simply run away from the combat. The situation after the battle was complicated. Many of the Royalist units were raised in Cumberland and Westmorland, to the north, and – though many took shelter with sympathetic locals, or just disappeared – the best-supplied and quickest way home for these men was probably to rejoin their army in the retreat.

On the other hand, many of Aspinall’s soldiers had been recruited in Blackburn, Salford, West Derby and other areas well to the south, and the official orders forbidding collection of any booty from Midlawton brought a rush of desertions – many felt that the battle was won, the campaign must now be over, the immediate prospects for life in the army did not appear attractive, and they would be best setting off for home. Aspinall quickly detailed some of his units of horse to patrol the tracks heading south in search of deserters, but they had little success – they had too much ground to cover, and the situation was not helped by the fact that some of the troopers took the opportunity to desert also.

The consequence of all this was that the proportion of missing men who rejoined the colours after the battle was rather higher in the defeated army, which seems counterintuitive but was nonetheless true.

A pre-war portrait of Sir Roderick Broadhurst, hero
of Hobden's Mill, whose brigade of the Royalist horse
was practically destroyed at Midlawton

Royalist

Force A (Lord Porteous with the brigades of Rice, Fulwood & Parkfield, at Lowther), Force B (Lord Sefton with a detached force at Midlawton) and Force D (Col Broadhurst, with a cavalry force at Erneford) were ordered to garrison the town of Midlawton. This was compromised by the refusal of the Mayor of Midlawton to allow more troops into the town, followed by the unfortunate battle on 28^th – afterwards these forces merged into a revised Force A (Lord Sefton in acting command, with Porteous indisposed) and fell back to the area of Lowther.

Force F (Genl Darracott, with the reinforcement from the Marquis of Newcastle) had orders to rest until 5^th February at Woodhouses, but on hearing of the defeat at Midlawton he marched his troops to Erneford, the old fortress on the River Arith, to cover Porteous’ retreat.

Parliament

The various columns converged on Pacefield, and marched north, where they were engaged in battle at Midlawton. Following the battle, the victorious forces were merged into revised Force A, at Midlawton, under the command of Genl Aspinall (Genl Figge-Newon having left to join the Scots…)

Force I - General Geddes’ Covenanters marched from Briskhill to Pacefield.