Hooptedoodle #392 - An Old Friend, Welcome Back

 We had some new turf laid a couple of weeks ago, and it's been very dry weather since then. Though I've put the sprinklers on a couple of times, the new turf is definitely looking a bit rough.

Since the gardener is due to visit today, and since I am nervous about receiving a telling-off for not looking after the turf, I had the sprinklers going full blast on Tuesday until late. At around 11pm I put on the outside lights and went out to shut off the water. I was walking down the path when I realised that a hedgehog was walking alongside me - not bothered at all. I watched him saunter off into the hedge - I was really glad to see him. He may, of course, have been a her.

 

Not my photo - someone else's hedgehog, in daylight

I knew they were around - I've seen their droppings on the lawn recently. We used to get lots of them - I'm talking of nearly twenty years ago - you could hear them snuffling about in the garden at night, and in the woods at the back of our house. The hedgehogs used to suffer a few casualties - they sometimes used to get caught in the traps the farm ghillie set for rats, and one or two managed to get trapped in the lobster pots which were stacked opposite our house - one of the more complicated forms of suicide. Then they were gone. I suppose there were some around - we never saw any sign  of them. And now, after an extended absence, they are back.

Well, at least one is back. The photo is not mine, of course, it was dark last night and I had nothing with me to take a photo, but I'll try to keep an eye open from now on.

I'm pleased with that - over the years we've lost our Greenfinches and a few other friends, but the hedgehogs are back. Well, well.

Wargame on Thursday - Sorauren

 On Thursday, Stryker and I will play a Zoom-based Napoleonic game. This one is a scenario snappily entitled "Sorauren (French Left)", which neither of us has played before, and is taken straight from the commandsandcolors.net scenarios. It looks like a slugfest, and I noticed after it had been chosen that there is no cavalry on either side, so Stryker and I are going to be wondering how to spend the first 15 minutes of the game, if there are no cavalry units to throw away.

I spent this evening setting up the field, while listening to a football match which I shall not mention again. There is something quite liberating about using someone else's scenario; whatever happens, it will not be my fault. I think these things probably do matter. It is different from my usual scenarios, since the field is quite bare and there are far fewer units than I'm used to. I may learn something here.

 

Initial view from behind the Allied left flank

 

And from the Allied right

 

From behind the French left. There are bonus Victory Points for possession of the ridge just above the centre of the picture (with Spaniards on it). The French had better get cracking...

On the scenery front, I am delighted to announce that I've finally found Wellington's Tree (yes, it was in the wrong box), so it will be appearing, as is required by the terms and conditions of my franchise, and I was also delighted to find the missing top for one of my Iron Age Merit fir trees, this time in a box which has nothing to do with scenery at all. I have superglued the tree-top into place. 

Ha.

 More on Thursday - rural broadband permitting, we have a 10:00 start.

WSS: And Still They Come...

 Really on a hot streak now. Having been pleased with the three British battalions I finished off last week, here comes a unit painted by Count F Goya, which puts everything back into perspective. These chaps are Archibald Rowe's Regt, or the [Royal] Scottish Fusiliers by any other name.

Again, figures are all Les Higgins/PMD 20mm (1/76), apart from the colonel, who is an Irregular chap (?) on a Higgins horse (that's how we do things around here).

Thanks again, Goya, the boys are raring to go.

Hooptedoodle #391 - LaptrinhX - an unfortunate oddity or a symptom of something?

 I'm not at all sensitive about privatising my blog, or making it somehow kind of exclusive. It's not that big a deal - if someone reads it and likes it then, good; if they don't like it then they can move on and do something else. If they protest in a comment, then I can please myself whether I publish the comment, and it's all just part of the blog world.

Like many others, I get a bit fed up with the constant lifting of bits of my labours into TMP, but since the combined attention span of TMP is minimal it doesn't matter much, and occasionally someone who comes across my blog through that channel does what I would think of as the normal thing to do, and makes human, friendly contact. [In fact, of late, the borrowed bits of this blog on TMP which appear under the "authorship" of Tango01 have also carried a house official legend identifying the original source - could it be that TMP's views on decency and intellectual property are somehow evolving? Who knows? Who cares, actually?]

Occasionally I find that chunks of my blog are on Pinterest - I am unmoved. On one occasion I was surprised to find that I could purchase a mug or a poster from some on-line pirate, bearing a photo which was actually mine, and was pinched from here. Again - so what?

And then there is LaptrinhX. 

If you visit their site, laptrinhx.com, you may find, if you search for your Blogger ID, that you are one of their featured contributors. I was very impressed to find that some 800-odd posts from Prometheus in Aspic - credited to MSFoy - have simply been stolen, intact. They are reformatted, though not changed otherwise; the comments are dropped, but there they are. This is, supposedly, a news and job-advertising online journal for software developers, and they feature paid adverts which, presumably, generate revenue per hit.

I'm not awfully upset about this, to be honest, my material is in the public domain, and I realise that the pinching is done by a robot somewhere, so I am neither flattered nor personally very offended, but - for better or worse - this blog is all me own werk, Miss, and if someone generates advertising revenue for themselves and their poxy website by using my original thought and images, without any pretence of a by-your-leave, then I find that less than amusing. Thus I felt it was only appropriate to name them in this blog post, and see if it, too, is lifted intact.

Naturally, I wish to offend no-one, but thought it would be appropriate if I were to mention here that, in my opinion, LaptrinhX, their owners, advertisers, bots and readership are all a bunch of sad little wankers; please publish this. I hope they enjoy reading about themselves here today. Consider it an experimental work-out for their editing software.

WSS: More British Foot Completed

 After a day's delay, occasioned by my deciding I really had to produce my own version of the flag for North & Grey's Regiment, the three new units are now ready for war. This is all Blenheim period...

 

On what looks rather like Joe Morschauser's breakfast table, here is the regiment of Baron North & Grey (surely one of the sillier titles?), also known as the Earl of Bath's Regt. I refuse to discuss these chaps in terms of regimental numbers which weren't thought of for another 50 years (although it seems everyone does...). The flags were quite a lot of work, but worth it.

 

This is the Duke of Marlborough's Regt (aka Edward Dering's)

 

And this is Scrope Howe's Regt (aka Sir Wm Clifton's). Scrope Howe not one of the great names, either, really

Since it seemed a pity to miss out on the opportunity, I fetched Ferguson's Regt out of the Really Useful Boxes, and lined up a group photo of what could be my first British brigade - if they only had a general...

It's OK - all in the pipeline. I'm waiting for cavalry figures and guns to arrive in the mail, and I have the next couple of battalions ready to go on the bottletops. Coming along nicely.

***** Late Edit *****

I've been using flags from Warflag and the War Office for my WSS armies, though I had to put in some original effort for my Imperial troops. For the French, my intention is to use Warflag, and I'll maybe dust off my blog note on texturing using Photoshop. There are also some lovely flags on the Not By Appointment blog, of course, (though they tend to be more towards the SYW) and I always keep an eye on Ray's smashing work on Don't Throw a 1 (though his are usually a bit earlier than the WSS).

Since I couldn't find flags for North & Grey's regiment with high enough resolution in a decent size, I had a go myself. If you're not offended by the stock clip-art "Sun in His Splendour", I thought they might be useful for anyone else who, like me, couldn't get hold of the appropriate Robert Hall sheet(!).

I might texture them, in fact, if I get into texturing the French ones, but for the moment I'm pleased enough with this - at 20mm scale, the textured flags sometimes look as though someone dropped them in the dirt!

******************

Hooptedoodle #390 - March Morning Unlike Others

 

I'm delighted to see that the farming company have been busy smartening up the lane in from the Real World - new turf and daffodils on both verges, and they've fixed all the fences. This section is about 1/3 of a mile of road, and they've done both sides - just the thing to keep you busy on a Sunday afternoon.

Lovely Spring day here, so I am pleased to trot out one of my favourite Ted Hughes poems, which seemed apposite.

 

March Morning Unlike Others  [Ted Hughes - Season Songs (1975)]

Blue haze. Bees hanging in the air at the hive-mouth.
Crawling in prone stupor of sun
On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards,
Still-wings, each
Magnetized to the other,
Float orbits.
Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.
A raven, under the hill,
Coughing among bare oaks.
Aircraft, elated, splitting blue.
Leisure to stand. The knee-deep mud at the trough
Stiffening. Lambs freed to be foolish.

The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled
Out into the sun,
After the frightful operation.
She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,
To be healed,
Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,
Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling
Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.
While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know
She is not going to die.

 

Featherstonia: Wargames Terrain [part 2]

 As promised, here is the remainder of the Wargamer's Newsletter booklet on terrain. I certainly hope you will be attempting sloping battlefields sometime soon. And you know you always wanted a sandtable, though they always remind me of my kids' sand-pit in the garden when I was with my first family - whoever lives in that house now must still be getting ancient Matchbox Toys rising mysteriously out of the depths. Would you really put your lovely soldiers in a sandtable? - really? Well, you're a brave chap.

Once again, many thanks to Albannach and his private museum.