Uppity Medieval Women

More from my Bad Squiddo order; the pack "Defending Villagers". These lovely ladies are full of attitude and ready to defend hearth and herd from raiding orcs, Vikings or Englishmen. I used air brush paints for the green, red and blue dresses. I also attempted some embroidered flowers and animals on their pinnies.

The complete group

One of the matrons

Gran doesn't put up with any nonsense! 

Plucky girl providing short range missile capability. I tried to do bunnies on the fringe of her pinnie 

Mom keeping her baby safe. Should probably get a bonus for ferocity. 

My favorite I think. Looks like the leader of the bunch. 

Adding guard dogs and my more belligerent looking Foundry and Essex civilians to bring them up to a full unit. 

Appropriately I listened to the Medieval Baebes while working on these.

PRSD

I realized last night while washing the dishes that Mrs. Rabbitman hadn't been playing any of her many and varied (we discovered No Doubt with this song) Christmas CDs. We're two weeks into December and we haven't heard Madonna's Santa Baby, or Merry Christmas From the Family, let alone Bing Crosby or Tony Bennett.

"Christmas music stresses out our daughter."

Six years of toiling in the Buy Food deli have taken their toll. The holidays for retail workers are really awful; longer hours, stressed out grouchy customers and having to work while everyone else is enjoying the holidays. Even having been out of retail for a year, she still finds Christmas music puts her on edge. Especially Jingle Bells.... but I find most versions of Jingle Bells annoying anyway.

"I have deli PTSD dad. Even after a year I can still smell the squelchy ham."

I managed to escape without any holiday Post Retail Stress Disorder (PRSD) fortunately. I'm looking forward to a good 10 plus days off and I'm hoping for some of Mrs. Rabbitman's pies, more hobby time (painting and some 4Ground buildings) and getting some games in with the Mad Padre.

So this year, plan for the lines, be a little more patient and spread the Christmas (or whatever is appropriate to your beliefs) love by not being a dick to those who have to work while we're not.

Rabbitman Rocks Out to the '70s (and 60s and 80s and maybe even the 90s)

My multi-disk CD player in the basement o'rabbits has started having mechanical issues. I've had to manually change to the next disk for a couple of years, but recently it would sometimes not change the disk even manually, or play at all. When it was feeling co-operative recently I managed to get my CDs out and have decided to not risk putting anything back in. This does make painting sessions with Wierdy-Beardy a bit quiet if we've seen each other regularly and are all caught up. I mean, once you're past your 20s or 30s there isn't really that much to talk about once you've covered your grown kids, grandkids, jobs, new gaming project, recent movie/book. Bitching about work or the government doesn't help and just takes effort.

While tidying up yesterday for a game I found a couple of boxes with my old cassettes, and the basement o'rabbits stereo does have two cassette decks. Among these were a collection of mix tapes made for me by my friend John. They have interesting names like Stuff etc. (with things), Jazz Rock Friends, The Police: Some Stuff!, Vitamin Enriched Bits of Cardboard and the obligatory make-out CD; The Return of the Son of Fluff: Music to Fall off a Chair By (which definitely got played when the future Mrs. Rabbitman came over to my apartment for our first dinner date!). He's an audiophile and his collection of vinyl was pretty cool back in the day (I hope he's kept building on it). We'd hang in his room talking about life and he'd give me a pretty good education in music. His taste ran to the eclectic; Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, Kate Bush, the Chieftains  and Jethro Tull (more to them than Aqualung), with a solid foundation of ZZ-Top and Led Zepplin leavened with some cool jazz like Pat Metheny and Branford Marsalis. I first heard the Blues Brothers in his basement room.

So when Mrs. Rabbitman came along to fill my ears with 80s New Wave, I was open to more sounds than 70s soft rock. Today for example we woke up to Portishead.



John hated my pop and 60s folky leanings. He liked Paul Simon without Garfunkel. I like them both. Paul Simon's lyrics with Art Garfunkel's harmonizing is pretty amazing. Yeah, I've left the folky 60s protest rock, it just bugs me now. I prefer Blue Grass when I'm in the mood for mandolins, banjos and rich harmonizing vocals. But some pop music is just a guilty pleasure ya know? Bands like ABBA, who don't pretend to be anything but some pop act having fun, I can take a lot easier than pop acts that try to dress themselves with 'deeper meanings' and teen angst. Besides Belinda Carlisle's Mad About You is "our song".



I hate guys my age who claim all good music stopped sometime in 1978. Stupid pop music is stupid pop music whether it's from the 60s and 70s or the 90s or this century. Admit it, we listened to a lot of banal crap when we were kids, One Direction and Justin Bieber are just the latest incarnation of that. My daughter has turned Mrs. Rabbitman and I on to some pretty good new stuff too.

The cassettes will disappoint Wierdy-Beardy though, I don't have any Johnny Cash on cassette. But I do have the music of my university years, and that's pretty cool.

Rabbitman Gets His Theme Song

A Steampunk friend put me on to this little ditty:


It's strange, but I like it anyway.

Rabbitman and the Man in Black

People always ask "What sort of music do you like?" And I'm pretty broad minded. I like most things from ABBA to ZZ Top. Amadeus Mozart , opera and Medieval Baebes to the Ramones, Pink Floyd and Elton John. I love the Blues and the B-52s. Even Lady Gaga and Ke$ha have some tunes I like. It would probably be easier to answer with what don't I like. Country music is one of them.

My dad used to listen to country music a lot and one day while listening to CBC I heard Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.
Wow, that's pretty good I thought.
Soon I had amassed a pile of Johnny Cash CDs. Enough that I can load up my CD player for 5 hours of listening and still have a few discs in reserve.
I love his gravelly voice and thumping guitar rhythm. His cover of Hurt is amazing and The Man Comes Around is haunting. I think an argument could be made that he was the original Punk. He was certainly an iconoclast and walked his own line.
That being said, I hate Country Music.
And I've been wondering why. I like Johnny Cash. I like Blue Grass and American Roots music. I like KD Lang and Patsy Cline. I play the Oh Brother Where Art Thou? sound track a lot.
Man of Constant Sorrow is my personal theme some days.
And yet, some evenings when one particular cashier and one particular grocery clerk are together in the Buy Food they switch the music to country. She usually switches back before she locks the office and goes home. But one night she forgot, leaving me to listen to broken hearts and pick up trucks all night. Drove me nuts. Worse than the Adult Contemporary or the 50s Teen Angst stations.
So why?
The Blues are full of what could be called hurtin' music. So it can't be the content.
Then as I listened I realized; it's the pitch.
That nasal twang they all sing in. And all the male singers in the 8 hours play list all sounded exactly the same.
Country music has found a template that works and pleases the audience and they repeat it ad nauseum . Probably more so than Top 40 Pop, where some lip service is sometimes paid towards the mythos of Rock 'n Roll and having a unique voice. Sometimes. Teeny bopper bands are pretty interchangeable. But they don't have any pretence to artistic integrity or anything other than this is a lot of fun.
Of course, repeating what works ad infinitum makes Country music insanely profitable. But it really pisses me off to have some rich rhinestone encrusted hillbilly wannabe driving about in his $60K pickup singing about how great it is to grow up poor. Complete with an electric guitar, smoke machines and laser show now.
It sucks to be poor. It sucks to have pain and loss and struggle, but there's also hope too. Johnny Cash knew that, and it comes out in his songs.
So give me the Man in Black and the guys playing Blue Grass and not making any money. You can keep the rest in Hashville.