maradydd | Score!

I am now the proud owner of two kilos of premium, high-grade Dutch marzipan. (Well, okay, it's probably Flemish marzipan, and the jolly man in the chef's hat who sold it to us at the Kerstmarkt probably wouldn't be too thrilled if I referred to him and his product as Dutch. But I couldn't resist the garden-path joke.)

enochsmiles and I were planning on going to Köln tonight for the New Model Army concert, but between the COSIC Christmas party that ran to 3am last night and the seizure he had just after dropping off to sleep, making it to the train just didn't happen. (

kekhmet, I really can't justify jetting off to London alone if the seizures are starting up again, so tomorrow's out. I'm sorry.) We were a bit dejected, but we were also hungry, and

enochsmiles remembered that the Kerstmarkt (Christmas Market) was going on, so we headed downtown in search of food. Two Polish sausages in buns later, we went shopping for gifts for our friends.

No, I'm not going to tell you what we got for everyone -- except, obviously, the marzipan. Anyone in Houston who wants to come over and make marzipan animals with me and my family sometime after we get back into town, feel free to give me a holler; there's more than enough to go around. In fact, when the chef-hat guy was explaining prices, he said, "1 kilo, 12 euros; 12,000 euros, one tonne."

enochsmiles and I seriously contemplated the idea of delivering a metric tonne of marzipan to ESAT and billing it to his advisor's budget -- "well, you've got all this money you need to spend before the end of the year, and we wanted to study ideal knot cryptography, and modeling clay just isn't tasty enough!" -- but in the end we decided just to take what we could carry.

We probably blew as much dough at the Kerstmarkt as we would have travelling to Köln, seeing the show and staying the night, but now we get to share the happiness with everyone. I love this time of year.

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hippetyhop! Oh, the things you could do with a tonne of marzipan! You could make a marzipan mansion with furniture and a marzipan museum of washed-up celebrities in the roles of the household staff!

Or you could run to the local electronics store and get a whole bunch of components and control boards (I have a list somewhere) and mold android parts and make a semi-autonomous/semi-RC Marzipan Minion (I think I may have to copyright that name) and add a sound box so he can run around saying, "Can't catch me, I'm the Marzipan Man!"

And then turn him loose on the Mall Santas.

Hmmmm, I seem to recall a project revolving around a Roomba and a mobile phone. So perhaps the marzipan could be used to mold, oh, things for the Roomba to have mounted upon it. Perhaps weapons emplacements. Does this stuff count as a hard point?

Roomba. Battering ram. Cell phone controller. Crowded mall. Oh, yes.

Or you could build a whole diorama-set and a series of posable characters and get a good camera to do stop-frame stuff and call it Marzipanimation.

And shoot it in Marzipanavision!

I'm always eager to participate in harmless evil, especially when it's sticky and edible harmless evil.

I'm digging the idea of doing stop-motion animation, though I wonder if my digital camera is good enough. I don't have a tripod, which could be a problem.

You and Jaymes are totally welcome to come by; we get to Houston late on the 20th.

That's quite alright! Would've been nice to see you, but there will be other chances. As I said before, it's not like I won't know plenty of people at the gig :-)

If you ever should feel te urge to make marzipan on your own, it is (in theory) not taht difficult. Not that I've tried, there's always been good-enough marzipan down the store.

Basically, take equal weight sugar and peeled whole almonds, chop and mix (thein iterate from "chop and mix" until it forms a smooth mass).

Score!

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