S&M Wedding

That was a lovely day, though not really lending itself to blogging. Weddings and ceilidh are great, I'm really tired and will likely spend tomorrow relaxing. Here's to Sally and Matthew!

Doh! Dress code...

Doh! For the Veizla "Dress code is fancy dress or black tie or some combination, e.g. black tie with corset or cloak." I forgot to say wedding dresses were approved :)

Veizla

And we have seating riddle objects. It's annoying when I form a fixed idea of what I want, and then can't get it, and am too tempted to waste ages looking. But in only a couple of hours today I'm satisfied.

Background, at the veizla there's some simple riddles to solve to find your seat. Eg. a seating plan with crossword clues one of which solves to your name. Last year, which I liked very much and decided to copy, Clare had 30 alphabet blocks with little pictures on them, and handed each person a pair of clues to the block on the left or right. There's a lot of variation as sun could be "yellow" or "big" or "hot" or whatever the clue demands.

I wanted to copy this with different blocks. I didn't actually have this conversation, but it represents the problem:

CartesianD: Hi!
Storekeeper: How can I help you?
CartesianD: Can I get 30, that are smallish, have a different picture on each, and cost about £10 for the lot?
Storekeeper: Thirty what?
CartesianD: Well, exactly.

Substituting "google" or "froogle" for "storekeeper" doesn't help either. I had a few ideas: alphabet blocks, flash cards, illustrated playing cards, tarot cards. But I wanted something really shiny and nothing was. There were some nice novelty card sets (I got a nature one from borders, it's bound to be useful sometime), but all too specific (animals, or even african animals) or way too specific (german declensions, or parts of anatomy) :)

Here are a few of the runners up, the last two were the nearest to shiny but I wasn't sure if they'd do:

National geographic: Nature
Bold but not shiny flash cards
Alphabet blocks, attatched to a wooden frame. Nearly right, but I didn't like some of the pictures.
One of several animal playing card decks with nice art
A more recent (as in, 1800s) Tarot-like deck, with 36 numbered cards not from the tarot. Nice art, but a bit wishy-washy (literally) for my feelings at that time.
Children's snap cards. The photos of objects were beautiful, you could nearly taste the apple, and the objects appropriate (clue for red pepper: "Mars"), but I wasn't sure how many there'd be.

But finally something clicked with me. It was a modern tarot set, and shiny, and illustrated all 78 cards, each then having a picture and a name or number/suit, so more chance to make good clues.

I'm glad I don't have to worry -- I wanted to choose something nice, and had a day to spend at home recuperating, but didn't want it becoming a major job or to be paniced at the last minute.

Erotic Tarot

But of course, I could always throw in half a deck of african mammals or other tarot deck to give a wider range. Cards -- of any sort -- with porn on always seem just tacky and ugly, but I was browsing I was browsing loscarabeo.com and some of the not officially "exotic" decks like Witchy were pretty. However, tell me Gay Tarot isn't funny somehow?