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Tonight was the last roundtable for which I was the district roundtable co-chair and the theme was communication and I had assembled a pile or resources from camp school and the web on how to talk with teenage boys.  I was about to get to the topic when someone asked “how will the sled race at the Klondike be done?”

Me: Well, I thought it’d be appropriate if the sled race were done with fully packed sleds.
Leader 1: Kids cheat, you’d have to inspect the sleds before and after.
Leader 2: That’s ridiculous.
Me: Yeah.
Leader 2: The inspectors might have a vested interest so we should weigh them.
Me: Woah, what happened to a Scout is trustworthy?  Are there any concerns with racing full sleds?
*silence*
Leader 3: Safety.  Things could fall off and kids could get hurt.
*grumbling*
Me: So, no one has a problem with racing with full sleds assuming we inspect them?
All: Nope.

Scouting: because fun and injury aren’t mutually exclusive.

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I put together a presentation for Roundtable on using WordPress.com as a host for unit web pages.  I made a sample unit site in about 20 minutes over my lunch break and showed it to unit leaders along with a few other solutions but I think there as some lingering skepticism.

Scoutmaster: Sure, it’s easy for you, but how do we know it’s something we can figure out?
Me: Well, there’s a 97-year old woman who uses WordPress as her platform, she calls it her “web blob” and she figured it out.  There was a 108-year old person who blogs, but I think she used blogger, which is pretty similar.
Scoutmaster: She probably has someone to help her, we won’t have that crutch.
Me:  WordPress is easy enough that the OSR Camp Director maintains their web site.
Scoutmaster: You lie.  He doesn’t even like answering email.
Me: Hold on *log into camp wordpress install, opens edit log*  See:

Scoutmaster: I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

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As my special addition to tonight’s roundtable I built a soda can stove that looked something like this:

Courtesy of... some other web page

You put fuel in the bottom, a little in the top, and light the top.  This heat vaporizes the stuff inside and you get a neat and surprisingly functional burner.  I did the same and tested one a few times and it worked quite well, but I built another as mine was made of Budweiser cans and I didn’t want to bring that to a Scouting event.  The new one was slightly taller which was apparently enough to get it to not light when I did the demo.  I manipulated the can and found a hole had formed from which fuel was leaking which immediately ignited in the pie plate I was doing the demo.  Luckily, this generated enough heat to get the vaporizing going and the stove was ablaze.  I like the idea of being able to kick a stove or otherwise cause a fuel spill to get it to work.

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One district held their roundtable today and their theme was identical to one I did two months ago. Their presenters were covering for a missing person and didn’t quite fill the time. I asked to comment and 20 minutes later I finished stating the fruits of my previous research and waited for comments. Leaders kept raising their hands and commenting prefacing it with “like Terry said” to drive home points I had brought up, which was fine. Except that even after we switched topics away from winter camping leaders were still saying “like Terry said” first about things ranging from unit operations to their Klondike Derby. Does the phrase confer magical powers of factiness, if so, I need to get in on it.