Website Index

This site has several parts. The first is the Abernathy Murder website, which is the first website I wrote (I coded in raw html and css - and I still do). A friend of mine and his son were murdered in their home in 1997. I wasn't particularly close to them, but Neal and his son Brendan were still part of my universe. I liked Neal's family a great deal. Time spent at Neal's house was always time well spent. We shared many of the same friends. Our social lives overlapped. The publicized evidence suggests that Neal knew his murderers, and that means that I and many of my friends may know the killers too. The double homicide is still unsolved and there is no "closure" for those of us who knew Neal and Brendan. Even if you didn't know the Abernathy family, please check out the website. Who knows - maybe you know something that could help the police solve this case.

The second part of my website contains various articles related to medieval crafts that I've published over the last 20 years, as practiced and re-created within the Society for Creative Anachronism ("SCA"). Currently, there's stuff on my silver project, several pigments and my class notes on medieval poisons and medieval glue. My 1996 TI article is also now on-line. My article in the Fall 2002 issue of Tournaments Illuminated will show up when I get it converted to a pdf file. You can also find the class notes for Laura Stumpp's cadels class, as well as my most recent permutation on the exemplar for Anglo-Norman Secretary Hand. As I get more stuff into pdf format, the number of articles will continue to grow. I should probably get stuff webbed as HTML pages, but hey, I'm lazy. This part of my website is being rewritten to make it more general instead of narrowly focused on the membership of the living history groups I belong to. My ultimate goal is actually to convert my opus of writings on things medieval into a book about medieval material science, and I'm rewriting things with that goal in mind. My current delusion is that people would be interested in such a book, based on the huge number of hits that some of my material science articles get, and based on the fact that the silver smelting page has been linked by several living history and university web pages. I will warn the SCA visitors now that some of my humor pieces are also webbed here. Click here to go to my medieval living history page. I've also been working on turning my iron smelting endeavors into a new web page but it's not quite there yet. Click here to see a preview of stuff for this future web page.

I now have an active link off my SCA page that will take you to scanned images of the scroll used as the ceremony script at Twelfth Night AS 2 (1968). This was the SCA event where Dukes and Laurels were first created, and where the chivalry was turned into a formal order. There is a "mirror" of the 12th Night Scroll now available on the West Kingdom history project website that loads a lot faster then my version - so if your connection is really slow, you may want to go to the other site (to get there, go to www.westkingdom.org, follow the links to the history project, go to the table of AS 2 events and click on 12th Night.

In the last part of my website is a peek at what I do for a living. Click here to see the pre-print of my best-known paper on wireline geophysics in basalt (Helm-Clark et al., 2004). Like my brother before me, I got tired of the soft-money treadmill just to remain an underpaid researcher in the privileged (sarcasm on) corridors of academia. Like him, I too have bailed for better pay in industry. Click here to see who I'm working for these days in the "oil patch." The downside is that I miss the intangible perks of a scholarly life. The upside is the pay is really good and I get to play with state-of-the-art software toys. Mega Fun! Did I mention that the pay was good...?

This site went on line 19 February 2001. Most recent revision was uploaded on 06 September 2008. No ads. No cookies. No marketroids. No spam. No junk email. No hassle. This site does use an invisible counter. I spell badly and sometimes links die. Send info on dead links or any other comments about this site to: gc@bigroom.org. Thanks for stopping by.