The good folks at Miss(ed) Manners have done it again: they've recreated one of J.R.R. Tolkien's most epic scenes ... in candy. This time around, it's the conclusion to The Hobbit, featuring the Battle of the Five Armies and the assault on Lake Town by the dragon Smaug.

As with their previous creations -- The Battle of Helm’s Deep, The Battle of Pelennor Fields, The Mines of Moria, the diorama is truly a sight to behold. A red licorice Smaug rises from a frosted Lonely Mountain to ravage a gingerbread Lake Town. Gummi bear armies of goblins, orcs, humans, dwarves and elves battle for the treasure under the mountain, while overhead eagles and giant bats fight for ariel supremacy.

The Innsmouth Horror expansion for Arkham Horror -- my Birthday/Christmas present from my family -- arrived today.

It's taken up its place of honor underneath the Greek Tree, where it will remain until Saturday, Dec. 26 when the Blackrazors convene to repel the Deep One invasion that threatens to rock New England.

Naturally, we intend to bring as much firepower to bear on the problem as possible, as witnessed by the arrival of the Imperial AT-AT and Slave 1 at the top of the photograph. 

The kids and I built our annual gingerbread houses on Sunday, using gingerbread house kits from Wegman's and candy from the remains of our Halloween horde. You can find the full photo gallery (with annotations) on Flickr.

We built two houses, one for my six-year-old daughter StarGirl, and one for my three-year-old son, NeutronLad (with NeutronLad sitting on my lap the whole time, which made things just that much more challenging). We had a big assist from my wife, who showed us how to put the icing guns together, and pre-glued the gingerbread houses. Yes, glued -- last year, we used icing to hold the houses together, and it was a gigantic mess. This time around, we took the advice of a friend and glued them together. They're far more stable, and it's not like we're planning to eat these anyway.

If you're looking for a science fiction or fantasy theme, you won't find one; these are utterly conventional gingerbread houses. Maybe next year we can create the candy Tower of Saruman instead. Gummy ents anyone?

This is my first-ever post written on my family's spiffy new Asus Eee PC netbook, aka "The Blue Dolphin", so named because it's small and blue, which led my wife to describe it as a baby blue dolphin on Twitter.

Anyway ... we decided to get a netbook as a direct result of our summer vacation; I could have used it at Origins, and it would have been handy to have for writing on Butler Island on Lake Champlain (where we spent a week hanging out with family friends).

It's a cute little machine -- it ships with a 160 GB hard drive, wireless N support, a 4 cell battery capable of up to eigth hours of use (assuming you use the Asus power management tools), three USB ports, an SD card reader, an ethernet port and Windows XP.

I'll forgive it for that last bit; I don't have the energy to hack this thing to run Mac OS X, and if I have to run Windows, XP isn't too bad (though I am curious about trying Windows 7 on it). The whole thing cost about $300 from Amazon. which made it a fairly inexpensive experiment.