Redactio ad absurdam

Yes, Virginia, there is a Meeting Claus!
The where: for a radical change in venue, Pam A's dining room. We've met there more this year than they've had family dinners, I suspect!
The when: 7:00-ish
The why: Because we wuv you!
The project: Redactio ad absurdam - No, it's not a Harry Potter curse, it's taking a page from some guy artist "someguy" who takes a page from a book and redacts (crosses out, X's out, obliterates, hashmarks through) the text, leaving words, phrases, etc., creating his own subtext. Below is a lot of theft from this blog: AnimalNY

San Francisco artist someguy remixes books, crossing out all text in the King James Holy Bible except for “love” and “evil” and all of The Catcher in the Rye, save the “goddam.” How cute. Most recently, he highlighted nine pages of the Bible mentioning “unicorns.” Most notoriously, he reverse-censored Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn down to 212 instances of the word “*i**e*.”

The controversial piece is entitled 212 Slaves, in reference to a new version of the novel where the inflammatory slur is changed to “**a*e,” because statistically less-educated and louder Bible-thumping Americans would rather whitewash our abominable history than address racism or freshen up that archaic classics curriculum.
Some 'nother examples.

Check out the different ways to redact: black tape, crosshatching, black marker, white-out, plaid or madras markers (okay, they don't make those but they would be cool), paint, gouache, guacamole, gouachemole, overtyping, sliced out with an X-Acto knife, sliced out with a matte knife, sliced out with a butter knife, etc.) The slicing out might be difficult if we're removing most of the text, unless you had something to attach the lacy leftovers to (and even then...).
The supplies: Bring some way(s) to redact, and a source for verbiage to use and/or share. It's gonna get destroyed, so don't bring a family Bible or your current mortgage contract -- always copy, copy, copy. "And remember please to be calling it research," notes Nickolai Ivanovitch Lobachevsky. Ai!
The alternate: Redacting not your cup of ink? Remember that great 3D cutout site: http://www.goscoutcreative.com/calendarofthemonth/ - you could print out one of their exciting calendar entries and cut-and-paste it together - but only November will be current, so you might want to find another printout of some future month - or maybe all of 2012, and make replaceable months for a more permanent display.
The future: we're holding out the possibility of making inkblots (a tad messful), and creating our own thermonuclear can openers (keep a window open in the kitchen to counteract the pressure increase!). And there's also the up-and-coming SANE Winter Solstice Dinner & Gift Slam (13 Dec), for which we must plan. Stay tuned!