Use only as directed

Some of the instructions and warnings on the Bayou Classic boiler/steampot that Jessa got me for Yule:

• Sober adult operation ONLY!
• ALWAYS operate in an open area a minimum of 10-ft from buildings, trees, and overhangs.
• NEVER use under any roof or overhang.
• NEVER allow children or pets near the cooking area during and after use.
• NEVER! No barefeet [sic] or sandals while cooking.
• ALWAYS wear protective mitts, gloves, goggles and long sleeve clothing when cooking.

I can see the logic behind each and every one of these admonitions, but let's be honest: Everyone knows the crabs, crawfish, shrimp, etc. will be cooked under the carport with a passel of kids and dogs running underfoot. The cook will be wearing shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops—well, shorts, anyway—and drinking beer. That's just how it's done. That's arguably how it should be done.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

—William Shakespeare 

Eagles

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop," as my dad once muttered to great comic effect...

For real eagles, read this.

Cassowaries, and more of the world's most awfulest things

Duncan Wright at 10,000 Birds has a nice essay on his native land of Australia, a wonderful place where everything is potentially out to get you:

“You don’t have to move far off the plane to step into the danger zone. Lurking in the suburban lawns of Sydney are the deadly Funnelweb Spiders. Sharks cruise off the city’s beaches, and just yesterday a deadly species of snake was found in a suburban railway station. Further afield, there is a poisonous mammal, the platypus, many waterways are filled with the carnivorous Saltwater Crocodile, and a species known as the box jellyfish is so dangerous that it causes the closure of every beach across the entire north of the continent for several months each year, an achievement that the sharks can only look at in wonder.”

RTWT.

Jessica's comment was, "God made Australia so that most of the world’s most awfulest things can be easily avoided."

Meanwhile, we're limited to just a few statistically insignificant wildlife hazards, like the odd mountain lion... [Sigh.]


I'll save you the trouble...here's the list from Wikipedia.

Must go faster

That's one way to get ahead...

Libya's Muammar al-Qadhafi (pick your own transliteration) has been in the news quite a bit lately: Here he is (in a very restrained powder-blue uniform) celebrating the 40th anniversary of the coup d'etat that brought him to power...


...which reminds me of a story.

One of my military science instructors was a salty, very senior NCO I'll call "SGM Carter" (not his real name). Carter was a Green Beret who had made many HALO drops and had been awarded the Purple Heart numerous times in Vietnam. He also had extensive experience working with military units from other countries, and one day he happened to mention that among the foreign soldiers he had trained was a young Libyan named Muammar al-Qadhafi. So I asked him, somewhat impertinently, "Sergeant Major, this guy is a dictator. He could be General Qadhafi, or Generalissimo Qadhafi, or Field Marshal Qadhafi...why Colonel Qadhafi?"

Carter growled back at me: "Colonel's a pretty healthy promotion, considering he was a goddamned staff sergeant when he took over the country."

[Other sources have him as a captain at the time of the coup, but it's still a good story.]

Grace under pressure

When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.

—Mark Twain

Obviously someone at the Lancaster County Sheriff's Department is doing well with their training. Here, Deputy Ryan Schmuecker counts more than four (about ten, I reckon) and manages not only not to swear but even to be polite: "You want to pull your vehicle forward so that it's not on top of mine anymore, please?"



HT to the Lincoln Journal Star, kudos to Deputy Schmuecker for his incredible composure, and best of luck to all of us who have to share the road with the idiot in the SUV.

(PS to the Journal Star: the GL series is built by Mercedes, not BMW.)

The importance of ground truthing

Chas Clifton at Southern Rockies Nature Blog has hit this meme a couple of times lately (here and here), but you've got to love the visual here by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich of Real Life Adventures:


GPS can be a useful tool—I have a Garmin as well as several DeLorme atlases in the Subaru—but don't forget to pay attention to the actual road, kiddies!

Demotivation

From the good folks folks at Despair, Inc.

The pink gun

For several years now, firearms manufacturers interested in expanding their female clientele have taken the sporting goods industry's traditional "shrink it and pink it" approach literally, offering both handguns and long guns in pink finishes.


A good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this post) is considering a handgun. She's being encouraged by her boyfriend, who owns several of his own firearms in addition to the sidearm he was issued as a sheriff's deputy. But he won't "let her" get a pink gun. Is it just me, or does it sound like he's a bit insecure in his masculinity? Or perhaps in hers?


As the saying goes, guns don't kill people, ammunition kills people. Unless her rounds are going to be loaded with face powder instead of gunpowder, even a pink gun will spit out chunks of metal at a pretty impressive velocity. So, "Joey", let her make up her own mind.

Lost appetites

A friend of my dad's told me the following two stories yesterday:

Her ex-husband had worked at the USF&G Building in downtown Baltimore while Scarlett, the famous peregrine falcon, was in residence there. Apparently it was not uncommon for office workers in the building (especially newcomers) to return to their desks to eat, or abandon their lunches altogether, when the peregrines dined: one of the peregrines' favorite "butcher's blocks" or plucking perches was directly above the cafeteria window, and some people were put off by the blizzard of disjecta membra—feathers, gizzards, guts, feet—that fell past the window as Scarlett or her mate dismantled a pigeon.

[The USF&G Building, now the Legg Mason Building. It doesn't really lean; the Pisa effect results from my unsteady hand as I shot from a boat today.]


Another acquaintance of hers, a lifelong Baltimorean, happened to be present when a body was recovered from the Inner Harbor. As often happens, scavengers had found the body first—it was covered with dozens of blue crabs. They may be Baltimore's favorite seafood, but the lady never ate crab again.

(Happily, I have no such inhibitions.)

Finding Jesus, ever so briefly

I never thought I'd spend much (any) time on video games, but my brother Greg got me hooked on the Nintendo Wii back in November, and we bought one soon thereafter. Blazing Angels is my favourite game (where else will I get to fly a Spitfire?) but we also play quite a bit of Mario Kart.

[Mario Kart: The Rap by Remy M.—HT Patrick at Terrierman's Daily Dose, who shared Remy's rap on Arlington, Virginia]




Anyway, racing on Wi-Fi the other night, Susan and I found ourselves in a lineup with a familiar-looking bearded Mii named Jesus. (Online identities are usually genuine, right?) It's not often we get to go head-to-head with a big celebrity like that, so we were pretty enthused. Unfortunately, our connection was interrupted just as the race got underway, so we can't answer the question posed by all those bumper stickers:

What would Jesus drive?

(Until we find him again, my money's on the Sugarscoot.)

Maybe they're Camel Lights

Clearly, I'm not getting as much use from my Subaru as I might. My '98 Outback hauls, at most, a couple of hawks and a few dogs—miniature dachshunds, at that. But an unnamed Bedouin from the Negev Desert got two camels in his much smaller Subaru:

According to the article from Ynet News, the camels were being smuggled to the West Bank for slaughter as food. Photographer Amir Abu Jamma noted that "It is less expensive than lamb. For the price of four sheep, you can buy one camel." The real money quote, though, is this: "Once, goods used to be smuggled on camels. Now we are smuggling the camels themselves."

HT remchick, previously cited as "my best source for strange news out of North Carolina" (see previous posts here and here) but now apparently covering the Middle East as well.

Cryptozoology

Spotted at a farm pond west of Syracuse, Nebraska:

Final act of defiance

This is one of those wordplays that will make you smack yourself on the forehead: "Why didn't I think of that?" Dan Piraro, creator of Bizarro (and BizarroBlog), did think of it. And then published it in newspapers across the country. Just in case yours isn't one of them...well, here you go.

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree"

Someone had to post this for Thanksgiving...may as well be me.



I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Arlo perform this on his "Alice's Restaurant" tour a few years ago. Other highlights included, of course, "City of New Orleans" and a spooky rendition of "House of the Rising Sun".

The historical background on the Massacree is here for anyone who might be interested.

Back later with some falconry...

Please?

The eagle says it all in this cartoon by Bob Englehart at the Hartford Courant. Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama, and to us all.

Pearls

As long as we're talking about conservation, today's Pearls Before Swine nails one of the bigger issues:


Pearls creator Stephan Pastis has the predator mindset down pat in this strip—just ask any falconer about bagged game, live-lures, or hawk-trapping:


And finally, one for Christy and other fans of the Athens music scene:

If your newspaper doesn't carry this strip, write a letter and beg them.

Not original equipment

I almost hate to admit it...but this is kind of cool.


For discussion and terrible, terrible puns, click here. HT Susie.

In a nutshell

So here's the thing:

The guy has access to good information. Sometimes knowledgeable people, experts even, come to him...


Occasionally he might seek them out.


He might take his time, weigh the options...


But just when it seems he might be getting it...

He goes and makes the lame decision anyway.

(Gotta love the stylin' "Members Only" jacket, though.)

The bear candle

I’ll be mostly away from the computer for about a week, but here’s a story to tide you over... Last September, in their “All-Gear Issue”, Field & Stream ran a Bill Heavey article (“Always on Call”) about his visit to the Cabela’s call centers in Kearney and Grand Island. It included a few stories from phone reps; the best were the guy who wanted a refund on a broken fishing rod (he had been fishing for alligators) and the customer who kept ordering and then returning cuckoo clocks (his complaint was with the packaging: "Everybody knows that if you pack cuckoo clocks in cardboard, it makes the cuckoo louder"). I do some part-time work for Cabela’s, and the following is a transcript, as accurate as memory allows, of one of my favorite calls:

“Do y’all carry bear candles?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, bear candles: they repel bears?”

“Uh, mosquitoes, yes. Bears, not so much.”

“Could you double-check?”

Pause. “Okay...” I should mention that I did not know at the time, and still don’t know, if my leg was being pulled. But if this was a joke, the caller deserves some kind of award for his acting skills. He played it very straight. In any case, I couldn’t imagine what kind of scent might repel bears. They are very serious about omnivory: they will eat almost anything, including plain candle wax. My search, predictably, came up empty, and I told the caller so.

“Okay, then, how about a spray?”

“Now there I can help you. We carry several...” I proceeded to tell him about what I considered the best option. “It’s basically a very heavy-duty pepper spray.”

“How far will that spray?”

“About thirty feet, maybe thirty-five.”

“Yeah, that sounds good. Now, if that gets in the kids’ eyes...will it hurt?”

I thought about saying, Well, that depends, sir. How tough are your kids? I mean, we’re talking about pepper spray here, enough to deter a bear. I settled for:

“Yes. A lot.”

Brief hesitation. “Okay, then, thank you very much.” And he rang off.