Note: A prologue from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)
Back in the Day…
Country kids have the most fun.
I am biased, of course. I spent most of my youth in a rural setting. Most teenaged boys these days are playing video games and surfing the internet; at that tender age most of my contemporaries and I were driving tractors and dump trucks, helping with haying and detassling and, at least in my case, spending a good part of the winter running traplines twice a day in below-zero temperatures.
I wouldn’t have traded today’s kids their recreations for anything in the world.
Some of the best parts, or course, aside from the heavy equipment and outdoor opportunities, involved one of the other aspects of country life that isn’t discussed nearly as much:
Explosives.
Fun with Models
About the age mentioned above, I spent one winter on a model ship-building binge. I spent some trapline money on some plastic model ships, mostly World War 2 battleships and aircraft carriers, and spent a fair amount of time in the evenings carefully painting and assembling the ship models and placing them on stands on the various surfaces around the house.
I did a few airplanes, too; three, in fact, a B-25, a B-17 and a B-29, those being the three aircraft with which the Old Man had some experience during World War 2. What happened to those carefully crafted airplane models is something of a mystery at this distance in time. The ships? Not so much.
The model-building winter was an unusually harsh one even for northeast Iowa, so I was housebound more than usual. Spring came that year, and when my normal outdoor activities resumed, I lost interest in model-building and turned my attention to other things.
Specifically, to the creek that ran past our house.
Around this time my Mom was making some rather pointed comments about the dust-gathering capabilities of my various ship models. Also, around this time, I was messing around with two black-powder arms: A .45-caliber Connecticut Valley Arms “Kentucky” rifle the Old Man and I had built from a kit, and an 1851 Navy Colt replica. This meant that I had a supply of black powder around.
The next step was perhaps obvious.
I had one model I didn’t particularly care for; it was a Revell model of the USS Missouri, one of my first efforts, and not well put together. After watching a couple of old WW2 movies on late-night TV that involved ship battles (I remember Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way was one of them) I was kind of taken with the idea of big naval battles.
I was inspired. I took that model of the Missouri, pried off the turrets, filled the open body of the ship with black powder, and stuck the turrets back on. I poked a hole in the top of the aft funnel and threaded in some model rocket fuse I’d picked up somewhere along the way. On a nice spring morning, with my rather bemused folks watching, I took that ship out to the foot bridge across the creek, put it in the flowing water, lit the fuse and let it go. It drifted about twenty yards downstream, trailing a plume of smoke from the fuse, and then detonated with a very satisfactory showering of plastic parts.
The rest of my model ship fleet followed suit in short order, the primary result of which was having to nag the Old Man to taking me into town so I could re-stock my supply of black powder for the summer’s shooting. He didn’t resist overly much; I was spending my own money, after all, and I suspect he enjoyed a good explosion as much as I did. As long as certain limits were observed, of course.
I think he knew that I would find ways to explore the extent of those limits.
Ditching and Fishing
My interest in explosives was prompted further when I was about sixteen and had the opportunity to watch an explosives expert blast about a half-mile of ditch with TNT, buried at intervals and daisy-chained together with electrical wire. The setup took most of a day, but at the end, the blasting guy hooked up wires to an old WW2-style crank detonator, gave the handle a twist, and BOOM! Instant ditch.
My buddies and I thought that was one of the coolest things we’d ever seen.
Then some other ideas occurred to me and my partner in misadventure Jon. The Old Man had become concerned about carp working their way up Bear Creek from the Upper Iowa River, and indeed the big corner pool near the downstream end of his land had become infested with the big Asian immigrant fish. “Why don’t you boys spend a day catching those carp out of the corner pool?” he asked one summer afternoon as Jon and I were lounging on the front porch. “Just throw them in to the cornfield. Helps the trout and helps the corn.”
We thought that was a good idea, but serious angling time was best reserved for trout and other, more edible fish. About then, Jon hit on a better idea.
“Say,” he mused after the Old Man had left to go about his daily choring, “are there any empty oil cans around?”
“Probably,” I replied. “We just changed the oil in the tractor a few days ago.” Back in those days, it’s important to note, oil was not supplied in plastic bottles but rather in heavy, sealed metal cans. The anchor on my old canoe was an oil can with the top cut off, filled with cement, with an iron ring set in the cement; in fact, it’s still the anchor on that same canoe today. Those oil cans were stout and durable.
“I think we can get rid of those carp really quickly. Still got some of that model rocket fuse?”
I did. Some experimentation proved, somewhat to our surprise, that the fuse would indeed burn underwater.
When opening a metal oil can, the standard practice was to take a chisel or heavy screwdriver and poke two holes in the top of the can; one to pour from, and a smaller one to allow air into the can. We found a funnel and discovered it was easy to fill two discarded oil cans with black powder.
Sealing the cans was a little trickier. We had an ample supply of duct tape, but we lacked faith in the waterproof qualities of tape. Jon hit on the idea of sealing the opening around a length of rocket fuse with wax, then wrapping a generous helping of duct tape around the whole thing. That proved to work remarkably well.
We made two of the improvised explosive devices and proceeded hither to the corner pool, where we lit our improvised depth charges and tossed them into the creek.
We didn’t see it clearly, but suspect it looked something like this.
“Maybe we’d better take a few steps back,” Jon said in an uncharacteristic display of youthful wisdom. We backed away a few yards into the cornfield just in time for two large, muffled BLOOMPS and a shower of water and fish parts to rise from the pool.
We stepped back up to the bank for a look. Dead carp were still floating to the surface, along with a leavening of creek chubs (also a trash fish) and, to our chagrin, a couple of smallmouth bass. We waded in and retrieved the bass for eating purposes and came ashore just in time for the arrival of the Old Man, who demanded to know what we thought we were up to.
He was satisfied with the removal of the carp but somewhat less than pleased with our method. After a considerable lecture there on the creek bank, he went back to his choring, and we returned to our lounging on the front porch.
“Well,” Jon observed, “that worked like a charm.”
“It did,” I agreed. The Old Man’s lecture was water off a duck’s back. Our interest in explosives was unchanged.
And Then This Happened
A few years later:
The Old Man with a couple of grandkids, on that actual by-gosh piece of bottomland.
Across the creek from the house there was a fair amount of flat creek-bottom land, and on that land had been a grove of enormous elm trees. Now folks of a certain age will remember the Dutch Elm disease that killed most of the North American native elms from the early years of the 20th century up through the Seventies; the elms on our land had succumbed, sadly, to this blight. So now these big, once-beautiful trees had to come down for firewood.
The issue was this: Some of those trees were huge, as much as four feet through at the base. That in itself was no trouble; the Old Man had a huge, gear-driven Black & Decker logging chainsaw with a 36” blade, and my Uncle George, who loved messing with a good chainsaw, had a near-identical machine, and he happily showed up to help. In a couple of weeks, Dad, Uncle George, my brother, and I had the three biggest trees down, cut up, split, and stacked for burning wood.
What remained, of course, was three enormous stumps that had to go. Dad thought about piling slashings (small branches unsuited for fireplace wood) around the stumps, soaking the whole mess in kerosene and burning them, but George had a case of dynamite and a better idea.
It was the work of a few minutes for Dad and George to instruct my brother in the techniques involved in affixing a blasting cap, connecting the detonating wires, and the use of the crank detonator. Then Dad and George left to take the last wagonload of wood back to the woodpile by the shed.
Now my brother Bob is thirteen years older than me, which is why he, presumably the more responsible one, was given the task of blowing the three stumps. At the time he would have been in his early thirties, and supposedly more thoughtful than I was at eighteen.
But we had both overlooked one thing, one essential detail, and Dad and George had likewise neglected that detail. The object of the exercise was, after all, just to knock each stump loose enough to be able to wrap a chain around it from the tractor so it could be hauled off into a pile and burned along with the aforementioned slashings.
But we weren’t sure as to how much explosive was required to accomplish that.
“Say,” Bob asked me, “did Dad say how much dynamite we should use on each stump?”
“He didn’t. Want me to walk over and ask?”
“Nah,” Bob said. “That would take took long. Let’s just wire up, oh, three sticks. That first stump is pretty big.”
The first stump on the agenda was indeed a big one; a four-food diameter monster, with probably three feet of trunk left above ground. As we had been instructed, we dug down among the roots, wired up three sticks of dynamite, stuck them down in the hole, filled the hole back in and backed off maybe fifty yards.
As Bob was connecting the detonator, I had a flash of insight. “Maybe we’d better lie down behind that down log,” I said, pointing to a downed box-elder a few steps away.
“Good idea,” Bob agreed.
Once behind the log, hopefully sheltered, Bob gave the detonator handle a vigorous twist, as we’d been instructed.
We didn’t see it clearly, but suspect it looked something like this.
WWHHHAAAAMMM!!!
The concussion bounced us up and down on the ground and took the breath right out of our lungs. Our ears were ringing; a shower of wood chips rained down on us for three or four seconds.
“Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” my brother said. He sounded like he was underwater.
“What?” I demanded. “Who’s Butch?”
“What?” Bob shouted back.
We stood up, both of us more than a little unsteady, and staggered over to find a six-foot wide crater, maybe three feet deep, surrounded by wood chips, where the stump used to be. We were still shaking our heads and trying to pop our ears when the Old Man and Uncle George arrived at a dead run.
“What happened?” the Old Man demanded.
We told the story. Uncle George collapsed in helpless laughter. “You’re supposed to use HALF A STICK,” the Old Man roared, one of the two or three times our normally soft-spoken father had ever been known to raise his voice.
Bob and I were banished back to the house to finish stacking firewood while the Old Man and George finished the stump-blasting.
“Well,” Bob said to me as he tossed me a piece of cordwood to stack, “I sure learned something from that.”
“What?” I demanded. “I already have a hat! Why would you ask?”
“What?” Bob shouted back. “I don’t have any cash. Why the hell would you ask me about that now?”
“What?”
I think it was a good three or four days before my ears stopped ringing, by which time the folks were good and tired of having to shout at me to get my attention.
The end result of all this was worth it.
These Days…
Nowadays I’m a bit more cautious. I enjoy a good firework display as much as ever (I’ve seen some amazing ones in Japan!) but I rarely indulge in the temptation to make my own, improvised explosions.
On the other hand, it’s legal in Colorado to build and use your own flamethrower. I have this set of plans, and loyal sidekick Rat is on board to assist in the construction and testing…
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
That could be the title for your autobiography.
Another entertaining entry, Animal.
I’m a city boy who should have been a country boy.
Ditto. The times I got to be out in the country for an extended period are some of the favorite memories of my life.
“Say,” Bob asked me, “did Dad say how much dynamite we should use on each stump?”
“He didn’t. Want me to walk over and ask?”
Major oversight by Dad, there.
Booms good!
I love this series so much. Brightens my day whenever you publish another one. Thanks, Animal.
#MeToo
By the way, Animal, is this actually published somewhere? It always says from your “upcoming” autobio in the lede, but if it’s available, I would like to own my own copy.
Agree! I would definitely buy this book as well.
It’s not; I have been working on the autobiography in a desultory fashion, mostly because 1) it’s the story of my life, and that life ain’t over yet, and B) I’m normally heavily involved in work that pays the bills.
I suppose I could assemble these early (somewhat embellished) tales into some sort of tome.
Please do.
Great stuff – could wind up as the 3/4 / 1/4 version like some of the other 20th cent writers (don’t recall name… “They shoot horses don’t they”, etc.
Inspiring and does bring to mind a few stories I have in the back of my head….from long, long ago…mid-90s.
Oh. My. God.
Thank you for this one, Animal! I laughed myself to tears.
The Marine Corps makes the mistake of giving new Second Lieutenants a week with the Combat Engineers. It’s not as sexy or sought-after an MOS for young men trying to prove their salt, like say Aviation, Infantry, Tanks, or Arty, so the Engineers use that week as a kind of recruiting exercise… which means they gave us LOADS of military grade HIGH-EXPLOSIVES and showed us how to use them.
Thankfully, the Marine Corps has learned enough to account for every single piece of Det Cord, TNT, blasting cap, white phosphorus grenade, data sheet, and C4 they give you, but whew-wee! Did we blow some shit up. Man, there is nothing like felling a tree across a road by cutting it with det cord wrapped around it “just so.” I’m glad I never had access to that stuff as a kid – undoubtedly my hands would look like that shop teacher we all had who would point at you with a couple of stubs.
I could use some det cord for a snag I don’t really feel like felling.
Wow. Blowing up the wife is one way to deal with the problem i guess….
Oh you said snag…
I was friends with a guy who used to dispose of old ordinance while in the Marines. He would spend days wrapping det cord and TNT around old bombs in Korea and blow them up.
Our final exercise put all of our fire-team projects (4 man teams, 3 per squad; 4 squads per platoon; 5 platoons in our company – so 60 individual blocks of C4, det cord, and some other stuff) into one giant company-size Boom project. We watched it from inside concrete bunkers and it was something to behold. I’ll say this again: the destructive power of military weaponry is beyond human comprehension until and unless you see it up close… or at least no closer than danger close if you want to live and tell about it.
The ordnance I worked with was in the 200KT range. Luckily for all of us, I never experienced any of it being uses.
???
We used to build models and destroy them as well. It must have been a 70s thing.
Many laugh out loud moments in this one, Animal.
Thanks for the tale!
Yup. Every 4th of July for awhile featured some of those plastic models getting blowed up real gud.
The planes made great BB gun targets, too.
Many of my Barbies met their fate at the end of my brother’s BB gun.
Great as usual Animal.
There is a shallow grave filled with melted and shredded Army men and models in my former back yard. I also have fished Crocodile Dundee style in a few ponds with M80’s and 1/4 sticks.
I’m sure they are still picking plastic army men out of the yard of our house when I was a grade schooler. Another application of 4th of July fireworks.
There’s some MIA Joes in a muddy hole where my brother and I tried to figure out how deep of a hole we could dig with a high pressure nozzle on a garden hose. You are not forgotten!
Fun read. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds me of when some of the neighborhood boys would put small firecrackers in green walnuts, light, and toss. Good times.
One small nitpic: chainsaws have bars, not blades.
Small nitpick? That’s revelatory, chainsaw ‘blade’? that’s outdoors-man/hillbilly 101, I bet it’s all been one big lie, Animal’s probably some effete city slicker, He may not even be a bear. You just uncovered the biggest scandal in Glibs history.
Wait til a contrarian is exposed as not being contrary all of the time…
Thanks for the memories, Animal. The senior Mr Fourscore loved those giant firecrackers, at a drop of his baseball cap he’d figure out something that needed a little quick maintenance. We dug a hole in the pasture with a post hole digger, 4 sticks of 40% and time fuse, lit it off and we had an instant watering hole for the cows. We had to fence 2 sides off ’cause they were too steep for the cows to negotiate. Fished with DuPont lures as necessary, suckers rather than carp. Stumps were fun but just enough to be able to pull them out with a tractor.
No wonder that my first day on the man job was blaster’s helper (wheelbarrow and long handle shovel maintenance).
My dad’s been gone 50 years but I’ll always have those fond memories, the good times, learning by trial and error sometimes. Thanks again, your stories are meaningful and accurate and I’ll vouch for their validity.
I don’t see this ending well.
https://twitter.com/reallouiehuey/status/1254527073416146946?s=19
There is no explanation there for what happened or what the guy did
Yes, the Denver PD said he violated a Denver Ordinance that prohibits open carry. So… criminal.
I waded into the comments on Twitter asking some Socratic questions. Shouldn’t be long before they make me drink hemlock for my thought crimes.
Ok. I vaguely remember a gun rights demonstration in Denver a while back where about 1500 armed people showed up and the cops backed off. I think they were protesting that ordinance.
Holy crap. I can post by just clicking ‘Post Comment’
Yeah, hard to know if his concealed carry was purely incidental or the reason for the arrest.
The cops didn’t seem too worried that he had a gun, though. None of them pulled a weapon.
This guy….
Having cop dick in our throat is what separates the right from the left.
Yeah, the reverential treatment of police as a tenet of faith on the right is just… *gag* stomach turning. I have/had a ton of cop friends, but I lost a bunch by posting articles of some of their worst malfeasance. I went back and checked my old case logs and realized a shit-ton of my clients as a criminal defense attorney in and out of the military were also LEOs… huh, what a co-inky-dink.
I have a though experiment I used to use on everyone: ask anyone you know from your high school class if they know someone from back then who became a cop. Inevitably, invariably, there are at least a couple whom everyone, universally, unequivocally, knows and says: That guy?? He’s the last person on Earth who should be a cop. I have never failed to get that response, yet no one ever puts 2 and 2 together.
Commie Cough update:
We have around 4,000 employees. This is a population that gets screened (lightly) every day they come in to work – temp check, asked about symptoms – and if they don’t clear the screen, they get tested. They can also get tested just by asking, if they have symptoms or an exposure to a known Commie Cough person. Testing is not a bottleneck for hospital employees.
We have 54 negative tests, and 15 positive. Not sure how many are still pending. That means 0.375% of our employees have tested positive, and 25% of our tests have been positive (running a little higher than the national rate of around 20% – Tucson actually has a higher rate of positive tests and deaths than Phoenix). As far as I know, none of our employees have been hospitalized. None have died.
I don’t know what it means, but just as an additional point, they’re also working in a hospital. (As compared to the general pop, for example).
I don’t think working in a hospital (outside of an actual COVID unit) has any additional risk. This place is effing deserted – volumes down 40%, staffing down nearly that much, no visitors. We have mandatory masking outside of your office, and a cleaning crew that we have kept full-time who are well-supplied and trained.
The COVID units are basically closed units – no one goes in without good reason, and everybody is in full droplet precaution gear. The only known exposures to Commie Cough patients we have had were in our ED; nearly all of our positives were community-acquired.
I look at our employees as essentially a population under heightened surveillance and testing. I believe that our numbers give a better look at what the general population would show if it were being checked and tested nearly every day.
Awesome Tale Animal! I enjoy everything you right,
Plastic Tank? Check,
Gunpowder, check,
setting the garage on fire, check,
Ah the 70’s…..
and the tales you tell,
/Write
I had an acquaintance who referred to dynamite to fish as using a “DuPont Spinner”.
Fun times – reminds me of blowing all kinds of things growing up. Sadly, now impossible for my son.
https://www.nj.com/coronavirus/2020/04/gov-murphy-unveils-6-point-coronavirus-reopening-strategy-with-no-timetable-to-lift-lockdown-restrictions.html
NJ is fucked. I watched part of his press conference today. Not good. Sorry NJ Glibs.
Murphy was on Squawk this morning. His clear objective, along with allies Cuomo, De Blowhard, and others, is to force a government bailout. Literally threatened to shut-down state “essential” services (fire, teachers, police, sanitation) if something isn’t done.
Then Trump should call their bluff. I’m sorry, but I’m sick of this,. And I live in New York. They had enough money for “free” college and “green” industrial parks. Well, maybe a little budgetary discipline is in order.
Or better yet, make a bailout conditional on a federal budgetary administrator (no, I don’t actually want either; I just love the idea of the “I just shit myself” looks on their faces when that is the counteroffer.).
“Budgetary discipline”. Oh, we have that in spades. Once upon a time, the fair city of Newark received a windfall of $200MM to improve its failing schools:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-education-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-cory-booker-2018-5?op=1
Of course this was money well spent. The problem, according to Mayor Baraka, is that
the mafia didn’t get their cutthe foundation failed to work “with local groups like the SPAN Parent Advocacy Network, the Newark Teachers Union, and the Newark chapter of the NAACP — which have all focused on local education issues for many years”. They worked so hard for so many years, yet nothing changed. I can’t imagine why the feds might think twice about writing a (blank) check.As I recall Suckerberg’s money evaporated into thin air and no one could account for where it went. It just disappeared.
Yeah, that’s about right. Baraka was pissed that the pie got divvied up before he and his cronies could grab their slice or two.
Burn it all down, I got nuthin,. I especially love the 6-point graphic, looks exactly like every “vision statement” I’ve seen in my career. Vacuous bullshit with a shiny cover produced by an executive assistant with a degree in advanced PowerPoint.
Safe places for isolation: People who test positive need to have proper contacts with officials so they can get needed support service so they can remain in quarantine.
Labs are reporting positive test results to state/local health departments, no? If there’s a ball being dropped, it’s them.
What support services? Drop off a thermometer, an oximeter, two N95 masks, a dozen nitrile gloves, a bottle each of hand sanitizer/cough syrup/Advil/quat solution, two cases of MREs, and a “what to do if” sheet of paper with phone numbers for the appropriate next steps.
The “Federal Jobs Program” spin on this crisis is not lost – even Mark “I’m a Libertarian” Cuban was calling for Fed employment of the tracing army.
Ugh. The state gov here want to hire 600 people for contact tracing. When the state and local health departments pretty much washed their hands of it two months ago and said “community spread”.
Now it’s a “requirement” to reopen. If it’s widespread, it’s really pointless to contact trace. Assume everyone else is a potential carrier and order your life accordingly. If it’s not widespread to the point where contact tracing is effective, then there shouldn’t be a lockdown period.
Honestly, I think testing is simply a canard. If you don’t quarantine the sick, it amounts to little more than kabuki theater. And I see little to no evidence that our leaders have any appetite to quarantine the sick. They find it much more convenient to quarantine the healthy.
Of course it’s a canard. First they want you to believe anyone who tests positive (for what exactly they never specify – the virus or the antibodies) and then they want everyone vaccinated which means everyone will test positive for antibodies. And any vaccine’s effectiveness will be limited.
It’s a little more transmissible than influenza, but its effect on the population is very much like influenza except that it causes pants-shitting paranoia.
“anyone who tests positive is a danger to society”.
In NJ that is pretty much any day that ends in “y”.
Posted this in the dead thread, so carrying it over here. For anybody who still thinks we didn’t know who was really threatened by COVID until mid or late March, the CDC knew by at least early to mid February, and probably had strong indications even before that:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/03/who-is-getting-sick-and-how-sick-a-breakdown-of-coronavirus-risk-by-demographic-factors/
The article only mentions China data and never mentions South Korea data. I can’t blame anyone for being cautious about conclusions drawn from CCP data.
Korean data was confirming Chinese findings by at least February, and was undeniable by early March.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfLVxx_lBLU
Dr. Erickson’s Covid19 press conference. I watched the whole thing. If you have the time, give it a shot.
Summary – open everything back up.
What is he. Some kind of quack?
I clicked through just to see if YouTube had axed it yet.
Somewhat to my surprise, it has not.
I suspect he enjoyed a good explosion as much as I did
Toxic something something.
Man, does this story ever take me back.
My father used to work as a chemical engineer for CIL (Canadian Industries Limited), a well-known Canuck company into all kinds of modernish stuff back in the 50s and 60s, including paint, plastics and, of course, explosives. He was also a member of a ski club on the Niagara Escarpment of Ontario, Canada, and as a member, he was required to assist with the clearing of new club-owned land every year, including stump removal.
I’ll bet you can see where this is going.
He used to have, in the trunk of the car, a case of Forcite 40% (a type of percussion-activated dynamite), which he would use to do some stumpin’, when it wasn’t being used to, ah, do other stuff. He also brought home (and left on a shelf for me to read) a copy of CIL’s Blaster’s Handbook, from which I learned at an early age an unconscionable amount of techniques to efficiently and effectively blow things up. There was even information on safety, information which was sadly lacking in many of my other more dubious youthful adventures. I particularly enjoyed the chapters where it was explained in considerable detail how to loft an object into the air (and in a known and predictable direction and distance) using explosives instead of merely shattering said object. A skilled blaster is an artist, I tells ya!
(Did you know you can also use Forcite 40% to “hunt” for amethyst nodes on the northern shores of Lake Superior?)
Good times. Stupid times, but good.
Man, does this story ever take me back.
My father used to work as a chemical engineer for CIL (Canadian Industries Limited), a well-known Canuck company into all kinds of modernish stuff back in the 50s and 60s, including paint, plastics and, of course, explosives. He was also a member of a ski club on the Niagara Escarpment of Ontario, Canada, and as a member, he was required to assist with the clearing of new club-owned land every year, including stump removal.
I’ll bet you can see where this is going.
He used to have, in the trunk of the car, a case of Forcite 40% (a type of percussion-activated dynamite), which he would use to do some stumpin’, when it wasn’t being used to, ah, do other stuff. He also brought home (and left on a shelf for me to read) a copy of CIL’s Blaster’s Handbook, from which I learned at an early age an unconscionable amount of techniques to efficiently and effectively blow things up. There was even information on safety, information which was sadly lacking in many of my other more dubious youthful adventures. I particularly enjoyed the chapters where it was explained in considerable detail how to loft an object into the air (and in a known and predictable direction and distance) using explosives instead of merely shattering said object. A skilled blaster is an artist, I tells ya!
(Did you know you can also use Forcite 40% to “hunt” for amethyst nodes on the northern shores of Lake Superior?)
Good times. Stupid times, but good.
Oh, and by the by, I tried to do some linkin’ up above. No go. Glibs still doesn’t like me to link anything, it just pukes and refuses to post the comment.
Same.
SP @ Sunday Open Post said report problems @ this site backslash techtrouble backslash
That. is. awesome.
Explosives are – and can do – some crazy shit.
They can also turn people into a “pink mist.” That is an actual quote from someone after their commander went to look up close at an IED spotted in a wadi and the bad guy detonated it just as dude was reaching for it. At least he never felt anything.
My God, that was incredibly dumb
Somebody has to serve as an example of WNTD.
He may have been a dumb ass but he never should have been there in the first place.
Son, we live in a world that has IEDs, and those have to be reached for by men with hands. Whose gonna do it, you? You, Suthenboy?
percussion-activated dynamite
I don’t think I’d want that in my trunk.
High grade Tanenrite?
Isn’t that a binary? Different beast.
The precursors are the binary part. Once mixed, it’s detonated via high velocity round.
“Percussion” is a relative term; it needed to be detonated by blasting cap that had detonation speeds of many thousands of feet per second. You could hit a piece of Forcite 40% with a hammer all day long and it wouldn’t do anything. My memory is foggy, but I believe we even tried to detonate it by shooting at it with a .22; no dice.
Like I said, stupid times. ;-)
Next in Coronavirus Tyranny: Forced Vaccinations and ‘Digital Certificates’
RP is the man.
I must’ve missed him during the DoD’s anthrax vaccine debacle. Mehh, maybe that’s too snarky and harsh. Ron has been out there fighting for liberty for a long time, but I cannot remember any major political voices making these arguments when the DoD was publicly stating that they could strap me and my friends down to give us the anthrax vaccine if they wanted to.
Was that during his haiatus from Congress?
I don’t know; honestly, I had my head down, but did wind up sitting in one of the GAO oversight hearings. I wasn’t as politically attuned, so maybe he said something and I missed it, but I don’t recall any Congresscritter being too good on the subject of our rights.
Sign of the beast? Also, “Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose record of wrong predictions makes him the Bill Kristol of epidemiology…”. Sick burn, that.
“AIDS is transmittable thru the air.” — Fauci, in the 80s.
Okay, that isn’t an exact quote, and isnt entirely fair to his position, but is close enough to mock him for.
That which is not prohibited, is mandatory.
Hey, Look! Gun rights got stiffed! As the old lawyer joke goes: but at least you got a great dissent!
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alito-dissent-gun-supreme-court
I mean… That’s not a veiled threat. That is just a threat.
The most terrifying part of that story – the usual suspects threatening the court:
The court’s move to even hear the gun rights case despite a perceived procedural issue previously drew veiled threats from Democratic senators who filed a brief in the case, saying “[t]he Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.'”
Sorry, but if you want to blame anyone for this, blame John Roberts. The Democratic hacks are just Democratic hacking. They do what they are inclined by their natures to do. It was Roberts who signaled to them that the Court could be intimidated. In the name of “preserving the prestige of the Court”, Roberts made clear that a threat to that prestige would elicit compliance. The Court won’t gain much prestige until he’s effectively sidelined.
“[t]he Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to
reduce the influence of politicsdestroy the tattered remains of the Constitution.’” Also, has anyone seen leon and RAHeinlein in the same room together? 🙂seen leon and RAHeinlein in the same room together?
I did. when we were both in the Hall of Mirrors.
Magic Mirror https://youtu.be/vEHyXmvHOps
Old guy Magic Mirror
Magic Mirror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPjqd8ThDMQ
The Court has no jurisdiction to give advisory opinions, and the case was moot.
It’s funny how that “capable of repetition, yet evading review” exception only seems to work in certain kinds of cases, though, eh?
…..
Gun rights are evidently the wrong kind of rights. I mean, it’s not like they’re a penumbra or an emanation of the living Constitution. And the law school student who challenged the racially-based admissions policy also didn’t have the right kind of rights to get over the mootness hurdle. Weird.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII_S2_C1_1_7_3_3_3/
Not to mention, SCOTUS has a long history of giving the relief it wants, regardless of what is requested. Its not like there is an up or down vote on giving the petitioner exactly what they request, in its entirety.
IANAL, and so i’ll have to defer to that expertise on the issue. Some people seemed to think that the case was not moot. I do think there is something wrong about a government being able to do something so clearly unconstituional that once they realize that they will be heard by the SCOTUS that they change course. It’s not like the people bringing the complaint kept trying to after the case was moot, they were granted cert and then the state decided to do the CYA move to make sure that such a decision couldn’t be made.
Gotcha covered, leon.
My feeling is having passed the law (and attempted to enforce it against the plaintiffs to boot), the lawfulness can still be determined. To do otherwise is to allow the government to pass all manner of rights infringing laws (or similar, such as anti-abortion laws, those idiot Roperites think will never be used against their causes), use the threat of those laws to intimidate people to into not exercising their rights, yet when confronted, just repeal it. That’s five year old behavior, not the basis for the rule of law.
I don’t know why the Court couldn’t have taken up the revised statute anyway. The reference to “no stops that aren’t reasonably necessary” creates a whole (potential) violation of the 2A and opens the door to a “void for vagueness” argument.
Still, the petitioners shot themselves in the foot (hah!) by asking for such specific relief. They trapped themselves. I don’t know why they didn’t just request that the law be overturned as unconstitutional.
If they had asked for that, then it would have been shot down on overly broad grounds. Heads I win, tails you lose school of legal reasoning.
OMG that last picture is just gorgeous.
Thanks, Animal!
Yeah, and I was lucky enough to grow up there.
Taking XX out for a driving lesson today. It’s in the truck, as that’s what she’s going to be driving, but she is nervous and her eyesight isn’t quite what it should be (*shakes fist at Children’s Mercy Ophthalmology Department*), so she won’t be able to drive at night until we get her squared away.
I kind of feel bad teaching her how to drive a truck before teaching her how to drive a car, but I learned how to drive in an extra-long passenger van (and VW Beetle auto-clutch [yes, there is such a thing]), so I figure she’ll be fine for a while.
My dad made me learn stick before i could touch an automatic.
For some reason i thought XX was already of driving age.
She is, but she has been too nervous to want to learn. Now we’re forcing the issue.
Except…not much you can do when she can’t see very well and the eye doc’s closed for the foreseeable future.
Did you warn her about hop-ons?
I did not. The child’s nervous enough as it is.
Have her watch this.
If I gave the impression the truck is a stick, my bad. It’s an automatic.
Just make sure she doesn’t think the lack of the clutch means the left foot can be used for braking then.
/memories of shifting from manual to auto as a kid
Rule 2: if you can’t find ’em, grind ’em.
The good news (for these purposes) is that any nearby shopping malls & sports/event arenas are closed, leaving nice big empty parking lots in which to practice.
Yep. The huge Southern Baptist cathedral parking lot is ginormous and empty.
With my son, the game was: can you get to fifth without skipping before the end of the HS lot.
Now, he went to a TX 5A school, but it was a fair challenge for a 13 year old.
We do not have a stick to learn on, which is sad, because then I could teach her how to ride a motorcycle and everybody needs to learn how to ride a motorcycle.
Been driving sticks since I was 18. Never learned to ride a motorcycle.
Heh. I just looked up “how to rent a car with a manual transmission” and came up with “Kansas City has lots of them!” but “ToS says you can’t use it to train someone how to drive it.”
ToS
yeah: they probably say no one under 25 can drive it whatsoever
@Don, I forgot about that.
@kinnath, my tongue was firmly in my cheek, but that doesn’t come across well over the innert00bs. 😉
Devote a session to parking. Just from my own observations the vast majority of people who drive a truck have absolutely no clue on how to park one. Or don’t a fuck. Or both. We’ve all seen trucks parked at odd angles, whopperjawed into a parking spot. Or they leave .05 ” next the adjacent vehicle and 3 feet on the other. As a general rule I avoid parking next to trucks and cringe if I return and find one parked next to me.
??
Growing up, we had a Ford Econoline and a pick-up truck. That’s what my older siblings all learned to drive on.
By the time I got my learner’s permit, my parents had gotten an Escort, so that was how I learned. Everything stick-shift.
Lighting Ozy signal!
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-trade-blows-in-a-debate-over-whether-ancient-bronze-swords-were-just-for-show
The only way they would have been ceremonial is if they had better metals for making swords. Since the Bronze Age predates the Iron Age, its pretty safe to say bronze was the best they could do at the time. IOW, no study needed to answer that question.
But the study was really interesting anyway, for other reasons.
I believe RC has the right of it. People will use whatever they can at the time to make weapons to poke, slash, bludgeon the other guy. I don’t even need to look to know that flint-knapping pre-dated the use of those softer metals. Once those were available, they would become “state of the art” and in turn be used to poke, stab, slash, etc. It’s almost as if we’ve not really changed in our essential nature of the millennia.
Thanks for that, Yusef!
People will use whatever they can at the time to make weapons
And they certainly are going to use whatever they can get their hands on that is best for that purpose. Nobody is going to say “Hey, my new iron knife is the tits, but I’m going to use my old, soft bronze knife to fight this guy to the death!”
There are, and probably always have been, purely ceremonial “weapons”. But the thing is, they are obviously ceremonial – that’s the whole point. They are rare and completely unsuitable for combat (think gold knives, jeweled scepters, etc.). Neither of those apply to bronze swords, spears, etc.
Yeah, asking if a particular sword was made for ceremonial use is valid, but not bronze swords in general. That’s just silly.
I like Roman Swords,
I’ll take “Swords” for $400, Alex.
You go, Donnie!
Of course, its anonymously sourced. The officials (if they even exist) should be tracked down and fired or perhaps prosecuted for blabbing to the press about military deployments. Still, I hope its true.
Now do the balkans and Sinai.
pushed
Pushed? He’s the goddamned Commander in Chief. It’s right there in Two Corinthians.
America isn’t some tyranicall tinpot where the President can command the Armies, there are checks. That is why we have to listen to the recomendations of the Generals and any move by trump to contravene their recommendations should be met by impeachment by congress!
“Here’s how this works, fellas. I give orders, you carry them out. I am ordering you to pull our troops out of Afghanistan. Look, I know it will be complicated, which is why I am giving you 72 hours to update your contingency plans for my approval. You do have contingency plans for this, right? I mean, if you don’t I’m going to wonder what you and the rest of that crowd of staff officers I am paying is actually good for. See you on Thursday!”
I wouldn’t pull all troops out of Afghanistan; I’d transfer all the Pentagon officers above a certain rank to Afghanistan and let them fight there themselves.
Oh, and I wouldn’t replace them at the Pentagon.
Hey, fellow curmudgeons! I just got tested for COVID19. Takes 24 hours, so who knows?
I assume it’s the usual asthma plus sinus infection, but the doc on my phone appointment wanted me to come to the ER. So here I am.
They don’t actually want us inside though, so they have a tent city set up outside the ER and are having us wait in our cars. They even came to the car to do the COVID test. Pretty slick since I can stream content from Netflix through my car.
Anyway, wish me luck. I’ll give a full report when I know what I have.
For some reason, your comment reminded me that one of the little games I have been playing to amuse myself at work paid off last week. In polite company, have been referring to the Commie Cough as “the COVID”. At a Board meeting last week, I noticed that this has been picked up by several of my colleagues. I even heard a couple of Board members use it toward the end of the meeting.
Haha. I just call it the ‘VID
I’m thinking about shifting gears and calling it “the ‘Rona”. Don’t want to tip my hand, though.
Calling it “the ‘Rona” up here confuses us Canucks, who’ll think the speaker’s talking about the RONA store (like HomeDepot, and now owned by Lowes). 8^>
The Overrated Plague.
The Financial Flu.
The Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution
Take your pick.
I’ve come to think of it as the “Fuck You” Flu. Shut down your business. Wear a mask. Stay out of the park. Why? Because Fuck You, That’s Why.
Isn’t that the best? I spent one summer taking my kids somewhere and having to wait, but I could watch Dr. Who on my phone through Amazon Prime.
We have tent cities in these parts, I hope they were not used as the model.
All the luck in the world to you. May you have it, get through it without much trouble, and be immune to it. And return to blowing stuff up.
And NY canceled its Dem primary for June 23… ‘cuz the COVID. Except other elections will go on that date as planned.
Beijing Biden must be protected at any cost!
They stalling for a legitimate candidate to wander by before the Dem primary?
Does this allow them to send a slate of “unpledged” (Cuomo) delegates to the convention? That would be pretty convenient.
It keeps Sanders from running ads in the run up to the June primary about Joe grabbing an aide by her pussy and thus taking the primary away from Joe.
Honestly the states should refuse to pay for a primary that has already been decided. Sanders has quit, and he has endorsed Biden. States shouldn’t be funding or running these elections anyway, but especailly not when the outcome is certain. If the DNC neds delegates from those states they should get them at their own expense.
I thought he already endorsed Biden.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-york-cancels-presidential-primary-because-of-coronavirus
New York cancels presidential primary, citing coronavirus, after Sanders camp asked to stay on ball
New York has canceled its Democratic presidential primary for the first time ever due to the coronavirus pandemic — igniting a backlash from supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign had asked that his name be allowed to stay on the ballot.
Remember, Bernie suspended his campaign. This means he 1) holds his delegates till the conventions, and 2) continues to raise funds for his campaign.
Most of the candidates that dropped out so far only suspended their campaigns. Got to keep those bucks flowing in.
If he drops out, it releases his candidates and they don’t have to vote for him in round 1.
If Biden falls over dead between now and then, having guaranteed votes keeps him in the running.
AKA: Commie mouthpiece does damage control.
https://twitter.com/EdMorrissey/status/1254805023621476352
http://archive.li/PSGzo/e6050e0142ec746009435176d5c94c4669375e93.jpg
So…apparently I can reschedule my missed dental appointment and mammogram for sometime on or after May 1. Thus I can have a hygienist crawl around in my mouth and a mammogrammer smoosh my boobies between metal plates. But I still can’t get my gray roots colored.
::glowers::
And don’t even get me started on #SpiritWeekOhio. ::spits on the ground::
My wife bought four boxes of root coloring stuff, but she’s starting to get ornery about no hair salon.
My wife had an appointment for this Saturday, scheduled back in the before times. She talked to them today and it is cancelled. They won’t be open yet.
As the panic and government malfeasance continues to gut our finances, we have an expanded furlough plan:
Mandatory 30% reduction in time for all staff (except nursing unit staff, who always flex to volume anyway). This means 3 days per two week pay period, only one of which can be taken as paid time off. So, a 20% cut in pay across the board.
We are burning the healthcare business in order to save it.
I loved this entry. Quite funny! Thanks Animal!