Digested readers

First and most appropriate, Adam at Sophistipundit reviews Who Let the Blogs Out, an interesting look at blogging and the wherefores. Adam also brings us “The Skeptical environmentalist” by Bjorn Lomborg, which I found quite interesting myself. Early Riser counsels us to First: break all the rules

Deputyheadmistress’ daughter “The head Girl” at the Common Room brings us ‘The twenty four days before christmas’ and ‘seeing salvation’ in her post “Two different, but marvelous books” both of which look like excellent reads.

Following the religious theme, A Random Yak at Random Yak (Love the blog name, btw) reviews the brief and tasty autobiography of C.S. Lewis, “Jack’s Life” If you’re a lewis fan, you should read this.

At Multiple Mentality, Josh Cohen reviews (among other books) “The Big U”. The line that got me was

“Casimir Radon, a junior in his late twenties, just wants to engage in intellectual pursuits. He is a physics geek (sometimes genius), and his ultimate hopes are to build a mass driver (railgun), avenge his cat, and get it on with Sarah.”

It’s on my reading list now.

That’s the ones for December. There are other older ones. Anyone else who wants to host this, please drop a line to Digestedreaders@gmail.com

it’s official

I’ve done some housekeeping at Chez Og, and i have discovered that I now have more camo/hunting/upland game clothing than regular clothing.

Meeemreeeeez.

Thirty years ago, I was sixteen years old. To rid themselves of the onerous burden of dealing with an annoying teenager, my parents would often send me off to be with the grandparents for extended periods.
My grandmother made me bib overalls. Out of 28 ounce denim. To give you some idea what that’s like, regular jeans are made out of 12 or 14 ounce denim. Wearing grandmas bibs was like wearing an iron truss. Until you’d worn them in a bit, you couldn’t sit down without a blacksmith, and the chafing was nothing but horrid. I learned to wear two pairs of underdrawers in the summer to prevent the family jewels from turning into mashed potatos.

Anyway, that summer I was finally big enough to plaw, and plow I did, all damned day, for weeks. I plowed with the ol man’s ford 8N, and in gramma’s garden, one of the horses. We were also allowed to keep our 22’s with us, to shoot what squirrels we could find, rabbits, the occasional fox or other varmint, and crows were always fair game.

The old man had a still. He was a cheap bastard, and gas had gone up to over a quarter. So he made shine, not necesarily to drink but to run in the tractor. See, the hogs still ate the mash after it had been fermented out, and they loved it, or seemed to. They also seemed to fat up faster. And the old man got the additional benefit of several hundred gallons of alcohol a year. Which ran in the tractor and in the farm truck. Now, if there should happen to be a petcock in the fuel line, and if a guy should happen to stop and lean on the old man’s truck and sit a gallon milk bottle on the ground, and open that petcock, talk to the old man for a couple minutes, then close the petcock, grab his bottle, and walk away, now that couldn’t do much harm, could it? The old man himself never touched the stuff.

Anyway, the point of that story was to tell you this one.
Continue Reading »

« Prev - Next »