- “Oh crap! More ammo for the ‘ban body armor’ people.” Something on the lighter side from Y.B. ben Avraham.
- And exactly who here terrorized and abused those free-range kids?
- Just another example of why people are fleeing the biggest nanny states.
- Schadenfreude is so very ignoble. Still, it’s a delightful thing to see some of the greatest supporters of Obamacare getting skewered by it.
- This is one of those things you might have intuitively perceived but never quite believed: we recall better (especially recall concepts better) when we write notes by hand rather than type on a keyboard.
- Those “racketeering” teachers and administrators really got what was coming to them. No wrist slaps here.
- Wow, looks like those girls got a two-for-one when it came to being assaulted by authority figures. (Via Codrea)
- Okay, back to the lighter side. The 13 cuddliest dog breeds. (H/T PT)
No mention of corgis on that dog list. Hmm… 🙂 Had a dog that was lab/rottweiler long ago. Biggest cuddle bug ever, but at 140 pounds he never did figure out why nobody wanted him as a lap dog. Just his head in my lap was more than enough.
I have a cuddle dog, pitbull- yellow lab mix. Cuddly, goofy and big.
And because writing in cursive engages more areas of one’s brain than writing in print, having kids learn (and use) cursive is directly related to better memorization, more refined motor skills, and overall greater academic achievement.
Don’t take it from me. Check for yourself. 🙂
And on a freedomista note, I’ll point out that the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are all written in cursive. With “long ‘S’s”.
Shouldn’t future generations be able to read our nation’s founding documents for themselves?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/15/8421793/man-lands-gyrocopter-at-us-capitol
[And exactly who here terrorized and abused those free-range kids?]
The child “protection” bureaucracy had their usefulness challenged. I suppose they were terrorized…
My wife wants to move to Washington state as she’s tired of Oregon income tax. Ideally we would live in White Salmon and shop in Hood River… I just tell her to stop working so hard.
To up the ante still further on the handwriting bit, I regularly correspond with a couple colonial reenactor friends by writing letters with quill and ink. The quills I use are the wing feathers from my first turkey. Had a few goose feathers as well but they didn’t seem to cut as clean as the turkey ones. My ink I buy from Jas. Townsend; it’s powdered and just has to be mixed with a bit of water, just like in the old days. Took me a while to figure out the exact rules for the long S usage, but I think I got it down pretty good now.
I second Archer, btw, for future generations being able to read the original documents!
Ha! If we’re one-upping… I make my ink. And paper. And pens. [grin]
I make my own clay tablets, and write in Linear A, with a bone tool that I carved myself, from a buffalo I slew with an atl-atl.
More ammo for the ‘ban body armor’ people. — made me think of this: http://www.infowars.com/dhs-to-purchase-62-million-rounds-of-ar-15-ammo/
And a 100yd shot at an armadillo with a 9mm pistol is just dumb.
Actually the article said he was 100 yards from his grandmother’s house, not the armadillo.
And if the shot killed the armadillo, I think maybe it went through the critter and ricocheted off the ground behind it, then hit the fence, then the lady.
Does provide a good lesson about 9mm ball.
Oops. MiL, not grandma.
I’m actually having a hard time buying the armadillo story. The likely trajectory of the bullet, the distance traveled after hitting the target, plus the energy level in the average 9mm cartridge just doesn’t add up to this outcome. I’d have to see it done to believe it.
But this is why I encourage my students to research the dynamics and ballistics of what they are shooting. I don’t have time in class to go into any detail, but we do discuss what might happen if a bullet hits various things and how to prevent at least some dangerous ricochets.
In the late ’40s when I was 6 and 7 I used to take 2 buses by myself from Beaverton, Oregon into Portland to go to Saturday movies.
I could read and tell time.
I’m actually having a hard time buying the armadillo story.
Come on now. Back in the day, when my SO was in college, she had a roommate from Guam. Some of the students invited her for a ranch weekend hunting armadillo. They had her convinced that if you were good you could hunt from horseback, but she would use a jeep. After all, if you only wounded the armadillo with your 30-30 it would come for you.
Of course they also had her believing the Budweiser Clydesdales were average size Texas horses.
In real life, when I was a kid we cousins had an aunt who kept a big garden. She paid a nickel for dead pests. Armadillos were easy money, and we never used anything but .22LR.
Anybody who’d put a Chihuahua on that list is probably an Obama voter. I don’t want to come across as a hater here, it’s just simple objective truth that Chihuahuas are the spawn of Satan.
Love the cuddle dog pics. There’s a lady locally who trains Mastiffs as service dogs and the local feed store has a Mastiff and a Cane Corso on premises and I’ve fallen hard for those dogs. I’m not sure that they’re what you’d call cuddly but they sure do want pets and attentions and love rubbing up against folks they meet.
Archer, I’m not ready to buy into the whole “cursive leads to better academic achievement” thing just yet. One of those articles you linked quoted the researcher as saying “What is it about writing that’s predicting later achievement?” I suggest that she might have a “correlation/causation” problem there. It’s entirely possible that the same factors which give certain kids better fine motor skills also predispose them to academic achievement. In other words, both characteristics might be the result of some common underlying cause, but otherwise aren’t directly linked. She seems to be jumping prematurely to an unwarranted conclusion.
Shoot the armadillo, take shot at MIL, then blame the armadillo. Sounds reasonable to me.
Bear,
I haven’t tried making my own ink yet (on my to-do-someday list) but a couple of the aforementioned friends do. Apparently black walnut hulls are the thing to use.
Tried making paper once – didn’t turn out too well.
As for the pens, I started out using those (with a steel nib) but they weren’t available in the backwoods in colonial times, so I switched to feather quills. Took me a while to get the hang of cutting the tip just right.
Kyle,
If you’ve got oaks, try iron/tannin ink. Traditionally, the tannin was extracted from galls, but I use acorns (I had to process them to extract the tannin anyway, for eating; just saved the tannin solution). Boil acorns, pour off and save the solution. Put some pieces of iron the solution until it blackens enough for you (I use steel wool, usually, for speed- lots and lots of surface area exposed to the acid).
My pens have been turkey quills, and wooden nibs — shave wood thinly, cut to shape, with scissors, if you have it thin enough.Then I cut a slot in the end of a pen-size dowel, insert the nib, and lash it into place with string.
Paper’s trickier. My best stuff uses grass (instead of wood pulp) and rag fiber.
My wood pulp paper starts with saw dust boiled in a lye solution to break down the lignin.
Yeah, I made the lye myself, from my woodstove ashes. Also used that for soap. [grin]
Bear,
where did you get a copy of my “Want-to-do” list? 😉
Great info on the tannin ink, thank you, Sir. I’ll try that someday!
Woodstove ashes I have plenty now, too, and will have more still when I can finally move to the Cabin full time. Right now I’m using them to build my garden soil, but making lye will happen one day as well. Until the Cabin is finished it’s “too much to do, not enough time” but once I get there,
watch out 🙂 !
Hats off to you for doing all those things!