- Hm. Great minds. (You may recall this.)
- And almost great ones. (Funny how so many people come so close but miss the real point.) (Tip o’ hat to PT.)
- Oooh, da poo widdle
snitchpowice infowment. Him get his widdle feewings hurt. (Tip o’ hat to C^2.)* - Weird stuff found in the woods. (Don’t click unless you have a lot of time to waste today.)
- A tad dated. But amazing
- Also amazing. Owl flying in for a kill at 1000 frames per second.
- Oh my. The Internet Movie Firearms Database. Search on a movie or TV show and learn all about the guns they used (or misused). Isn’t the Internet wonderful? (Tip o’ hat to D.)
- Twenty-one frugal ways to reward yourself and the real meaning of spending less than you earn.
- Did you get your Guy Fawkes fix this weekend? I watched V for Vendetta again. As usual. It never fails to inspire.
* The original article seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Cliff’s Notes version: Lifetime criminal, who has continued to be a lifetime criminal — going in and out of jail while also taking money from the police for the last 15 years to rat out his friends — has been outed. In court. By a cop. Now he’s all indignant because … the police, it seems, aren’t loyal. Now he’s getting phone calls telling him to get out of Toronto and he’s peeing his little-boy pants over it. Sheesh. If the people he’s been ratting on for 15 years are kind enough to give him warnings he ought to consider himself blessed.
The Sony video is an inspiration, and a hopeful sign. Governments want to control the mundane and the anti-establishment — but how? To act with force brings rebellion upon themselves; to react with force is too late to stop the avalanche of information and truth from getting out. (Wikileaks as an example.)
James Altucher (on his About page): “Only write about things you either love or hate. But if you hate something, try to find a tiny gem buried in the bag of dirt so you can reach in when nobody is looking and put that gem in your pocket. Stealing a diamond in all the shit around us and then giving it away for free via writing is a nice little hack, Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack.”
Good advice. And lots of ‘tiny gems’ sprinkled here today. Thanks.
I didn’t have time to read about the stuff people found in the woods, but by God, I’m retired. I made time. Amusing reading but it occurred to me that a lot of stuff I’ve come across is pretty standard. Up on the Klamath river I found a nicely sanded plank tied to a downed redwood, about six feet long and with three HUGE black dildos attached (can I say “dildo” here?). This was in a clearing about a mile from the nearest road and seemingly in middle of nowhere. It looked recent, but there was no other signs of anyone having been around. My youngest son started referring to it as a “three holer”.
Claire, have you read the graphic novel for V for Vendetta? I’m not much of a graphic novel/comic person, but it was better than the movie in some aspects (the movie was made from the graphic novel).
I went to a post-Halloween party on the 5th-not exactly a Guy Fawkes Day party, but it did involve friends,socializing,lots of good food, T-shirts with funny sayings on them,lots of good discussion,demonstartion of lasers(I got myself a cool green laser-you can see the beam at night),and some gunfire.
Stuff Found In The Woods-I found a knife I’d lost about 25 years before-as a teenager, I had lost it on my uncle’s 120+ acre farm..fast forward a couple decades, I found it stuck in a tree-where I had left it. The wood handle ahd rotted off, the brass bolsters and lining had turned green,but the stainless steel blade and backspring were still shiny.
I have found all manner of strange things in the woods-mostly, a lot of old bottles….and,once, a five gallon bucket of glass insulators.
It’s Me — Yep, I’ve read the graphic novel twice and I much prefer the movie. I know a lot of people think otherwise (esp., it seems, those who like the book’s more explicit anarchism). But to me the novel is a confusing mess. I have trouble telling one character from another, among other problems with it. I love the way the filmmakers drew a clean, coherent (if not 100% logical) story out of the source material.
EN — A “three holer”? LOL — and egads!
I’m lucky I find only useful things like discarded doghouses and headboards.
BTW, a confession: I poached that link off an anonymous comment on Joel’s blog. So thank you, Anonymous, and Joel, sorry for beating you to material that was meant for you.
Scott — You found your own knife after 25 years? Pretty cool. And knowing you, you probably managed to do something clever with the ruined old remnant of it.
Grumble. I was gonna use that. Sometime. Maybe. Probably not. Mostly I was embarrassed because, while I live in the boonies and do occasionally find stuff, most of it isn’t all that weird. Felt kinda left out.
BTW, on that Altucher article: I spent most of it wondering what he was saying that was wrong. Then he got to his point, and I felt a bit of a chill. I’ve a feeling that participatory democracy made that easy would become a hell on earth. Talk abut a thousand masters a mile away…
Sorry, Joel. It really wasn’t very noble or courteous of me to poach such a fine link. I am a bad girl. Unrepentant, actually. So even a worse girl for having no conscience. (But I owe you.)
I’m with you, though, on feeling left out. I’ve never found anything all that weird out in the woods. All those corpses. All those shrines. Mostly I find heaps of old roofing tiles and the dogs find (of course) plenty of corpses of elk, deer, and other “delicious” things. But not one of my kids has ever come trotting happily home with a human skull or even a mangled hand.
I wonder if where you live has any influence on what you find in the woods,as far as junk goes? I tend to find a lot of glass/porcelain things-bottles,jars,electric fence insulators,the ocassional large insulator,Avon(or similar) glass crap,an old glass tail-light lens, and the old toilet that’s been strategically placed for comic effect.
Generally, it’s new stuff-piles of beer/cheap wine/booze bottles mostly-but I have found the rare old bottle/insulator(my aunt Stella collected old glass things, so she got the stuff I found,and identified it. This was in pre-Internet days). Sometimes, insulators are found where the pole has rotted away,so you may find them somewhat evenly spaced apart.
My son insists that I mention that upon finding the “APPARATUS” (know in family lore as “three holder”), I squealed like a teenage girls and said, “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!”
EN, I think I would have done the same. (And I see you have a fine bit of family lore there. I can just picture it. Generations from now you’ll be known as the person who …)
I’ve found junk like old washing machines, a sofa, and an entire bale of barbed wire in the woods. And I even once found where someone was living in a wooded city park, without using store-bought conveniences, it looked like it could have been an idian camp except it was too fresh. But the weirdest, and the creepiest, was when I stumbled upon a sacrificial alter.
There were fallen logs arranged as benches, in a row liike church pews. There were empty drink bottles and small animal skulls stuck on the ends of branches like they were a parody of lanterns. And a mound of dirt, 2 feet high and swept smooth, that stank of 3-day old blood.
Just the thought of that place still gives me the creeps.
(*Ahem*, I have no idea how, 3 months later, the entrance to that clearing got so overgrown with poison ivy, or how those thistles and nettles planted themselves so thickly through the entire clearing that there was no room left to walk.)