This year is about battling for our liberty. And I can’t be the only one here whose New Year’s resolutions included a determination to honor Capt Mal Reynolds and “aim to misbehave” — for the country, my family, myself, and to affirm my deeply-held principles on individual autonomy and resistance to a tyrannical state run by a cabal of powerful liberal fascists and their corporate cronies.
Plus, I’d like to lose a few pounds, get a crossbow, and solve a Rubik’s cube.
Those of you with the means, please contribute what you can to keep pw going strong. I may not be the most popular thinker on the right, but at the very least I should get points for being what leigh once described as “the honeybadger of the blogosphere.” You may not agree with me, but you always know where I stand. And it doesn’t matter what “side” you’re on: if you’re wrong and promoting dangerous ideas, I’ll call your ass on it.
Honey badger don’t care what Karl Rove’s snake head counsels. Honey badger isn’t afraid of no buzzy little beehive of impotence. Honey badger don’t give a shit.
Friday update: Thanks again to all who’ve contributed. I’m at about the 2/3 mark for the month. Please consider taking a bit out of your newly attenuated paycheck and giving it to me. I mean shit, it’s not like they even make Twinkies or Hostess Fruit Pies anymore, right?
Time to start thinking of me as your guilty pleasure.
And let’s be honest: it ain’t like any mainstream conservative outlet is gonna touch me at this point. The money goes to those who find the sunny side of disaster and keep the Hobbits in their place. And my feets is hella hairy these days.
Thanks to Kevin B!
Thanks to Silver Whistle!
Mr Honey Badger,
Happy New Year to you and yours. Looks like you can get a “vintage” Rubiks Cube (OMG, w/stand!!!!!!!) for about ten bucks on ebay. Buy a few on me.
Or ammunition…
Or liquor….
Please keep writing. I think (but then what do I know, I like your blog) yours is an important voice, and needs to be heard by more. Anyhow, thanks for all the time and effort
As long as you promise to keep that arse Piers Morgan.
Thanks, serr8d!
SW: can’t make that promise, brother. I’m sure you understand.
Sears: got one for my wife for Christmas, with stand. But it was really for me. Shhhh.
honey badger cares very deeply i think
he just keeps it inside
Thanks, geoff B!
a crossbow! Great minds think alike. :) I think I’ve been watching too much Walking Dead, but whatever. Happy New Year
Thanks, Kathryn L!
I’m looking at this one. Reviews look excellent. Plus, a friend of mine has some hay bales in his back yard, so perfect!
Thanks, palaeomerus!
Thanks, di!
Thanks, Terry H!
Thanks, Lillian D!
I can only send you my love and admiration, honeybadger. How cool is it for me that you remembered that I named you that?
Pretty damned cool, is what it is.
I’m gearing up my stock portfolio …. this year is going to be a blowout.
Wait … you never solved Rubik’s cube? You must be very young.
Thanks, Diana!
No worries, leigh! We still use the blanket for Tanner!
Thank you for sending me a picture of him in it. He is a doll.
Thanks SDN!
Thanks, John B!
Thanks, cranky-d!
Meh. Crossbows are overrated. Arrows kill entirely by exsanguination so you’ve got to drive a broadhead straight and deep to do the job. The best way to accomplish that is with a heavy shaft and that’s where crossbows fail. Learn to make longbows and you’ll be prepared for TEOTWAWKI.
Having fun with Google Earth. I went to Phoenix to see a friend’s house and I’m struck with how from above the whole place looks like Legend of Zelda map, every tree important, every bush xeriscaped in its place. It seems.
And I’m struck, and I mean struck, by how Washington D.C. looks like a blob with tentacles, an octopus, and if you look at the whole city from above and go up down up down up down up down at a particular elevation the whole place looks exactly like face hugger from Aliens smack right on the face of America.
Get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off get it off you cannot get it off. It must be cut off. One by one, snip snip snip snip snip and I imagine in extreme cases the patient dies.
Yeah, that Google Earth is interesting sometimes.
You find the true four corners and maintain them throughout.
You hold the cube so that you never loose orientation, and crank the sides as clock faces. Each series of movements picks up a target piece and puts it in its place positioned correctly while maintaining the pieces already positioned. Very quickly you’ll have two complete surfaces of correctly positioned pieces like a yo-yo.
Now only the center disc remains, and that disc is held and maintained horizontally. The final moves flip those pieces while maintaining the structure by rotating through. That is, depending on the final arrangement on the remaining center disc, by holding the cube firmly oriented, and cranking right disc twice, top disc, center disc to jostle the target disc containing the tiles needing to be flipped, are now part of the rotation, but everything else is messed up, so the rotations are continued through after picking up the pieces, to restore the original construction with the central disc tiles flipped.
Essentially for closure, you rotate good completed sides around and rotate central disc into it, then continue rotating and slip the central disc out of it, and continue rotating to restore to original position with new pieces flipped.
It’s rather magic.
Sometimes the last move will miraculously flip both remaining pieces all at once, by the intervention of God, certainly, and other times God does not intervene and that ‘mess up-grab-restore’ rotation need be preformed twice. Such is chance.
Thanks, Nancy M!
Swen —
Having an arrow sticking out of you tends to focus your attention and make you rethink options. Besides, I want to use it mostly for silent hunting.
Thanks, LMC!
Are you going to try to take a deer this year? I have a friend who only hunts during bow season. (I don’t know why since he’s Sicilian.) Sitting in a deer stand is really, really boring and could be good rambling father/son talk time for you and Satch. And, if you catch a break, Bambi to haul to the deer processor.
Sent a belated Kwanzaa gift. Unless you’ve moved. Then I sent someone else a belated Kwanzaa gift.
Nothing useful, either way. Happy new era.
John “Bawlin'” Boehner – setting new standards of useless dick-weedery.
On its way, Cap’n Reynolds. And thanks for banning Slip-Slop. He ended up being more of an annoyance than a troll. We have bigger fish to fry.
Thanks, RI Red!
All the more reason to use something effective. Did Robin Hood use a crossbow? No. Did the Dukes of Hazzard use a crossbow? No. Can you think of a single outlaw ever who used a crossbow? No.
The French used crossbows. I rest my case..
Crossbows could be used by line infantry with minimal training, were relatively easy to make, and did not result in skeletons of yeomen having strange proportions on one side from a life of longbow training. The French crossbow while shorter range than a longbow, needed much less skill to use, and was also extremely deadly when it hit. Modern hunting crossbows are much less so since they aren’t really made for killing soldiers in armor and tend to use carbon or laminate arrows. Of course as .22 LR proves, ‘less deadly’ is not anywhere close to being ‘non-lethal’. Also having one type of bow doesn’t stop you from having others.
EVERYBODY used crossbows. It was the Saturday Night Special of the 13th century., no training needed, every toothless, smelly peasant grunt a Knight-killer.
Which is why the Knights did not approve.
BTW, the french also used breech loading artillery and diesel engines. That don’t make ’em bad.
Not in medieval times obviously (Mmm. Pepsi and stew!) but still they did eventually have them.
Leigh? What is this deer processor you speak of? Can you not skin and butcher your own? Jeff, a liitle love coming tomorrow.
Yes, we do. I didn’t know if Jeff was going to try that right out of the gate, though.
“Can you not skin and butcher your own? ”
Well we were able to dress our deer to a certain point: gut, skin, and quarter. But as for butchering, trimming, seasoning, grinding, sausage stuffing, and dry-smoking or jerking,…my cousin tried that once to save us all a little money (usually $20, by skinning and quartering we saved $20 off the total process fee, which you could also lower substantially, perhaps to zero, by taking a share of the finished meat instead of all of it) , and the results were… hilariously / tragically unsatisfactory.
“Modern hunting crossbows are much less so since they aren’t really made for killing soldiers in armor and tend to use carbon or laminate arrows.”
The one we used to fool around with when I was in high school was a home-built jobby. The bow was a lamination from a leaf spring with thin aircraft cable for the bowstring. It was a real bastard to cock.
We didn’t have any arrows, so we used some straight anchor bolts that we’d swiped from a construction site. They weren’t sharp, nor were they accurate.
On one occasion one of ’em went plumb through the wall of my buddy’s trailer house.
I gather that it wasn’t easy explaining that to the ‘rents. Me, I’d discovered that I was late for supper shortly after the incident occurred. Heh.
I admit that part of me wants to get my hands on a PIAT launcher (just the launcher, no anti-tank warheads needed) and see how it works as a potato gun. Or alarm clock gun. I think I know better than to try though.
I also think it would be fun to get one of those crazy air compressors that they use to rapidly inflate the tires of bobtailed trucks.
Paleo, I learned most of that at the knee of my grandfather. I may be useless with the english language but there are things coming that you’ll want me for.
SBP…don’t EVER use a cherry bomb in a tent pole launcher. Trust me on this.
“Blitz says January 2, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Paleo, I learned most of that at the knee of my grandfather. I may be useless with the english language but there are things coming that you’ll want me for.”
I have no illusions of surviving long past a technological and financial collapse. I’m just a juice pack of protein and nitrogen on the middle shelf of nature’s fridge.
We’ll need somebody to hot wire cars and reverse engineer gas pumps after the power goes out forever.
Blitz is our man.
Thanks, Evan C!
HA!!! Thanks Leigh, but I’m more capable than that. Any simpleton ( yes, even Alfie ) can siphon gas out of an underground tank. Trick is? having the balls to defend your gains.
Hunting, farming ( to a degree, I only know a backyard farm) fishing, mechanics and sniping are my way into the new US.
.257 Roberts, last week. 5 into a quarter. ’nuff said.
Paleo? you’re MUCH more than that. You’re the guy I’d like teaching my grandchildren about how things used to be, and how we’re going to get there again.
Bedtime for this simple mechanic…Thank you all for being here, and Thanks Jeff, for that damned armadillo.
Thanks, Bordo!
My SF buddy is working up a course with my help — me being the ideal candidate to take it, knowing little if anything about how to do shit — which we’re calling a “MacGyver” course: among some of the things we’ll be learning to do is start a car using steel wool, create a gas siphon out of found elements, create makeshift shelters and weaponry, etc.
Not a good example, but I recently bought one of those little camping “chain saws” — essentially a sharpened bicycle chain with two cloth loops for handles — and all I can think of when I see it is, fuck this, I’ma get me a gas-powered Husquevarna and use this little fucker as a garrote.
If Lee Zlotoff can do it, it can be done.
Just bear in mind that modern gasoline doesn’t keep well in the long term. If we don’t use it we still lose it.
I bought some stuff that keeps the gas good for several years. Forget the name. It’s out in my garage.
Back in the days when I was running a repair shop, we fashioned a ball bearing gun powered by the air compressor that we were getting at least 400 feet with. That shit stopped when I started noticing the holes in the aluminum garage door the boys were creating with it.
Sta-Bil, most likely.
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A boy scout handbook is a valuable addition to anyone’s library.
Almost as good as a army ranger manual.
Oh shit. I’m becoming a bit scatter-brained in my middling years.
Hey, speaking of my state of decrepitude, I should also speak of my state of ignorance.
I really have no idea on hyphens and compound words. Is it scatter-brained or scatterbrained?
There is a bit of sense in each. Most often the hyphenated version looks best to my eye but that’s about it.
Just do what I do do. Fake it.
Most people are too stupid to know the difference.
Scatterbrained is in the dictionary.
I’ll occasionally change it around to where I feel more secure because it’s older, Lee.
Harebrained, for instance. No need to worry about that one. Folks have known about stupid rabbits for a long, long time. It’s a real word now, all in one piece.
How long has it been in the dictionary though, palaeo?
I’d hate to be vulgar.
Yesterday I used drunk’in instead of drunken.
Pedantry is ugly…
Thanks, BT!
Thanks, bh!
Like Mark Twain said, it’s a poor man that only knows one way to spell a word.
Nope, not Sta-bil. Pri-G.
Good times.
“bh says January 2, 2013 at 11:47 pm
How long has it been in the dictionary though, palaeo?
I’d hate to be vulgar.”
Er…since 11:35PM at least…
So this would be that dangerous slang I’ve heard about then. Or what the kids might call bizzle babble or phrump-taggles in Cosby-talk.
I’ll take no part in this exceedingly loose language, sir. Good day.
I just have no idea when it was put into the dictionary. First I noticed it was in there was 11:35pm or thereabouts. It might have been in there for a long time. I couldn’t say. I only know when I saw it. I’ll let you know if it goes missing though, just as soon as I notice.
Thanks so much, Robert J!
I’ve got a Montagnard crossbow my father brought back from Viet Nam. He said they could kill birds in flight with it. The arrows are made out of grass or something. Prolly wont help against zombies.
Hyphenate and compound words at will, bh. I do it all the time.
Of course, I live in a part of the country that has its own charming patois. The land where saying “I tell you what” is a complete sentence.
Heh.
Thanks, Patrick C!
Thanks, squid!
“Scatterbrain” v. (indelicate) to complete one’s life in the fashion of Kurt (Nobrain) Cobain.
Oh. Nevermind.
Thanks, Dale P!
Thanks, Darleen!
Thanks, Don H!
Thanks, David H!
Thanks, Charles A!
Thanks, William P, for the crossbow set-up, the arrows, and the youth compound bow. Satch has shot before in Scouts, and between this, the Red Ryder he got for Christmas, and the .22 Walther and .22 S&P M&P we had, he would have been really well prepared.
Stupid boating accident.
Thanks, McGehee!
Thanks, Billy H!
bh, if in doubt, use the hyphen.
It’s butch-er.
Thanks, S Richard L!
Thanks, Kevin K!
Thanks, Pablo!
Thanks, Thomas D!