Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Memes for your enjoyment
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
Screenshot
The super power of apology
This blog is not a confessional or a tabloid. Our three readers will not enjoy prurient views into my private life. But once in a while we have to toss a tidbit to those three loyal readers, just to keep them coming around once in a while, so here it is.
Last week I said “I am sorry” to someone I care about a lot, but whom I had not treated with the kind of “care in handling” I would expect to do now or want to receive from someone else. The infraction was done decades ago. Yes, I am now so old that my doofus mistakes and selfish oversights are, generally, decades old.
And for decades a little voice had nagged at the back of my mind, “You owe that person an apology. You need to say you are sorry. SAY IT.”
This subconscious voice and its clarion message of redemption for all parties involved was accentuated annually in the Fall, every Fall, for years and years. And it became louder and louder, until one day I could no longer do what most adults are so good at doing: Ignoring things that are embarrassing or painful. I had to own up to a personal failing at a critical moment with someone vulnerable to my actions.
Thankfully, this person has a (one) social media account, and fortunately, this person is far more mature than I am and is better natured than most people would be, when dealing with a Johnny-come-lately lout seeking forgiveness. This person responded pretty quickly, and welcomed the opportunity to speak.
Some days later I got the call, and I was able to say forthrightly, person-to-person, voice-to-voice, what should have been said many, many years ago. I said I am sorry for x, y, z and some other loutish behavioral problem child kind of stuff. And this wonderful person, for whom my feelings and admiration have never dimmed, was gracious and wise, accepted the apology, and asked about my kids. I got a lesson in grown up relationships, and I felt literally a hundred pounds lighter when we hung up the phone.
One imagines that the other person quietly enjoyed knowing that I had been bothered for all these years, and was not uncaring, but had been simply immature. Know this, K: I am still immature. But remorseful.
If you have hurt someone, intentionally or by mistake, recently or in your young adulthood, take my advice and say you are sorry to them. It is powerful medicine. It heals both parties. Take the opportunity while you are still compus mentus, still capable of remembering to open your fly when going to pee, and don’t put it off. If that person was angry at you, or hurt by you, they will have at least some grudging admiration for you, if you take that step to bring some healing.
People have conflicts. This is human nature. People make mistakes, this is human nature and we all know it and we all readily accept it when we make those mistakes. After all, we make those faulty decisions because of whatever was going on in our mind at that time. Those mistakes make sense to us.
What is rare is to step up, own up, and take ownership and responsibility for the stupider mistakes we have made, by recognizing the other person’s experience at our hands. The avoidable ones. The careless ones. The unnecessarily hurtful ones. The immature ones. Not talking about principled stands here, or legitimate disagreements about policy, law, values, etc, but just simple personal acts that we all do, that did not go the way we would have wanted them to go, had things been handled better.
But this should not be a rare or difficult thing to do. It is easy and it feels good. Thank you, dear old friend, I finally feel like a grown up man, thanks to your willingness to hear me out. I feel like I might even have had a hidden super power all these years. Glad I finally got to use it.
Trump-Kennedy Center Vacancies Create Opportunity
Nature abhors a vacuum, goes the tried and true adage. This adage is true because wherever an opening occurs in the natural state of things, like a fallow farm field, or a wildfire’s burned out charred hole in the middle of a woods, some plant or animal will find a way to adapt to that unique opening and move into it, make it home. The newly open space creates a home for those who will move into it the fastest, while many cannot or will not leave the comforts of their present niches.
This dynamic fact of life on this planet is the quintessence of competition and adaptation, two primary forces of nature and, as the main tools of God, the main way that living things evolve and develop here.
And so must this same rule apply to the Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington DC, a place I have sat in many times before. Last time was some years ago, to see “War Horse.” Which was quite good as theater goes, which is a big critical compliment from me. See, my theory on theater is that if a play is any good, it will end up as a box office smash movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston, etc. et. al.
Every other kind of play will inevitably cause me to slump in my uncomfortable folding chair, and sleep contentedly among the anonymity of a large audience. And also often earning hard nudges from left and right, because apparently I snore when sleeping in public. Most plays are hardly worth the effort of keeping my eyes open.
Which is to say, I am a professional art and theater critic, because I am very experienced, tough to impress, and quite discerning. And I have the acid tongue to match. And thus, my opinion on the ever longer list of “artist” cancellations at the Trump-Kennedy Center is that we now have a gigantic and rare opportunity. In other words, all of the prissy leftist brats who have recently canceled their appearances at the Trump Kennedy Center have left a hole into which other talent can and should move. And it should be new talent, different talent.
Conservative talent.
Patriotic talent. Non-Woke talent. America First talent. Traditional values kind of talent. Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and cry at the National Anthem kind of talent.
America has a new and ever larger opportunity at the Trump Kennedy Center to showcase pro-America/ pro democracy/ pro elections/ pro open minds/ pro thinking entertainers, artists, circuses, acrobats and tumblers, drunks, comics, poets, and writers. Hell, throw in some Capitol Hill staff skits, and the place should be rockin’.
Point being, the absence of the traditional self-anointed far Left entertainment industry (complex) people has created a vacuum into which a new tradition should step and grow. I am thinking Lynyrd Skynyrd or Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs a la 2026, whoever that may be. Kid Rock would be a good team leader here, maybe the new facility director or artistic creator or whatever silly high falutin’ name the industry typically uses. Except that whatever it is, we need to mock it into oblivion, like put Kid Rock in a top hat and tails and have him put on dramatically fake airs of superiority and faux seriousness.
America needs new curators of popular culture, which has traditionally been established by our artists, actors, and writers, who like a herd of lemmings in the past fifty years have unsustainably embraced economic and cultural anti-America Marxism. And now we have an opportunity to evolve and build an entire new pro-America genre, housed at the Trump Kennedy Center.
Some nameless, talent-less Washington DC based opera company was among those who ridiculously quit the place in a huff because of the partial name change. Turns out this lame group was only a group because they were based at the Trump Kennedy Center. As in housed there, subsidized there, lionized there, cradled there, simply for being there. May I suggest their replacement? A new group?
We, the new group I am promoting, are named The Kings of Toxic Masculinity, and we may not always sound in tune, or get our lines right all the time, but by God, we will be entertaining as hell for any red blooded American who wants to laugh, cry, celebrate America, and not fall asleep in the usual uncomfortable chair.
Hope to see you there, fellow American!
UPDATE: Days after this essay, President Trump announced the closure of the Trump Kennedy Center to fix the place after decades of deferred maintenance. Smart decision, because there were whole corridors there that smell like mildew, which means physical rot had set in to the building. What a symbol! Nice to know it will be overhauled and fixed up in two years.
What the hell do you write on a blog these days?
What the hell does a guy like me write on his blog these days, with the insurrection crap in Minnesota and California, people hurting ICE agents, foreigners coming here to aggressively defraud us taxpayers of billions of dollars?
This is all both painful and infuriating, and I am just tired, worn out from all of the disputatious fighting and broken government. I cannot believe America is undergoing this again, after the 2020 “Summer of Love” leftist + BLM wave of destruction that killed innocent people and cost billions in damage. Once the weather improves, America probably will go through that again.
What I WANT to write about is our outdoors lifestyle, Biblical insights, my friends, business, anything but more political violence. I am scared and angry about this stuff. Especially because neither political party seems willing to do anything about it. Not the enabling Democrats nor the cowering Republicans.
Welp, gotta go pull an oak splinter outta my paw. Got it pulling in firewood, because we are burning a ton of wood daily. The wash room pipes are frozen, and who knows what else is in store with the coming wave of deep freeze. Sitting next to a hot fire on a cold winter evening is a satisfying and reassuring thing to do. No, I do not suck my thumb.
But I sure as hell am tempted to…
One Year Later…SoCal still a disaster
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting southern California. But the much vaunted amazing Mediterranean climate SoCal is famous for was nowhere in sight, as buckets of rain fell day after day. The temperature stayed between 45*F and 60*F, which coming from the frozen East Coast sure felt like a vacation to me. But boy did the locals beeatch up a storm of complaints about this unseasonal discomforture.
What was striking about the trip’s weather was not so much the uncharacteristic cold, but the lack of official preparation for the torrential rains that accompanied the cold. You would think that the people there have been through this enough to know what to do by now. You know, mitigate the threat, reduce the pending damage, save lives, save property.
Much of SoCal’s building surface is a weird mix of loose dirt and small rocks, and it is prone to easy erosion. This has been known since the time of Ronald Reagan’s ranching days there, an Ice Age ago. As we drove north along the 405, we could see many large, often extravagant buildings perched unsteadily over chasms below, which had once held enough dirt to comfortably, on which to confidently, build a house.
And then the summer fires came (year after year) and burned the vegetation that holds the dirt in place, and then came the winter rains that washed the loose un-anchored dirt away, and left the expensive homes literally hanging, clinging for life to shreds of dirt on the uphill side of the ever-deepening slope below.
Eventually all the homes and buildings we saw hanging out in the wind, perched over a void, will slide downhill like a toboggan, like those before them that were once closer to the growing chasm and which are now completely removed from that landscape.
Their once carefully secured electric, water, data, phone, and sewer connections will be lost forever. Many are already visible, sticking out of the dirt like veins and arteries of a heart held high in the hand of a surgeon, or of an Aztec priest.
The place, the actual land itself, that was once surveyed and measured and given a parcel number, will no longer exist. The old building lot will be seen on paper and on old aerial photos, like a ghost, but the actual dirt that it was once made of will no longer exist. That building lot will go the way of so many others right there over the past few decades: Mass wasted by heavy rains downhill into steep arroyos, and eventually washed out into the Pacific Ocean.
When I was a kid, people not from California joked a lot about how the great San Andreas Fault would eventually crack open, Biblically swallowing great swaths of expensive SoCal real estate and its fancy cars and shiny people, and then shearing off the surviving residual into the Pacific Ocean. The more culturally conservative the joker was, the more emphatic was their lack of humor about this looming armageddon. And why not?
Yes, you and I must be curious about the strange mindset of all those tanned beautiful people living their pretty plastic lives over there in SoCal, surrounded by palm trees and perennially perfect days. It cannot possibly be real. Kind of like the American Pompeii – not if it will happen, but simply when. Especially curious about the people, because They seem so damned judgmental and contemptuous of Us, the great unwashed and untanned living in Flyover Country.
And while there have been some exciting earthquakes in SoCal, it is more the tick-tock-tick-tock metronome-like regular prosaic wildfires and monsoons that are the real threat to house and home and happiness in SoCal. These natural disasters happen like clockwork, and yet are treated each time with wide-eyed amazement by SoCal residents. Yes, the rains come every winter, but these rains, oh God, THESE rains, this year, they say…
Even worse have been the elected officials, whose reactions have run from feigned amazement to outright glee at the opportunity to score so much waterfront or Pacific view properties at such low prices…and so why not wonder at both the residents and their duly, unquestioned elected leaders, who fail to prepare for the erosive rains or the wildfires. A year ago this week, catastrophic wildfires ate a lot of beautiful SoCal real estate and homes, due to no brush management, no water in reservoirs, incompetent DEI firefighters.
Nothing has changed a year later. SoCal residents now just as defiant and silly as they were last year, still blaming the unusually extra strong sunshine or some guy in Washington DC for their unhappiness. I think just one building permit has been issued for the thousands of homes lost last year, and yet the Los Angeles mayor and the California governor enjoy plenty of support from their victims.
But just maybe the failure to issue building permits to last year’s total loss homeowners of Malibu and Palisades is the biggest mitigation step ever taken. That would be ironic. I don’t know, can’t know, and really don’t want to know. Rather, I am sitting over here on the cold East Coast drinking a hot cocoa with a splash of whisky, watching SoCal go through the death convulsions and twitches of a dying body politic and its sick land base.
You could possibly write the script to this Hollywood movie, but I think the best one was already written a long time ago. It is called The Bible…
(My iPhone screenshots of the 2025 fire are below, taken as it developed, and they include some heartbreakers such as spectacular homes and barns catching on fire, and a homeowner racing back to his home in his pickup truck, only to be blocked by smoke and then fire, and then turning and retreating just as the flames engulf his position, his beautiful mansion going up in flames behind him. Some of the mountain cameras send messages that they cannot upload their images… because they have been burned to a crisp)
Recall that the beautiful Will Rogers homestead and farm in Topanga burned to the ground. It was my favorite hiking destination in SoCal
Note the pickup truck on the road. One of the screenshots I took showed the driver get out with his hands on his head, obviously upset
Two Hollywood legends I will actually miss
Normally I am not a fan of Hollywood in any sense. In recent times, including just days ago, America lost two Hollywood legends, two actors who personified Hollywood at its best and maybe its worst, but also at its most colorful. I will miss them both, for very different reasons.
First up is Rob Reiner, apparently murdered two days ago by his own son. Both Rob and his wife Michelle were found deceased in their home by their daughter. Their throats had been slashed. Their son Nick has been arrested and charged with their murders. Apparently Nick has had a long history of drug abuse and all of the resulting relationship challenges that come with it. We now see the gruesome result, and can easily imagine the victims disbelievingly pleading with their own son not to harm them…
…their murders are a tragedy on its face, as well as a statement about the unworkable culture that is “inside Hollywood.” A mix of libertine excess and constant parental indulgence and allowance followed by inexorable failure. What a symbol of the whole place.
Rob Reiner really began his Hollywood career as “Meathead,” the abrasively sanctimonious know-it-all liberal son-in-law of appropriately named American workingman archetype, Archie Bunker, in All In The Family TV sitcom.
Relying on a well-scripted, well-played political and cultural tension between old guard Archie Bunker and Hippie “Meathead,” Rob Reiner gave effective voice to his generation’s anti-war, anti-tradition, anti-religion, anti-America liberalism.
The show captured the “generation gap” of my 1960s-1970s childhood, where older Americans held the traditional values that built a fully functioning nation, and the younger Americans were utopian meatheads with unrealistic, unsustainable expectations guaranteed to derail the nation.
Confusingly, Rob Reiner never grew up or let go of his Meathead persona, nor his destructive goofball political views. I suppose to his credit, in a way, neither have nearly all of his contemporary eldering-in-place fellow ever-child meathead Hippies. I will miss his entertaining online rants against Trump, MAGA, conservatives, Republicans, regular working Americans, essentially against everything outside of the tiny bizarro world Hollywood bubble that Rob Reiner inhabited.
Rob Reiner created the living liberal strawman that conservatives easily use to prove their points. In essence, Meathead grew up proving that Archie Bunker was right, decade after decade. And so, as much as he was strange, he also contributed well to the American political discourse. Rest in peace, Mr. Reiner. I am genuinely sorry you left us in this horrible way.
The other Hollywood person who recently left us is actor, producer, film maker Robert Redford. Easily the best looking man in American history, and also the one Hollywood actor least addicted to plastic surgery as he aged, Redford inhabited a very different cultural place than Reiner.
Famous for playing a variety of all-American hero and anti-hero roles, from gritty to suave, from cowboy to playboy, Robert Redford was a fixture in Hollywood for a really long time. He also fueled the Sundance Film Festival, an alternative to Hollywood, where low-budget art films and documentaries could gain audience and funding outside of Hollywood’s metrics and politics.
One of my favorite Redford movies is Spy Game, with Brad Pitt. Redford plays the role of a CIA spook and patriot, who in a former job as Cold War spy went so far as to unilaterally murder/ execute a known American traitor in Europe. This role alone sends a loud message about Redford’s politics: He was no leftist, no Hollywood commie, but rather he was a true American patriot in every conservative sense of the phrase.
But Redford also promoted environmental quality, and public lands, two things that are close to my own heart and not always present in the conservative movement. Not that Redford followed the leftist doctrine of heavy regulation and anti capitalism, but rather, he simply said that these things are important. And of course, they are important. And there are other ways of achieving environmental quality and public lands conservation without following leftist doctrine. Such a moderate stance is unheard of among Hollywooders.
Redford played very well a famous, iconic role that still speaks to men of my generation, that of historic mountain man Jeremiah Johnson. Filmed right before the 1976 American Bicentennial, Jeremiah Johnson captured the spirit of the American frontier, Westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, self reliance, urban vs rural, and the European-American conflicts with the western Indian tribes (Crow, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Lakota and others) in the Rockies.
Many of these themes and character traits are still central to the American identity that us older Americans have. Including Archie Bunker.
Jeremiah Johnson promoted the now-underappreciated but still central role of undeveloped American open lands in forging the tough American frontier spirit and Yankee ingenuity that built our nation. That conservatives miss or ignore this link, or misunderstand it, is just as much a crime as leftist attempts to essentially shrinkwrap public lands and make them off-limits to humans.
Robert Redford represents an image and political philosophy almost at the other end of Rob Reiner’s place on the political bell curve. Both men played important parts in shaping American culture, and I appreciate them both. However, Robert Redford will forever be an aspirational icon, whereas Rob Reiner represents a dead end on the political evolutionary tree.
Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson, iconic American frontiersman
A thousand in hand, none in the bag
Several days ago, sitting on a stump on the edge of a brushy power line right of way, a rifle across my knees, looking for a fat doe to tag, my eyes kept involuntarily darting around, tracking small things flitting about. The warming rays of sunlight had apparently caused otherwise dormant insects to become active, and in came a thousand “LBBs”, Little Brown Birds, as Robb sardonically calls them.
I was surrounded by troops of bluebirds, hordes of nuthatches, chickadees, cardinals, a thrush, hairy woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, woody woodpecker woodpeckers, tufted titmouseses, and a dozen other species of colorful songbirds I would not expect to encounter in December. Especially in such profusion. It was literally a bird riot, but without a murder of crows.
A golden wing warbler kept landing on the dead branch my right boot rested on, eyeing me curiously, closer and closer each visit.
Deerless, I nonetheless felt immensely richer for this baptism-by-bird experience. Deep Nature immersion is one of those common themes hunters talk about, probably the main side benefit of hunting. Hunters see stuff you people would never believe.
About twenty years ago I was spring turkey hunting, covered in camo and with a head net, motionless, my back to a white oak along an old woods trail. Morning had just broken, and before I could begin calling, an enormous hawk streaked right past my face and nailed a timber rattler maybe ten feet to my left, hidden in the leaves. Before I could fully register what had happened, the raptor was already energetically pumping its wings and lifting its heavy writhing meal off through the forest to some secluded snacking branch.
Reluctantly beginning my present hunt on foot, I stood up, stretched, and naturally spooked the whole carnival into flying in every direction. Like a fragmentation grenade made of feathers. A lifetime in the woods, and this was my first experience like this. A thousand beautiful little winged gems all around me, literally in the palm of my hand, all peacefully collected in my mind without hurting a soul.
Someday, like tears in rain, these dramatic images in my mind will be lost to me and to the rest of humanity. But, for now and for whomever I would later try to share it with, it was a huge, distinct, memorable event.
“Nothing in the bag on this hunt, but already as successful as it could ever be,” my mind said to itself.
Back hair, chest hair, belly hair…baby, I got it all and more
Confession time: I have a hell of a collection of back hair, belly hair, chest hair, even butt hair and ear hair. Fo’ real.
I know, I know, a man of my age does not age well, as “things” begin to grow from every orifice and heretofore unknown location, but so why then do we have to write about it…sorry, my apologies. There is an honest purpose here.
You, the lone, long-suffering sole reader of this blog, are probably already thinking to yourself “Good Lord, this guy has finally gone off the deep end with this TMI shock jock shtick. ” And were we actually talking about real body hair from my own voluptuous, idyllic form, you would be correct. However, as racy or as disgusting as this may sound, the fact is that I do have a pretty cool record-setting collection of all the aforementioned clumps of hair, but they are not from my own body.
Again and now even more so, whoever is left reading here at this point is gagging, and wondering what happened to the erudite intellectual who used to occupy this lonely outpost of fascination. Well, the bad news is I yet remain under the mal-influence of one Bill Heavey, the also-lonely humor writer of the once-wonderful magazine known as Field & Stream, now digitally un-dead and unknown to Americans under the age of sixty.
The good news is that I am not talking about human hair here, but rather the hair, or fur, of the many deer I have shot arrows at over the past five decades. This is true. I am not lying.
See, I fancied myself an archer at a young age, and so I got somewhere (probably at the kind of now-gone country auction that elderly collectors dream about and salivate over) a cheap recurve bow and a motley assortment of mis-matched arrows and dull broadheads, and set out to bag a deer.
Yes, I practiced, for years, as only the uninitiated and un-groomed and un-mentored can practice. Which meant that on Tuesdays and Fridays my archery “form” aligned well enough that I could hit the broad side of a barn, which were plenty, large, bright red, and quite broad where I grew up. And on all other days of the week my arrows sailed off into the wild blue yonder, to sit hidden in the fallow weeds and maybe puncture a neighbor’s tractor tire the following spring. Or maybe eventually catch my eye and be re-purposed as an arrow, more defunct stick than game-getter at that late point, but available and at-hand, and so useful nonetheless.
As a young man, I shot at deer from the ground and from neighbor’s hillbilly blinds, AKA rickety wooden death traps in today’s more refined hunting circles. My woodcraft was then and remains now unbeatable, and I am not lying or exaggerating when I tell you that I could stalk within feet of a dumbfounded deer, and let fly. Only to watch my arrow clip hair from the aforementioned areas and parts of the deer’s external anatomy, time and time again.
Bill Heavey would tell you, had he been as cool as me as a kid himself, that the deer died of laughter from the ridiculousness of the experience. But no, my deer did not die of anything. Not from shock, not from surprise, not from overwhelming mockery of the incompetent human mere feet away, and not an arrow in the heart. No, my deer stood stock still, with grass or acorns or corn hanging out of their slack jaw, staring at me in disbelief. Some even provided me with two shots.
I could have died from the shame of it all.
This routine of Bad-Indian-Sucky-Bow went on for decades, even as I graduated to used but working Fred Bear Kodiak recurves and then to custom “stick” bows. My prize and pride is a beautiful reflex-deflex longbow made by none other than Mike Fedora, the dean of modern traditional archery in America. Back in 2000, Jack Keith and I traveled from Harrisburg to the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous, then at Denton Hill in Potter County (home of many more bears than people), where we connected with Jack’s dear friend John Harding, and where I was introduced to Mike Fedora.
At ETAR, Fedora traced my bow-holding hand, did some phrenology-like measurements of my various body parts, and pronounced that the bow of my dreams would be ready within a few months. And no sh*t, Mike Fedora did produce a beautiful bow that was like an extension of my soul. I could then and still can shoot that thing into bullseyes all day long. At archery targets, me and that custom bow are deadly.
At deer, I still drop the ball. No can hit. Must be nerves, which are steely when I am hunting with a rifle. And so my arrows continue to clip bits of hair from all over deer bodies all over Upstate New York and Upstate Pennsylvania.
I am telling you, my collection of these bits and clumps of hair is large and legendary. If nothing else, no human being alive has missed so many deer at so short a distance for so long as I have. A living, walking, malfunctioning Guiness Book of World Records I may be in this regard, around these parts it is nothing to brag about. Rather, I inspire pity from even little kids dressed in camo who have already arrowed several Pope & Young bucks by the age of seven.
In the not too distant past, someone with my pathetic archery hunting skill would have perished from starvation long before amassing even the beginning of such a fine and rare collection.
And yet, I have discovered hope, salvation for my pathetic-ness and hopeless skill-less-ness. As much as I hate to admit it, I, a traditional archery snob who mocked bows with “training wheels” (compound bows) and belittled “bow-guns” (crossbows) as un-sporting arms that no worthy deer would allow itself to be taken by, I have finally fallen to the siren song of the modern crossbow. Or, to be honest, the cross-gun that shoots a short arrow like some kind of James Bond super-weapon.
Despairing of my ineffectiveness at archery hunting, and desiring to finally carve some notches in something to prove my prowess as a traditional hunter before I expire, I went and bought a Ravin R10X crossbow. It came highly recommended by contractor Ken Pick of Renovo, PA, whose son aced a very nice mountain ten point with one two weeks ago at the distance of 87 yards.
I can barely hit a deer with a modern centerfire rifle at 87 yards, so when I saw the photos of the young chap and his buck and his James Bond cross-bow-gun, I decided if I could not beat them, I had to join them. And join them I did, by buying said Ravin R10X at Baker’s Archery in Halifax, PA. Vindication and verification and all related cations came at me real fast as soon as I took that scary-ass contraption afield.
This is no lie and no exaggeration: Ten minutes after I took a little mosey to a spot where I had not hunted before, but where I thought deer had to be (this is the woodcrafty Josh), I had whacked an anterlessless deer. I had only put the scope reticle on the spot where I thought the arrow would hit the deer, and before I even pulled the trigger a loud THWACK resounded in the woods.
The deer ran twenty yards and died of fright, with a gigantic hole coursing through its body where I must have aimed but do not remember doing so, due to my own shock at having actually killed something with a stick and a string.
Life is full of surprises. Don’t deprive yourself of these dangerous-as-hell you’ll-shoot-yer-eye-out-kid bow-gun contraptions. Dude, they are cool and totally worth it.
Take my experienced word for it.
The trophy of my dreams: A yearling button buck taken with a James Bond super weapon on a ground stalk
A young man who was mentored in traditional archery, with good form, at ETAR 2020 at Ski Sawmill
People’s trail cameras are literally everywhere. This was sent to me as I was preparing to ask this kind young man to help me drag the deer fifty feet to the gravel road
No joke about it, my friend and archery and life mentor, Jack Keith, was the real deal in everything, and I miss him every day.
People who subsist on archery can’t afford to write silly essays about sucking at archery
Traditional archery legend Fred Asbell showing how to correctly hold the bow while hunting. Fred took all kinds of animals all around the world with traditional archery tackle
A young man with even better archery form at ETAR 2022
Playin’ the Quatar in the quicksand
Past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with the fast pace of everything, including my work, and just let the last blog post stand as the latest word on things: America is badly divided, really like two different countries at this point. President Trump is about to declare the Insurrection Act in effect, something this blog advocated back in 2020. Lawless judges continue to try to play policy pro with legal cases that require a simple Yes or No ruling. It has been amazing to watch the “Blue” states and jurisdictions demand that the Feds stay out of their crime waves. They like their crime, and by God, they are gonna keep it…forgetting tha we Americans have a right to go anywhere in America without fear of being beaten to death.
Then again, the 1940s-1950s Democrat-run South was like this: Lawless, violent, in open revolt against the federal government’s effort to integrate public schools.
But President Trump stole the show with his effort to bring peace of some sort to Gaza and Israel. This looks like languidly playing a Quatar-guitar while also sinking into the Middle East quicksand. Because the people supposedly facilitating this momentary conclusion of hostilities with Trump are the very same people who have been stoking the same conflict for the past seventy years, including on our own American college campuses: Qatar.
For decades, Qatar has dumped billions of dollars into American college campuses to buy entire programs filled with far-Left Marxist pseudo professors who preach hatred of America, Christianity, Capitalism, Israel, and Western Civilization. Qatar is a tiny postage stamp of a country with more oil money than it can use at home, so it is very effectively using it to eat into America’s foundation with jihadism and faux journalism.
Maybe Trump is playing Qatar here, but it sure openly looks like Qatar is playing Trump, luring him in with unrealistic promises meant to further weaken America and Israel, bog down America in the Middle East quicksand, and stop the anti-jihad momentum that Israel and America have been successfully implementing the past six months.
For example, now American troops are supposedly going to be stationed in Gaza to enforce the ceasefire….a stupider idea cannot be invented, but here it is. Our own troops will be at the mercy of Hamas, and will serve as a block on Israel being able to get Hamas back in the genie bottle. Anything that happens to our troops will be blamed on Israel. A wedge will be further inserted between these two great natural allies, America and Israel, and the only people benefiting are the jihadis of Qatar, Hamas, Turkey, and Iran.
Maybe it will hold, and it will all work out great. I am no pessimist, but I am a realist. I admire President Trump’s willingness to take big chances for the right reasons, but I also worry that he tends to see everything in the world narrowly through his own lens of golf courses, resorts, and money-solves-all-problems. Including the flea-infested quicksands of the Middle East, which have historically eaten up and spit out the bones of many different great civilizations. Sometimes reality just has to be accepted, no matter how frustrating or painful: appeasement is not peace, and appeasing the jihadis only encourages them to do more damage.
America is not too big to fail in Gaza, and a lot is riding on the line. Good luck to America and Israel and to our entire Western Civilization.
A Tale of Two Men, Two Peoples
We have in the past couple weeks been able to observe the best and worst of human behavior in America. Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the outpouring of grief and love on the one side, and the mockery, cruelty and evil on the other, has stratified Americans like few other events.
Even the George Floyd response (before the resulting burning, looting, and murdering riots) had some basis in widespread earnest initial belief that Floyd had been unfairly killed by a policeman, which crossed all political and ideological boundaries.
Not the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Starting the day of his assassination until just a few days ago, I have spent a good deal of time with mainstream liberal Americans at different events, and I can tell you there is no sensitivity there, that I can detect. No sorrow, and no open animosity, either. Indifference mostly, as far as I can tell. Unless we scratch the surface…
Last week, at a mostly liberal soiree in a special place, a nice looking older woman approached me and chatted with me. Her name tag said she was from New Jersey, so I made some humorous quip about the unfavorable Pennsylvania view of New Jersey’s polluted environment and its erratic drivers.
“Oh no, I live in the center of the state, near Princeton,” the nice lady replied. “Though I have to admit I also live near HIS golf course, if you know what I mean. The TRUMP golf course.”
Her eyebrows arched up and down with implied meaning. Apparently rotten-to-the-core Princeton is just fine, but a pretty golf course has all sorts of problems for her.
Said I, using one of my standard golf-related quips, “I do not play golf, I hunt. Because there is not a golf course anywhere on this planet with sufficient liability insurance to allow me to pick up a club. I am safer to be around with a shotgun chasing after geese in the water hazards than swinging at a ball.”
She smiled wanly, un-used to meeting anyone at a posh soiree who does not at least pretend to like golf. When our pregnant quiet moment was at its ripest, I followed up with “Besides, I am a huge Trump fan. And I don’t think we should all be shooting at each other over these differences, because we are all Americans and can work out our differences with our words.”
What she said surprised the hell out of me: “No, we shouldn’t.” And then she was gone, a scowl on her attractive visage. As if anyone on the Trump side of things has been shooting anyone, anywhere. Or maybe she meant that we shouldn’t be using our words…?
There are two different peoples here right now, inhabiting our country. Each one orbiting two different men, Christian activist Charlie Kirk, on the one hand, and once-humorist pagan Hollywooder Jimmy Kimmel, now fired and late of late night TV, on the other hand.
While some Americans oppose Charlie Kirk’s policy preferences on intellectual grounds, I guess, a lot of them also seem to be seething with hatred or animosity about him and anyone associated with him. This is strange to me, because Charlie Kirk never hurt anyone. He was a gentle person, civil, generous, a listener, he asked questions. He did politics the right way: He talked. What on earth about him would make people filled with hate?
Yes, he had some strong opinions based on his Biblical values, the same values that founded America. And….guess what? His political opponents also have strong views, based on God only knows what, because I do not know. Does having strong opinions simply make a person a bad person? If so, then the hate should flow both ways. But it does not.
It appears that the ever-angry, lying, mis-informing, wildly partisan Jimmy Kimmel is fully representative of the political Left and the Democrat Party partisans right now. When faced with consequences for his poor behavior (mocking the assassination of Kirk and lying about who did it), Kimmel is defiant and petulant. People losing their TV and radio shows in the cancel culture war was fine for Kimmel when they had different opinions than he. However, when the shoe is on his foot, and his words fail in the marketplace, suddenly he is aggrieved, and foot stomping, and like a spoiled child demanding demanding demanding.
Never mind that Kimmel was in essence telling leftists that they could murder their political opponents for disagreeing, and that TV personalities would cover for them. Kimmel was violating the basic conditions on which his employer, ABC, had been granted an FCC public broadcast license decades ago. We can debate whether the FCC should even exist, but it does right now, and if one has a broadcast license from the FCC right now, then one must meet its “public benefit” requirement, or let go of it. Kimmel’s lies placed his employer’s FCC license at risk, and so his employer cut him loose and with him the liability.
When we compare and contrast Kirk vs Kimmel, we see two totally opposite men, and totally opposite ways of conducting one’s self in public and in private. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has brought out a lot of good people, and also a lot of troubled people. We now have a tale of two different men, and the two very different peoples surrounding them.
I hope you, dear reader, choose the gentle one. America needs this, not the hate.
