Where I would like to be in a couple of weeks (actually, I’d like to be there right now, but I’m being realistic since the doors are still probably frozen shut on the place I store my boat).
Muskie opener in Minnesota is still a couple of months away. Sigh. At least in North Dakota I can be hunting pike after ice-out and shake off the cobwebs and make sure the gear all works.
The pictured setup is my newly put-together low-budget light muskie / northern pike setup. $45 Ambassadeur 6600 BCX (on clearance at Walmart), Shimano Beastmaster rod that I picked up from a friend for a song, and $1.99 Cabelas muskie bucktail (I bought a half dozen of those that day for that price!). If the reel lasts, it will be well worth it, but it is kind of sad that there is now a classic Ambassadeur round reel that’s made in China and not Sweden. I guess that’s the way of the world.
Via Greg Johnson’s Thinking Outside Blog:
The Ice Fishing Challenge in Alexandria, MN had 2200 anglers competing this year and not a single person caught a fish. Had anyone caught a fish of any kind, it would have been worth $10,000. I’m always amazed at occurrences like this, but there have also been bass and walleye tournaments that failed to turn a fish in more than four hours of fishing, as well.
At least no one has to have a sense of inferiority or failure. When 2200 people get skunked that’s just a story to tell to your grandchildren.
Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the TSA. Good. I’m glad someone is keeping the pressure on the TSA to change its policies. In a previous post I gave my reasons for preferring profiling over body-scanning every Tom, Dick, and Grandma.
How would you like to be the TSA employee to tell Jesse Ventura he needs a pat-down? I think you might be on the receiving end of a smack-down. Body scan might become body slam! (Oh, I have way too much fun with words!)
I think there’s a reason “gate rape” was voted the word of the year by the Urban Dictionary.
As a shooter and former firearms trainer, it really irks me to see stories in the news that indicate guns firing by themselves, as if they suddenly come to life. Case in point — headline from the Associated Press: Two Wounded at Los Angeles School When Gun in Backpack Fires. Now, the story seems to be that the gun fired when the backpack was dropped. There is no mention of the make and model of gun, so it is hard to speculate how that might happen. My point is that it probably had help. Most modern guns need a very deliberate sequence of action to fire. Yet the press continues to report these incidents as if guns are magical, self-operating devices with murderous urges.
The other genre of guns-firing-by-themselves stories involves the classic “the gun fired when I was cleaning it” variety. A similar theme was reported in a news story I read yesterday in my own region of the country. The introductory sentence of the article goes something like this: “A Grand Forks resident was cited this morning for discharging his firearm within city limits after he accidentally shot himself in his home while attempting to move his handgun.” The story goes that the man was cleaning his apartment in the wee hours of the morning and when he moved his handgun, it fired, striking him in the hand. The story reports the man’s first name was Darwin.
GUNS DO NOT FIRE THEMSELVES. Accidental discharges are certainly (remotely) possible, but are mostly due to negligence. I have heard a story, for instance, in which a man shot himself in the leg with a single action revolver because he had it stored in the console of his pickup in a sock. Evidently, in the process of things moving around with the gun in the console, the single action hammer was cocked back, and when the man moved some other things around in the console, he caught the trigger in the fabric of the sock and fired it. Knowing the full context in that story, it is somewhat believable, but the person who shot himself was certainly negligent in how he was storing a loaded gun, as was the high school kid in Los Angeles.
Stories I generally approach with suspicion are the ones where police officers and/or security guards cleaning their weapons at home experience accidental discharges. Those people have obviously been trained to know better, and what I usually envision behind those stories is either boredom or drunkenness leading to quick-draw practice or other unsafe stunts that lead to the discharge.
I hope for a day when the mainstream media writes gun stories with factual information and avoids personifying and/or demonizing mechanical objects.
The ball dropped a little bit early on us in southeastern North Dakota overnight. We’re cleaning up from Phase I. Phase II is coming this afternoon, bringing subzero weather and another 6-12″ of snow on top of what got dumped/drifted last night.
My leisurely 35 mph drive this morning on Highway 75 between Breckenridge, MN and Wolverton, MN. There were a few pillow drifts nearly the size of my pickup.
I came upon a truck that had slid from the roadway and was receiving assistance from a sheriff’s deputy:
This is what I got to do when I got home:
I know–New Year’s Eve should be a time of reflection and celebration and positivity. Maybe when the tons of snow are all moved and I’m inside with a hot toddy on New Year’s Day, I’ll make some resolutions and look ahead. Hey, it can only get better!
I have been meaning to do a blog post for a while on Sarah and her haters, but there are so many facets to cover, it’s almost overwhelming. As evidenced by the recent credit card attacks and SarahPAC hacking attempt, there are plenty of folks who go out of their way to manifest their hate for the Palins. As a matter of fact, there is a ridiculously complex website called www.democratichub.com that seems to have devoted a lot of time and energy to creating a page tracking Sarah Palin’s “Gaffes,” “Lies,” “Incompetence,” “Negativity,” and so on. The people who contribute to it must suffer from equal parts paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and unemployment. One of the tag categories is “negative behavior.” It seems that Sarah’s reality show on TLC would fit into that category just about every week according to these folks.
Sarah Palin's Alaska is what's on my DVR.
In the first episode, Sarah, Todd, and family go salmon fishing and rock climbing. In the second episode, Sarah, Todd, and Bristol visit the range to shoot clays, and Sarah and Bristol go halibut fishing. The third episode focuses on passing along the leadership of the family’s salmon fishing operation to Track, the oldest son. In the fourth episode, Sarah shoots a caribou.
And the reaction to all of this “negative behavior” by the left and the Sarah-haters? Predictable.
An animal rights group was outraged by the halibut clubbing in Episode 1, which is par for the course on a commercial fishing vessel.
Aaron Sorkin recently called Sarah Palin “deranged” and her show a “snuff film” because she shot a caribou on a legitimate hunt.
Having given too much attention to the perspectives of the Sarah-haters, let’s pose a question: What if she’s for real? I think that’s what Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC is trying to answer.
The Sarah Palin I see is the person who was thrust into the spotlight as a hail-mary by the McCain campaign. Like many of us, she made some mistakes and wasn’t perfect in front of the cameras. I can’t imagine standing up to that kind of scrutiny. It is sad that one of the first “real” (i.e. non-Washington insiders) people to run for that high of public office was so vigorously targeted by the media and the left that she so naturally and easily threatens.
The Sarah Palin I see in TLC’s show is a loving mother much like my wife. As a matter of fact, our families have some things in common: we enjoy the outdoors; we participate in activities such as hunting, fishing, camping, and kayaking; we believe in the sanctity of human life; and we love our kids to death. In addition, Sarah and Todd’s relationship is very similar to ours. My wife is the organizer and the brains behind the operation in many ways, including our finances. She is outgoing, energetic, and makes things happen. I am more laid back and tend to take things as they come. I admire Todd Palin and his support of Sarah in her endeavors with politics and TV, and I would like to think that I would do the same thing for my wife.
So what is wrong with this typical Alaskan family that works hard and plays hard? And why do they deserve titles such as “hate monger” and “liar?” The answer is that they scare the living heck out of the left and they don’t apologize for their beliefs. I’ll be watching the show, since I not only get to see the Palin family, but a reflection of my own. Sarah, Todd, Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, Tripp and Trig are all interesting folks and I find it hard to believe that they’re all acting out a script as part of a one-hour weekly campaign ad.
My take on the TSA and the recent increase in body-invasive techniques is that we are giving up rights at a rate far faster than we are gaining national security.
The debate is getting interesting as several articles have been published lately that suggest profiling as a much more efficient method of preventing air disasters (which in my small amount of research appears to be why Israeli air travel remains so safe).
What surprises me is the number of people who are OK with the body scanners and pat-down procedures. In my small midwestern town a newspaper poll is leading 54-46 in the opinion that they are necessary for security.
In my mind, a logical parallel to the issue is our health care system. It was functioning better than any in the world, but we had to fix it. Why do we continue to spend huge amounts of federal dollars chasing broad solutions to non-existent problems when we should be perhaps doing some judicious tweaking?
Recently, I was interested in the capacity of the American public to revolt against the TSA measures, and I read an article that claims the national opt-out day was not quiet because of a lack of protesters, but because the TSA did a good job of stepping back from the procedures for the day so that there were no negative experiences for anyone to report. Interesting. I will continue to follow this issue, since if nothing else, there are some good articles about passengers in see-through bikinis.
Links:
This is the worst time of my year. In some areas, March is beautiful and there are adornments such as cherry blossoms to enjoy. For those of us in the Red River Valley, it’s time to watch the dirty snowdrifts slowly recede, the rivers rise, and anxiously wait for the walleye opener (which was ridiculously close to ice-out last year and it’s in MAY!).
I just returned from a trip to Illinois via Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa (thus my absence from Blogville). There were lucky folks fishing on the Mississippi river from boats, waving as we drove past, taunting me, as I’m sure they could tell clearly from afar that I was from North Dakota. ”Poor bastards,” I imagined them saying as I left them and drove back north. I thought of my own boat lying in state in my best friend’s quonset. He probably won’t have the doors busted free from the ice and snowdrifts for another month so I can free my vessel. And then about all I will be able to do is bring it home, park it in the driveway, and sit at the helm, making outboard motor noises and dreaming of open water.
At this very moment, I’m waiting for the melt to really break loose to test my newly installed 3/4 hp sump pump. The Red River here near the headwaters is going to be above flood stage, as usual, and is due to crest on Wednesday. Fargo prognosticators are predicting a crest there to match the 1997 flood. Having lost a home to the 1997 flood when I lived in our sister city of Breckenridge, my back aches for pretty much the entire month of March, and I think about water non-stop. Ironic that a fisherman would experience so much stress over the very same thing that provides so much enjoyment later in the season.
So I wait. I can’t even do boat prep for the season yet. The tackle has all been obsessively organized several times over the long winter, and the gear is ready to go back in the boat. I guess I’ll stand in my garage and look around at all of my stuff, plug in the bait fridge, and wait for the river below the dam to break up so that I can at least drop a jig in it sometime in April. And I will think of the guys below all the dams I passed on the way back up the Mississippi. Catch one for your northern brethren, boys. It will be a spiritual work of mercy for us souls in purgatory.
