Funny, but alas quite pathetic drunk walk.

Rugged individuals

Fridtjof Nansen and his tale

                                        Edward Abbey, author, monkey wrencher, and curmudgeon.  Incredibly, he managed to get himself married five times.

Don't know who this is, but dang, that is one rugged individual!

                                                   Ollas Per Persson, Dalarna, Sweden

                                               Portrait of C. H. Meares, Scott Expedition, 1912

                                                            John "liver eating" Johnson

Rumors, legends, and campfire tales abound about Johnson. In 1847, his Native American wife was killed by the Crow people, which prompted Johnson to embark on an almost 12-year vendetta against the tribe. The legend says that he would cut out and eat the liver of each man killed.

Another time, he escaped captivity by a group of Blackfoot by chewing through his straps, knocking out his young guard with a punch to the face, scalping the man with his own knife and quickly cutting off one of his legs. He made his escape into the woods, surviving a journey of about two hundred miles by eating the Blackfoot’s leg.

The 1972 Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson is (loosely) based off of the life of Liver-Eating Johnson.

                                                           Moral: don't mess with this guy's wife.

                                                        Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom

The first Chevy Volts are delivered to your local leader.

Pundit and Pundette are on fire this morning skewering the modern progressive state by quoting Mark Steyn.  Don't miss it.   

A short snippet:

An able-bodied man paid by the government of the United States to lie in a giant crib, wetting his diaper week in week out, is almost too poignant an emblem of the republic at twilight. But, as Hillaire Belloc wrote, “Always keep a hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse.” Only last week, ABC News reported:

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

Oh, no! The horror!

“Self-reliance” is now a pejorative? Nice to have that clarified. And San Francisco, a city that registers more dogs than it has kids enrolled in its schools and in which adults are perforce the children they never bothered having, seems as good a place as any to make it official. In less enlightened times, “self-reliance” was the great animating principle of the American experiment. By the standards of the day, George III was one of the most benign, caring rulers on earth: You were his mewling charges, and he was the regal babysitter. Then a bunch of settlers in small towns clinging to wilderness and thousands of miles from His Majesty the Nanny decided they didn’t need him and they could stand on their own. What’s the word for that? Oh, yeah: self-reliance.

Is it too late for a Self-Reliance Awareness Day? No, there’s no ribbons. Make your own damn ribbon. If that’s too much to hope for, how about a Multi-Trillion-Dollar Debt Awareness Day? The ribbon starts out black but turns deeper and deeper red. How about a We’ve Spent All the Money Including the Money for an Awareness-Raising Ribbon Day? An Impending Societal Collapse Awareness Day?

Nice places

Bizarre story of the day.  

Swedish woman, working in her garden, finds the wedding ring she had lost 16 years earlier, being worn by a carrot.

Since the last place it was seen was in the kitchen, the couple think that the ring might have fallen into a bin for kitchen scraps, which was then fed to the family sheep, and whose dung was then spread on the garden as fertilizer.

What a long strange trip!

Pissed off about Congress's ban on regular old lightbulbs, and their replacement by foreign made, harsh light, poison filled curly bulbs?

The answer is provided by the teutonically named Seigfried Rotthaeuser. The Heat Ball!

Get yours today!

A new Island has risen out of the Red Sea, and is currently about 500 meters wide, due to the eruption of a volcano off the sea floor.  This coincides with increased volcanic activity in Eritrea and Ethiopia.  Whether the island will endure the action of the waves or not remains to be seen, but the longer the eruption lasts, the better the chances.  It only broke the surface on December 23rd, so it's growth so far seems positive for permanence.

Still life

Scholars have identified a stele in the possession of a Norwegian collector as showing the only known depiction of what is probably the biblical Tower of Babel, along with it's floor plan.  It also has the best picture of the actual King Nebuchadnezzar, who finished building the tower and made it famous. There are only two other pictures of Old Neb,  carved into a mountain in what is today's Lebanon, but the elements have not been kind over the centuries.  

According to historians, Nebuchadnezzar finished the tower in the late 500 BC, but it had been started by an earlier king, in the 1700's BC.  It was dedicated to their god, Marduk.

 As written on the stele, the King stated that  "“I mobilized (all) countries everywhere, (each and) every ruler (who) had been raised to prominence over all the people of the world (as one) loved by Marduk…” he wrote on the stele"


All those people working in the same place, it must have been a real "babel" of languages!


Anyway, historians tell us that when Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 538 BC, he pulled down the stairs leading into the tower to prevent it from becoming a fortress.  Later, in 331 BC when the Macedonian Alexander the Great came around, water damage caused by the removal of the stairs had made the tower dangerously unstable, so he ordered it torn down and rebuilt.  Well, it was torn down, but when he died unexpectedly, it was never rebuilt.

However, even today the foundation for the tower can still be seen from space!  So, about 3700 years after it was first conceived and begun, it's mark is still there on the land.

Chinese grenade drill goes very wrong.  Leave it to the recruit to bounce the thing back at them, and give the instructor credit for his quick thinking.

Future Darwin award winner.  Incredible irresponsibility.  If you are going to do something super dangerous like this, at least only risk you own life, not those of people innocently passing by in the other lane.

An article in the Sacramento Bee on the CHP's plans to use volunteers to look in the window of passing cars to see if the driver is texting, goes horribly wrong in the comments.

Keep in mind that this is the Bee, a wretched hyper liberal rag that panders to the worst of the liberal mouth breathers, and the hostility of the commenters to further state intervention in their lives becomes even funnier.

Hey, put your hand in here.

Cool car in a cool place. Literally.

America's greatness will defeat Obama.

I would only ad that our greatness will actually defeat Obama, the democrats, and liberalism/progressivism in general, if we are willing to put up at least a token fight about it.  It is certainly not just Obama, who is in reality but a figurehead for the underlying philosophy supporting the entire left.  They have failed in all their incarnations.  Communism, socialism, and now whatever you want to call it in America - probably best termed progressivism.

We only need to not sit down passively.  We must but push back, at the ballot box, in 2012, and the stench that is leftism will collapse of it's own rottenness.

Cars use less energy than does light rail─3,445 BTUs per passenger mile vs. 3,465 (that is the amount of energy each mode uses on average to move a passenger one mile). 


"Transit is heavily subsidized — in Los Angeles County and elsewhere. The correct figures: Metro currently subsidizes on average 72 percent of a bus fare and about 76 percent of a rail fare. See page 64 of this year’s adopted budget."

It looks as if not only is liberalism's efforts at forcing us all onto mass transit absurdly expensive, it is also less fuel efficient and worse for the environment.  In fact, it looks kinda like this:  

Maybe someday we can stop government from forcefully taking our money from us to subsidize these progressive fantasies.  Until then, keep working sheeple!  Progressives need your money.

"Ok, which one of you forgot to put the drain plugs back in!?"

Paradise.  Fancy boots don't match the rest of the picture, though.

The store clerk said, "If he wants money, get a job. Work, like everyone else in the world."


Which he said right after punching the robber in the face, knocking him out cold.  When he finally came to, and while waiting for the police, the clerk made the robber clean up his own blood off the floor.


  That is a fast punch from a beefy guy.  Hadda hurt.  


The perp at the end of a very bad, no good, rotten day.  For him.

Righteous!

A thoughtful article on the meaning and substance of beauty, which will cause you to contemplate what it really is that makes something worthwhile, and beautiful in and of itself.

From the article:

"Which is why it is so reviving to come across Lauridsen's citing of the magic and mystery of a painting that inspires music from his soul across more than three and a half centuries. It reminds us that art that is true, that art that comes from belief and the soul, will survive and will continue to expand the soul of man despite all the forces that may array themselves against "the good, the beautiful and whether or not something is true."

Things I'm liking right now.  Because they are beautiful.  Especially this first picture.  At about 7:30 am.

Nothing says Christmas like an old rusty snowy truck.

On a frosty Christmas holiday morning, the two younger kids and I went on an expedition.  Up Irish Hill Road and on to the little burg of Plymouth, we enjoyed the clear, cold weather, and saw some things we hadn't seen before.  Good, clean, cold fun.

A bucolic scene from a Christmas holiday

It was a quiet Christmas at our house this year.   Our tree was still just as nice as any previous Christmas, even if it was a more simple celebration.

The oldest daughter and I arranged a Julbord this Christmas eve for everyone to enjoy, and indeed it was  very tasty.   There was enough in leftovers that we got to reenact the fun today as well.

Find the cat.   This one is in plain view, but perhaps not in the way that you might think.

Would'ja look at that!  The hole was exactly the size of the puck.  I'll bet "Frenchie's" never thought that they would ever have to give away that truck.

Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood mess with handguns.  The definition of cool.

  That octopus looks like he has already been in a few fights. 

Out here in California, the weather has been clear and a bit cold in the morning, but warm during most of the day.  Fine stuff, but hardly Christmas weather.  

However, I saw this picture on the internet, a view of the road going out to Brudskär in western Finland. For some reason this strikes me as a classic holiday scene, and sometimes I think I would prefer this to the green and sunny weather we have here at home.  Of course, that's what everyone says who doesn't have to live in the white stuff every day for months, but too bad, that's the way I feel about it today.

Photo by Tanja Björndahl

Comet Lovejoy just keeps putting on a better and better show down in Australia.

Dawn sightings of Comet Lovejoy are now widespread around the Southern Hemisphere. (The tilt of the comet's orbit does not favor northern sightings.) It is also interesting to observe the comet's "double tail." These are the dust and ion tails. The gaseous ion tail is blown almost directly away from the sun by the solar wind, while the heavier, brighter dust tail more closely follows the comet's orbit:diagram. The gap between the two tails can be seen with the naked eye while the sky is still pitch dark ~30 minutes before dawn.

The latest in TEOTWAWKI preparedness.  Might work as a low cost vacation retreat somewhere as well.

Nothing like a little ingenuity to turn a couple of these...

Into this...