Proof I actually exist to be found here. Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden were in Amsterdam for their holidays and we met up at Cafe Ot en Sien, together with several other Making Light regulars and lurkers. Fun was had by all.
This ‘N That
More on hunting
Palau’s comment on last week’s hunting post is too good not to quote in full*:
Revoke the Enclosure Acts! See, there’s your trouble, right there, the rich dispossessing the poor. It always is.
I think part of the motivation for the current leftish rethink on hunting is coming from miserabilists like me who’ve been predicting an eventual return to subsistence living as the whole economic system collapses.
The prospect of bankrupt nations falling like dominoes plus worldwide unemployment and depression does set one remembering all those WWII recipes and Ray Mears survival tips.
One of the little headgames I play when I’m bored or can’t sleep is ‘what would you do if…’ say, there were no supermarkets? If Russia cuts off the gas? We get flooded by rising sea levels?
I’ve even caught myself musing on the utility of a crossbow vs a shotgun while listening to the news and idly wondering how much protein there might be in the wood pigeon in the garden that I’ve been feeding. I’ve got a nice recipe for rook pie too…
But on the whole I blame the hunting rethink on posh trendies [like] Hugh Fearnley-bloody-Whittingstall.
Poor pigeon…
* Beside, makes for an easy post…
Simple pleasures: Bear Hunt
Part one in an occassional series when it all gets a bit too much.
Michael Rosen. Poet, writer of childrens books, public intellectual in the best meaning of the word, socialist. And not too embarrassed to act out his own stories on Youtube…
That can only happen to us
Na het plassen handen wassen
Sorry for “cheating”yesterday and only posting a book review; some days blogging just isn’t on the cards. Don’t know what it is, but it might just be the onset of flu season. Fortunately for us, at Making Light Jim MacDonald Who is an EMT in real life has some advice on how to deal with flu, (get your doctor to get you a flu shot if you’re at risk!) including a guide to washing hands:
1) Turn on the water and get it to a temperature you like.
2) Lather up using soap. (Soap does not kill germs in the time that the germs are exposed during hand washing. There’s stuff that grows fine on a bar of soap. The surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That’s how it works. It’s purely mechanical. Antibacterial soap is a waste of time and money, and just helps breed antibiotic-resistant bugs.)
3) Rub your hands vigorously together, paying special attention to the fingernails, getting up onto the wrists, for as long as it takes you to sing one stanza of The Star Spangled Banner or two verses of Little Mattie Groves.
4) Rinse off the soap with the running water.
5) Dry your hands with a paper towel.
6) Use the expended paper towel to turn off the water.
Which is all very well, but does not work so good when the toilets at work do not have paper towels, but one of those cloth towel dispenser thingies with the towel on a loop, so hence you need to use your elbow to turn off the tap. Also, no soap, just some liquid gunk of obscure provenance. Not to mention cow-orkers you hear peeing, you hear flushing, you hear leaving the toilets, but who you not hear washing their hands… For some reason, there a lot of those around in IT.