08:13 – Someone sent me a cartoon about Y2K prepping, so I just went back and re-read my journal entries for late December of 1999. It was as I remembered. I wasn’t really expecting any major problems, and we did nothing special other than updating our software, filling the fuel tanks in our vehicles, filling the bathtub with water, and digging the oil lamps out of storage. What I’d forgotten is that few people around here seemed very concerned. The stores were full of unsold stuff that they’d ordered in expecting a Y2K rush that never materialized.
Barbara is meeting her sister for dinner tonight for her sister’s birthday, so Colin and I are on our own for dinner. Barbara went to the gym last night, so I took the opportunity to watch Mutant World with Amber Marshall. IMDB gives it 3.6/10, which is about 3.6 too high. This is a really bad movie. Good cast, but truly dismal writing. I watched the first half hour or so, which was time enough to watch Amber go rock-and-roll with her assault rifle on a zombie. I turned it off after that, because I was afraid Amber would get eaten by a zombie.
11:55 – Which reminds me that I need to think about stocking up on zombie repellent, or at least the supplies to make it up as needed. Apparently there are many effective zombie repellents available, but one of the best is good olde napalm.
The napalm itself requires only gasoline and a gelling agent. Many different materials work as gelling agents, but the best is still polystyrene, AKA Styrofoam. So the napalm itself won’t be a problem, but I need to think about igniters.
I suppose I could go with one of the two old favorites: (a) a flaming rag stuffed in the mouth of a glass bottle that’s been scored with a diamond ring or glass cutter, or (b) a half inch of concentrated sulfuric acid in the bottom of the bottle that causes a paper soaked in potassium chlorate, dried, and wrapped around the bottle to burst into flame when the acid contacts the chlorate.
But both of those methods have problems. The obvious problem with the first method is that you have to stand up holding a bottle stuffed with a flaming rag, which tends to draw unwanted attention from every zombie nearby. Both methods have the problem that a glass bottle, even if it’s been scored with a diamond beforehand, often doesn’t actually break even when it hits concrete, let alone soil or other soft materials. And even if the napalm ignites, it usually doesn’t scatter very well.
So I think I’m going to go with 1- or 2-liter soft drink bottles, using a bursting charge with a pull igniter and a 3-second fuse. The bursting charge will include magnesium granules, which should ensure that every bit of the napalm will be ignited, contacting anything in a radius of 5 or 10 meters.
I think I will get a small pet pig so I can keep the muslims away. Almost the same as getting a cat to keep the mice away except pigs have standards and won’t eat muslims.
Um, Ray. Have you taken down the basketball photos already? I got a 404 when I clicked on your link from Sunday.
Have you taken down the basketball photos already?
Yes, I did. I removed them just a couple of hours ago.
That surprises me. I thought pigs would eat anything. I’ve read about quite a few murders where the killer disposed of the body by feeding it to the pigs. (Didn’t that Canadian serial killer do that a few years ago?)
I’ll defer to your farm experience, but I do think a large-scale controlled trial is in order.
In HBO’s Deadwood the body gets disposed in Mr. Wu’s pig farm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtObLJ1yXvU
Hannibal Lecter anyone?
I thought pigs would eat anything
There are few things that pigs will not eat. They ignore thistle bushes and berries that are bitter probably thinking they are poison. They also don’t eat shit so I suspect they would do the same to muslims.
We are totally water logged around here. We’ve gotten about five inches of rain over the last two days. The swimming pool and both ponds are overflowing. Both ponds are normally about a half acre but the front pond has expanded to over an acre, maybe two.
55 F and and overcast here in the Land of Sugar. The weather liars have been predicting 70 F temperatures for days but have been wrong so far. I just wish that we could save this stuff for August and September when it gets real.
One of the prepper series has bodies being disposed of in the pig pens. Fellow walks home 300 miles after an EMP event and finds DHS agents all over the places, stealing XXXXX collecting food and guns.
http://www.amazon.com/Going-Home-Novel-Survivalist-American/dp/0142181277/
I have had the feral pigs coming up from the river several times so far this year. They have probably torn up 3 or 4 acres of my land, overturning the turf and eating the grubs and worms. The guy who mows my office property charges me extra to go roll the land so he does not tear up his ZTRs.
Ray Thompson said on 10 March 2015 at 10:33
I thought pigs would eat anything
There are few things that pigs will not eat. They ignore thistle bushes and berries that are bitter probably thinking they are poison. They also don’t eat shit so I suspect they would do the same to muslims.
Pigs are voracious and pretty indiscriminate eaters. They DO eat thistles! Not the bushes, but the roots, which are starchy, juicy, and somewhat sweet, and which they regard as the equivalent of carrots or parsnips. Feral pigs do a lot of damage rooting up pasture chasing thistle roots.
They also definitely eat shit. I have no reason to believe they would draw the line at Muslims. In fact, bullshit is a delicacy to them (as is cowshit). If they are running in the same paddock with cattle, the pigs learn to roust-up sleeping cattle. They heave themselves to their feet and take a wake-up dump, which was the whole aim of the pigs waking them. The cattle have been eating grain, some of which is passed undigested. The pigs scarf down the dump, getting the benefit of the healthy wholegrains contained therein. Yummy!
Older, drier cow rosettes tend to be rich in beetles and worms, and hence rich in protein. They are also favoured delicacies for our porcine relatives.
Pigs DO generally draw the line at bitter things, which is a survival characteristic, since things that are bitter are poisonous, and the taste is the plant’s warning of the poison as a survival adaptation. Pigs usually avoid citrus fruit (which coincidentally are technically berries), as the oils in the skin are bitter, and that is what they first encountered (and thereafter smell) in citrus fruit. They need to be taught that the inside of an orange tastes different before they will develop a taste for it. However, even there, the pigs have evolved to be remarkably versatile. If they start to carry a heavy load of internal intestinal worm parasites, their tastes will change, and a certain amount of bitter food becomes attractive to them. This poison kills-off most of their intestinal worms, as for instance the accurately-named wormwood which saw Socrates off, or the nicotine in tobacco.
They DO eat thistles!
Our pigs ignored our thistle bushes, left them completely alone. Maybe we had some type of tough variety as I know they were tough to kill manually. Took some fairly strong spray as cutting them down did not work.
They also definitely eat shit.
Never saw that behavior from our pigs. Most of our cattle were fed on hay (grass, oat and alfalfa) so perhaps the bovine discharge was not appealing to our pigs. We also fed our pigs some pretty good grub and maybe they developed a more sophisticated taste preferences.
We were raising our pigs for our own personal meat consumption so were a little more careful in what the pigs were exposed to for eating.
Which reminds me that I need to think about stocking up on zombie repellent, or at least the supplies to make it up as needed.
Have you considered a couple of good farts instead? If I can clear a classroom it should work against zombies.
Remind me to avoid Tennessee.
Of course, we have our own fart production facility here…and OFD is not the champion, not by a long shot….
Remind me to avoid Tennessee.
It was a very small classroom.
And of course you’d topped off yer scrambled eggs that morning with week-old chili and beans and a six of stale Budweiser….
And speaking of the great Volunteer State:
“Residents of the Volunteer State are stepping up and packing heat, according to statistics released by the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. In January 2008, 191,208 Tennesseans had carry permits. As of February 2015, that number has mushroomed to 488,911. With 6.5 million people now living in Tennessee, that means roughly one out of every thirteen Vols are licensed to carry.”
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/03/johannes-paulsen/one-in-thirteen-tennesseans-licensed-to-carry-assaults-with-firearms-down/#more-352128
Great news!
Lock and load, Volunteers!
It was also recently approved to open carry without a permit. They are working on some other gun owner favorable legislation such as stopping local county and city governments banning carrying weapons in local parks. Basically local laws will not be allowed to trump state law.
It’s all good, when we hear and see stuff like that. But as some of us right-wing gun nuts know full well, the bastards never stop trying.
Nevertheless, we salute our Firearms Salesman of the Decade, Mr. Barry Soetero, of Hawaii by way of Kenya and Indonesia, many blessings be upon him!
Hey Mr. OFD! I hear Mrs. BJ Klinton is looking for a new IT guy. Something about 30,000 deleted emails. That’s what you get when you run your own email server out of BJ’s bedroom and hire a guy in Bangalore to manage it. lol Only the MSM would believe that story. Who knew Her Majesty was so into tech. Apparently she’s not turning over the server either. I wonder if the tech guy kept a backup like the blue dress.
You may be on to something, Mr Atoz. What we think is just junk DNA on that blue dress is actually the data backup. Monica was supposed to be the offsite storage for the data, but there was a data leak. Fortunately, the cleaner didn’t manage to completely destroy the backup.
gelling agent
I’ve heard that Palmolive dishwashing liquid would work.
Haters.
Is it just me or did Monica Lewinsky’s former boyfriend’s wife look old today in her lying conference? What is she, 80?
Ageist.
She has lost the gorgeousness she once had in her devoted and loyal service to this great nay-shun, you lookist/ageist, you.
I just had to laugh earlier, listening to the commie stooges on NPR yakking about this huge non-event; the regular narrator plus two remote commentators, and while all of them mentioned that a bunch of emails got deleted and a bunch more were “personal” emails between her and her big lovable lug of a husband, nobody saw fit to mention that said big lovable lug does not USE email.
He tweets, ’cause he’s so up-to-date and hip and edgy, you see. His own spokes-stooge said that he’s only done two emails in his whole life, both while he was Prez and none before or since.
So one of them is a lying sack, of course. Your call, the Heroine of Tripoli and Benghazi, or the nameless spokes-stooge who may soon be Vince Fostered for his careless insolence.
ATF has dropped their NPRM to ban M855 ammo for the AR.
http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/10/great-news-atf-backs-down-for-now-on-big
Doesn’t affect me, as I don’t have an AR, nor have I fired one since Boy Scouts. But I thought it was stupid overreach by the Feds.
BTW, one of my son’s friends ordered a Springfield M1A through him. It came in yesterday and we all got to lay hands on it. That is one fine, slow loading rifle. And heavy too! He paid about $1,100 for it.
Just finished my estimate on the amount of money that me and the wife owe to the feddies next April 15. We are barely under the wire this year and will get a few dollars back. I won’t get this finalized until the accountant and I finish arguing about our S Corp return due Monday. We file that one on a cash basis but we keep the books on a accrual basis. Converting the books from accrual to cash can be interesting at times.
“Apparently there are many effective zombie repellents available, but one of the best is good olde napalm.”
Typical chemist. Go for the complicated solution when an easier one is at hand: Music!
Yep, it’s well known that zombies have very poor taste in music and will flee in horror when such classic masterpieces as Mandy by Barry Manilow, or anything by Bertie Higgins, Tina Charles, Maxine Nightingale and ABBA are played. So just copy them to a keydrive and turn up the stereo when they approach. Then they’ll be someone elses problem when they stop running, which should be kilometres away.
I have it on good authority that the same solution works on Moslems too.
ATF will likely be called on the carpet. Dear Leader must get his way.
will flee in horror when such classic masterpieces as Mandy by Barry Manilow
I flee when I hear the fingernails on the chalkboard screechings of Aretha Franklin.
“…as I don’t have an AR, nor have I fired one since Boy Scouts.”
Wait, Boy Scouts had AR’s??
“That is one fine, slow loading rifle. And heavy too!”
Too heavy, too slow, and usually more expensive than that. Depends on what one wants it for, I reckon.
Slow-loading? I used to have an M1A. Are we talking about the same rifle? Basically an M1 Garand modified to take 7.62 NATO from 20-round magazines? I don’t recall it being any slower to load than any other magazine-fed rifle. Nor did I think of it as particularly heavy, other than in comparison to lesser rifles. That few extra pounds was useful to deal with the recoil of .308, which is fairly punishing, particularly if you’re shooting from a bench.
The M1A came with a 10 round mag that was difficult to load since not much room. A 20 round mag would probably do better. Although, USMC son says the Marine snipers usually use the 10 round mag in their M14s.
And yes, Eric got a good deal on the M1A.
Wait, Boy Scouts had AR’s??
When I was at camp one summer, I got the rifle and shotgun shooting merit badge. We did most of the shooting with pellet guns that were about the size of the .22 we had at home (IIRC, a Marlin. Had a wood stock and a scope, tube magazine. One of my brothers has it, along with Dad’s deer rifle and his Remington 12 gauge shotgun. I have a 20 gauge that was a birthday present. A single shot that has interchangeable barrels, IIRC. Could switch to .410 or .22 rifle.) after passing the merit badge, we got to shoot the instructors AR-15 for a couple of shots each. This would have been in 1968 or 1969. I understand that they now have a shotgun range and a .22 range for the merit badges.
Sweet!
Was that instructor a veteran by any chance?
BTW, if you do not want to pay sales taxes on a gun, just buy your gun from a FFL out of state. They will transfer to your FFL of choice who will probably charge you $25 to $50 for the transfer on their side. I use gunbroker.com to contact out of state FFLs:
http://www.gunbroker.com/
Was that instructor a veteran by any chance?
Nope. A college student, with NRA instructor training. He strongly implied that he had parts at home to mod the AR to full auto, FWIW.
Interesting. It wouldn’t have then, or now, been a huge stretch to mod an AR for selective-fire capability. I just heard my guy down at the dump (a gunsmith and seller of customized AR’s and ammo) recite a very low-cost method of doing it.
But like I told him, why anyone would want to is a mystery to me still; two- to three-shot bursts, maybe, but that’s it, and anyone with the finger-eye dexterity can squeeze off two to three rounds real quick from an AR. You want a machine gun, get a license, pay the Fed tax on it, and go get a real one.
Fuck that. It’s an unconstitutional restriction and therefore not valid. Just remember the Eleventh Commandment.
A machine gun would be cool, but I’m still holding out for a select-fire megawatt laser. I’ll set up an acre or two of solar cells to keep it charged. Maybe five acres, considering the generally execrable weather around here.
I hear ya loud and clear on both counts.
My legally legal answer was for those who wish to abide by the currently established bullshit roolz.
I can see having selective-fire capability for unusual home defense situations but in general it’s only useful in actual battlefield scenarios, which we in this country have not quite got around to just yet. In which case, take a page from the Mr. SteveF playbook and simply liberate a machine gun or two or three from the currently established rule-enforcers.