Thor's Day Thing, 10/27/22

Baldr standing among most of the “accidental pigshit pumpkins” mentioned previously. The Great Pumpkin on the right ended up at just under 2 feet tall, not 3.

Some mundane stuff, but not too much, as there’s actually a ton of current events worth at least mentioning.

• My birthday surprise turned out to be Husbandmouth secretly researching comic book stores within any sort of driving distance and finding one that was running a Dungeons and Dragons night in their back room. We played Tomb of Horrors, one of the original D&D modules from before I was even born, and met a bunch of nerds that represent at the very least a pool to draw any new friends at all to share a hobby with. It was a pretty damn good surprise.

• I picked the above pumpkins and squashes so that I could move last year’s boar into the pasture they were growing in. He and the steer are being processed shortly after New Years, so he gets about 2 and a half months by himself to fatten up, which he very much needs. He has had a bitch of a time since last year, especially since the new breeding boar showed up, and is generally cranky and antisocial and was very happy for the peace, quiet, and solitude. The steer is extremely good friends with all the other cows and doesn’t need any fattening, so it would be cruel to isolate him before the big day.

• Yesterday someone, unaccustomed to having the boar in the previously-idle pasture, left the human-sized gate to it unlatched, whereupon the boar let himself out. (In the past he has mastered the use of latches, handles, and knobs- everything that needs to keep him in needs to be deadbolted or locked.) I discovered this minutes later as I heard the sounds of him being set upon by every single dog in the house and screaming for his life.

  Dog #3, a husky, had gotten both hind legs in her mouth and was bearing him down while being roadhauled. Dog #2, a collie, had jumped onto his back and was holding on by the back of the boar’s neck in his teeth. Dog #1, the lab, had gotten hold of the boar by the snout, her face about an inch from his mouth.

  If you’ve ever seen dogs do this kind of thing that aren’t trained hunting dogs (mine aren’t), it’s a pretty bad scenario. They were not my dogs anymore. Screaming their names didn’t do anything. Grabbing them and trying to pull them off didn’t do anything. Getting my hands in their jaws and prying didn’t do anything but cut my hands up. Hitting each of them with sticks, hard enough that if someone else did it I’d put them in the hospital, didn’t do anything.

  The boar is presently about a hundred pounds or so and has tusks that, thanks to constant fighting with the other boar, have been sharpened enough to go through a work boot if properly motivated.

  I’m scrambling around the dogs, in no small pain from my torn ACL, watching this progress towards getting a hog killed and/or getting at least one of my dogs killed, and maybe the hog turning on me if it survives long enough. Amazingly, up to this point, the boar isn’t fighting back; it’s simply trying to move as fast as it can while screaming.

  So I continued screaming and my other futile efforts, and finally transitioned to screaming “Someone Help Me,” which eventually got a passing guy in a pickup to pull into my driveway, run out into my yard, sort of breathe “hey I’m Curtis” over his shoulder, and immediately drew off my dogs, who decided to try to play with him because the “kill a boar” thing was so 5 minutes ago. Between the two of us, we were able to herd the boar behind the “invisible fence” line where the dogs can’t cross and keep the dogs at bay; the boar then very obligingly put himself away through the open gate, which I closed and locked 3 ways from Sunday, Curtis and I kind of patted each other on the shoulder exhaustedly and he took off.

  The boar spent the rest of the afternoon lying motionless on a straw bed in a stall. I periodically checked on it; other than a bloody puncture wound on its snout that oozed blood for a few hours and then stopped, there were no external injuries. The boar was, suprisingly, very tolerant of being soothed (he tends to be very grumpy) and let me check for internal injuries, which I did a few times over the course of yesterday and this morning. He remained more or less completely still until last night, when he got up for a bowl of dinner, and was sunbathing in the pumpkin patch this morning and waggled his ears back and forth when I scritched behind them while checking for internal injuries again.

  

  Thistle, the boar in question. The abrasions visible on his head and shoulders are actually old battle scars from the other boar (who has a notched-up ear from HIS old battle-scars on his previous farm.)

  

  As you can see, one day on, the injury to the snout isn’t even visible anymore, and clearly his disposition hasn’t been harmed. The healing factor of pigs is absolutely incredible.

  I don’t know why the boar didn’t fight back or turn on me once freed, but I certainly was lucky. We all had a serious talk about gate discipline yesterday. My leg still hurts and I can feel a throat infection coming on from all the screaming, but these are honestly not a very big deal.

  Anyway, I hope Thistle enjoys the rest of his retirement in peace. He’s certainly earned it. (The dogs were also all fine and seemed to regard the whole thing as having been a grand adventure that didn’t harm them in the slightest. They lay on me in a big pile for much of the evening watching Blacklist.)

• We are now up to roughly 26 chickens pullet-aged or older, more than halfway to my goal of a permanent flock of around 40. All of the youngest generation are visibly at least half Jersey Giant or Plymouth Rock (many are probably also half Rhode Island Red). Most are not laying age and all the males have not yet been identified, so we’re currently getting about 6 eggs a day. We run an incubator continuously, kept in our bedroom so we can hear hatchlings quickly and get them out into a heated box in the basement. I donate the small eggs from hens I don’t want to breed to the adult female pigs as at least one of them is likely pregnant and can use the extra aminos, and the rest of the large eggs, after the incubator is full, ensure a sufficient supply for homemade dog food and human breakfasts. I will probably start culling the last of the first generation hens I don’t want to breed as it gets colder. The ones that are too tough for roasting or barbecue supplement the pigs’ feed.

• Our coffee and avocado trees are installed in the greenhouse (kept in pairs for pollenation) for the rest of the year. One of the coffees is wilting probably because I was a dipshit and overwatered them but I expect it will rally before winter. The outdoor fruits trees and bushes look good, except a fig tree I planted in the yard that hasn’t grown at all and is currently leafless but is apparently still alive.

• We will harvest potatoes and rutabagas probably around Thanksgiving, and are amazingly still getting tomatoes. Onions and garlic will be ready next spring, and asparagus in about a year. Lettuce and kohlrabi is still leafing. While this was a very haphazard year for planting and harvesting, it was incredibly educational and we learned a tremendous amount by trial and error. I have next year’s schedule very well planned out, and now that we’ve redrawn the dogs’ invisible fence boundary will have no problem planting corn again (which was extremely successful until Dog #3 destroyed it), which means beans and non-accidental-pigshit squash (“three sisters” method, which fell apart when the corn was destroyed this year). It was messy and highly suboptimal but I really can’t complain at all- I got more of everything than I expected.

• ACL surgery is in a little less than two weeks. Husbandmouth has started making accessibility fixes around the house including a monitor setup in the bedroom so I can work from bed, which will be a thing for about a week or so. The rehab is going to be long, and this is going to suck. I am not thrilled, but I will enjoy the outcome.

On to bigger things.

You know you’ve missed this.

• As a Pennsylvanian, I watched as Frankenstein’s Monster was beaten by Dr. Nick Riviera in recent debates, which is to say that Dr. Oz managed to keep his mouth shut juuuuuust enough to allow the vaccine-injured progressive dilettante Fetterman put to rest any notion that he was remotely capable of doing anything at this point, regardless of platform.

  

  “Empty the jails. Open the borders. Braaaaaains. Good night, everyone.”

“Try my new weight loss boner pill! Several of my views are only hours old, but they’re excellent.”

• More interesting than the awkward, cringing experience of watching a disabled person (admittedly one you may not like) fall down on a task they were no longer able to do was the fact that this painful performance seems to have actually moved sentiment that “you know, I guess we really CAN’T elect someone who is barely able to form coherent thoughts anymore just to own Red Team.” Obligatory disclaimer about polls not meaning anything, yadda yadda, but the debates geometrically accelerated Fetterman’s downward trend in the polls. The fact that he had actually been continuing to LEAD (albeit by a small, gradually shrinking margin) until the recent debate blew my mind, and better substackers than I have already mused that the deep state has deliberately gotten voters to the point of wanting to elect barely-conscious broken people just to w00t so that government can be stocked with lobotomized puppets. But Fetterman and Brandon are plummeting in their respective polls. Though it isn’t much to brag about, we may have finally found our political bottom: Americans are apparently unwilling to be ruled by borderline coma patients just to not be ruled by a member of the opposing party. Like addicts, we’ve found our apparent rock bottom. Now it’s time to be insufferable for about a decade and go around passive-aggressively coercing people to forgive us for when we pawned their prom dress to score an eight-ball and ran their dog over when we went on a nod while driving a school bus.

• A thoroughly optimistic-but-pessimistic prediction, based on recent examples of the aforementioned phenomenon and others I’m beginning to see in the discourse: the midterm elections were either an ambush or a managed loss, and 2024 won’t be. I don’t actually think it’s likely the midterms will be stolen anymore; I think the following will happen:

  • there will be something close to the predicted red wave. It will probably not be as sweeping and total as the cheerleaders predict, but it’ll be big, and it will break all the important majorities.

  • the legacy media, defeated candidates, and their Democrat allies who still have their jobs will, in a single voice, decry the victory of white supremacy and misinformation in having brainwashed poor stupid Americans into voting against their best interests. No specific, legally-binding allegations of election fraud will occur, because the deep state has learned that accusations in the court of public opinion don’t require any evidence at all, are basically impossible to prosecute for libel, and are way more effective at their intended goal than actual criminal allegations. Lots of breathless articles in The Atlantic and The New York Times with headlines like “We All Know What Happened In November. Here’s What Needs To Happen Now.”

  • In the interests of “never again,” the deep state will double down on “misinformation” as the source of unacceptable election results and will begin selectively targeting campaign ads in all forms of media they can get their enforcement hands on to deplatform campaigns that represent dissent or change, including but not remotely limited to Trump’s inevitable 2024 bid. They will frame this as a moral crusade against “dark money” and “big business and billionaires sticking their dicks in Joe The Plumber’s democratic elections” and “Russian (but not ever, ever, ever Chinese) meddling” but the only dark money and dicks they will be going after will be those representing a disruption of the deep state and their anointed Uniparty puppets.

  • I think Hydra is actually gradually learning its lesson on this one and is going to try and build hegemony around surveillance-state-driven censorship and suppression of dissenting speech instead of just direct, mechanical cheating anymore (unless they figure out a dramatically new technique that the increasingly skeptical watchdogs haven’t thought of yet). We may even get something along the lines of “misinformation” being considered SO BAD that it will be comprehensively criminalized, and people with a criminal record of such things will be ineligible to hold public office, and anyway aren’t you deplorables supposed to be the “party of law and order,” hurr hurr?

    

    Want to sing that Mary Poppins song?

• So Twusk (Twitter + Musk; I’m so sorry) happened after all. I don’t have a ton to say. I intend to stay off it anyway; my entire career has shown me that it’s fundamentally bad for human brains, no matter who’s running it. I wish Musk well and hope it is, indeed, a victory for free speech, but I won’t be joining. I’m curious to see where he goes with it, especially with his plans to make it an omnipresent platform for other shit like PayPal-esque transactions and probably crypto. If anyone remains or returns to Twitter that wants to share or repost my content, go nuts, but I’m staying out here; Substack is as much a social media channel as I’m willing to engage.

  I am REALLY, REALLY enjoying the left losing its collective mind over this, though, and especially look forward to all the little thought police brownshirts having a nice loud temper tantrum when they lose their “do nothing at home in your pajamas” jobs.

• Hu wants some Wang? (If you don’t get it, I was just incredibly witty on at least two levels. Laugh along with everyone else or you’ll feel incredibly stupid in a few minutes.) Not God-Emperor Xi, that’s for sure. China has refused to disappoint me and has lived up to my every prediction of becoming the transparently vicious new empire state that will threaten world order while making the lives of its ant-farm citizens at home a living hell of the sort that Westerners make video games and sci-fi movies about. There are a lot of different ways to dress up totalitarian rule, but communists have the second-best uniforms, that’s for sure. I’m quite certain Peking (lol fight me) will be very interested to see what happens in 2024 and if anyone will even attempt to stop them; possibly the only interesting wrinkle is that they won’t be a friend of the WEF, which makes you wonder Hu will be. (I did it again. It’s hilarious.)

  

• I’ve saved this last piece of information to the end to reward your patience with my hijinks, because it’s arguable the most serious in its implications. It deals with recent events that have understandably concerned everyone, and some very dark secrets that I’ve decided to risk whatever harm comes my way to reveal to all of you.

  There is no dirty bomb. There is no nuclear plot. There will be no NATO military action in the Ukraine. There isn’t even a NATO, and there never was a Ukraine. There isn’t even a United States.

  It’s all a Russian false flag operation.

Guard this secret with your life.