Woden's Day Thing, 1/25/23

Divers Alarums

• This makes me very happy:

• I love reading pulp. Pulp is the American lit equivalent of Japanese kabuki theater: bright colors, bright lines, an emphasis in contrasts, usually morality plays (or cunning subversions thereof). I also love Westerns, sci-fi, and mythos horror. This seems pretty eclectic until you read anything by Joe Lansdale (of Hap and Leonard fame) who writes ALL OF THEM by the dozens and dozens and does them all well. It makes you wonder, briefly, if “genre” itself is an illusion and we’re all just reading the same two or three stories dressed up by our expectations and prejudices, but soon you realize that’s pretty gay.

Anyway. I just finished reading Bleeding Shadows (I’m using the Amazon link only because the book is out of print and copies are ludicrously expensive outside of Kindle editions), which is a fucking gargantuan short story collection that Lansdale wrote about 10 years ago that showcases his writing in every single one of the aforementioned genres, including an actually official original John Carter of Mars story about collectivism/transhumanism, “Metal Men of Mars.” Yes, I know it’s a decade old, but the man has written literally dozens of books and probably thousands of short stories and I’m still working through the Hap and Leonard novels again to catch up to the ones he dropped in the last 3 years. For an author as insanely prolific as Lansdale, I’m actually keeping up fairly well.

If you’ve never read Lansdale before, you can expect the surprising array of stories to include pretty much all of the following elements: set in the 50s, 60s, or 70s (1900s or 1800s, mind you); set in East Texas; honky-tonk style fisticuffs and violence more compatible with the rough emotions of busy men than with Tom Clancy sterility; commentary on race relations of the respective era without wokeness or preaching; likable, generally male anti-hero (but sometimes hero) protagonists; lots of cursing and dirty jokes. There’s plenty that his stories don’t have in common, but a surprising amount that they do.

Anyway, get you some. I’ve moved on to the non-serial novel Moon Lake, which I didn’t notice when it dropped in 2021 because my life was busy falling apart.

Also, if anyone knows where I can get Hap and Leonard impersonators that hire by the hour, I want to retain them for an, um, birthday party.

• I was recently turned on to 1440 News, a free (with ads) daily newsfeed with the explicit focus on unbiased, just-the-facts reporting. Yeah, I know. Shortly before COVID, when I was at the job I lost during COVID, our agency was marketing a similar product that was one of a small handful of similar brands- feeds promoting “neutral” or “balanced” reporting that were mainly just aggregators using human curation to try and have an equal number of left/right biased stories culled from mainstream media. None of them really took off.

  1440, as far as I can tell so far, is actually producing handwritten stories that are very carefully crafted, headlines included, to omit conjecture, opinion, or editorial slant. They’re currently just very brief articles about top news stories, but that’s honestly plenty for me as a daily digest. Anyway, it’s free, with relatively unobtrusive copy-only ads in the newsletter. Check it out.

• My knee has been doing extremely well. I haven’t been to PT for a few weeks now because of life, but activity has been pretty strenuous- the weather has been absolutely awful for at least a month, everything is swamped everywhere, BADLY, we sink almost to our knees getting out to the pastures to feed livestock. A sort of aggressive tingling has started all around the surgical area indicating nerve groups coming back online, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had swelling. I’ve ended up with moderate pain once or twice from over-exertion. I have a checkup with the surgeon tomorrow and in a month or so I’m going to start asking pointed questions about readiness to return to sports; I’m almost starting to forget what axes look like. That’s a lie.

• Last week we slaughtered one steer, one aged-out boar, and 7 chickens. The steer had a dressed weight of about 245 pounds of meat, the boar around 110. Enough for the whole Mouth clan to eat meat at least once a day for a year, which was the goal. This was our first harvest of animals we had entirely pastured ourselves, which is a small point of pride; I’ll report on what the meat quality is as we start tucking into it.

  • A side note about the chickens: we’re now at a point where we are drowning in eggs, and they’re FANTASTIC eggs; rich orange yolks, and we’ve only really moved the birds to commercial feed since winter started. After the slaughter we’re at (probably) 17 birds and are getting between 2 and 3 dozen eggs a week. About half the culled birds from last week are plump enough for us to eat as meals; the rest are pressure cooked and will be the protein base for a few weeks of homemade dog food (our dogs have only eaten homemade since infancy) which saves us using our ground beef. From a survivalist/self-sufficiency/prepper standpoint, really nothing beats chickens. We could seriously just have gone all-in on poultry and would have insane abundance at this point (but the beef and pork is very, very nice to have). I highly recommend ANYONE keeps chickens that can get away with it, and I highly recommend steering clear of commercial roaster breeds (once you get your feet wet with keeping them, at least) and stick to heritage breeds so you can breed a sustainable population. In just three generations we’ve gotten to some very good genetics (I’m very happy with the Jersey Giant/Barred Plymouth Rock crosses so far). They’re also stupidly easy to keep without having to become obsessed with mastering a new skill base, though they’re equally fun to take seriously if you want to.

• I’m kind of surprised that it only now came to me, but as I was reading some WEF and public health horseshit about eggs, I found myself specifically noticing how much the focus of all the things the authoritarian trenders want to radically redesign or eliminate from daily life seems to be things people ENJOY. Notice the loudest trumpeting about what we need to do to stop climate change or vaccine injury sudden death or racism is stuff that makes us happy? It’s never anything most people are indifferent to or ignorant of; it always seems to be about sacrifice. Most of what has been heralded as “progress” throughout history was things that were ostensibly going to make people happier or make work easier or improve social harmony? If I were a despotic social engineer, I would think you’d have to occasionally promote changes that people are actually excited or happy about amidst taking away all their rights and stuff. It feels like social manipulation 101, in fact: convince people they’ll be happier or more prosperous doing the thing you want them to do even if that’s exaggerated or false. Has anyone presented an UPSIDE to taking away our diets, lifestyles, energy, homes, and cultures, apart from “we must do this to stop a constantly erroneously predicted extinction?” I feel like that isn’t a sustainable motivation even for GOOD ideas, especially when the sky never seems to fall on time.

  Something something nothing left to lose?

  

Catch you on the other side of my hash browns.