A Smaht Cah

 

More on 'roos and wallabies

Don Curton asked "Video clearly misses on several important topics, like choice of caliber, cleaning instructions, and recipe ideas."

Part of one night's haul for a professional shooter. Images from 24hourcampfire's Australia forum.

Professional 'roo hunters (often a second "night" job) are hired by farmers with kill permits and the hunters get to keep the carcasses.

The caliber of choice for professional 'roo hunters is .223 Remington or 5.56X45mm NATO with a minimum of a 50 grain bullet. The LEGAL minimum is .222 Rem with a 50 grain bullet but .223 Rem is more available and less expensive.

The trailer of a "chiller" who buys 'roo carcasses

The "chillers", i.e. the carcass buyers, will only buy 'roos that have been head-shot. A 'roo's skull is much more fragile than the skull of a goat, it doesn't take much to penetrate it.

Much of the hunting is done at night with artificial light or with IR night-vision. LINK

The 'roo's tail is the prime cut and is "fatty" like beef-brisket. Most of the rest of the carcass is lean and has been shipped to the US to add to "hamburger". There was a minor scandal when a major fast-food restaurant was found to be adding 'roo meat to the burgers in their "hoppy meals". 

Song HERE

Video of making

wallaby stew here.

Note: Wallaby are like smaller, less aerobic 'roos and feral populations exist in the U.K., New Zealand, France, and Austria. With a reproductive rate of about one-per-year-per-female, they are not tremendously fecund.

Change my mind

Any government work that can be done from home can be done more cheaply from Bangalore or Bangkok or Bucharest.

Thanks to all of the selfless government workers for piloting the concept. Your transition to coding should not be that difficult.

Could have been worse

Mao Zedong was feeble in his old-age and his wife ran a shadow government and justified her commands as 'coming from Mao himself'.

Under her tenure, the median estimate for "excess deaths" due to atrocities during the Cultural Revolution was 2 million.

That pales beside the death-toll from The Great Leap Forward with estimates between 15 million and 55 million. It is not know what, if any, roll Jiang Qing Zedong played in The Great Leap Forward.

NEMA plugs/recepticles for future reference

 

Simplified

Non-locking

Amperage of plug/recepticle must have wire-gauge to support. That is, 50A plugs must have 6 AWG copper conductors or thicker, 30A must have 10 AWG copper conductors or thicker, 20A plugs must have 12 AWG copper conductors or thicker.

Ampacity of breakers must not exceed the ampacity of the plug/recepticle OR the ampacity of the wire.

McInflation

Graphic courtesy from the Visual Capitalist

If the McChicken sandwich's price increases tracked with the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment, it would cost $1.32 in 2024 instead of $2.99.

Chicken, it ain't caviar

Charles Hugh Smith once noted that the COLA is bullshit. All of the things we don't need to survive drop in cost while all of the things that we need to survive go up in price.

The price per gigabyte capacity of SD cards gets cheaper every year. How many gigabytes of memory do you need to keep your body-temperature above ambient?

The cost of eggs and rice and beans and oatmeal go up.

The odds of being attacked by a kangaroo are low, but never zero

 

The primary way they fight with each other is to grip their opponents head with their front legs, rear back on their tail and lash-out with their very strong, rear legs, attempting to disembowel their opponent.

Kangaroos have a gristle-plate below their rib-cage, much like a wild-boar's gristle plate in his shoulder area to help them survive this kind of attack.

Kangaroos take dogs into water and drown them.

A male Red Kangaroo can tip the scales at 200 pounds.

Old Houses and Ghosts

My belief in the super-natural is very limited. I believe in angels and I believe Satan exists. Based on the text in Luke 16, I believe that those who slipped their mortal coil have very limited to no ability to communicate with us. I also have a (mostly) clear conscience so even if haints are a thing, they would have issues getting much traction.

But I do believe in a different kind of ghost. I believe that we leave our imprint on everything we touch. People who own and live in a house stamp the house with their personality. The older the house, the more imprints.

Some houses are Instagram, ginger-bread perfect. Their owners are meticulous, are attentive to aesthetics and clearly invest resources in keeping their finger on the pulse of what is fashionable.

Other houses have more of the "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" vibe. That doesn't mean that the houses are shabby, but floor coverings and paint are renewed after they are worn out and not because the "Color palette is dated". I would like to think that our house falls into this category.

Another kind of house is the "All hat and no cows" statement. Lots of square-feet under roof, including various outbuildings. Like Banana Republic, tin-pot dictators' public-works, the footprint vastly overshot the budget available for maintenance.

The final kind of house I want to mention is perhaps the saddest of all. It is the house of broken dreams. It is usually an older house. A young couple stretches to buy it, thinking they found a bargain. And then they discover it is a ticking time-bomb of deferred maintenance: Old plumbing, obsolete mechanical systems with no parts support, bubble-gum and scotch-tape repairs from generations of previous, overly-optimistic owners.

The house of broken dreams breaks the backs of each owner in their own turn. Some divorce because of the stress and neither cannot afford it. Others add more toothpaste fixes to the plaster and lamp-cord electrical wiring and other ad-hoc "fixes" before they dump the property on the next set of dreamers.

The only happy endings for the house of broken dreams is if the new owners had the foresight to have budget to catch-up on the worst of the deferred maintenance. You can call me a liar, but that might be as much as 20%-to-40% of the sale price. Or, if they recognize what they got themselves into, live well below their "means" and slowly, hand-over-hand invest in the property to get it back up to snuff. Many times, that involves an interim fix to buy a few more years and then a "good" fix to actually correct all of the deeply layered ugliness.

Stay away from crowds

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/reported-fatalities-bourbon-street-after-vehicle-plows-crowd-during-new-years

Ten reported as dead and over 30 reported as injured after a truck plowed into a crowd at approximately 3:15AM local time.

"The thing about experience is that you don't get it until just after you needed it." That is a quote from a different story.