Taint

(NOTE: Belladonna is at the Homecoming dance.  I am staying up until she gets home.  I am posting this story to kill time.)

One of the more puzzling parts of parenting is what to do when your boy is Taint.

Taint is that awkward period that, for boys, seems to last between 16 and 26 years of age.  They taint kids anymore, but they taint full-growed adults, either.

This story was shared with me by Kenny Siefert of Springport, Michigan.  I claim to have taken artistic license with it.  That way, anybody mentioned in this story can claim..."That never happened.  He just made that part up."

Kenny was a third shift electrician.  It suited how he chose to live life.  He was a farmer who raised about 30 Angus-Simmental cross beef calves a year.  Beef farming was good to him.  It paid the taxes without placing undue demands on his time.  Mostly, it gave him an excuse to get out of the house.

Rattlesnakes

One of Kenny's favorite passtimes was to run the woods with "Rattlesnake" Dick Haley.  "Rattlesnake" is an uncommon nickname in Michigan, so it merits some explaining.  "Rattlesnake" fell into a deal with a local pharmaceutical company that was breaking into the anti-venom trade.  They needed a goodly supply of rattlesnakes on a steady basis, and that is where "Rattlesnake" shone.

There is only one species of rattlesnake native to Michigan, the pathetic Massasauga Rattlesnake.

Rattlesnakes like it HOT!  Michigan is not.  So the Massasauga Rattlesnake is about as at-home in Michigan as an anorexic Los Angeles model on a Steelhead stream in November.

"Rattlesnake" had this all figured out.  A lifetime of hunting mushrooms, picking berries and tomatoes and gathering firewood informed his uncanny ability to fill a bag with snakes.

Some people claimed he could smell them.

Kenny liked nothing better than stomping around the woods with "Rattlesnake"  rolling rotten stumps over, looking for 'rattlers.  The most fun was when you took a new guy.  Typically, the rattlesnakes will just lay there, coiled up and as energetic as a hobo with a moonshine hangover.  But sometimes there would be a Blue Racer beneath the stump and they are LIVELY.  And you cannot always bang out a quick ID as you squint through the bottoms of your steamed up bi-focals.  The new guys gave some amazing lessons on levitation until they figured out that rattlesnakes don't move.

On one expedition, "Rattlesnake" and Kenny did really well.  They collected well over their quota, even after letting the bent-up ones go.  Kenny asked if he could try to keep one of the extras.

You see, the reason the pharmaceutical company needed a steady supply is because rattlesnakes cannot be kept in captivity.  They just don't eat.  They wither away.  Kenny knew he had a fair hand at getting sick calves to eat and thought he would like to give rattlesnakes a whirl.  There might be a little more money in it than in beef calves.

So Kenny picked out a healthy looking 24 inch specimen and installed it in a styrofoam beer cooler.  He put a piece plate glass over the top and furnished it with a few chunks of wood and a rock or two.

Mostly, Kenny concentrated on collecting "pinkies", hairless baby mice he would find beneath bales of hay.  He thought he got the snake to eat one or two but could not be sure.  He was not too keen on sticking his hand in the cooler and stirring around the furniture to see if any of them had crawled out of sight.

After a month or two Kenny kind of lost interest due to bow hunting season's imminent approach.

Kenny's son

Kenny's son was Taint.  He lived in a single-wide behind the barn where Mom did not have to feel obliged to keep an eye on him or get aggravated by what she might see.

Kenny's son put that styrofoam beer cooler on a low table where he could keep an eye on it.  Kenny's son had a plan.  He figured that a grown up snake probably wanted grown up meat...to heck with the veal.  So he caught a mouse with a little hair on it and tossed it into the cooler.  The mouse caught onto the plan pretty quick and commenced to doing Daytona qualification laps around the beer cooler.  The snake must have been a NASCAR fan because he seemed to perk right up.  Kenny's son could almost start counting the money.

Magic

Kenny's son had a girlfriend and he had learned a little bit of magic.  He learned that if one carefully selected the right movie (An Officer and a Gentleman comes to mind), added generous amounts of cold Pink Chablis graciously served in Dixie cups, and make the mobile home cozy-toasty warm.....then clothes disappeared!  This was a magic trick that he took great pleasure in practicing at every opportunity.

In anticipations of the evening's magic show, Kenny's son cranked up the thermostat to something north of 75 degrees and went to work.

Fast forward

While nibbling on his girlfriend's earlobe, Kenny's son's eyes strayed to the hither-to-forgotten snake cooler.  There was a round, dark spot in the side that he did not remember being there before.  The round spot was somewhere between the diameter of a quarter and a fifty cent piece.

Ever the gentlemen, he also noticed that his girlfriend's Dixie cup was empty.  He asked if she would like some more refreshment, untangled himself and picked up the cups.  He just happened to walk by the cooler on the way to the refrigerator and look through the plate glass cover.  No mouse.  No snake.

After handing the-love-of-his-life her cup, he casually asked her, "So, what do you think about snakes?"

One thing led to another. We can assume that the situation was exacerbated by the feelings of vulnerability that accompany being dressed in only panties and a bra.  She stood on the exact, geometric center of the coffee table after kicking off all the stray "cover" that might provide an approach for assault by a snake.

I have great sympathy for the boy.  Most people lose focus after hearing the words "venomous snake" and don't generally register words like, "small" and "sluggish" and "pet".  Girls who have consumed copious quantities of Pink Chablis seem particularly unfocused in this regard.

The mood was broken

There are some distractions that you can recover from.  Some are things that you can laugh about a year later.  Passing gas....a door that blows open...a power failure.

Unfortunately for Kenny's son, having your girlfriend dance like a dervish for two hours while you hunt down a prime specimen of Michigan's only species of poisonous snake is not one of those savable events.  At least not that evening.  Not even when watching An Officer and a Gentleman.

In retrospect, recapturing the snake would have been far simpler if the trailer had not been carpeted with green-gold shag carpeting.  At least, the carpet was green-gold in the few locations that were shielded from 20 years of hard living.  And that is where he found the snake.  It was stretched out along the baseboard behind the dresser in his bedroom.  About 2 inches of the tail was visible.

Boys do a lot of learning and growing up in the Taint years.  It just takes time.

Politics 8-(

I try to avoid discussing politics.

People's opinions have polarized.  There seem to be more low-information voters than ever before.  I believe that is because we lost many of our shared sources of information.  We now have 4473 channels of cable and are wired to 18 separate devices.  OK, I made those numbers up....but you almost believed it.

The stagnate recovery also contributes to the polarization.  Every other recovery was like a super-ball bouncing off the pavement.  This recovery has been more like a raw egg hitting the pavement.  All we see is our own little slice of reality and we wonder, "Who short-stopped my piece of the cheese?"  That makes us mad.

Some snippets from the news:

From Sultan Knish

The government shutdown has forced Obama to make do with only a quarter of his 1,701 person staff. That would leave 436 “vital” employees. The 90 people who look after his living quarters would be slashed to 15 to “provide minimum maintenance and support”.

On Twitter, Michelle Obama announced that she is unable to Tweet on her own without the aid of all of her sixteen assistants; many of whom take home six figure salaries. There are more directors, associate directors and deputy associate directors on Michelle Obama’s staff than there were in George Washington’s entire administration.

From Breitbart

Shawn Moran, Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council,<snip> claimed that Border Patrol management has begun the practice of ordering Border Patrol Agents to stand down and cease pursuing drug smugglers, human smugglers and traffickers, and illegal aliens. He also warned it could lead to illegal aliens entering the country from nations associated with terrorism.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s drugs, bodies, or how large the group is, our agents are being ordered to stand down by Border Patrol management,” said Moran. "I have received reports from our agents in every single sector from San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that they are receiving these orders."

From Fox

The U.S. military has...Catholic chaplains...banning them from celebrating weekend Mass. At least one chaplain was told that if he engaged in any ministry activity, he would be subjected to disciplinary action.

A well-placed source told me that a furloughed Air Force chaplain was threatened after he offered to forgo pay. The chaplain was told he could not go on base or enter his chapel offices. He was also barred from engaging in any ministry activity.

Precinct Ball-Busting

The behaviors listed above may have some utility in The Big City.  Precinct Ball-Busting is used to keep order within the political machine.  But the foundation beneath those behaviors is the Democratic monopoly on power within those big cities.  Monopolies are notorious for boorish behaviors.  Their customers have no other choice.

The Chicago politicians who are in the highest circle of the Executive Branch returned to their roots when they did not get their way.  Those roots are no longer embedded in their native soil.  The United States is more heterogenous than Chicago.

We have choices.

Thanks, Captain

Next time, I paint over the label before relabeling to eliminate read-through.

Romance

It has been a big week for romance at the ERJ house.

It is Homecoming week in Eaton Rapids.

Kubota

Kubota's girlfriend broke up with him.  It lasted two and a half weeks, which was about 10 days longer than we expected.  For most kids in 8th grade, "dating" is mostly about drama and being on center stage.

The extraordinary longevity of the romance appears to be related to the fact that they don't share any classes.  The script requires that the break-up occur in public (otherwise, how would anybody know that you had been dating?)

That left lunch time as the only available time slot for the theatrics.  The difficulty was that lunchtime break-ups are booked 10 days in advance.  It would be WAY tacky to have two break-ups going on at the same time.  Who would the diner's watch for their entertainment?

The first hint we had that Kubota had been through the trauma was when he showed up wearing his favorite hoodie.  That's what dating in Eaton Rapids Middle School means.  The girl is wearing the boy's hoodie.

I think the origin of the practice was from TV.  The two love interests go home together from a bar.  The next morning the girl is fixing stirring coffee in the guy's kitchen while wearing one of his hoodies.  Most guy kitchens I have seen the girl would be better served wearing shower sandals and carrying a taser.

Other than the fact that Eaton Rapids 8th graders rarely pick up girls in bars, transport them home or drink coffee.....wearing hoodies makes perfect sense.  They sure are much cheaper than rings.

Kubota is recovering emotionally.  The fact that Captain learned of Kubota's recent travails and dropped off the following item helped.

Belladonna

As of Wednesday, Belladonna had not been asked out to Homecoming.  It was starting to wear on her.

She has boat loads of friends who are guys.  She hangs out with them.  She studies with them.  She hunts, she fishes, she lifts weights with them, she watches football with them.

It is a huge annoyance to many of her friends who are girls.  They pine away waiting for the guys to call while Belladonna is deadlifting with them and punching them on the shoulder.

But the boys don't see her as a "romance interest".

So she waited.  And waited.  And waited.

She called her study-buddy (a guy who already has a girlfriend) and 'splained the situation.  He then made a few phone calls.

Minor drama ensued.

She was asked out (by text, I assume) early Thursday morning.  She accepted.  It is with her best friend-who-is-a-guy.

Meanwhile, I need to find a file to sharpen the German Shepherd's teeth and inventory my supply of pepper spray and buckshot.  My youngest daughter is going on a date.

Homegrown Insecticide

Harvesting the insecticide

Let one go to seed for next year

Curing shed

Locked and guarded

Tragedy of the Commons (revisited)

Garrett Hardin wrote The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968.  He was writing primarily about unbridled population growth.  The following is excerpted from that article because it is so deeply buried in the article.  Significant snipping used by ERJ:

We (will) call it "the tragedy of the commons," using the word "tragedy" as the philosopher Whitehead used it (7): "The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things."

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" This utility has one negative and one positive component.

 1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

 2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of 1 (ERJ note:  If there are 50 cattle on the common at the time of the decision, then the negative component will be -1/50 or -2%)

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. (ERJ note:  Or adding the 51st animal would result in a net gain of 0.98 to the decisionmaker)  And another; and another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. 

Conscience Is Self-Eliminating

 ---End Excerpt---

Another item in the news is that Karl Denninger is pulling the plug on his blog.  He is the editor of The Market Ticker.  He lists many reasons why he is pulling the plug, but they appear to be many manifestations of The Tragedy of the Commons, where the commons is not a plot of pasture but, rather, the US economy and the herdsmen are Government bureaucrats.  

Critique:

The first European settlers in North America were able to act as if forests, the fish and game, and the fertile soil were an unlimited resources.  Those resources were vast and the settlers were few.

Franklin Stove.  Picture from here.

In time, it became apparent that the resources were not unlimited.  Benjamin Franklin invented the Franklin Stove in response to a firewood shortage in Philadelphia in the 1740s.

Advocates of Big Government view the Economy in the same way that the first Europeans viewed the shores of Virginia....as an infinite stage upon which they are actors with the moral imperative to subdue it.

Like the herdsmen, advocates of Big Government are not a monolithic entity.  Rather, they are a disorganized hodge-podge of agenda driven actors.  

The math behind their decision making is the same math that makes the overgrazing of the commons inevitable.  

So, what does an overgrazed pasture look like?

Glad you asked.  All examples from Eaton County, Michigan.  Photographed October 2, 2013.

Contestant Number One

Contestant Number One is a poster child for overgrazing.  Ground is dominated by sub-soil, rocks and gullies.  Lush hay field in background indicates that this ground was capable of growing 6000 pounds of dry matter per growing season...before it was degraded.  It probably produces less than 300 pounds per acre now.  Ironically, this property is owned by a family who sell animals that consistently win blue ribbons at the county fair.

From the standpoint of gross productivity  this patch of ground has been reduced to a virtual moonscape.

Contestant Number Two

Contestant Number Two yields more metaphors than edible dry matter.  It looks productive, but the dominant plant species are Canadian Thistle and Jimson Weed.  

Canadian Thistle's has multiple competitive advantages.  It spreads readily by rhizome (root) and via massive numbers of seeds.  The seed can blow for miles before settling down to await developments.  It is a copious producer of thorns that puncture with great gusto and frequency.

Jimson Weed is toxic.  Not only is it poisonous, it seems to revel in the fact, being foul of odor and bitter of taste.

So an overgrazed pasture can look productive, but in fact be dominated by species that puncture, cut, maim and poison with gleeful abandon.

Contestant Number Three

Contestant Number Three receives my vote for "Best metaphor for the US Economy".

The short pale green grass in the background appears productive.  It is bluegrass that has been clipped as short as the grass of a golf green.  While it may appear productive, it has no resilience.  The roots are as short as the blades of grass and this grass will turn brown and go dormant at the first whiff of a dry spell.

In the foreground Milkweed (toxic and bitter), Canadian Thistle (the curse is everywhere) are in the process of overtaking the canopy.  Off camera various portions of this pasture are being taken over by Jimson Weed and Elderberry (toxic).

How to heal overgrazing

Overgrazing is misnamed.  Overgrazing is a two-fold issue:  Too little time for recovery between haircuts and un-equal application of canopy removal.

Like the very short grass shown in Contestant number Three, short blades of grass equate to short roots.  Short roots cannot mine the soil moisture nor the plant nutrients in the soil.  Consequently those plants produce little.  Allowing more time between hair cuts allows the blades of grass to grow longer, push down deeper roots, store up reserves so the plant can quickly rebound after the hair cut.

The second part of overgrazing is allowing the grazing animals too much time to select their dinner.  They over harvest the nutritious, palatable species (honest businessmen and tax payers) while avoiding the less palatable species (the toxic and painful).

The solution is to leave the pasture alone until it is ready to harvest.  Pulse the harvest by placing a large number of hungry animals on the pasture for a short time.  They will harvest with minimal "preferential treatment".  Once a year, or so, mow the pasture with mechanical means to ensure that "preferential treatment" that is inevitable gets redressed.

A final option to ensure that the most productive elements are favored is to wick apply a contact herbicide like Round-up.  Set the wick high enough so it brushes the tops of the Canadian Thistle and Jimson Weeds but passes over the clover and palatable grasses.

Farmer Dennis

I was riding a combine with neighbor many years ago.  I commented that I had deep admiration for how the Desgrange family exercised stewardship over the land they farmed.

I asked the farmer next to me, "Why don' all farmers treat their land as well as the Desgranges?"

His response went to the jugular of the matter.

"They own it."

Treadmills, bees and apples

My left eye is improving by leaps and bounds.  I walked on the treadmill at the gym.  This is the view from my "regular" ride.

I see a lot from up here.  I see busted up men and women coming in for physical rehab.  Some of the busted up people are really old.  Some of them are middle age.  A few are young. Most of the couples are touching in their concern for each other.  I see moms coming in for appointments and bringing rafts of kids.  I saw 4 year old boys doing very proficient cartwheels in the parking lot.  I see Farmer's market on Fridays.

I watch traffic streaming along M-50.

After dropping off my gym partner I ran the 4.5 mile run and was not bothered by my eye.  Yeah!

Captain

Late the other night, before I caught the sharp stick in the eye, I got a call on my cell phone from Captain.

"Are you home?" he asked.

"Yup."  I said.

"Don't go anywhere.  I am on my way over."  he said.

It turns out that he found ANOTHER feral beehive.  He waited until dark thinking things would go better.  They had settled into an old speaker box that somebody had pitched into the tall weeds.  He carefully placed the speaker box in a top-bar hive, placed the top-bar hive atop some swim noodles for padding in the back of his Gator and started driving this way.

The bees did not like his script and started improvising.  He was on the Gator getting stung when he called me.

He whipped up the driveway and stopped in front of the garage.  He leapt off the Gator and dashed inside.

"They are yours now.  Bring the Gator back in the morning."  he said.

I put on a face net and some winter cover-alls.  I got on the Gator and moved them out of my driveway and next to a barn.

The speaker is too big to fit inside the top-bar hive so the lid does not fit.  One of the noodles did not make it back inside the Gator.

I am now the proud owner of four bee hives.  Two of them are courtesy of Captain.  I may have to buy him a bottle of snake bite medicine....or bee sting medicine.  I understand Wild Turkey Rare Breed is good stuff.

Apple seedlings

One of the joys of my life is sampling apples from apple seedlings as they come into bearing.  I am the first human being to taste them and I get an explorer's thrill.  Goldrush seedlings continue to impress.  You can never really know who the papa was, but in my orchard it is a good bet that Melrouge fathered a goodly percentage of the Goldrush seedlings.
 
The seedlings are late.  They are hard.  They have quite a bit of starch (powdery flesh) that will turn to sugar as they age so they should increase in sweetness.  They hang tenaciously. Size is adequate. I tagged two trees with green flutter tape to keep track of them.
 
It is a pity that my camera cannot capture the flavors of these apples.

Dry Firing 

I started doing some dry firing.

One of this blog's mottos is "Too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash.", so what you hear will not be pretty.

Like many people in the hinterboonies, I have at least one shooting iron squirreled away in a place where it might come in handy.  That is one of the guns I decided to dry fire.

Well, the locks on the lock-box were distinctly gritty and did not turn smoothly.  Hmmm!  Make a note to lubricate them.  

Once out of the box, I noticed that the hog-leg was missing the cylinder.  My memory is that, at one time, it seemed advisable to have an additional degree of separation due to unpredictable kid behaviors.  Dang, where is that cylinder.  

Fifty-eight seconds later the cylinder was located and installed.  That would have taken much longer on a dark night with a goblin knocking on the door.  We are going to have to rethink that. 

Dry firing drills were executed.  Locks were lubricated with ATF.  Gun was stowed with the cylinder in place.  Lock box was stowed in its designated place.