With the last-minute Christmas shopping crap, that is. I didn’t do much — some stuff for Herself, some stuff for mi madre, and for my brothers. We brothers do our best not to exchange gifts with each other because a) there are just too damn many people to buy for, and b) my mom won’t countenance a name exchange*, but I’m a little flush this year, so I got them…something I like. The Ka-Bar USMC standard fighting knife. I get away with this because my pa was a huge knife man…loved them, in all shapes and sizes, collected them by the boatload. “Just keeping the memory alive.” Neither one of them will probably ever use them, but if they do nothing more than put it in a drawer and some future generation finds it, then that’s fine, too.

For me and my “keeping the memory alive”, becuase I got the knife bug deeply and truly** from the old man, I snagged the Cold Steel Recon Tanto. I think it’s probably the purtiest, knicest knife I’ve ever owned. I’m afraid to pick it up, for fear of dropping it and scratching it. Something else for the next generation.

* I’m going to propose doing it without her in the mix this year, and see if I can make it stick.

** Except, I can’t sharpen a knife to a decent edge to save my life. It’s completely embarassing. I’ve tried everything, all kinds of contraptions and stones and steels and diamonds, short of just doing it daily and practice, practice, practice. My dad could sharpen a knife, any knife, enough to shave with. All of his knives, every single one, was like a razor blade. On my first trip to a deer lease, in the back seat supposedly asleep, I pulled my dad-sharpened Buck out of the sheath to look at in the moonlight. My fingers looked like hamburger in two whole seconds…bleeding like a stuck pig. By the time I got it put put back in the sheath, it was covered in blood. My dad and his deer-camp buddies had a good laugh over that the next day.

I like most of Bob Cringely’s stuff, but this is plain stupid:

It may sound simplistic, but what would have happened had we simply bought a Toyota Prius for the 10 million American households that currently burn the most gasoline?

I daresay most of those households have big trucks sitting in the driveway, and those drivers have to haul shit around. That shit they haul around is a living, and it feeds the rest of the economy. Look, telecommuting works and driving smaller cars works…unless you have to move a pump or a transformer or an RV four counties over.

Sorry, but the boneheaded tunnel vision here, all in the service of delivering an anti-war message, gives me the creeps. Another elite who doesn’t know what’s going on out in the hinters to keep those Priuses humming along is counter-productive.

I shelled out $40 for a smoked turkey from Dickey’s today. That’s crazier than dang hell, but the problem with me cooking for Christmas is that the memory of shopping, prepping, cooking and then cleaning up from Thanksgiving is much, much too close. I’m already on the hook for a breakfast, with attendant whines and moans about pork sausage, fatty bacon and regular old white eggs. You’d think I’d given all these people salmonella or E. coli everytime I ever turned on a burner, or held a gun to their head while they spooned a can of Crisco into their unwilling mouths.

Somehow, the undeniable fact that they enjoy my cooking is utterly uncoupled in their minds with the fact that I don’t cook like some Birkenstock-wearing, yoga-bending, Oprah-channeling, hippie-freak Frisco hausfrau wandering through the Organic Grains aisle at Whole Foods.

I think the problem here is that I learned to cook from women & men who fed people who worked. They’d go out and feed the cows or bust some brush or chunk a lure all day or try to walk up a whitetail. Over the years, though, that’s pretty much a “not so much.” Toughest thing I have to do somedays is click the blockquote button. I probably should go organic tofu grains, but man, that stuff sucks.