This is what I grew up on:

I have four DVDs worth of old Looney Tunes digitized, and on two separate HDDs. Post-apocalypse, I will be an off-the-grid entertainment magnate.

I don’t guess you have to be extreme right-wing to be a survivalist*. It probably helps, what with all the guns and Bibles and stuff.

TFGlandia was introduced to Corb Lund by the esteemed Canuck Jane Finch several years ago. He’s a good Canuck, who lives in the iPod under the Texas Genre. Strongly recommended, and it looks like he’s got a new CD** out, so I just commenced the download.

*I’m informed that I’m not a survivalist any longer, rather, I’m a prepper. Kinda fits with the old Boy Scouts’ motto of Be Prepared. Rebranding, though, seems too New Agey.

**Oh, lookie…he’s got a song on it with Hayes Carll. From Dallas. Little bitty old world, huh?

FOR REASONABLE HAYSEEDS UPDATE: Not a survivalist? Try Cows Around:

Then you’re going to need to download this video on field-stripping and cleaning the AR-15:

The AR demands good cleaning for good running. I recommend watching this several times before beginning, and then during by using the pause & rewind.

Via Ace…

My all-time favorite Thanksgiving Day piece of pop culture:

I’m spending the day with the family. One brother is on the road, earning a living delivering consumer goods to a Sears store somewhere in the mid-South. As you might guess, I’m extremely thankful this year. Last year, I was just finished with the radiation treatment, and looking forward to a full month of no chemo, and I was completely & utterly weakified. This year, I’ll be doing twice-baked potatoes, asparagus with cheese sauce, and a gluten-free dressing (*shudder*), all of which were demanded requested by Mini-Me. My Sainted Mother will be doing the turkey & a green bean dish that doesn’t call for cream of mushroom soup, which will probably drive my younger overly-traditionalist brother around the bend. And I’ll be trying out a gluten-free beer bread.

Well, the point was to wish you & yours a happy Thanksgiving.

Specifically helps me buy the too-damn-many books I read, which are an enormous expense. When you shop through my Amazon ID, I get a small percentage credited to my account, and it doesn’t cost you anything extra — win-win!

To everyone who has shopped through my link, I thank you deeply. It’s greatly appreciated. And you can do it year-round, not just at Christmas time! Share it with your family and friends!

Stickied to the top for the holidays…scroll down for more fresh TFG, should you find you desire more of my unique insight on a sorry, yet beautiful, world.

Yesterday, it was waiting six hours for the dang Charter man to swing by and install cable internet at the doctor’s office of 40 years. They’ve been limping along with ATT DSL, but by jumping into the second decade of the 21st century with cloud-based electronic medical records…limping becomes paralyzed from the shoulders down. I was there as the “IT guy”, and I was doing infrastructure changes, for which you can read pulling cable. Except I couldn’t pull cable, as the extensive remodeling this joint has undergone over 40 years includes a shingled roof existing underneath another, higher, shingled roof. Roof #1 has a hole cut in it, but climbing through holes in roofs under roofs, well, that was 20 years in my rear-view mirror. So, I took the easy way out, and added a desktop switch on the other side of the office. None of which refers to the six-hour wait — “we will be there between 8am and noon” and they showed up at 2:30, so I’m rounding down. Two hours later, the new shizz is installed but only has one lonely blinking light which seems to mean that support has to activate it, and adios, gotta go to the next install. I’ll be going by to see if there are more lights going blinky-blinky and we have that blazing fast pipe, which actually isn’t blazingly faster, more like vastly bigger, but I don’t expect yall to understand that, maybe you do.

I’ll be on my way to my quarterly-for-me scan, a PET scan this time, and two weeks (TWO!) before the cancer doctor reads them, interprets them, and informs me of my fate for the immediate future, such as “carry on as you were” or “more chemo for you” or whatever might be more horrifying. That puts it past Thanksgiving, of course, a Thanksgiving I didn’t expect to see from the perspective of last year’s Thanksgiving. Actually all of this, being the “IT guy” and various other activities, I didn’t expect to see. I’ve got to change that outlook, I think, or not and continue to be gushingly thankful to my Lord that I am blessed. I need a synthesis of those two, somehow.

UPDATE: and now the cancer doctor’s people have called and, I quote here, “the PET tracer was coming in from Houston and it didn’t make it.” Absurdly, I picture a radioactivity symbol smoking a cigarette leaning on a car with it’s hood up on I-45 and Junior Brown’s Broke Down South Of Dallas playing in the background. More weeks of worry that I will endeavour to abstain from, as I have things to do.

Things such as drive to Rockwall and see if any more lights are going blinky-blinky.

The comedic aspects of this whole megillah get more comedic. The first murder of an American ambassador in 30 years is merely a ginned-up Republican distraction campaign from President Golfpants’ re-election. Mix in two crazy Lebanese 30-somethings with big boobs & miniskirts (& a super-weird twinned-up photo pose), Robin Leach-ish social aspirations, apparent gobs of money from what’s probably a vastly overworked husband, and you get something the Fourth Estate or Fifth Column, or whatever they style themselves as these days, absolutely positively cannot get their fill of.

You just can’t say Idiocracy often enough.

You know what would be funny? That poor deluded bastard who married the Social Climber of 2012 is off in Missouri for deer season, no phones and shit, and shows up Thursday or Friday, ready to relax and get back to earning to pay for the next OTT shindig that the nut wife already has on their holiday schedule. Really, what does he get out of all this honorary ambassadorship / social liaison would-you-please-put-a-picture-of-me-in-the-paper horseshit?

Steven Den Beste has had a stroke.

That guy is insanely bright. I pray for a full & total recovery.

Secession, y’all: Why Texas can pull it off

As of writing, the Texas petition to peacefully “withdraw” from the United States via the White House’s open petition webpage is up to 62,481 signatures, on its way to tripling the required names needed to trigger a response from the Obama administration. No doubt Texas’s desire to break free is a source of amusement inside a White House that has mastered the art of belittling the opinions of its challengers, but there is one not-so-small problem here: Texas could pull it off.

Well, I’m game to give it a go. Understand here, I’m the indigent fat guy with a terminal disease, so you can justifiably say that I’m just talking out my ass. But I’ve been saying it for a few years. I know the risks, or I think I do. I can envision the rewards, too, though. Me, I prefer to think big, swing for the fences, go for the big score…never believed in playing it safe. And really, I’d far rather spend my remaining time & energy working to make that particular project a success than just about anything else I can think of.

Beer Bread

Ingredients:

• 3 cups flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• ¼ cup sugar
• 1 beer (standard 12 oz, no tall boys)
• ¼ cup butter (aka half a stick), melted

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Mix dry ingredients and beer in a large bowl.
3. Dump into a greased pan.
4. Pour melted butter over dough.
5. Bake 50 minutes to 1 hour, until crust is golden brown.

I made two of these this weekend, the second one because I tore the first one getting it out of the pan, which I failed to grease well. Not a real fluffy bread, but you’re done in 1.5 hours. Tastes good, too. Open for experimentation with different beers, such as Shiner Bock. My uncle suggested Coors, since it’s unpasteurized. My next one I’m just going to shape it and plop it on a stone. It would be an awesome biscuit dough, if you can fade an hour waiting for biscuits to bake.

I am apathetic about the sausage. First off, it’s way too lean, like Michelle Obama or Michael Bloomberg were looking over their shoulder at the butcher shop. This food nanny bullshit has got to stop. Ergo, there will be no sausage gravy. Second off, it’s ground too fine. I prefer a coarser, looser grind, say one step down from a chili grind. So even if it had the necessary fat, sausage gravy would be odd. Third, it’s too sweet, kind of maple-y or something. This I blame on the continued infantilization of an America which consumes bubble gum vodka instead of good honest brown liquor. So that would make a super-weird sausage gravy. However, the sausage has a good pork taste, thanks no doubt to the fact that it was a mid-size sow at the end of summer. The bottom line is that I’ve learned my lesson with this butcher, and know what to ask for next time around. More fat, coarser grind, and leave out the maple syrup since this is for grown-ups.

There, aren’t you glad you wasted your time here?

Wednesday, November 7, 2012
The permanent sunset of the Republican party is begun
By Donald Sensing

I want to note briefly that the Reverend Sensing has been on my reading list since the dawn of the blog, and that he is a fount of wisdom. Ignore him at your own peril.

Currently listening to Born To Lose, by the great Ray Charles. Seriously, it snuck in on the ipod shuffle deal betwixt ZZTop & Steely Dan.

I’ve been giving serious thought to chicken ranching, and this kind of thing cracks me up: “What am I supposed to do, ask the chickens? How should I know? And why is there variety anyway?” The issue here for me would be the enormous volume of eggs. I can manage about two eggs per day, though I could wedge in a hard-boiled egg four or five days a week, which is about what, an hour of boiling, cooling, peeling, and containerizing for the icebox? Or…

Pickled eggs! With feral pigs feet! Gallon jar! I’ll become a McGuane novel.

I wouldn’t mind the ranching part, as long as the new hound is agreeable, if there someone to pay for the feed and take the extra output off my hands. Though I’m given to understand that the chicken egg can be coated with mineral oil and will remain edible for durn near a year.

“So our question is: at what point does the perpetually self-deluded US population finally admit to itself that when even 99 cent meals are no longer affordable, that this country has a problem?”

The feral hog breakfast sausage is ready at the butchers, and will be retrieved manana. First thing I’m going to make with mine is gonna be a nice breakfast taco, I think. Then, like the old days with my old man up in that Paris (TX), provided the sausage is edible, I’ll make a skillet of sausage gravy. We used to live on that, with biscuits. Of course, I also played tennis for three hours a night then, too, but whisky tango foxtrot…I got the cancer, I’m gonna eat like the hog that I am.

Oh, yeah — that’s why the Golden Arches is having a suck month. I reckon I can fix a baloney sammich for cheap.

Currently listening to Satan's Pilgrims ice it with Music To Watch Girls Go By. Also Music to Drink Beer To.

Feinstein rumored to be pushing semi-auto ban if Obama reelected

California Senator Dianne Feinstein‘s Washington, D.C. “…staff held meetings on Friday with FTB/ATF [Firearms Technology Branch/ Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] legal staff to discuss a new ‘Assault Weapons Ban,” Jim Shepherd of The Shooting Wire reported yesterday, characterizing the meeting as a “rumor” based on “pretty good intelligence.”

Feinstein’s rumored bill “would ban pistol grips and “high-capacity” magazines, eliminate any grandfathering and ban sales of ‘weapons in possession’” Shepherd writes.

We already know President Mulligan supports this — he said so right on national teevee. Hell, I told you this months or years ago, but I’m too rushed to look it up.

Well, America wants a Santa Claus and they got Santa Claus. It won’t hurt you to disarm yourself. Nothing bad ever came from that. Why would you need guns in Utopia?

The Belmont Club Manifesto

The future lies in building up new networks and methods for the purpose — if nothing else — of surviving the consequences of this gigantic incompetence.

The pisser is not having much left in the tank. Still, it is the way. It’s up to us.