Saturday, March 1, 2025

You have to have been raised Catholic


I know it's horribly unfair to force upon you a sight like that over breakfast, but there is method in the madness. Look closely at what he says. If it rings a bell, you were either raised Catholic or you participated in anti-abortion marches or protests.

The idea that someone who might eventually cure cancer shouldn't be deported because they're an illegal is the same justification The Catholic Church has been using for millennia to forbid any and all forms of birth control among practicing Catholics, abortion included. You can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy.

The Airborne Ranger in the Sky does get his little laugh now and again.

 

Thursday, February 27, 2025

It all makes sense.


We knew Social Security was crooked, but it took Elon Musk and the Whiz Kids to show us just how crooked. This is why the Democrats were always screaming, "They gon' take away you Sosh Security". They knew once somebody started digging, they'd find the biggest scandal in American history.

When it started, it was basically a second income tax without any of the exemptions or deductions. At a time when it was only for people who worked outside the home and set retirement at 65, most men's life expectancy was 57 - 62. So that little bribe to put up with another income tax slipped right through.

Then came the end of WWII and with it, the introduction of antibiotics into the civilian market. Now men lived to 65 and beyond and the Demos found a political cash cow, so they demagogued anyone who wanted to make it better.

Until the Lone Ranger and his faithful African companion began investigating. Now people are finding out how they've been had.


Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Saturday, February 22, 2025

On Fun & Change

Sometimes I come across one that makes me laugh out loud.  Today, it was this from Powerline's "1 Down, 47 to Go" collection of Week in Pictures: 



Friday, February 21, 2025

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

On Picking & Choosing

 



Senator John Kennedy:  "...And most of the time, Americans look at this and they go, these people are about ten times past normal. And that’s what’s killing the Democrats right now, in my opinion."  

Thursday, February 13, 2025

More walnut stories

 

Walnut is a wonderful wood to work with, it has been prized for centuries, and people like walnut things - furniture, bowls, heck, walnuts themselves. Let us delve into some of its attributes.

Let’s start with the trees themselves - they are very good looking trees with compound, opposite leaves, and in the open they crown out nicely.

I planted this one in 2012 after I moved into my current house. I took this picture of my dog Boudreaux and the sapling when the tree was about two years old:

Boudreaux didn’t like having her picture taken in her later days, but I tried to get a picture of her next to that tree every year. She was a great dog.

I have planted a total of a dozen walnut trees here and in a good year (proper amount of rain, no late freezes and so on) I get a lot of walnuts just from my yard:

That’s a lot of walnuts! I like sprouting them and planting more trees. I think of it as paying it forward.

My turning teacher lives a couple of counties east of here and he has tree guys deliver logs to his place. In the past I would take my saw over there and saw the giant logs and he would pay me with slabs or turning chunks.

I got a nice slab out of that pile, and the burl in the foreground became a nice bowl:

This slab is from out at that farm.

A few years later I got some walnut from local walnut that was knocked over in an ice storm.

Some of the pieces from that tree had a nice contrast between the heart wood and the pale sapwood:

I rough turned them into bowl blanks:

Then I finish turned them.

There is another story about that tree that I have to write. As I sawed the downed log into manageable sized chunks then ripped the chunks in half, I kept hitting nails.

Seriously, I had never encountered another tree in my decades of sawing that had that much tramp metal in it. Sure, one finds random pieces of stuff in trees - one time I sawed a beer bottle in half - it had been set on a tree and the tree grew over it.

This is a piece of sweetgum wood that my sawing buddy Mikey had been working on, he kept hitting this and when he stopped to sharpen his saw I cut around the obstacle and found this - an old glass insulator that had been attached to a tree to support a wire of some sort. Given the nature of sawing it is inevitable that one finds such things with a newly sharpened saw. Murphy wrote about that.

But back to the walnut tree - I would make a cut and the chain would become dull. It seemed like I hit metal every time I made a cut, but that’s probably an exaggeration. It was probably only about 50% of the time. I split out some pieces and I collected some of the bits of chain-dullers:

It was an impressive array of nails and other fasteners and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what was going on with that tree.

I was working on the tree and around noon a bleary eyed guy stumbled up to me as I was sharpening my saw.

“What you doin’?”

“Sharpening my saw - I keep hitting nails” I replied.

“Oh yeah”, he said, “I built a tree house in this tree when I was a kid and I nailed boards into the trunk so I could climb up to it.”

Well, there you have it. Mystery solved. He was probably about 40 years old and had lived in that place since he was a kid. And, if you know how kids nail things together you know that he had used all the nails he could obtain. And, of course, the tree had overgrown them and they were no longer visible on the surface and the rungs of his makeshift ladder had long since rotted away.

I swear I found every single nail he used. But the wood was beautiful and frequent sharpening was a small price to pay for such nice walnut.

“Thanks for explaining that”, I said.

“No problem”, he replied. “Now I’ve got to get my mind right” and he went inside and came out with a 24 ounce beer, which he proceeded to drink. Hell, it was noon, so go for it, bro. It’s five o'clock somewhere!

Sawing is never a dull (argh!) or boring job. The human element just makes it all the more fascinating.

I am pretty sure this small bench was made out of wood from that tree. I suppose I could run a metal detector over it just to be certain.

One more piece of tramp metal I found in a walnut tree:

That is a full metal jacket slug that I found with my band saw. No tree deserves to be shot - hell, they are just standing there - what’s the challenge in that, eh?

But enough about that. Keep your tools sharp and you will always do well.

On Runaway Rockets & Enflamed Rage

 

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Monday, February 10, 2025

Saturday, February 8, 2025