Just a Little Perspective...

Green On White And The Meaning Of Life

The snow came roaring in on Tuesday, and with it the birds, pushing ahead of the blizzard raging behind them. Hunkered down in the cattails, we watched them flying high, fast and gone with neither glance nor quack toward my meager spread and ever-pitiful calling. A typical evening hunt for me.

So we just sat there, the dog and I, in the lee of an old beaver lodge, content to watch the undulating spectacle of migration play out across the evening sky. And, as I often do in the presence of such ancient and wondrous magic, I quickly fell into deep contemplation of all life's mysteries.

I mused and I mulled. I pondered and naval-gazed. I philosophized and proselytized, and just when I was on the verge of pulling it all together into one, all-encompassing unified-field theory of life, the universe and everything, a flight of mallards suddenly pitched into the decoys and my half-formed grand realization was gone like a forgotten dream, leaving in its wake a pair of drakes bobbing in the slushy water.

So much for figuring it all out, but a beautiful pair of greenheads on a luminous winter evening is about as good a consolation as a guy could ask for.

'Tis The Season For Giving...

I want it...


Findmeagift.com are the first in the UK to stock this ridiculously hilarious RC toy! Our fantastic radio controlled helicopter is like no other! Don't expect there to be any room for passengers on this voyage sonny-jim. The Remote Controlled Flying F*ck says it all!

Imagine a normal day in the office and some idiot next to you is blabbering on about something pointless. Instead of turning round and telling them that you don't give a flying f*ck, show them instead!

This remote controlled toy is literally the word 'F*CK' with a helicopter propeller. Fly it around the office or house without a care and let everyone know what you really think of their dull and pointless conversation.

Blatant, crude and oh-so funny, the RC Flying F*ck helicopter is a fantastic way to show your true feelings without having to say a word. Whether you love radio controlled toys, or you just need a way to tell your boss that you don't give a rats ass about his golfing stories, the Remote Controlled Flying F*ck says it all!

Shamelessly stolen from Patrick Burns' Facebook page, or wall, or whatever the hell you call it...

And a Spoonie Shall Save Them...

Pardon the absence. Last week I was in Stuttgart, Arkansas, duck hunting (and rice) capitol of the world, where I shot exactly...one shoveler.

How did I manage to not shoot a single mallard of the non-smiling variety (or any other ducks) in Stuttgart-freakin'-Arkansas? Simple, there weren't any there, and what ducks there were, were scattered all over the area, thanks to a ton of standing water in the fields combined the White River being out of its banks.

Had an absolute blast, anyway. Despite all the mallards for which Stuttgart is justly famous still being somewhere else, I shot my first limit of specks, got to meet a bunch of cool, like-minded folks, developed a much-deeper appreciation for the DU mission and got a glimpse into a part of the larger waterfowling world and culture that's quite a bit different from my own, but still the same.

More to come over on the Field & Stream website...  

Honest Gun Descriptions...

                                                           This gun is "Shithead Approved"...

Greg over at Shotgun Chronicle had a good post recently about Champlin Firearms, a really cool high-end gunshop here in Oklahoma, specifically the descriptions of the firearms for sale on the Champlin website, which tend toward the...highly descriptive...

From Greg's post

I love to visit the Champlin site. Besides being a sweet site to drool over some of the finest guns ever built, like this Purdey over under they also offer good info on guns and some exquisite snippets of sarcasm, like this one from a gun description.

“I believe the guy that installed this recoil pad drives a Volvo, likes warm flat beer and was breast fed until age 7; however the pad can be changed easily.”

Better still, they have a knack for finding cool guns that are interesting and very shootable. Check out this little Italian gun they have listed. What a nice little gun. Except the recoil pad that is…

Nice find, Greg, but you missed this one, man...

#70953, W. C. Scott & Son Makers London, England: A Boxlock 16 Bore Model 162 Made 1901 with 26" Damascus Extractor Barrels that some Shithead blued to make them look like steel barrels but they are British Nitro Proved with Rib Extension & Hidden Cross Bolt at .669 .003 & .011 (Skt.I & Skt.II), Wall thickness on the right barrel at .0295" and .0305" on the left barrel, 2 1/2" chambers, Nitro proved at 1 ounce, A single selective trigger that functions to select the right or left barrel moving the slide forward or rearward, Splinter forend, Open pistol grip stock at 14 1/4 x 1 9/16 x 2 13/16" over a 1" pad, 5 lbs. 14 oz.., 70% coverage of period scroll engraving, The bores are excellent to near excellent plus.

If you're ever in Enid, Oklahoma (and if you are, I'm sorry...) then a trip to Champlin Firearms is highly recommended. It occupies a distinctly nondescript (from the outside) ramshackle metal building at the Enid airport, but walk through the door and you know you're in a real gunshop. And the best part is, you are free, nay encouraged, to handle any of the guns in their inventory.

It's interesting, but I can speak from personal experience when I say it's also a bit terrifying to fondle a gun worth more than your house.

Guns I Shoulda Bought: Pre-War Superposed...

It was a thing of beauty leaning there in the gun rack among the ass-ugly plastic fantastics and worn-out department-store pumpguns. Two triggers, two barrels, solid rib, with a stock of swirled chocolate.

It was a widower's gun, on consignment for an elderly lady whose husband had had good taste in firearms and a penchant for Brownings. In addition to the super there was a sweet sixteen and two light twelves, all pristine post-war guns.

But I only had eyes for that old 30's-vintage super. I'd come into the gun shop, press my face to the glass of the circle rack and slowly turn the carousel until it was level with my face, then I'd ask to look at it, again. The asshole clerk would sigh, hand me the gun and glower impatiently while I fondled it.

I'd swing the gun on a few imaginary birds, break it open yet again, look down the bores, trace my fingers over that beautifully-figured stock and then reluctantly hand it back to dickface, who would put it on the rack with a smirk and then go back to ignoring me. The hangtag said $600. Hell, they were practically giving it away.

Didn't matter, of course. It may as well have been $60,000. I was a sophomore in college. I was working as a donation clerk at the local Goodwill store. I shared a dumpy one-bedroom apartment with a girlfriend who made even less than I did. I was driving a Schwinn at the time. I could afford Milwaukee's Best. I could afford Hamburger Helper. I couldn't afford a Browning Superposed no matter how much of a screaming deal it was.

And then, of course, one day it was gone from its place in the rack. The eared phallus smiled broadly as he told me that some guy from Tulsa here on business had walked in, just killing some time, picked up the super and bought it on the spot. "Helluva deal on that gun, too bad you couldn't get it."

Yep, too bad...

That's Great, But Does It Have Any Quail?

Because I'm having a helluva time finding any down here on Earth...

From the BBC

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C.

It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours - an "Earth 2.0". However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid. During the conference at which the result was announced, the Kepler team said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets.

The Kepler space telescope was designed to look at a fixed swathe of the night sky, staring intently at about 150,000 stars. The telescope is sensitive enough to see when a planet passes in front of its host star, dimming the star's light by a minuscule amount. Kepler identifies these slight changes in starlight as candidate planets, which are then confirmed by further observations by Kepler and other telescopes in orbit and on Earth.

Kepler 22-b was one of 54 candidates reported by the Kepler team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other telescopes.

More of these "Earth 2.0" candidates are likely to be confirmed in the near future, though a redefinition of the habitable zone's boundaries has brought that number down to 48. Kepler 22-b lies at a distance from its sun about 15% less than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However, its sun puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water.

On the Nature of Whisky...

"Of the history, geography, literature, philosophy, morals, use and abuse, praise and scorn of whisky volumes might be written. They will not be written by me. Yet it is opportune that a voice be raised in defence of this great, potent, and princely drink where so many speak to slight and defame, and where so many glasses are emptied foolishly and irreverently in ignorance of the true qualities of the liquid and in contempt of its proper employment.

For, if one might, for a trope's sake, alter the sex of this most male of beverages, one would say that there be many who take with them to the stews beauty and virtue which should command the grateful awe of men.

Though, in truth, there is little of the marble idol of divinity about this swift and fiery spirit. It belongs to the alchemist's and  to the long nights shot with cold, flickering beams; it is compact of Druid spells and Sabbaths (of the witches and the Calvinists); its graces are not shameless, Latin, and the abundant, but have a sovereign austerity, whether the desert's or the north wind's; there are flavours in it, insinuating and remote, from mountain torrents and the scanty soil on moor-land rocks and slanting, rare sun-shafts."

                                                               From Aeneas MacDonald's "Whisky"


I think this is going to be a good book. With an intro like that, how can it not be?

That's Great, But How Do You Light The Damn Thing?

From the Guardian

Science fiction legend Ray Bradbury, who at 91 has long been one of the last bastions against the digital age, has crumbled, with his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 finally published as an ebook.

In the past Bradbury has said that ebooks "smell like burned fuel", telling the New York Times in 2009 that "the internet is a big distraction". In an interview in which he also said that he had "total recall" and remembered "being in the womb … coming out was great", he told the paper that he had been contacted by Yahoo eight weeks earlier. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? 'To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the internet. It's distracting," he said. "It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."

But the author has now been convinced otherwise, with his American publisher Simon & Schuster announcing on Tuesday that it was releasing the first ever ebook of Fahrenheit 451, a novel which has sold more than 10m copies since it was first published in 1953 and in which Bradbury predicts a dystopian future where books are burned and reading banned. The ebook release was part of a new publishing deal, reported to be worth seven figures, for all English language print and digital formats of Fahrenheit 451 in North America, and English language mass market rights in North America for Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.

Maybe it's time someone re-imagines "Fahrenheit 451." Not the basic premise, which of course rings just as true (if not much more so) today, but the method. I mean, seriously, WWGMD (What Would Guy Montag Do?).

Let's face it, deleting a hard drive or someone's "cloud" account just doesn't have quite the same flair, resonance, or sheer dystopian panache as flamethrowers and literary bonfires, does it?  

It's just one more example of the native superiority of real books over those ephemeral ersatz abominations. Hell, real books even destroy better and with more style...

 I do wonder, however, how #1 Bradbury Fan Rachel Bloom is taking the news?

It's That Time Of Year...

And both my ever-diminishing back as well as my ever-expanding waist do not like it. When the dead-standing trees are still two hundred rough, brush-choked yards from the closest point you can drive the truck, one pick-up load is about all this old-ish dude cares to handle at one time.

And unfortunately, it's also this time of year...

So for the next nine days while Oklahoma's public lands are off-limits to quail and duck hunting, I will join the Fuddite Army in pursuit of The Antlered Ones, although if I tag out quickly or just get bored and restless I may load up the dogs and make a few quick trips to some nearby Kansas WIHA lands. I hear the war doesn't start up there until Nov. 30th...

Jenny's First Mouthful of Feathers...

Just got back from the Kansas quail/pheasant opener with the guys from the Pheasants Forever Rooster Road Trip. The hunters were many, the birds were few, and those brought to hand were well-earned. As they should be.

Just one good, solid point on a wild public-land quail is what I wanted. Ask, walk like hell, and ye shall receive. It was a beautiful thing, and like most beautiful things, I was the only one to see it.

She sure as hell wasn't perfect, but I wasn't asking her to be. I was simply asking her to show me she was starting to get it. And I'll be damned if she's not starting to get it.

The Sports That Sports Illustrated Used to Cover...

A fellow freelancer and I were talking last week about the subject of how great Sports Illustrated used to be.

Or I guess I should say how great we assume Sports Illustrated used to be, since of course neither of us (being young, hip dudes) were actually able to read back when SI was publishing hunting and fishing journalism from guys like Robert F. Jones. That SI was long since gone (or so I thought) by the time we came of age, replaced by, well, whatever it is that SI covers now. Sports, I guess.

But I didn't realize just how recently that metamorphosis had occurred until I was doing a little Google Fu on red setters (not Irish setters. Red setters. The former's a photogenic dustmop. The latter's a bird dog that has always intrigued me) and I stumbled across an SI article on that very subject. Even more amazing, it was from the Novermber 20, 1978 issue.

I would have thought that by that time SI would be basically the same publication it is today. I would have been basically wrong, because there it is. Whodathunk it. The SI Vault website is, by the way, completely searchable. Well worth the timesuck.

I sure wish Sports Illustrated still published those kinds of stories. Hell, I wish most hunting and fishing magazines still published those kinds of stories...

Incidentally, the picture above obviously isn't a red setter, it's a chessie, which was featured on the Nov. 30, 1959 cover of SI. I couldn't find anything out about him other than his owner's name was Kenneth Hand. Don't know if the dog actually ran in the 1959 National Field Trial Retriever Stakes (there were two chessies, according to the article) or if he was just a model. Good-lookin' dog, either way.

Hey Man, Nice Shot*

I have to admit, I've become a bit inured to a lot of the waterfowl and waterfowling photography out there because, quite frankly, most of it's pretty derivative, especially the standard C&C (cupped and committed) mallard shot.

But I gotta say, the cover shot on the current issue of DU magazine is really, really nice. Me like.


* With apologies to Filter

How To Beat The High Cost Of Living...

The ever-resourceful Suburban Bushwacker recently blogged about dumpster-diving for a perfectly fine-looking Burberry jacket that had no doubt been cast off by one of this year's UK nominees for Upper-Class Twit of the Year.

Since SBW and I share not only a mimimalist aesthetic, but the minimalist income stream that usually precipitates said aesthetic, I am appropriately jealous of his score. The closest I can come to matching is my purchase last year of a brand-new Barbour shooting jacket that was sitting on the clearance rack of a local insurance salvage resell store.

I have no idea where it came from or how it got there, but I had always wanted one of those classic waxed-cotton shooting jackets. When I saw this one, in my size even, I snatched it up with visions of being the best-dressed, classiest-looking quail hunter in Oklahoma (something most folks believe to be mutually exclusive...)

While not as expensive as one of those Burberry jobs, it was still a $400 jacket for, IIRC, $79, so I got it. And wore it hunting. Once.

A thick, waxed-cotton coat may be fine for genteel chaps who hunt damp, chilly Britain, standing around with a gun-bearer, in one spot, waiting on driven grouse, but it was about the worst thing this lowborn Okie prole ever wore for walking miles up and down northwest Oklahoma sandhills.

My fashionable, Orvis-endorsed dreams crushed, I went back to the vest and relegated the Barbour to being my general around-town coat, a purpose for which it performs and looks great.

Would I pay $400 for it? Oh, hell no. But I have no regrets paying $79 for it, and I'd dive in a dumpster for one in a heartbeat, headlong, even... 

A**holes and Autumn People...

A few random observations - both impolite and wistful -  on Halloween and the month of October...

First, a bit of a post-Halloween screed...

Since when did trick-or-treating with your children become a strictly vehicle-based activity? One in which the parents - who apparently can’t be bothered with the tiresome act of removing their lardasses from their vehicles and physically walking down the street with their children and, you know, engaging with them – instead kick said children out of the vehicle and slowly cruise along the street ignoring their kids and other pedestrians, updating their Facebook status on their phone and creating huge traffic and safety hazards.

Thanks for that.

What the hell, people? Is this what we’ve come to? Can we not, for one night a year, just one friggin’ night out of 365, park our cars – just this once – and take a walk instead of willfully disassociating ourselves from the opportunity to have a real, tangible, organic experience with our children?

You horrible, self-indulgent, fat, lazy, no-good, stupid-ass mo-fos; you squawking, shit-for-brained, lemming-like creatures whose asses are apparently connected - Avatar-like - with the heated, air-conditioned Corinthian leather seats in your steel cocoons, here’s a hint: Not only do you ruin the experience for the rest of us who still use our lower extremities for something other than operating a gas pedal, you ruin it for your own children, too.

How? By teaching them to grow up to be just like you. And if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need right now, it’s another generation of self-absorbed dickheads.

And this is just my opinion, but I’m pretty sure that, deep down, most eight-year-old girls don’t really want to be tarted-up pixie streetwalkers for Halloween. That’s your fantasy, and if you've secretly always harbored some Penthouse Forum daydream about rockin’ the stripper pole, hey, that’s cool, but maybe you shouldn’t be living that dream vicariously through your child. Just sayin’…

Just had to vent a little. I'm good now...

Last night, after we got home from trick-or-treating and got the kids out of their costumes and into bed, I grabbed a wee nip and curled up in the reading chair with some Ray Bradbury.
 
October is a restless month. It has always made me - even as a child - wistful and pensive, with a touch of fear at the transition it represents, not just of season, but of mood, being and mind. It’s the one month in which even this hoary, jaded old adult still feels some residual tug of an ancient, pagan magic we all once believed in as children, but which gradually lost its grip as we grew into adulthood.

And I don’t think there’s ever been a writer that captures the essence of, and speaks so eloquently to, my (for lack of a better term) ‘Octoberism” than Ray Bradbury. Reading “Something Wicked This Way Comes” as an adult reminds me, just a bit, of what it was like to be a child who still possessed the capacity for wonder.

That and a stiff glass of scotch also makes a perfect balm for having to deal with assholes all evening... 

Oklahoma Clay Pigeon...

For those days when the hunting turns shitty...


Oklahoma clay pigeon thrower...

Where to shoot Oklahoma clay pigeons...

The rules for shooting Oklahoma clay pigeons...

Rules of the World Cow Chip Throwing® Championship Contest

Two (2) chips per contestant. Chip thrown the farthest shall be the only one counted. If the chip breaks up in mid-air during the throw, the piece going the farthest will be counted. (This does not mean the chip hits the ground and then breaks up.)
Contestants are divided into the following: Men's Open Division; Women's Open Division; VIP Division and Team Division (Must be at least 16 years of age to participate)
Chips shall be at least six (6) inches in diameter.
Contestants shall select their own chip from the official wagon provided by the B.S. Enterprise Committee. To alter or shape the chips selected from the wagon in any way (except in the rare instance when a loose fragment may be removed and provided that the removal does not render that chip less than (6) inches in diameter), subjects the contestant to a twenty-five (25) foot penalty. Decision of the Chip Judge is final.

Oklahoma clay pigeon enthusiast (AKA "shithead")...

On second thought, it might be better to just stick to regular clays...

Bleeding-Edge Goodness...

                              "If, on your journey, should you encounter God, God will be cut."
                                                                
                                                                  Hattori Hanzo, from "Kill Bill: Vol. 1"

Ok, so maybe it's not that sharp, but it's damn sharp. Charles May BladieMae. D2. Black canvas micarta. Nickel pins. Nothing fancy, just form following function. Will still shave hair off a forearm after breaking down a deer.

One of my favorite knives from one of my favorite knifemakers. I've got a review of his bird and trout knife (in S30V rather than D2) coming up on the Field & Stream gundogs blog, but the BladieMae remains my favorite all-around knife. I got this one in trade on the secondary market. If you want a new one, it's about a ten-month wait.

Charlie is one of the relatively few knifemakers out there (other than dedicated bushcrafter knifemakers) who offers his knives - any of them -  with a scandi grind, and if I could ever scrape up the coin (which I can't, of course...) I'd have him make me a scandi-grind BladieMae in a heartbeat...

Stuff 'yer feckin' e-readers up the 'ol cloudchute...

...and re-embrace the Gutenberg OS.

Because books were meant to be stored on shelves, not on the digital dildo of the moment. They were meant to be held, read, admired, cherished, displayed and eventually passed on, not downloaded, copied, pasted, and stored as binary code on some goddamned corporate-controlled HAL 9000 with a catchy, bullshit, focus group-derived name...

"Dickens, open my Kurt Vonnegut file, please."
"I'm sorry, Chad. I'm afraid I can't do that. Your Vonnegut file has been deleted as a result of our new corporate guidelines on the downloading of seditious and/or obscene materials. We regret the inconvenience. Would you care to download the latest young adult paranormal romance thriller* instead?"

All the goldbugs bitch and moan about the ephemeral nature of fiat currency, but no one ever says anything about fiat literature. Why is that?

But I digress. The original point of the blog (and really, it did have one, sort of) was to give a link to Steve over at Querencia, who recently put up a couple posts here and here with pics of some of his bookshelves. Proper bookshelves, chockablock with books, memories and mementos.

Cool stuff, and definitely worth a look. That's what I consider a proper e-reader (eclectic reader), one that never needs to be upgraded or replaced, and one that sports an indefinite battery life...

* Actual (and large) genre (with its own aisle!) I observed during a recent visit to a Barnes & Noble. The shelves were packed with titles and the aisle was packed with browsers. We're all fuckin' doomed...

*Definitely not my bookshelf, though I wish it were... the pic is from Shakespeare & Co. in Paris.

The Metamorphosis, Okie edition...*

No giant man-roaches, just a delectable transformation from this...

To this...

Forget that horrid, slimy, breaded, undercooked mess that restaurants try to pass off as "fried okra." The only acceptable way to cook okra is to lightly coat it with cornmeal, salt, and pepper (no breading and for god's sake no batter) and then fry it in a hot cast-iron skillet until it's crunchy, crispy and almost black (it's actually not quite done in this pic...).

Any other way is simply an abomination...

That represents the year's last batch of okra from the "Stick It To Big Agri-Business Revolutionary Garden." Never thought I'd still be getting okra on October 18. Maybe there's a silver lining to catastrophic climate change, after all...

This year's garden was a mixed bag. We ended up with a good okra crop, and our squash and zucchini harvest needed to be measured in metric tons. On the other hand the seventy-odd days of hundred-degree (and often much higher) heat completely shut down most everything else. None of the watermelon, tomatoes, eggplant or bell peppers produced anything until it started cooling down.

So now I've got tons of green tomatoes, tiny eggplants and itsy-bitsy melons, all doomed since we got our first good freeze last night.

Just as well, really. Duck season's nine days away, quail season opens Nov. 12 and I guess if I can muster the interest there's also a deer season or two mixed in there somewhere. Fall is no time to be messing around with vegetables, anyway...

* with apologies to Franz Kafka's dried-up exoskeleton...

Writing-Related Flotsam and Jetsam

A few writing-related quotes from perhaps the most acerbic wit of 20th-century journalism...

“...an author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.”

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. ”

“I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.”

“Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.” (not really about writing, but I'm making it so).

In other news...

An interesting account of how one first-time novelist (but established writer) came to the decision that giving away his self-published debut novel for almost nothing made the most economic sense, via BoingBoing

It's worth a read, especially for those aspiring (is there any other kind?) book authors who can't seem to gain any traction trudging along the traditional book publishing path (And if there are any literary agents out there, I'm now holding up a cardboard sign that reads "Will Work for Representation and/or Food").

A quote from the last graf...

As the screenwriter William Goldman said years ago about Hollywood, Nobody knows anything. You try something, you try something else, you try everything, even things that sound insane, because in an industry where the longstanding business model has been upended, everything else has been upended too, even the gravitational tug of logic. If you want to get rich, value your work at zero. Yes, okay, it reads like the last line of a Zen koan. But self-publishing’s best practices are still unwritten, so really: Why not? That tactical freedom might be the most disruptive, the most liberating part of the whole self-publishing business.

I'm still trying to decide if that's a fair statement or self-delusional bullshit. I'm thinking the latter, mebbe?

And if you're a writer or journalist who just doesn't have enough despair in your life (and who couldn't use a little more despair, right?) I'll now direct you to this cheerful little report on the current state of the alleged creative class, via Salon

Read it, writers, and weep for the present, never mind the future, 'cause there 'aint one...

Listen to the optimists and the great recession sounds like a great opportunity. This is the time for the creative class to brand itself! A day job, they say, is so 20th century – as quaint and outdated as tail fins and manual sewing machines. Thanks to laptops, cheap Internet connections and structural changes in the world economy, we’re living in a world of “free agents” – “soloists” who are “self-branding” and empowered to live flexible and self-determining lives full of meaning.

We are all citizens of Freelance Nation — heirs not to the old-school stodgy, gray-flannel-suit Organization Man but to the coonskin-capped pioneers and rugged, self-made types who built this country.

But for those who must actually scrape together work in this new “gig economy” – architects, filmmakers, writers, musicians, bookstore managers, graphic designers and other downsized members of the creative class, folks made obsolete by the Internet and the current predatory style of corporations – Freelance Nation is a place where they fight to keep a home or medical insurance.

Some are losing their houses. Others are watching marriages go up in smoke or falling into heavy drinking. Still others are couch-jumping for months or years at a time. Or they’re veering close to bankruptcy because of the risk of living without medical insurance. Call it the new creative destruction.

"...In fact, many free agents see themselves not as freewheeling soloists but as permatemps and content serfs."

Content serfs. I like that one, because in the sucker's game that is modern freelancing, that's exactly what you are - a serf. And if you don't like it, if you can't live on what they offer, then tough shit, there's another serf waiting right behind you who'll do it for less. Move along, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Haven't you heard, dumbshit? Everyone's a writer these days...*

* Of course, the ironic thing is that most of the really good writing I'm finding these days is on personal blogs...

Do Morons Dream of Being Mindless Sheep*

From a press release I saw this morning...

"Have you ever dreamed of hunting waterfowl on TV with a professional sportsman?"

A "professional sportsman?" What? You mean like this guy?

I've met a few "professional sportsmen." And the only thing I ever dreamed about was getting the hell away from them as quickly as possible. But then again, I always was a sloth-infused small-time dreamer with no real vision, so if it's your dream - out of all the possible dreams in the world - to hunt waterfowl on TV with a "professional" sportsman, then who am I to judge? Reach for the stars, dude...

*With apologies to Philip K. Dick's corpse...

Mallard's Cop-Out Rewind: It's That Kind of Place

Apologies for the lull. I've got blog material stacked up (hunting trips, books, decoys, dogs, the shitty and depressing state of writing as a viable career, and many other random thoughts) but I've been busy the past three weeks and haven't quite had the time to sit down and write anything.

So of course I'm copping out (temporarily) by recycling an old post that maybe a few of you haven't seen. Lazy, I know. So sue me...

I have no idea what story is contained within this picture's alloted thousand words, but I was cleaning out some files in anticipation of switching over to a new computer this weekend when I stumbled across it and said "that's so weird it needs to be on the blog".

I took it some years back on a state highway somewhere between the southeastern Oklahoma towns of Antlers and Broken Bow. As I was driving along I looked over, saw something dangling from the highway sign, thought "what the hell?" and turned around to take a look.

It turned out to be a string of decapitated catfish, mainly flatheads. I have no idea what compelled someone to hang them there: an angler's pride, some kind of hillbilly voodoo, perhaps a warning to to stay the hell on the main roads (homegrown weed is and always has been a big cash crop in the mountains of SE Oklahoma). I never figured it out. I snapped the picture, looked over my shoulder to make sure Leatherface wasn't watching from the trees and got back in my truck.

I shouldn't have been surprised, though. My mother was born and raised in Antlers and I still have a pile of relatives down that way. I spent a lot of time there as a child so I was well aware things are a little, well...different in that part of the state.

How different? When I took that picture I was down there on an assignment, writing about... Bigfoot.
Yep, it's that kind of place. Beautiful, but strange, a little spooky and completely unlike the popular image of Oklahoma.

The year prior I had been down there on another assignment, writing about Oklahoma's timber industry. While there I had arranged to drive around some logging sites with a local timber company foreman. As I got into his truck and snapped my seatbelt into place he looked over at me and quite unexpectedly asked "You gotchaself a gun, doncha?"

Now, for those unfamiliar with that part of Oklahoma, it's as rugged, as isolated, as wild and as suspicious of outsiders as any place in the country. I was going to be spending all day in the woods with this guy, alone. And here he was asking me if I happened to have a gun on me. Cue banjos.

As it turns out I did, in point of fact, have myself a gun. Yep, it's that kind of place. Notebook? Check. Tape Recorder? Check. Camera? Check. Glock? Check. But I wasn't sure if I should tell him or not. I didn't know this guy from Adam. And he was big, kind of wild-looking. I was from "the city." Cue banjos again.

Would it be tactically prudent to keep it a secret or should I just come out and say upfront that I was packing. Was it a trick question? Would I be violating some company policy? The question, however, was rendered moot as he pulled a scoped .223 from behind the seat and shoved the barrel into the floorboard next to me.

"This is for coyotes 'an such," he informed me with a grin. I instantly wondered if nosy reporters, taxonomically speaking, fell into the "such" genus. "But," he continued, "Ah don' go nowheres roun chere without a gun. Dope growers. An there some roads you doan wanna go down even then."

Great. With the prospect of armed conflict apparently part of the day's tour, I figured I might as well tell him. He gave me an approving look and off we went, engaged in perhaps the most heavily-armed interview in Oklahoma journalism history. Yep, it's that kind of place.

I never ran into Tony Montana and his little friend on that trip, and I after I snapped this picture I went on, but never found Bigfoot, either.

Didn't really matter, though. The locals were scary enough...

Hate To Keep Flogging a Deceased Equine, But...

Did I mention that duck season's not looking so good this year? This is the old flood-control lake on the in-laws' homestead and my A#1 fowling spot. If I had taken this picture in a normal year I'd be standing in about four feet of water, ducks would be dropping from the sky and all would be good and right in the world.

So it goes...

At least I got in a little work on some planted birds with knucklehead Jenny while we were down there seeing how bad things were.

I'll be hitting the Kansas prairie chicken opener with Scampwalker this week and it'll be interesting to see how she does, or doesn't. I thought I had her pretty well whoa broke but we had some issues when the quail started flying. Hope the guys I'm hunting with are patient souls or I may be relegated to hunting along so they can actually enjoy themselves...

Copy Desk Fail and "One Ticket to High, Please."

Just a little random Friday flotsam and jetsam consisting of two absolute gems, both courtesy of BoingBoing...

First, the "Unfortunate Headline of the Day" award  goes to the Washington Post for this doozy...

'Nuff said there...

Next, seemingly staid, buttoned-down travel writer/PBS television host Rick Steves goes a little wild as he gives the funniest travel/getting stoned analogy  I've ever heard...



"I love going places, and to me high is a place."

I and the millions of geriatric PBS viewers anxiously await the debut of that particular episode of "Rick Steve's Europe." I'm guessing it couldn't be any weirder or more hallucinogenic than those old re-runs of "The Lawrence Welk Show."

This Is What A Cosmic Screwing Looks Like...

The highest fall flight numbers in decades whisper promises of an epic waterfowl season. And I finally have a boat to duck hunt out of. No more busting reeds, busting ice or busting my ass. Just launch the boat and go.

All those shallow backwater areas at the upper end of the lake, the areas you could never reach on foot? The areas you see ducks pouring into year after year as you hunker down in the ass-deep water blowing your duck call like a kazoo hoping to peel off a few tone-deaf stragglers?

They're yours now. Just launch the boat and go. That's your new mantra: no worries, just launch the boat and go.

Uh, yeah. About that...

And that's the best-looking boat ramp on the lake. The others are much, much worse. And with the long-term fall and winter forecast calling for a La Nina pattern, it doesn't look to get any better any time soon, and in fact will - in all likelihood - only get worse, water-level wise.

All my other spots are bone-dry. The walk-in areas I typically hunt on the lake are mostly high and dry and the water level of the main lake body is so far away from any shoreline cover I'd need a layout blind to kill anything.

What I need is a small sneakboat I can throw in the back of the truck and launch from anywhere. What I have is a brand-new, much-anticipated, long-dreamed-about 16-foot, 25-horsepower albatross. What a cosmic screwing...

Teal season starts in three days. The general waterfowl season starts Oct. 29th. Time to start doing some rain dances...

Technical Difficulties...

Several people have e-mailed to tell me that they are unable to post comments on the blog. I have the "comments" settings as liberal as they'll go, and apparently people are still having trouble. Might this have something to do with Blogger's new automatic spam filter that I can't seem to get rid of or modify?

Anybody have any ideas? Anyone with a Blogger account having the same issue? What the hell am I doing wrong? Is it time, once agan, to think about moving over to Wordpress?  Please feel free to leave a comment, unless, of course, you can't...

Gratuitous Body Count Pic: At Least It's Not a Tailgate...

One thing you almost never see from me is one of these...

Not that I have anything against guys (or gals) who like to take pics of their limits, it's just not something I generally do (although if I manage to scratch out an Oklahoma quail limit this year you can bet your ass I'm taking a picture of that. Lots of them. But don't hold your breath. See below...).

As a sort of half-assed photographer, I'd much rather try to take an interesting picture of a single bird (feather detail, macro, different angle, whatever) rather than a big pile of perforated birds (as an example, I'm kinda fond of this one ). And it's not like an opening-day limit is some sort of accomplishment or personal milestone for me. I shoot a lot of them. Not a brag, it's just that I live in an area with (most years) a lot of dove. Hell, I'm sure if you gave The Suburban Bushwacker a plane ticket and a shotgun, he'd shoot a limit, too.

**EDIT: Actually, I just realized that technically, this picture is two birds short of a limit. Why? The two collared dove on the end don't count toward the combined mourning dove/whitewing limit, which makes my small victory in the face of today's lousy conditions, and my resulting euphoria (see below) essentially null and void. Sigh. Carry on...

But you know what? I'm posting this gratuitous body count pic, proudly, because damn it, I earned this 15-bird limit. I don't think I've ever been more miserable on an opening-day dove hunt, and I've been on some scorchers.


It's not that it was so terribly hot: it "only" got up to 106. It's not that it was so terribly windy: it was "only" gusting to about 35 mph or so. But the combination of 106 degrees, 35 mph winds and the effects of this (insert any adjective here) drought all combined to form some weird sort of unholy synergy of misery. It felt like someone was standing directly in front of me holding the world's largest hairdryer and a bucket of sand, and all the while the giant klieg light of the sun burning holes in my retinas, even through the sunglasses.

Misery. My only solace was leaning my back against the water-cooled steel of the stock tank and drinking gallons of ice-cold well water (out of the pipe, not the stock tank...) while waiting for the evening flight.

     Unfortunately, the dove were mostly coming in from the west so I had to get up, walk around the pond and go hunker down in the sagebrush, which meant my ass immediately got punctured with dozens of these little bastards...

That's a sandbur, if you're lucky enough to not be familiar with them. And if the abstract concept of pain could take a physical form, this is what it would be. If you ever plan on bird hunting northwest Oklahoma or southwest Kansas, I'd advise you to bring a good pair of hemostats, because you'll be picking these out of everything...

But eventually, after the pain and cursing subsided, I started shooting a few birds, including a pair of these...

The Eurasion collared dove, a non-native transplant which is quickly establishing itself across the region. It's still mostly a bird of towns, suburbs and semi-rural backyards (we've got a couple here at the house) but they're showing up in hunters' bags more frequently. These are the first I've shot. They're considerably larger than a mourning dove and when this pair came flying in like a couple B-52s even I could manage the double.

After limiting out I walked back to the truck just in time to catch the area manager driving by. I hadn't seen him in a while so he stopped to talk and eventually the conversation came around to quail. The news, as expected, was grim. It's going to be a tough year. Really tough.

He told me that according to the trapping results, it looks like the quail on that particular area managed to get off one meager hatch in the middle of August, which isn't a good time to be a quail chick in the best of years, much less the hottest, driest summer in recorded history. There were no other age groups for the young quail, which means all other hatches this year apparently failed.

And judging by the heat and condition of the cover, I'm surprised anything survived at all. It's hard to put into words just how desiccated the landscape in this region truly is. I hadn't been out to this particular WMA since the end of quail season back in February, and in fact hadn't spent much, if any time this summer north of where I live. It was dry in February, but it's powder now.

How anything as fragile and high-strung as those little nine-ounce birds can live through a summer like this is beyond me, but as I was sitting there this evening I heard a few bobs whistling from somewhere out in the sagebrush. But just a few.

I may shoot some quail this fall, or I may not, but I'm guessing this is the last "look-at-my-limit" pic you'll be getting from me for quite some time. And really, that's not a bad thing.

Rivers of Memory and Streams of Schlock...

                            
                               “You know (in supercilious tone), Nietzsche says "From chaos, comes order.”’

                               “Ah, blow it out yer ass, Howard.”

                                                                         From a great scene in a great movie...

And if you’ve read the blog long enough, you know that pretty much sums up how I feel about the majority of flyfishing writing. Insufferably pedantic, overheated, self-important, metaphor-choked twaddle that cranks the gratuitously pensive prose knob to eleven until our brains - unable to take any more - just say fuck it and go all Scanners on us. It's the Vogon poetry of the outdoors literary scene: excruciating to the ear, the tongue and the brain.

Don't believe me? Spend a few hours in the sports section of your local Barnes & Noble (can't very well do it with Borders any more, can we?) perusing the flyfishing titles. I promise you'll end up carrying your exploded noggin home in your favorite literary figure tote bag...

Which makes it such a damn mystery why I continue to love Harry Middleton, who, it could easily be argued, is the very embodiment of all that I loathe about the genre. Prose? Here is an honest-to-gawd random passage from the Middleton book I'm currently reading. I promise you I did not cherry-pick this; I just opened a random  page without looking and placed my finger on a random spot, again, without looking...

"The only break in the day's otherwise olamic tincture of grays was the luteous glow of my room's single 40-watt desk lamp. It had been like that for three days, the island enveloped in a thick, merciless composition of grays: griseous dawns, cinereous afternoons, dismal dingy gray evenings. I imagined that even the wind and the sounds of the sea were some shade of gray, perhaps an oyster-gray mist rising off the pounding lead gray sea."

You know, it must have been a real bitch to play Scrabble against him...

I mentioned this propensity for wordiness when I blogged about "The Bright Country" last year...

As much as I liked it, though, I did have some quibbling little issues with “The Bright Country.” One, it’s pretty obvious the book is at least semi-fictionalized. Middleton described it as “more real than imagined” but many, if not most of the characters, settings, events and dialogue were simply too perfect to the story to be real. Second, Middleton was an incredibly wordy writer. I’ve got a pretty good vocabulary, but some of his words were simply lost on me, to the point where they began distracting a bit from the story.

But I guess the difference between Middleton and many of the others, and the reason I tolerate his excessive wordiness, his bottomless bag of adjectives and his feathering of fact and fiction, is because the pain and the raw emotion he puts (or rather put, since he's dead...) down on the page isn't the droning, affected naval-gazing gibberish of all the single-malted Compleat Morons out there who somehow, inexplicably, scored a book deal. It's real. Long-winded, perhaps, but real nonetheless.

When Middleton writes about depression and pain and longing, about losing everything and having to climb on the back of a garbage truck every night to go to work, about how the wind and the splatter of rain sometimes reminds him of wild rivers he can no longer fish, well, I can relate to that, I can feel that.

But a book-length exploration of your boring-ass upper middle-class twit existential crisis set on a river, or perhaps a formulaically contemplative recounting of your worldwide flyfishing adventures and what it all means in the cosmic sense? Not so much. I'll just stick with the hard-luck hardscrabble angst and leave the rest of that high-falutin' shit to the "Fifty Places" crowd.

Which brings me to the original point of the blog...

I recently picked up a copy of "Rivers of Memory" which was published in 1993, the year of Middleton's death. It's a little book, eight essays, barely a hundred pages long and long out of print. It's a highly-collectable title, I got it for a good price and as such it will go in my meager collection of decent books, but not before being read, of course. And like all of Middleton's books, it gyrates wildly between passages of forlorn darkness and sublime wonder, all in the arc of a single sentence...

Each night as I haul myself onto the back of county garbage truck number two, there is familiar wind, some shred of moonglow or starlight, a splatter of dark rain on my skin, something that stirs my memory, and again, if even for a brief moment, I am on some mountain river, some stretch of bright water, water full of possibilities, including the possibility of trout, perhaps one that, when hooked, will haul me in and out of time, in and out of life's mysterious and frightening, wondrous and incomprehensible continuum, even to the edges of the universe.

Good stuff...  

A Little Maudlin Nostalgia...

A while back I wrote a blog detailing my penchant for collecting old and largely-worthless fishing tackle from the seventies and early eighties, explaining that...

"I have a special interest in vintage tackle and ads from the seventies and eighties because well, that's when I came of age. I'm constantly cruising the pawn shops and little small-town hardware stores for the tackle that time forgot. Old rods, reels, tackle and tackle boxes: it's amazing what's still out there sitting on store shelves. Whether it's pawn shops or some old ramshackle small-town bait store, I'm always on the prowl...old tackle from the seventies is like drinking an ice-cold coke made with real sugar out of a glass bottle with a bunch of salty peanuts in it, a delicious and fleeting evocation of a time and place you can't get back to."

And one of the places I most often frequented back in the age of sideburns and polyester was the venerable and ubiquitous chain of Oklahoma-based auto supply stores known as OTASCO. Like most typical Main Street-based auto parts-hardware-variety stores of yore (think Western Auto, Montgomery Ward's, TG&Y, Sears, etc...) OTASCO carried a full line of sporting goods.

My first bicycle came from OTASCO (a Flying O, remember them?) My first .22 came from OTASCO (a Winchester 190) and in all likelihood my first fishing pole came from OTASCO, though I was far too young to remember. OTASCO sold a surprising variety of fishing and hunting equipment, and the downtown Norman store was, along with the TG&Y just down the street, one of the icons of my childhood. If I had a nickel for every cardboard tube of Daisy BBs I purchased from that store...

But eventually, inevitably, OTASCO went the way of virtually every other sporting-goods retailer of that era. Some, like Sears, stopped selling hunting and fishing gear altogether (every time I walk into a Sears today I want to cry) while others, like TG&Y (damn how I loved that place) and OTASCO slowly closed stores until they disappeared. I can't remember exactly when the central Oklahoma stores closed. I do remember buying shotgun shells at the Noble, Oklahoma OTASCO up until sometime around the mid to late eighties, but by the end of the decade OTASCO was done for.

I hadn't thought about OTASCO in years, but yesterday I was perusing the Fishing For History blog and what did I see as this week's installment of the blog's excellent series "52 Trade Houses in 52 Weeks" but a very interesting history of the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Co., which is, of course, OTASCO.

Cool stuff, and an interesting read if you grew up anywhere near one of OTASCO's 455 stores scattered across 12 states. After reading it I immediately went and rummaged through some of my old junk. A cursory search didn't reveal any OTASCO-branded tackle (though I think I do have some lying around somewhere) or hunting gear (although I'm pretty sure I've got a few old shotgun shell boxes with OTASCO price stickers on them, again, somewhere...) but I did manage to come up with this:

Back in the day (early to mid-eighties, maybe?) that was the largest (1500 count) box of Daisy BBs you could buy (at least that I'm aware) and I went through a ton of them. I almost certainly purchased this box (and another I still have) from the Norman OTASCO when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I have no idea why I still have it, but I sure wish I still had the old-school, wood-stocked Crosman 760 through which I shot all my BBs back then. Which was bought at...OTASCO.

Ahhh, good times...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Song of September...

I am - for the most part - a proud ignoramus when it comes to sports. I never played sports (my youth was given over wholly to fishing, hunting, drinking beer and skipping school to repeat items 1,2 and 3), and I never grew up around anyone who did, so it's not that I've lost interest in sports, it's that I never cared to begin with. I couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year (the Dodgers, right?) or the World Series, or that Stanley Bowl thing. I have no clue what an ERA is and I don't know my AL West from my NL East.

I've heard that my home state now has a professional basketball team, the Thunderclap something or other, but since watching basketball interests me about as much as watching platypuses screw, I know nothing of the team, other than most of us here in Oklahoma pay much more attention to our millionaire ballplayers than we do our low thousandaire public-school teachers (current ranking: 49th! Break out the Andre! OK, OK, I'll stop being a political bore...)

But there is one glaring exception to my disinterest. See, I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. And when you grow up in Norman, Oklahoma, you are beaten daily as a child until you develop an interest in Sooner football (honest, it's in the city charter). So gradually, even if you're not naturally inclined to do so, your interest in college football grows, along with the scar tissue on your backside, until one day you wake up and realize that you are one of them, a...fan.

Sounds brutal, I know, but at least in Oklahoma it's confined to Norman. I hear that in Nebraska - a state much like Oklahoma in its lack of excitement but with only one state university football program to distract its people from ingesting meth and/or watching crops grow - the required beating is a statewide mandate. That would certainly explain a lot... (I kid, I kid my Nebraska homies).

I mean, let's face it: it's Oklahoma we're talking about. It's not like we have a helluva lot we can point to in this state and say "see, look how good we are at this!" So for the past half-century or so we have placed our collective pride and our sense of shared self-worth in the on-field accomplishments of the University of Oklahoma football team (sorry Aggie fans, but it's true...).

And as much as I hate to admit it, as much as the snobbish too-good-for-sports, shun-the-herd iconoclast in me fervently wants it to be otherwise, when I hear this song I completely understand how emotionally invested someone can get in a hometown sports team.

                        


When I was a student at OU I used to live in a crummy little apartment on the south edge of campus, an area that during WWII had been part of a military base. It's mostly developed now, but back in the mid-90s it was an overgrown, largely forgotten jumble of crumbling old buildings and encroaching wildness.

On Saturday mornings during dove season (and later deer bow)I would throw my shotgun in a dufflebag, hop on the bike, cross the highway south of campus and go hunt the south Canadian riverbottom. But even then, miles away from the stadium, I could still hear the roar of the crowd and the band playing the fight song, and I'd hum along to it, heart swelling with Sooner Pride.

"OK," you ask, "if you're such a fan, what the hell were you doing dove hunting when you should have been there watching the game, supporting your school, your team and watching stalking admiring your future wife?" (who as a member of the Pride of Oklahoma's flag corps spent every fall Saturday marching on Owen Field to that very song)

To which I can only reply, it was dove season, man, and during hunting season being a fan has its limits...

And just to give you an example of that, the Sooners are a consensus pre-season #1 and we're the odds-on favorite to win the national championship, but one of the toughest and most important games of the year is September 17th at sixth-ranked Florida State. Every Sooner fan has had that date circled all year.

Where will I be? Hunting prairie chickens in Kansas. Like I said, being a fan has its limits. But you can bet your ass I'll have a radio...