First Post...

...for Mouthful of Feathers is up and as with the Quail Forever blog feel free to read, criticize, praise, ignore or mock at your leisure...

Playin' Twister a little early this year...

In honor of our first tornado watch of 2011, a re-post from last year. Because I'm lazy.

Just east of my back porch, the tailing edge of a line of storms sweeping off to the northeast into Kansas. Grapefruit-sized hail and tornado warnings for them. A cold beer and a spectacular sunset light show for me.

We'll get ours, eventually, and when we do I'm sure some distant backyard observer on the safe side of the dryline will pop the top on a cold one, stretch out in his lawn chair and think to himself "sucks to be them" as he watches the sky boil up and violently erupt over my house. Turnabout. That's just early fall on the southern plains, a period of transition that's often every bit as violent as spring. New England this isn't.

But right now the sky over my house contains only hot, still air. Summer air. I watch the dragonflies weave and dance in the welding-arc glow of the distant lightning stitching its demented pattern across the sky. I watch the boys play with the dogs in the evening heat. Beads of condensation roll down the side of my beer bottle. I long for fall. Real fall. Hunting fall. Dogs-and-shotguns fall. Not sweat-your-ass-off-for-a-few-dove-and-teal-and-the-gawddamned-teal-aren't-even-here-yet-and-the-gawddamned-dove-are-already-gone fall.

But that's still a long month away. So I sit back in my lawn chair, take a pull from the cold, wet beer, watch the sky and think to myself "sucks to be them."

F&S Website a Finalist For National Magazine Digital Award

The National Magazine Awards, or the "Ellies" are sort of the magazine equivalent of the Pulitzers. For the past few years the Field & Stream print mag has been a finalist in several categories, and in 2009 it finally won its first Ellie. It was also arguably the most prestigious, the one given for general excellence.

Despite the fact that the trophy itself (above) looks more like a Klingon battle ax than a literary award, it was a big honor and I was of course excited for everyone at the magazine, but at the same time I must admit that excitement was tinged with a wee bit of melancholy. I don't write for the print side and therefore couldn't - even on an ancillary and/or self-illusory level (a level I'm quite comfortable with) - bask in the collective glory.

Well, the list of the 2010 Digital Ellie finalists was released yesterday. My editor forwarded the press release to me and lo and behold, there we were...

General Excellence, Digital Media

Honors the best magazines published on digital platforms; the award is presented in two categories based on content and audience
News and Opinion: The Atlantic; The Daily Beast; The New York Times Magazine; Slate; Wired.com
Service and Lifestyle: Epicurious; Field & Stream; POZ; Runner’s World; SELF

So I did what any self-respecting, attention-craving, accolade-seeking self-promoting writer would do: I immediately e-mailed my editor to ask if F&S actually won the award could I then claim to be "part of a National Magazine Award-winning team?" To which he replied "give me a hundred bucks and you can say whatever you want."

OK, so I made up that last part. Other than the multitude of blogs I crank out, it's not like I'm an integral part of the website or anything but hey, it's a dog-eat-dog world so you gotta grab whatever ancillary and/or self-illusory glory you can, right? Winners will be announced on March 16, and I'd sure appreciate any incense and/or livestock you see fit to burn and/or sacrifice on the website's behalf...

Hoist a Brew for Climate Change...

Two weeks ago, I was shoving wood in the stove as fast as I could while enduring -15 temps and fifteen inches of snow.

Last week I sat on my back porch soaking up sunshine and a warm, gentle, seventy-degree breeze while drinking a beer and listening to the turkeys talk to each other out in the woods.

Ultimately we're all doomed, but catastrophic planet-level climate change does have its short-term benefits...

Name This Lure...

Most people don't realize that in addition to my other interests, I'm also a part-time lure designer. Here's one I've been working on and tweaking for quite some time now. It's a completely original design; pliant yet stiff. The knobbies are for, uh, increased sonic hydro-harmonics as the bait is retrieved. I envision this lure as a swimbait-jerkbait hybrid, sort of a cross between a Zara Spook and a really big fluke.

I can't wait to try it out this spring. I think it's going to be a fish-catching machine, but for some reason the dogs love this thing. I can't keep 'em away from it...

I'm working on the marketing and distribution plan now, but I need to come up with a name. Any suggestions?  

A New Blog For Scattergun Junkies

Shotgun Chronicle is a new blog penned by my trout fishing/pheasant hunting, griping-about-the-state-of-the-world pal, Mouthful of Feathers blogger and soon-to-be-Idahoan Greg McReynolds.

Now Greg and I share similar tastes in many things: scotch, politics, books, music, fishing and above all, shotguns, so when Greg said he was starting up a shotguns blog, I couldn't wait to read it, even though my faith in his judgement had been shaken a bit after he started talking about the "classy little side-by-side" he was planning on bringing to our recent pheasant hunt, and then showed up toting this...

(OK, I kid, I kid...he actually showed up toting a sweet little AyA he had just finished refurbishing. It really was classy, and I wish I he'd sell it to me really, really cheap...)

Anyway, he's been penning it for a few weeks now, and if you're into shotguns - good, classic shotguns - it's worth a read and a bookmark. Greg knows his stuff, and writes about it well.

Son of Seriously?

I got the latest Harper's in the mail recently, and was delighted to see that it had a feature written by William T. Vollmann.

Vollmann is, quite frankly, a weird dude, brilliant in sort of a dense, mysterious Thomas Pynchon way. He writes much about life and people on the margins, and Harper's has published a number of such stories in recent years. Like say, Cormac McCarthy, people tend to be binary about Vollmann, either loving him or loathing him with little middle ground.

Personally I like him, but then again I've never tried to read one of his Tolstoy-sized books, either...

Anyway, I digress. In the current Harper's Vollmann has a feature on his experiences among the homeless of Sacramento, where he resides. As always, it's an interesting read, but one graf in particular caught my eye...

From Harper's

Safe Ground is a movement to protect the homeless in their itinerary. It was formed in 2008 in response to Sacramento City ordinance 12.52, which makes it illegal to sleep even in one's own backyard for more than one night at a time. The law specifies: "It is not intended by this section to prohibit overnight camping on private residential property by friends or family of the property owner, so long as the owner consents and the overnight camping is limited to not more than one consecutive night."

That's right; in Sacramento, California it is against the law to sleep in your own backyard for more than one night at a time. So from that bit of trivia I can only infer that it must suck to be an adventurous child, a Boy Scout or homeless in Sacramento...

Seriously?

I don't generally get too political on this blog, but sometimes the absurdity just slaps you smack in the face. And here's a perfect example: A Republican-controlled Colorado state legislative committee has killed a proposed conservation vehicle license plate because the money raised from the sale of the plate would go to aid and abet that radical socialist environmental tree-hugging long-haired granola-crunching hippie extremist threat to free market capitalism group known as...Trout Unlimited?

From the AP...

A special Colorado license plate saying "Protect Our Rivers" has been rejected by a Republican House committee because the tag would raise money for Trout Unlimited. Trout Unlimited is a conservation group that sometimes clashes with development interests over water habitat. The House Agriculture, Livestock and Natural Resources Committee voted 6-5 Monday against the "Protect Our Rivers" tag. Trout Unlimited agreed that money from the $25 additional tag fees would be banned from going for lobbying or litigation. But members of the Republican-controlled committee feared that despite the limit, tag fundraising would allow Trout Unlimited to spend more on those activities. Trout Unlimited said it had hoped to raise $75,000 over three years with the tag, which would have showed a blue stream cutting through snow-capped mountains.

A license plate showing a blue stream cutting through snow-capped mountains and with the words "protect our rivers" on it. I don't know about you, but that sounds like an obvious piece of anti-business propoganda to me. I shudder to think what horrible things may have happened had the proposal passed, what cherished corporate freedoms may have been lost had those six deep-thinking defenders of liberty not sent it down in flames. Thank gawd we can sleep easier at night knowing we have elected officials like this looking out for our (our?) best interests...

Now that is something I'd expect from say, Oklahoma, where political and corporate corruption and the routine usurping of justice and due process for the benefit and profit of vested interests are expected. But... Colorado? Rocky Mountain High and all that? Hippies and mountain bikes? The Peoples Republic of Boulderstan?

Damn, Colorado was on my short list of places for relocation and opening of my book/bullet/bottle store. Now where am I gonna go?