Tag Archives: BlindPigAcorn

Country Musings

(Edited and re-posted from my comment at Sebastian’s) I’ve never been to a big NRA convention, nothing outside a “Friends of the NRA” Dinner-fundraiser. They’re too far away and politics-oriented. The Gunblogger Rendezvous is more my style, but there’s another NRA-dinner happening just before the next-next weekend gun-show, and it’s a small-scale affair run by locals for locals at the American Legion Hall on Greenstone – and it’s really just for fun. I got us tickets because that way we can meet and talk to more people and settle-in here.
What I have noticed moving away from the city/suburbia nexus to the country/rural region is that there’s a huge attitudinal shift in just 20-miles of driving. Out here in flyover country I’m only thirty minutes from the hated City, but it’s a thousand miles mentally.
People are not especially noticeably or outwardly more conservative (how would that manifest, more NRA t-shirts?), and they are as fluent in urban computer-speak and tech-culture as anyone in the Bay — but their hobbies and sports and activities and JOBS are decidedly not the kind of cubicle/paper-shuffling that exists within the City Walls.
They do ride bicycles up here but often for many-many miles, so it’s not just PC virtue-signaling (and the bike weenies are still jerks). They also ride big loud motorcycles and in packs. Some leather-clad, patch-adorned motorcyclists drive Japanese bikes too, so it’s not just Harley’s. The young men drive little econo-boxes until they grow up and buy a truck – and a ranch or farm to live-on/work-on. People ride horses, still – it’s not just for little girls. They shoot bows-and-arrows in school and then go to hunt with them – and everybody has guns. There’s a thousand square miles of very rugged country-mountain stuff as a huge backyard, and it’s criss-crossed with rough roads, so that keeps the relative population low at any given time besides weekends, and trucks with lift-kits are not just Suburban-Poseur Signaling, either.
Anyhow it’s a very different from the blinkered, concretized mentality of the Urban Space we escaped, which most Country People I talk-to, both young and old, find dangerous, decayed, ugly and unfriendly. They have self-selected and live out here on-purpose, rather than go to the bright-lights just thirty minutes away. Bright-lighters come up here to gawk and gape and think they are superior (they’re not), then drive on to more bright-lights in glittery Tahoe to lose money.
The Anti-NRA people are centered in the Coastal Cities and its fiefdom-exurbs, and it’s because they are part of that machine and they like it that way. But people escape from that all the time and especially the young who want to experiment and live a fuller life: a life with guns and with trucks, with animals and critters, and with Freedom and Liberty – things that that the oppression and demand for conformity that life in the City prevents. So they get away from all that crap and live outside the box, out in the Country.

Belated Blogversary

Seems I missed my own blogversary.  It’s hard to imagine (or even remember) what has actually transpired since August 7, 2004… but I’ll, repeat my old post just for the hell of it – a Mai Tai recipe.

August 7, 2004

Da Kine rippin’ onolicious Mai-Tai recipe

Maybe it was the Exotica music that triggered it, or tasting the fine examples at Tao Tao’s in Sunnyvale: I went on a hunt for the best Mai-tai recipe.
Where the hell is that Demarara?

Mix: “Bleh” to those pre-mixed Mai-Tai bottle-blends. Even Trader Vic’s mix is too sour and without much fresh flavor. Dey all lousy, fuggedaboudit.

Sweet: I’ve tried a variety of sweeteners, from coconut syrup to orgeat syrup, but real juice just keeps coming back as the best answer.

Juice: Avoid tinned pineapple juice with that metallic taste, or anything less than fresh-squeezed. In the Islands pineapple juice is easy to get, while Island oranges tend to be less sweet – so pineapple/orange juice is not going to be sugary glop like you in the grocery stores here.
As a juice base I prefer passion fruit juice. If none is available pineapple-orange juice combinations are fine, or even “POG” – Pineapple-Orange-Guava, which is an Island specialty. Ultimately the drink should be flavorful without being too sweet or bitter.

Prepare two glasses with 4-5 ice cubes. Pour a dribble of juice from the jar of maraschino cherries into the bottom, over the ice.

In a cocktail shaker with 5 cubes of ice (for two persons) prepare:

    • 1/2 shot lime juice – to cut the sweetness
    • 1/2 shot Triple sec

1/2 shot Orange Curacao
1/2 shot Cointreau or Drambui

  • 1 shot Light rum, or even better, Brazilian Toucano, a Chacacha, (a light rum from the first press of the sugar cane juice itself) http://www.internetwines.com/rws19181.html
  • 1 shot good Jamaican Gold rum
  • 1 shot Demarara or Guyana 151 rum, or Myers’s

 

Fill shaker to the line with passion fruit juice, or 3 parts fresh pineapple to 1-part orange juice mix.

Shake until it’s cold.

Carefully pour over ice in drink-glasses. Avoiding swirling or tumbling the drink mixture with the bottom layer. You want to achieve a sunset, with light colors on the bottom, and the dark on top. Top with a 1/2 shot float of dark rum: a Negrito from Barbados, or Myers’s.

Pineapple slices skewered with a cherry under an umbrella should be used as garnish. Insert colorful straw.

Put on album of Martin Denny music.

 

Retail Therapy

Awoke to overcast, and mid-coffee it actually rained. Lunch at Bricks and then a visit with our favorite Darling-of-Retail at the Western shoppe – who’s quitting! Fortunately we’ll see her again soon at the Gun-Club Picnic, since her grandfather is Treasurer.
Trying to reach a contractor to get a bid on a quick mud & tape job for the garage and the phone glitches and blurps and I’m in some kind of cellphone dead-zone. So I tried another avenue, and it worked with the guy who’s got experience here already – and I’d rather pay local than a guy living out on the 80-corridor in Roseville. But local guy is in the middle of a flip, on his hands and knees laying tile, so the project might have to wait a while. Oh well, carpet is coming and there’s paint to do at the other house.
So off to the new Gunshop in town to meet the guy – Jeff – then to Wally where they had this which I had not seen in ages. And JHP too.
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‘Appy New Yarr

I really don’t do resolutions – really. But now we are up-country and out from under the pasty white thumb of the fluorescent-light BayAryans, so we are on a bit of a kick – kicking away from the fatted-calf of sloth and the zombie-life of Cubicleland.
One Christmas card from the wife of an old friend and mentor was starkly sad. His stroke ten years ago was bad, but the decline that set-in was permanent and irreversible in physical, mental, and also spiritual health.
We don’t want to go out like that and one of the conditions that works to prevent such is adding strength with weights – and actually it was my wife’s idea. Having dropped a few, WE are adamant at regaining strength so that we move towards greater agility and physicality in order to make the most of our Time remaining on this crazy cue-ball.
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Despite the role-models that I do have (thanks Bill!) I was content to just move rocks – and that worked, but they’re dirty and lumpy-shaped and don’t belong indoors, and that work now is mostly done.
So now we have some weighty book-ends to remind us that sitting around can be productive. She is working with the Eights while I’ve got these Tenners to hoist in between glasses of local Cabernet and alternating with the Newcastle Brown. I’m going to have to up my game when she starts to reach for the Tens…

Metalform Magazines

As the Queen of Snark advises, magazines are perishable, wear-items, so you should stock-up whenever possible. 

Brownell’s was havin’ a sale: $29.99 down to $22.99 On Sale Today! (and they still are on-sale), so I bought two because they’re stainless steel and I liked the look of the follower. Guess which one is the Ed Brown magazine.
Maybe I’ll get s’more…
Quick UPDATE: Midway has ’em on Clearance sale. and I ordered a couple more.




Stolen Ancestral Valor

Seems to me that squirreling up your family tree (a tree that was pruned years and years ago) to hitch onto a “native” lineage is a bit like claiming to be a MOH winner or a Marine when you were really only a Cub Scout at best… Must be especially sensitive to Hawaiians, where a LOT of inheritance money can be involved or tragically denied.

Slam Dancing Through Life

The Chiclet-Guava shirted Loud Left and the rest of the black-shirted Anarcho-hipoixousie like to chant the Get Out of Iraq slogan and are happy to dance on the corpses of millions. Dance Anarchist hipsters, dance – this is what the dance of pull-out looks like. Iraq is not Vietnam, it’s Cambodia…

[Holiday In Cambodia video removed by YooToob]

My brushes with celebrity amount to a blind pig’s acorn-finding chances; tertiary, tangential, and accidental at best for your basic dork.  B UT, one of my college housemates was a girl who’s boyfriend was a campus radio-station DJ and the roommate and “best friend” of Jello Biafra – and I sorta met him once when he came down from The City to do a gig at the Not-Catalyst, some less-distinguished venue down the street in Santa Cruz.

To meet the so-named munchkin was to be fully engulfed in his warp-field, and to understand the Psychologist’s Desk-Reference about the Napoleonic Complex.
Anyhow it was an interestingly brief meeting, from a disengaged backstage perspective. No free tickets for me.