Month: September 2020

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Autumn Memories – Part 2

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There’s nothing like a home smoked ham, is there? Uncle Dana liked his bacon. Autumn also meant that Grandma opened up the first of the bread and butter pickles she had put up the year before. Absolutely delicious. She always allowed them to sit a year in the dark root cellar before she served them to let the flavors mingle. Autumn was also the season for putting up apples and pears in jars. You make simple syrup and leave it plain, or add cinnamon or mint (makes the jars ruby red or emerald green). They have to sit for at least a year. Grandma (and my mom) also made jars of pie filling. Apple, peach, apricot, mixed berries. strawberries with rhubarb, pumpkin and sweet potato. That way you had filling ready for making pies after they were in season. Both my grandfathers were partial to grilled tenderloin or fish tail sandwiches and autumn was the time to eat them as the tenderloin was fresh from the hog slaughter. Us boys would make a weekend trip to Lake Erie and catch a mess of perch and walleye and we’d have a big family fish fry. The catfish we had was locally caught. Perch, walleye, catfish and crappie were the staples. If we were lucky the white bass would run in the local creek and we could bag a mess of them, too.

Fresh game was good, Rabbits, pheasant, quail, grouse, duck, Canada geese and deer. Me and my brother still make our own venison summer sausage.

Aye, we had good times, didn’t we?

Guest Contributor – Jason M – Autumn Memories

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Memories around autumn. The most common thread was the presence of extended family.

We didn’t raise tobacco, but my grandfather leased fields to a man that did. I got my taste of pulling tobacco as a young child and got a few bucks as a reward. I was too young to do much, but getting those few dollars meant the world to me. Every now and then you’d see one of the laborers take a leaf straight off the plant, cut it up and share it with his buddies. They’d roll the leaf right there and smoke it like a cigarette.

When I was older and soccer practice began in mid to late summer, we’d run anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5 miles as a team before practice. The entire run was surrounded by tobacco fields and I still remember the aroma. That farm is still in business some 28 years later. They’re still growing tobacco, soy beans and milo depending on the crop rotation.

Fall meant festivals and pork BBQ of any variety you could imagine. My school had a fall festival each year and they smoked hundreds of pounds of hams over hickory wood and sold plates to local businesses all night long for the 3rd shift workers, and to the festival-goers the next day.

It meant Saturdays with the cousins trying to knock each other off of rolling barrels while our parents made furniture to sell at the fall festival.

Fall meant dove hunting, squirrel hunting and deer hunting were all in full effect. You’d wake up to the sound of shotguns in the field next your house every Saturday… that is, if you weren’t the one waking everyone else up at sunrise.

It meant playing in the hay loft and building forts out of the square bales. Or setting up obstacle courses to try and conquer to see who could do it the fastest.

It meant Halloween and candy and a party at the church near our house with all the younger kids in our area.

Man, I miss those simple times.

Seeing the world today is almost enough to make you weep. I read an article two days ago where the white author was proclaiming how racist it is for a white person to own a dog. He ended it by saying that all white people should give their dogs to POC or give them to the nearest no kill shelter.

What have I done to my children by bringing them into this world? I moved “back home” 18 months ago. We’ve built a house “on the farm.” I’d love for my kids to experience things like I did growing up. It beats Atlanta, that’s for sure, but they’ll never know those simple joys. I didn’t intend for this to be such a downer comment. Focus on the good parts.

Media Uses Deceptive Headlines to Get Clicks

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If you see a headline like “Why the Trump Campaign Has Biden On the Ropes,” on a news aggregation site best to check who wrote it.  If it’s a lefty outlet like Newsweek you might find that the real title is, “The Trump Campaign Believes It Has Biden On the Ropes. Here’s Why.”  And if you bother to read it, you’ll find that the real thesis is the opposite of the original headline that caught your eye.

So, either the aggregator or the publisher is trying to trick you into clicking on their black pill article.  I like to look over Real Clear Politics every day to see what’s out there.  They’re a news aggregator that is useful because they make a point of balancing articles about 50/50 between left wing and right-wing sources.  But I suspect that their readership is more heavily right leaning, probably 70/30.  So, in order to increase clicks they seem to hide the lefty content as well as they can.

But I’m a wily consumer of the news.  If they leave the name of the publisher off the article, I hover my mouse over the link and eventually it reveals the web address and I can tell who wrote it.  Since there is so much political content during an election my rule of thumb for finding meaningful content is to look for left leaning writers who have good news for me and right leaning writers who have bad news for me.  That eliminates the stuff that is just partisan flag waving on both sides.  But apparently Real Clear Politics is trying to game things by altering titles.  So now, even if I think I’ve found something interesting I have to check the whole IP address to see who it came from and what the actual title is before I click.

I guess I could just read any stuff that sounds interesting but I like to limit any support for places like the NY Times or the Washington Post to a bare minimum just on the principle that not feeding trolls is a good strategy.  But even more importantly time is a precious commodity and wasting it reading nonsense is an offense against your own life.  Especially since some of these guys at places like the Atlantic will rattle off a 5,000-word screed.  That’s 15 – 30 minutes of your life you could have used to do any number of useful and enjoyable tasks.  Hell, throwing out the garbage would still be a more constructive and satisfying employment than reading some woke hipster’s take on why Joe Biden should get your vote.

So, if you have run into this problem the appropriate strategy is look at the web address of the link and you can typically tell the publisher and the actual title of the article.  But of course, a much better strategy is to go first to Orion’s Cold Fire.  The perceptive readers who come here know that we would never try to lure you in with deceptive titles.  And the writing and analysis is always top notch.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – Autumn Memories

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My favorite time of the year is Autumn. The summer temperatures moderate, there are usually fewer storms and rains, the air gets crisp, apples are harvested and cider pressed. The light is flat and the colors of the trees are amazing. Falling leaves are a pain to rake but they are also fun to run through, making ‘whoosh’ noises as you run. They also show up little dust devils, tiny cyclones a few feet tall as they whirl and crackle in the miniature tornadoes. We’d see them and run through them to feel the whirl of wind and the leaves. The nights get longer. It’s harvest time on the farms and I helped my paternal grandparents on their farm. Corn and soybeans were picked and put in gravity bed wagons, then hauled off to the local grain mill. The proprietor was a large man, some six feet six and at least 400 pounds. Every trip we made to the mill, he gave me a candy bar and a cold soda. If we made six trips, I got six candy bars and six sodas. I was rail thin back then with growth and constant exercise so they never bothered me.

My favorite month of the year was October. Not just for Halloween, but in general it’s moderate in wind and rain. The almanac says October usually has 19 fine days and I believe it. Football season on Saturdays and Sundays. Some days you wake up to frost in October. One year there was snow in October. It melted off the next day but there was a skiff of snow on the ground.

Another thing that happened in the late summer and autumn was we would find radiosondes on the farm released by the National Weather Service. They were instrument kits sent aloft on balloons for atmospheric readings. They also had a parachute attached. When the balloon burst at altitude, they floated back down on the parachute. The instrument kit has a paper box you unfolded, put the instrument in it and sent it back, free to the Weather Service. You put on a note where it was found and when. We used to find three or four a month in autumn due to the wind patterns. We were allowed to keep the parachutes and us kids had a ball with them. We’d tie one around our waist and see how fast we could run with the chute dragging behind holding air. Or we’d tie various objects to them and go up in the hay loft of the barn and drop them to see how they floated to earth. On really blustery days we flew them like kites but you had to use strong cord as they really caught the wind.

Yes, Autumn is my favorite season, and October my favorite month. The scents of autumn. The smell of leaves, of fires in fireplaces, of smoking meats. It brings me back to my teen years. Hard work in the fields getting the harvest in then plowing and preparing for next year, or planting winter wheat.

A couple of other things happened in Autumn. Uncle Wink grew tobacco. It was harvested and put in special barns to dry. Sometimes in October or November, the weather was just perfect. The dried tobacco was too brittle to move as it would crumble. But in a certain weather, foggy, cool it was time to move the tobacco to the burly. The leaves regained their flexibility. The whole family descended on Wink’s farm and any boy strong enough was put to moving tobacco bundles (50 pounds or more apiece) from their drying poles. The smaller children and the women cooked for us all. I can still smell the tobacco from those days.

 

The other thing that happened was the hog slaughter and butchering. Again, at Uncle Wink’s farm. Every family in the larger family bought a hog or two as a feeder pig. Wink raised them and we all chipped in for feed and such. Wink and his sons, doing the labor raising the hogs, got their hog for free. On a Saturday when it was crisp and cool, we all arrived at Wink’s. The hogs were rounded up and they were slaughtered and butchered all in one weekend. They were killed, had their throats slit, bled, then were opened up and cleaned, washed then scalded and scraped. They were skinned and cut up and wrapped and put in Wink’s ice house or went into his large smokehouse. Each family’s packages marked with their symbol. In a monstrous copper pot, the cracklings were made over an open fire. Everyone got their share of cracklings. At first me and my brother could only skim the cracklings out of the pot or keep the fires in the smokehouse going with lots of smoke. Later we were set to grind sausage. Between two kegs of nails a board sat and on that board was a two-handed manual grinder. One of us would stuff fresh pork into the grinder along with the correct amount of sage for each family. Ours had a lot of sage in it as dad liked it that way. The other would grind using the handles. We converted a #5 tub of meat into sausage. When one of us had their arms give out, the other cranked and the first grinder stuffed and seasoned. We took turns grinding all day except for meals. I’d like to know how many tons of sausage we ground over the years. I can still taste those hickory smoked hams we got out of it. Can’t find anything like that now.

We both had amazingly strong arms due to the sausage grinding and we won several arm-wrestling bouts at school. A few bullies got their comeuppance when they picked on the wrong, skinny kids with the stout arms.

Supreme Court Vacancy is a Huge Opportunity for the Trump Campaign

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Over the last month the media has been filled with reports of the enormous cash advantage that the Biden campaign is taking over the Trump campaign.  It’s not that the President’s donations have been meager but rather because lefty billionaires are funding super PACs with a fire hose in a desperate attempt to carry Biden over the finish line by any and all means.

And like a deus ex machina (a god from the machine, manna from heaven, a set-up too good to be true) President Trump is handed a situation that allows him to cancel that advantage.  The rage and panic engendered by the opportunity to fill the vacancy is sure to dominate the press for weeks.  The President will tease the selection until Friday.  The hearings will be a three-ring circus.  Every tweet by the President will be a mini-event.  And meanwhile Joe “hidin’” Biden will be standing on the side crying, “doesn’t anyone want to know what I think about this?”

There is an old saying that God helps those who help themselves.  It’s true.  President Trump is an energetic advocate of his interests and when you are paying attention to the situation every once in a while, opportunity knocks.  The flip side of opportunity is the uncertainty and disruption that comes with riding a tiger.  But looking at our opponents and their haplessness in the face of managing the crises they have embraced I’ve got to like our odds of ending up on the winning side of these events.

I remember how even a minor calamity like Hurricane Katrina unraveled the Bush presidency while the true disaster of the COVID crisis is being politically weathered and the BLM insurrection is actually a net positive for the Trump campaign.  To me this is the proof that leadership is much more than just following an MBA slide show template on how a CEO leads an organization.  You truly need to know something about what people are.  And that’s why the Bushes and the Romneys can’t do it.  They’ve never met any actual humans in the wild.  They’ve heard of them at cocktail parties and at management retreats and even seen a few caged ones in their mansions where they keep a zoo of cooks, maids and body guards.  But they’ve never gone out into the forest and studied them.  Somebody like Bill Clinton loved going out in the brush and rub elbows with the common man.  That’s how he got re-elected even after the world knew that he was a lecherous old goat.  When the people looked at him, they knew he was a sinner but they also recognized that he was an actual human being.  No one will ever confuse Mitt Romney with a living man.

So, fate has spun the wheel again for President Trump and as ever he answers the call and puts the machine in gear.  Will he win the game?  It’s absolutely impossible to know for sure.  But I tell ya, I like our odds.

More Wolf’s Bane?

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Wolfs Bane Coming Into Bloom

This has been a goofy mixed up year for weather.  The spring and early summer were extremely cool and delayed many plants by almost a month from their normal cycle of growth.  For the most part this wasn’t too bad but one plant that blooms late in the summer is wolf’s bane.  And as of today, the very last gasp of summer, the leaves on the plants are turning yellow and the flowers aren’t even buds yet, they’re bumps.  What we have here is a foot race between flowers and frost.  Last night it got down to 36°F.  That is dangerously flirting with freezing.  There are two more nights of near freezing temperatures coming up before a warm up is predicted.  I don’t like my chances here.  I need a miracle.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “What’s the big deal if some stupid plant doesn’t flower?”  Well, that’s a fair question.  I’ll try to explain.

The Calendar tracks the path of Earth as it performs its seemingly eternal dance with the Sun.  And here at the Autumnal Equinox we mark the point where the northern latitudes lose their grip on the sun and slip into darkness.  For millennia the inhabitants of the North have recognized this moment and celebrated it with various harvest festivals and religious myths like the Death of Tammuz or the Rape of Persephone.  These solemn occasions were meant to memorialize the end of summer and the beginning of the harvest.

Nowadays most of us aren’t involved in farming and the advent of electric lights has lessened the impact of shorter days on our lives.  But for some of us the end of summer is still an extremely meaningful time.  As I have so often stated here on the site I am an avowed therophile (lover of summer) and the autumnal equinox is like a death knell for me.  Like some primitive soul I atavistically search for a formula or spell to help me fight off the fear of darkness and believe that summer will reemerge on the other side of the sun all those months in the future.  And for me the first step is to take the last gasp of summer, the blooming of the wolf’s bane flowers and tie that to the next great festival on my calendar, Halloween.

For Halloween begins  for me with watching the classic Universal horror movies.  And I always start with Dracula.  Here we see Dracula square off against Dr. Van Helsing for possession of the soul of Mina Seward.  And in this battle one of the prime weapons is a garland of wolf’s bane.  Vampires hate it and all good vampire fighters carry it with them.  And later on in the Universal series we will come to the Wolfman.  Here we are told:

Even a man who’s pure at heart

And says his prayers by night

May become a wolf when the wolf’s bane blooms

And the autumn moon is bright

And that is the link between summer and wolf’s bane and autumn and Halloween.  And Halloween gets you to Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving gets you to Christmas.  And Christmas has to get you to Easter and the beginning of spring.  But it all starts with wolf’s bane.  So wish me luck.  If nature lets me down I’ll have to take drastic action and invoke the only other Summer/Halloween talisman I know of.  I’ll have to have an early showing of “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”  Bradbury’s story provides a direct link between summer and Halloween by way of the carnival theme.  Carnivals are summer and end of summer events.  But in the story we have a Halloween arrival of a dark carnival that is looking to ensnare souls.  The battle between good and evil is to my mind the battle between summer and autumn.  Between life and death.  Okay, that’s the end of my raving.