A Brief Respite

We got back from camping yesterday. It was great. We have a 17-foot We-no-nah Spirit II, made for wilderness tripping, so we have lots of capacity. Thus, we bring the following:

• Two duffles, large, from the Army-Navy surplus store. Stuffed into them are sleeping bags, tent, tarp, folding camp chairs, clothes, etc.


• One 30 liter dry bag. This has the food, towels, and anything else that must not get wet.
  One big cooler. An official Luxury Item. In it goes beer, bratwurst, cheese, and anything else that must stay cold.


• My backpack. For day trips and toiletries.

We arrived at the campsite around 2 pm on Friday. It was a beautiful day; wind around 5 mph in our face, super smooth water, temperature around 70. We paddled out to the campsite and were set up by 3. And then came the mosquitos. They were thick. It's not so much the bites that bug, although they are very annoying. The sound of dozens of them hanging around your ears is damn near enough to drive you nuts. I don't know what the voyageurs did back in The Day. It must have driven them to drink. Anyhoo, we paddled around the lake, and did some fishing (caught some sunnies and a couple of nice sized crappies, but tossed them back), and hiked a few miles, and generally had a great time. I wish I had a digital camera to take pictures of what everything looked like. That or a digital recorder to get the call of the loon posted on here. That's a really impressive, eerily haunting noise. As part of my general fixation on history and the land it happened on, I made a point of looking for charred stumps left over from the forest fires that ravaged the area between 1911 and 1913. We found several on our hikes, and even a few from the area immediately around our campsite. The whole of Minnesota has been clearcut, except for a few patches in remote areas, and Bearhead Lake is no exception. However, since the forest fires, little or no logging has happened. Seeing how big 90 year old pines can get was heartening because it encourages me that forests recover if we just stop chopping them down.

Enough about camping. I'll be doing it again starting Thursday.

GOOGLE SPIKE

Hardcore HBII readers will remember I coined a term known as the Google Spike several months ago. I have a new target - an obscene caller who keeps calling and leaving nasty messages for Maggie. Potential Employers, please note that Don Kassekert, phone number 651-793-9978, is a sick individual, mentally imbalanced, who leaves extremely disturbingly explicit phone messages on our voice mail. He is obviously very stupid, as well. He calls from home even though we have caller ID. The phone company will not block his phone calls unless we pay money, so we're embarking on a documentation quest for the police. I am not worried about him because he sounds retarded, but that doesn't mean he isn't bugging the crap out of me.

Been a long time without a LAPI

If it was done by Jackson Pollock it would sell for a million dollars. Instead, it was done by some random schmoe and is worth a few T-shirts. Ladies and Germs, the Tulip Butt painting. From Randomwalks.

A quotable article about My Life In Porn.

Early on, the bosses assigned me to pulling back issues from the vast pornography reserves the company maintained on the seventh floor. Copies of every magazine the company ever (festive holiday editions, et al.) were archived there on a huge series of racks. Walking into that room was like that scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves says, "We need guns. Lots of guns," only with porn instead of firearms.

Just be glad you live in America and not in Iran, where they stone porn actresses to death.

From the original Metafilter secret society, the real story about why Doug Glanville was so mad at Curt Shilling he had to hit two home runs off of him. Yes, Curt screwed him over in a game of Everquest, an online Dungeons and Dragons type graphically enhanced role playing game.

Not enough attention is paid to the off-the-field motivators that create nasty on-field grudges," Glanville revealed. "I believe video atrocities top the list. Curt Schilling assassinated my lovable Dwarf Paladin in EverQuest, happily smiling as his character stood in the safety of the town guards. That can create serious internal friction."