This will surely brighten your day…I wish there were more news stories like this.

Recently, I have been tagged by two very important people (Katie and Sybil) to post 25 things about me to my Facebook account.  As any good English major, I have created a list exceeding that quantity, padded with verbose explanations that will delight and prod your sensibilities as I unfurl the stream of consciousness.  Onward to your education in my very core being and to my inward theater of the absurd:

1.  When I was a kid, I had a crush on Joanna Kerns (mom on Growing Pains), Julia Duffy (Stephanie on Newhart), and to a lesser extent Judith Light (Angela on Who’s the Boss).  Funny that their names all start with J.

2.  I have never caught a muskie but intend to remedy that as soon as possible.

3. Snakes are one of my fears, and I have been unlucky enough to have nearly stepped on a blacksnake in Arizona and had an undetermined variety of snake swim into my leg while fly fishing in the Smith River in Montana. And they say white men can’t dance.

4.  I once smoked a cigarette in North Korea.

5.  I am right-handed.  I set up my spinning reels with the handle on the left, my baitcasters have the handle on the right, and my fly reels are set up with the handle on the right.  For left-handed people, I recommend the opposite.  People who disagree with me and/or have a different practice are wrong and fooling themselves, even if they catch fish with their poorly-chosen setups.

6.  I have a fascination with fasteners.  I replaced most of the crappy, rusting screws on my Lund boat with stainless steel ones.  I hate it when people build things with crappy fasteners.  Luckily, I have a mole in the Fastenal organization to feed my addiction.

7.  One of my pet peeves is salespeople who know less than me about a product.  They should do their homework if they want to sell me something, especially cars & trucks.  Recently, a salesman, who works for a dealership I shall not name, misled me (either due to dishonesty or ignorance) about the rear-end gear ratio on my Expedition.  I will not repeat the experience.  He probably will.

8.  I am left-eye dominant and right-handed, which pretty much blows the whole “shoot with both eyes open” thing, except when using non-magnification single-plane sighting apparatus such as a ProPoint.  I think it screws up my wing-shooting, but then it may just be an excuse for being a poor shot.

9.  I look lithe and statuesque in a tutu but my pirouettes and plies are very flawed.  I once appeared on Halloween as a Mexican revolutionary ballerina.  The tutu was recycled from a situation arising from betting with Canadians on hockey while drinking Korean soju.  Tutus are surprisingly comfortable and practical garments, but I have not tried them in hunting or fishing situations.  Yet.

10. I hope that my kids will grow up to be nicer and more tolerant than I am.  But still be the warrior-princesses I taught them to be and kick ass when needed.

11. I admire my father for having the unique ability to care very little about possessions.  He is nearly a candidate for being a Buddhist monk, as he owns very little in the way of personal stuff.  He tends to keep cars for about ten years, has hunted with the same two rifles all of his life, and probably has given away far more than he has kept.  I am not my father, as my garage will attest.

12. I have gone through a frightening array of hairstyles including skinhead, perm, ponytail, and all-purpose short haircut.  The skinhead was especially frightening because it revealed my obvious scars from two different childhood splitting-open-my-head incidents, which in and of itself should elicit concern for me.  You should also know that none of the above coiffures were in fashion when I sported them.

13. I spent a month in Korea several years ago and hung out with Buddhist monks, lecherous businessmen, progressive feminists, exploited immigrant factory laborers, and all kinds of interesting people.  I was not able to drive at all during that month, so when I returned it felt very nice to open up my Thunderbird to 120 on the way home from the airport.  Freedom, baby, yeah!

14. I have a huge aversion to Dodge pickups and will tell anyone who will listen not to buy them.  This is a sickness based on the reality of buying two brand new ones in a row that had severe drivetrain problems.  I lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 within months as I found my way back to Ford and vehicular bliss.

15. My favorite brands of random things include:  Tires—BF Goodrich/Michelin, Vehicles—Ford, Bows—Mathews, Spinning Reels—Shimano, and Power Tools—Milwaukee, but they all make individual products that suck, so I try not to be a brand junkie.  Awareness, my friends, awareness.

16. My favorite NASCAR driver is Matt Kenseth.  I think Roush should be allowed to keep five teams. I think Earnhardt Ganassi will be a joke in the coming year and Teresa E. deserves it.  I wish the Bass Pro Shops sponsorship would shift to Ryan Newman. If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.  Go put on your Juan Pablo Montoya pajamas and pout, but don’t bother me while my fantasy team is winning.

17. I like to be right and spend a fair amount of effort making sure that I’m consistently right.  “Right, right.  You’re bloody-well right.  You got a bloody right to say…” If you know the song lyrics I just quoted, you know what plays in my head.

18. I am shy in public situations overloaded with people but one-on-one you can’t shut me up.  And I am prone to blogorhhea.

19. Although I am a shy, withering flower, I was a two-term faculty senate president because I had a lot of people fooled (or they were just glad someone else was willing to go to management team meetings).  I always fantasized about abruptly yelling “Objection!” in one of those meetings and pounding my shoe on the table.

20. I have written and published some poetry, but that doesn’t make me a hippie.  Or even an uppity mountain hippie.*

            *words stolen from Buster Wants to Fish, the best Internet brodown ashram of fishing hippies ever!

21. Unlike the growing contingent of Christian bashers, I feel that my Catholicism is much more freeing than constraining.  Eat that, hippies.

22. I am not really a hippie-hater but I like saying “Eat that, hippies,” (maybe because I think hippies need to eat better—they’re so skinny). My sister is somewhat of a hippie.  I used to have a hippie and a cop for siblings, an interesting combination on both ends of the spectrum of fascism, but the cop has a more respectable job now that doesn’t involve throwing people in the back of cars like luggage.

23. I believe that a growing cadre of liberals (i.e. Nancy Pelosi) are the new fascists, as brown is the new black.  Tolerance begins when you open your mouth, even if it is really tight from all of your Californified plastic surgeries.  I should read my own words.

24. My wife’s car is called Pete because it’s a PT Cruiser and I’m so brilliantly original.  Everyone in our family now talks to Pete.  Pathologists would understand this progression.

25. I believe that most people impair themselves far too much with negative self-messages and resistance to reality.  The remedy is self-awareness but most of us don’t tune into ourselves worth a dang, thus acting on a false sense of who we are.  Stop it! 

26. My favorite mythological character (I teach mythology, along with technical writing and composition) is Pandora, a beautiful figure unleashed on humanity, carrying a box of afflictions, with hope hiding in there as well.  Microcosm of the human condition, I say.  However, hope is more than a word on a poster. <– subtle political message.  Eat that, hippies.

If you have reached this point, you know more about me than almost anyone, and you can go further your knowledge of the human condition by looking up an article on the Large Hadron Collider, or get a coffee at the Starbucks-that-used-to-be-a-Starbucks-but-now-is-something-else-because-Starbucks-tanked-due-to-the-economy-and-closed-a-bunch-of-stores.  Or you can go read about cemeteries that are surrounded by Home Depot parking lots.  Bye bye. 

The Buster boys are having a discussion about getting rid of the “trout bum” marketing stereotype. Good. It’s about time someone put that away. I’m guessing Gierach, who may or may not have coined the term, is probably pretty flippin’ tired of it himself. It’s probably kind of like being a musician and writing a semi-crappy song that becomes wildly popular, forcing you to listen to it over and over.  And the man left behind his bumminess about the time he published his first book (not a judgement of the fine man–just an observation that as soon as an artist creates something, it takes on new life and flees its original form).  

On to my cultural analysis. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what is sporting, and what makes a sportsman. Is it the look? Is it the Filson jacket? Is it the cost of the shotgun or the flyrod? I think most of us who actually live in contact with the great outdoors (as opposed to buying the costume at Cabela’s) would probably agree that none of those things define sporting. So we can leave image behind for now.

There have been tomes written on the subject of sporting ethics. So is it our ethics that define us? I think so, to a great extent. But that brings up lots of questions. What is fair chase? Do we practice catch-and-release? Is fly-fishing superior to worm-drowning? Do we spot-and-stalk our deer, or do we drive them from tree rows with three generations worth of bushwhackers and have Grandpa gun them down as they flee?  This last was a tad over-the-top, but then I have observed this very thing in Southeastern North Dakota.  The hail of bullets and my sense of self-preservation pushed me out of the regular gun season and right into the archery and muzzleloader seasons.

I once had a very long conversation over the course of several days with a beautiful woman with a quick mind and a vegetarian outlook.  Her feeling about animals was that we should hurt them as little as possible.  While I tend to agree, I also understand that I am at the top of the food chain.  We went back and forth over the issue of catch-and-release fishing.  Her perspective was that it is almost more honest to fish for subsistence, eating what you catch, versus harming the fish for sport and releasing them.  I think our main ideological difference was in the way we look at the resource at hand.  If fish=food, then I know I have the skills to eat, and I think that will always be one reason that I fish.  If fish=sport, then I know that in certain cases I want to practice catch-and-release to maintain the resource for others to experience, not necessarily because it is less harmful to the fish, which I do not believe are sentient beings who feel pain in the same way that humans do.  

Once one is aware of the ramifications of kill vs. release, the next level is to examine the methods, and this is where the sporting image sometimes comes into play, eclipsing the substance of what we do as killers of meat or seekers of sport.  One can see the debates everywhere on pure fishing art–fly vs. baitfishing, artificial vs. livebait, etc.  Some fly-fishermen see themselves as purely sporting, never intending to kill fish.  Some anglers seem to be hell-bent on filling their freezers with meat to last several lifetimes. And most of us are somewhere in between.

Case in point:  snagging.  This is certain to cause a little bit of debate.   My initial impression of snagging will always be what I observed growing up in Montana: bridges lined with cooler-toting dudes slinging treble hooks in an all-out war on salmon runs.  The monofilament left behind on overhead wires and bridge beams from those practices was in and of itself an environmental hazard!

Enter my experience with paddlefish snagging.  The first time I saw paddlefish snagging on TV, a guide from Oklahoma was taking a group out in a boat to find and snag 50+ pound paddlefish.  While I at first recoiled at the idea of snagging, I realized that the reason they were using that method was that paddlefish don’t lend themselves to baitfishing or artificial baits because of their plankton-sucking habit.  So I booked a trip and off went my brother and I to snag these prehistoric creatures at Grand Lake, OK.  Being from North Dakota, I was very surprised at the very liberal limits in OK, since we are only allowed one per season and there is a quota.  

The experience was surreal.  Motor along in a boat, dragging a 12 oz weight with about an 8/0 treble hook tied a couple feet up the line.  When the paddlefish is engaged, prepare for the fight!  

Our paddlefish were butchered by the guide (cleaned seems to be the proper word for a little trout, but these are a little big to slice open with a 4″ blade).   We took the meat, thick steaks mostly, home in coolers to be consumed.  

So do I feel dirty?  Nah.   Do I need to go on a paddlefish snagging binge?  Nah.  As with most experiences, the first time was rather exciting and now I may or may not seek out the opportunity again.  

The real question:  was it sporting?  I’m not real sure.  It’s kind of like catfish grabbling.  If you’re going to eat the sucker, anyway, does it really matter much how you catch it?  

I might also add other methods to the discussion.  Speaking of catfish, is jug fishing sporting?  Is using an automatic reel tied to a tree branch sporting?  Is fishing a wire crappie rig with three hooks sporting?

I will sit back, smoking my pipe, leaning on my elbow patches, and ponder the matter.  As with most things, I think a heavy dose of honest self-awareness will set most of us on the right path.

There is one thing I know for sure.   I sure would like to see one of these Filson types put down his box of slave-labor-tied flies and grab a catfish out from under the cutbank like the ladies on Girls Gone Grabblin‘.  Naw–scratch that.  I’d rather see the girls do it.

Click to enlarge.

Maybe this will be the first in a series, or maybe it will be a one-off lazy posting because I don’t have anything to say right now.  This is what I’ve been reading online, and this is where the real outdoor writing is happening.  

First, the Mad Fishicist:

What Economic Crisis?  is a beautiful post on a beautiful blog. It explains in very pretty words why a national economic crisis doesn’t affect a guy with a Marlin, a Stihl, and the skills to provide for his family.  The images and words on this blog are breathtaking and must be read for themselves.  My descriptions simply become cliche.  Quotable quote: ”It’s not just a good way to live.  I’m starting to believe it’s the right way.” 

(note: this blog was last updated in November–I sincerely hope it’s not going away)

Second, the Trout Underground.

Fly Fishing the Upper Sacramento in Winter…Barely Winter… is a post that is typical of Tom Chandler’s writing at the Trout Underground.  It’s a story any fly-fisherman could tell, but I’m glad Tom is telling it.  There is a nice mix of sensitive description, gorgeous photos, and a bit of the practical.  Quotable quote:  ”some people crave powerful illegal drugs, others accumulate power and expensive cars, but I’ve got a thing for rising trout.”

Third, Buster Wants to Fish.

This kind of thing never happens to me but… is Bacon’s contribution to the literature of the “Dude Code of Conduct,” describing his interaction with his rugged neighbor.  In the best Buster style, it reveals some of the very meaning of our outdoor dudeness.  Quotable quote:  ”By the sheer amount of guns, shells and beat-up canvas hunting gear I used to see this guy loading into the sweetest old 50’s-era station wagon every weekend morning, it’s fair to assume this is one genuine, old-school badass.”  

Enjoy the reading!

James Joyce (through a fictional character) described Hell to a group of schoolboys thusly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

fractal by Sundstrom at www.sxc.hu

“Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.”

I disagree on the temperature and circumstances of Hell.  I believe I have glimpsed it.

It is too cold for ice fishing and there is too much snow here. We have so much snow, in fact, that when holes are drilled, the pressure is so bad that water spews forth, slushifying everything and then freezing.  

photo by Xanderalex at www.sxc.hu

Forecast for tomorrow: 38 degrees below frickin’ zero (real temperature, not wind chill).  Record snowfall for the month of December and it’s still piling up.  

Somewhere a bad-ass Canadian ice fisherman is reading this and laughing while he screws together twelve foot extensions for his auger.  

I’m not.  Not when I have phrases like “afflict the bodies of the damned” and “how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings” unfurling themselves in my frozen brain.

Wake me up in May.

From my digital pics collection–taken in July 2005.

The latest online issue of Catch Magazine is out:

http://www.catchmagazine.net/

Consistently the finest collection of fishing eye candy I have ever seen.

Just a quick alert to a product I was unaware of.  It has made my life and the appearance and function of my rimfire rifles much richer.

THE PROBLEM:  Mounting scopes on European rimfires.  Examples:  Zastava imports, like the Remington Model Five; Sako Quad; some CZ rimfires; Anschutz.  They have 11mm grooves, which, at least in Remington’s case, get passed off as 3/8 grooves for .22 rings.  But they’re not quite the same.  I encountered this problem myself with my Remington Model Five, when mounting a scope with cheap rimfire rings.  They just didn’t seem to “grab” properly on the rail, and even seemed to be slightly off-level, but I went along with it at the time and it functioned.

THE SOLUTION: Fast forward to the present.  I just picked up a Sako Quad (for 399 samolians, no less!) and it, too, has an 11mm groove.  I stopped by Sportsman’s Warehouse, and my solution was waiting.  Warne makes a rimfire ring that solves the problem and grips the rail very tightly.  The claw on the side of the ring can be turned 180 degrees depending on whether you are using it on a 3/8 groove, or an 11mm European application.  And they’re nice steel rings for 20 bucks, available in medium and high.

These rings are a very nice replacement for the cheap aluminum stuff that usually comes free with rimfire scopes.  Go out and improve your .22s!  My Remington Model Five and Sako Quad will both be wearing these.

 Click here to visit the Warne page describing the 7.3/.22 Rings.

Oh, and the math?  11mm=.433 inches.  3/8″=.375″.  That is a .058″ difference.  Maybe I’m picky, and maybe it’s just the design of the rings, but the Warne rings set up for 11mm feel rock-solid on my Model Five.  I love it when I find things that make everything fall right into place.

It’s resolution time.  For those who can’t come up with their own resolutions, or who want to peep into my sordid life, I submit the following resolutions, along with how some of them can be accomplished.  From losing weight to catching muskies, I know I probably need a game plan to bring these to fruition.

#1:  Lose 20 pounds of belly insulation.  How?  Mike Huckabee’s show on Fox gave me the solution one day.  In his “ask me anything” segment, a woman asked him how he lost so much weight.  His answer was twofold:  First, if it comes through your car window, don’t eat it.  Second, if it didn’t exist a hundred years ago, don’t eat it.  Brilliant!  Think about it.

#2:  Improve attitude.  My daughter recently returned from an ice fishing trip with me.  Her characterization of the trip, rather than “wow, we caught some nice sunnies!” was “boy did Dad swear a lot at his equipment.”  Oops.  Bad Daddy. This shouldn’t be hard to accomplish, as long as I stay away from cheap tools and poorly-built equipment and vehicles.  

#3:  Catch a good muskie.  I shouldn’t need any help with this one.  Just prayer and time on the water.  Maybe I can make a deal with God related to swearing less and being a better example to my daughters.  

#4:  Finish all projects I have begun or identified as a necessary project.  This would include building a hutch for our computer desk, putting in a sump pump, replacing our water heater before it craps out, finishing a fillet knife project begun last year, reloading several hundred rounds of ammunition for various bang-sticks, and painting our back door.

#5:  Learn more about fly-fishing, including tying some flies.   I have my father’s vise and some of his equipment, but so far my only accomplishment has been a Freakishly Bright Yellow Rubber Leg Bass Chugger on a Ridiculously Large Hook.  Since bass will bite on a beer can with treble hooks (no, really!) I think I need to expand my repertoire to trout flies.

Enjoy the new year, and make your own resolutions!  Stealing mine will probably damage your karma or something.