Different Crowds

You said something before about running with the crowd. The thing is, there are lots of crowds, or cliques, or societies, or sub cultures in the world, and they all think that they're the only one. Like I said, I had plenty of friends, just different friends than you had. They weren't all hunters and fishermen either. There were the kids at school, at Elsdon, at Musichorale (the choir that my mom was in and that she persuaded me to join for a year, against my better judgment), and the kids on the block. The only person I remember who showed any interest in sports was my next door neighbor Jimmy. He was the one who got me to watching the White Sox games that one summer. It was interesting at first, but I soon tired of it, and of Jimmy, who had a few other personality traits that I grew to dislike. Some of the kids at school were into sports, but they were just acquaintances, not really friends. My parents were not into sports, and I don't think most of their friends were either.

There was some overlap between the groups with which I associated, both of people and of interests. One thing that most of us had in common was singing, not so much in high school, but we were always singing in elementary school, church, scouts, and Musichorale. Even the Outdoorsmen used to sing some ribald sea shanties that we learned from a record one of the guys had picked up somewhere. We used to sing some silly chants in the army while marching, and those Irish guys we trained with used to sing while drinking in the Quonset hut after duty hours. It always puzzled me why my colleagues in the paper mill thought me odd when I would break into song at work. Where I came from, you were odd if you didn't sing. It's not surprising, then, that you and I lived within a mile of each other and you never got into singing and I never got into sports. We just ran with different crowds.

Oren's farm was located a mile or two north of Kankakee. I forget the highway number, but you could get there by heading south on either Cicero or Pulaski. Later they opened an interstate, I believe it was 54, that brought us to Oren's back forty, where we could pick up a tractor trail that crossed the property to the front part. That trail was only usable in the summer, which I discovered when I tried to use it early one spring, got stuck, and ruined the clutch in my daddy's car......again.

Some years ago, Oren's granddaughter, who had not been born yet when I used to go there, contacted me on the internet. She had Googled Oren's name and came across a quote of his that I had previously used in a blog. She asked me what I remembered about her grandfather, and I ended up writing a whole series of blogs about my experiences on Oren's farm. She never did tell me much from her side of it, and I got the impression that she had not known him very well. I should have saved those blogs to my files, but I didn't, and they were lost when the site I was using shut down a year or so later. Writing those blogs was a real trip down Memory Lane for me. I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but recalling those days made me realize that working on that farm had a lot to do with making me the person that I am today. It was a privilege for this city kid, who wanted to be a farmer when he grew up, to get out of Chicago periodically and do something real. Too bad I never grew up.

The quote: "Show me a man who has a hundred ideas, and I'll show you a man who has at least one good idea. Show me a man who has only one idea, and it's probably wrong."

on baseball

What I was wondering about your sports fandom was not so much whether you played sports as a kid, but how come you never became a sports fan, you know like rooting for the Bears or the Lions, but I guess you have explained that with your comments about hysteria, you kind of have to give up part of your mind to hysteria to be a sports fan, or else it is not much fun.

There is a cerebral part to it, like where should the shortstop play a pull hitter, when does bunting make sense, should the pitcher bat ninth or eighth, which is not that different from talking about how to grease a bearing, I think it was. But those guys, talking that cool logical talk, drop it as soon as there is a big play and howl with hysteria.

Hard to believe you didn’t pick up a little baseball fandom when you were a youngun. It seemed like it was all over in my neighborhood, you had to talk some baseball or you were a conversation dropout, but maybe you didn’t mind that much being a conversation dropout.

I don’t have much to comment on Orin’s farm, except to ask exactly where it was, so I will go on about my Cub fandom.

I don’t know why I picked the Cubs, they were always in seventh or eighth place. The Sox, on the other hand where always fighting it out for first place and even won the pennant in 1959. And everybody around me was a Sox fan, I was the only Cub fan I knew. Well maybe that’s part of the reason, even though I ran with the herd, I always wanted to be a little different. I always wanted to be left handed, I used to practice writing left handed because you never knew when you were going to break your right arm.

My mother, the saint, used to take me and a handful of neighborhood kids (all Sox fans, but a kid would go to any baseball game) out to Wrigley Field. What was a cool thing about that, besides seeing other Cub fans in that mysterious alternate universe of the north side, was riding the el. So high, so fast, I think the only el I ever rode before coming back here in 1987 was the train that went by Wrigley.

Anyway I continued to be a Cub fan until I went to college. At the beginning of college I was overwhelmed and had no idea of what was going on outside of my classes and the dorm. Towards the end of my college I was becoming a hippie, and sports were so square I never paid any attention.

I remember once when I was in southern Illinois in 1970 I had a transistor radio and I happened to pick up a Cub game on it one summer night. There is nothing, nothing in the world like listening to that tinny play by play while smelling a freshly mown lawn.

When I came back to Champaign in 1971 and started working at the House of Chin bar, I was surrounded by Cub fans, and so it has gone ever since.

I love the structure of the game. It is a game within a game within a game. There is the pitcher and the batter and the only outcome is a man on base or an out. The balls and strikes pile up, but have no meaning when the at bat is done. A guy can have a 3 and 0, and end up being out, or an 0 and 2, and get on base.

And then within the inning is another game. You can load the bases and still not score. You can have two outs and nobody on and still end up scoring. At the end of the inning you will either have scored or not, and the next inning will begin as if the previous inning had never existed.

Then there is the whole game, and you will either score more runs than the other guy or not. Time is not a factor. The game will take however long it takes. There are no ties. Conceivably the game could go on forever.

Oh, and I enjoy giving myself up to hysteria once the first pitch is thrown.

The Game Farm

I think I spelled it wrong, I seem to remember that it was "Oren", not "Orin". It's not a common name, Welsh I think, and it's usually spelled "Orin" or "Orrin", but this guy spelled it "Oren".

The Beagle and Bass Hunting and Fishing Club, of which my dad was a member, used to lease hunting privileges from farmers. This was not a rich man's club, and the lease was usually for a nominal fee. Once they made friends, and convinced the farmer that all Chicago people were not gangsters, he was happy to let us hunt on his land because we kept everybody else off. Oren told us that he didn't want our money, but he could sure use some help around the farm. The deal was that we would have these work bees on several summer weekends, and that would earn us hunting privileges in the fall.

I did this with Beagle and Bass for several years, and then the club had a falling out with Oren. By then I had joined a club of my own called "The Outdoorsmen Gun and Hunting Club". It wasn't much of a club compared to Beagle and Bass, it was mostly high school aged kids, I think the oldest guy might have been 20. I asked Oren if he would work out a deal with my club like he used to have with Beagle and Bass, and he was happy to do so. Our membership peaked at 10, and then began to dwindle down until there was only two of us left, but we kept at it until I graduated and left the state. That last summer, between my junior and senior years, the other guy, who went by the name of "Smix", stayed with Oren all summer. He wasn't getting along with his parents and was looking for a new home anyway. I spent a lot of time out there myself, but not nearly as much as Smix did. By this time, my friend Jack had joined the navy, so he was out of the picture. Jack did not adapt well to military life, and they sent him home after about a year. I took him out and introduced him to Oren shortly before I left for Alaska, and he continued until Oren went out of business, but that's a whole nother story. I heard that Smix got in trouble with the law while I was in Alaska, and I don't know what ultimately became of him.

Oren and his family used to raise sheep and hogs, but they transitioned to wild game about the time I first started going out there with Beagle and Bass. They had a few buffalos, a dozen or so deer, and some mallard ducks, but pheasants were becoming their main focus. Most of the work Smix and I did that last summer was building pheasant pens and two big barns, where the chicks would be kept until they were big enough to be let outside into the pens. The farm was 80 acres, with the pens and barns located on the front forty. The back forty was in Christmas trees and was loaded  with rabbits. There were also pheasants out there, mostly escapees from Oren's pens, and we were welcome to shoot those too.

This can be a long story, depending on how much of it you want to hear, and I've got to go now and help my hypothetical wife with something. I will continue tomorrow, unless you've got something else you would rather talk about.

games kids play

I was thinking that you didn’t run with the herd as much as other kids did. I was thinking that where you grew up, on the other side of 51st Street which is kind of a busy street, might have something to do with it. Now it is all the Central Steel and Wire parking lot, but I’m guessing back then it had a lot of empty land because if it had been chockablock bungalows like the streets south of there, it would have been hard to buy it all up. And that whole area north of 51st Street is even now kind of empty. So maybe you had a comparatively more rural upbringing than the kids to the south.

Our prairies were generally just vacant lots, but there was an area just northwest of 56th and St Louis that was maybe half a block. We called it the St Louis Laundry, and the word on the street was that it had been like a dry cleaner and you know those guys have all kinds of strange chemicals and one day the whole thing blew up just like that.

I don’t know how we knew this, or if it was true. None of the adults seemed to know anything about it. There were still parts by 56th Street that had cement foundations and there was a ditch in the back that could have been a basement.

There was one of those little stores where your mother sent you to get a quart of Wanzer and a loaf of Wonder bread on 57th between Christiana and Spaulding. The sign above it said Connie’s, but we kids always called it Bendrooms. I have no idea why. Perhaps it was once owned by a guy named Ben Droom, but that is just conjecture. None of the adults called it Bendrooms.

I was just wondering about those little things that get passed down from kid to kid and none of the adults know much about it, and maybe it goes back hundreds of years, well I am just speculating.

I’m thinking of one game we used to play called fox. The fox would go and hide and then the other kids would come walking down the sidewalk chanting “One o clock and the fox ain’t here. Two o’clock and the Fox ain’t here. Three o’clock and the fox ain’t here,” and so on, and the fox would lay in wait until they had walked past him and then he would jump out and tag as many as he could. There was another called Patty Cake, where one of the kids would bend down over one of the stoops with his head in his hands, and the chant would be “Patty cake, patty cake, baker man, something, something,” ending up with something about he baked a pie and somebody stuck their finger in it, whereupon one of the kids would poke him in the back, and then, I am not sure, the kid would have to figure out who poked him in the back, and everybody else would run and hide and the guy would try to find them and tag them.

That patty cake thing strikes me as kind of old fashioned for modern kids, as we were then, and what did we know about foxes, and why the o’clocks, and why the ain’t?

We played red light, green light, but that is still widely played in the city today as I discovered when subbing. There was statue. which was like it except that when you were tagged you had to freeze, but the other kids could unfreeze you if they got to you before it got to them. And then there was goul. It was where you could go and it couldn’t tag you. I expect goul was a corruption of goal, but I don’t know.

I guess I went a little off the subject but I went a little awry talking about the St Louis Laundry, it was so distant (two half blocks), and so mysterious, and that explosion, and did anybody get killed? Nobody knew.

I was mostly a run with the herd kid. Because of circumstances I have been alone a lot, but I would generally rather be with a bunch of people. Being with one or two people is ok, but generally the more people the better for me.

I generally didn’t like going on trips with my parents. Not that I didn’t have a good time, but I would rather be running with the herd.

Love the name Orin Bolin, sounds like the kind of names that people in southern Illinois had. Tell the story, and include the story of Orin Bolin in it.

What I Did As a Kid

First, let me say that I think that your first paragraph is s pretty good assessment of my personality. Of course you got most of that information from our correspondence over the last few years. I don't know if I can be considered an unbiased source, but I try to be.

What I did as a kid: Well, it depends on what age you're talking about. Like I said, I didn't go to kindergarten, and I was the first born, so I probably identified with my parents more than I did with other kids. I don't remember ever feeling bored or lonely, so I must have done stuff. I always had friends, but I don't remember being all that socially oriented. If somebody wanted to do something and I would rather do something else, I did something else. My mother told me that I made friends easily, and that I frequently befriended people who nobody else liked. I suppose that's right, but I didn't do it on purpose, it just came naturally to me.

In my early years we played fantasy games a lot. Usually we would re-enact a movie plot and then proceed to make a sequel. There were two or three summers during which we played something we called "Dog and Dog Catcher". It was inspired by the scene in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" where The Tramp liberates a bunch of captive dogs from a cage on the dog catcher's truck. Our yard was fenced in and made a fine dog pound. The rule was, once you were captured, you couldn't let yourself out either of the two gates, but any "dog" that was still loose could open the gate from the outside and set you free. The "dog" role was more popular than the "dog catcher role", so the dogs usually outnumbered the dog catchers, making it easy for one dog to create a diversion at one of the gates while another dog went around through the alley and opened the other gate. We didn't keep any kind of score. On the rare occasion that all the dogs were captured before we had to go home for supper, one of the dog catchers would turn them loose and we'd start all over again. It was kind of a silly game, but we liked it.

When I was ten years old, I got a real shotgun for Christmas. Shortly after that, I lost interest in playing games with the other kids and gave all my toy guns away. My father worked a lot of hours and we didn't get to go hunting nearly as much as I would have liked. At some point, our family had a falling out with my Uncle Eddie and we stopped going to his summer home in New Buffalo, Michigan, which was where we previously had done most of our fishing.

Then, when I was about 13, I met Jack, who was three years older. Jack was kind of a loose cannon and, at first, my parents were worried that he would be a bad influence for me. Before long, though, they decided that, if anything, I was a good influence for Jack, and they stopped objecting to our friendship. Jack knew about places we could hunt and fish right in the city, and we started doing that a lot. Well, it wasn't real hunting because you couldn't shoot a gun in the city limits, but it was the next best thing. I'm sure that I told you about how I used to train my rabbit dogs in the big prairies behind the factories. Jack figured that there must be some way we could actually kill some of those rabbits without getting arrested. We tried a variety of home made weapons before settling on bows and arrows. We weren't exactly legal because, technically, we were trespassing, but nobody seemed to care, and we got away with it for years. I only remember shooting one rabbit, and I think Jack got one or two. It would take an expert archer to hit a running rabbit being chased by dogs, and we never did get all that good at it, but the dogs liked it, and the experience they got paid off when we went hunting for real with my dad on Sundays.

Our fishing was more productive, once we learned that there were lot more fish in the Sherman Park lagoon than in the Marquette Park lagoon. I did catch one nice catfish the first time we went to Sherman but, after that, it was all carp. Well, actually, they were oversized goldfish, but a goldfish is nothing more than a carp with pretty colors. They ran about six to eight inches, but they were tall like bluegills, and not bad eating. My mother wouldn't have anything to do with them, but she told me how to cook them for myself. Her exact words were, "You caught them, you clean them, you cook them, you eat them, and you wash the dishes.", which I did for years.

I think that I have also told you about the time I spent working for hunting privileges on Orin Bolin's game farm  near Kankakee. If not, and you're interested, I'll tell you tomorrow.

sports

I wonder what you did when you were a kid. Kids are always playing some kind of game or sport. I wonder if you just didn’t hang out with the pack that much. That would account with your love of authority, but then you also insist that authority must be doing the right thing, and when it doesn’t you go against it. That would account for how at the paper plant you were both a rad and a suck, or maybe it was that you were neither, and I think the words were different. Like you wanted to join the army and you wanted to be a company man, but then when you discovered that the army and the company were full of fuckups you lost interest in them, and mostly you want to go your own way.

Or maybe I am wrong. Just a cheap analysis from a guy who took a bunch of psychology courses in college, even though most of them were about rats.

I think the word hysteria is a little too extreme. I’m going to substitute the word passion. Although passion seems a little too positive the way it is currently being used. People like to brag that they have passion, people think if you follow your passion you can’t go wrong. But a lot of people with a lot of passion are big assholes and if you follow your passion you most likely will go wrong.

Well it’s in our genes, if we are going to take that forest from the other tribe, we will do better if we get fired up, especially if we are so fired up that we don’t worry about taking a spear ourselves. I think that’s where it comes from. I think that love of country is not far from love of your local sports team.

They both have their upsides and downsides. The love of country makes some sense because if the country does well, most of the people in it do well, but it also makes people do stupid and cruel things because they are too besotted by the sound of fife and drums to listen to the voice of reason. Sports is basically stupid, it is a lot of time and effort wasted, but on the other hand mostly nobody gets hurt.

I am not much of a sports fan, but I am a Cub fan. When I watch the game I get caught up in it, I am fired up, even though deep down I know it doesn’t mean shit. The six year old Cub fan in me is jumping up and down. It is fun to be fired up. The good thing is if the Cubs win, I let the six year old rule. If the Cubs lose, older wiser Ken takes over and says it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. So if the Cubs win it is a big deal and if they lose it isn’t, so it’s a profitable situation.

But there are a lot of excesses in sports, and the whole myth that it builds character is laughable, and that whole thing about casting a moral shadow on a win or a loss is reprehensible, and all the attention spent on something like the superbowl or the academy awards, while we are at it, takes up a lot of space in the newspaper when I would rather be reading about something else.

So I don’t think you are missing anything by not being a sports fan.

Why I Don't Like Sports

I thought I told you his before, but we never do get tired of those old classics, do we.

First of all, nobody in my family was into sports, except hunting and fishing of course. I had rheumatic fever when I was two or three years old, and I guess they thought I wasn't completely recovered by the time I was supposed to start kindergarten, so I didn't go to kindergarten. Looking back on it now, I don't think I was as sick as they thought I was. They didn't understand as much about heart problems in those days as they do now, and the rheumatic fever had left me with a slight heart murmur, which I still have, so the doctor didn't want me to exert myself any more than necessary. When I did start school, I was exempted from gym and sports until I was about ten yeas old. I never felt that I was missing anything. I used to sit on the bench watching the other kids at gym, and it didn't look like anything I wanted to do anyway. By the time my restrictions were lifted, I was so far behind in my athletic development that I never bothered to try to catch up. I had developed other interests by then which took up most of my time.

I never did watch a lot of TV, not compared to other people. When I did watch it, I was mostly interested in the Westerns, which were popular in those days. I liked the guns of course, but I think that's also where I also picked up my quaint ideas about right and wrong, good and evil. When the Westerns started to evolve into what they called "adult Westerns", I began to drift away from them. There was that one summer when the neighbor kid got me to watching the White Sox games. They won the pennant that year but, by that time, I had drifted away from them too. I went to a few football games during my first year at Gage Park but, by the end of the season, I got tired of that and never came back. Years later, somebody told me that an interest in sports was some kind of male bonding ritual. Having never desired to bond with any males, I don't think I missed much. Maybe that's why I never got excited about sports.

I drove school busses for almost ten years. I think that the only thing that kept me there for that long was that it was an excellent opportunity to study human behavior in the wild. I always wondered what was wrong with some people, and now I think I know. I always thought of hysteria as something to be avoided. Of course I have become hysterical from time to time, but I didn't like it and tried to avoid future recurrences. Apparently, some people enjoy hysteria and actually seek it out. They may not know that it's called "hysteria", if you ask them what they're doing they will likely say "Having fun."  I'm not sure if sports fosters hysteria or hysteria fosters sports, but I'm pretty sure that, without hysteria, there would be no sports. I suppose the same might be said about rock music. Jumping up and down and getting excited for no good reason seems to appeal to many people, but not to me. Hey, I never claimed to be normal! 

sports, tinseltown and lying liars.

The main point I was trying to make about the Oscars and the Baseball Hall of Fame was how bent out of shape people get when their heroes don’t get awards and don’t get voted in. It just seems silly to me.

I never did get the story, if there is one, about why you don’t care at all about sports. Maybe there isn’t one, maybe you were just never interested. In a way it is a blessing, because than you never have to go into the sports section to see what the score of the game is, and page past all these articles written by grown men, hopping mad that their team lost and blaming it all on some player who didn’t play well, or a manager who didn’t manage well, and it is never because the player or manager had a bad day or an unlucky break or maybe the other team was simply better, it is because of some moral fault in the player or manager and nothing else will do to remedy the situation then off with their heads, and if the owners of the team don’t do that, then they are morally corrupt and off with their heads too.

They never write a column saying that a previous column they wrote was crappy and so they are chopping off their own heads.

The Oscars are a little like that with some critic complaining to holy hell that his favorite movie didn’t win, and again it is not simply because a certain group of people voted some way on a certain day, whereas another group of people would have voted another way, or even the same people might have voted different on a different day. No, it is a terrible injustice that will tarnish the shiny tinsel of Tinseltown. And then they have this whole contingent of politically correct characters who count the women and the blacks and the asians and gays and whatever, and if they are not represented in precisely the right amounts, or if one group says something that offends some other group that is a tarnish of the tinsel. And movies take on a political hue, and if the liberal movies don’t win that is an insult to the left and if the conservative movie doesn’t, that is an insult to the right, and Fox is convinced that the whole thing is a plot by Obama to institute sharia law and to make Beagles marry his gay dog.

See what you are missing, Buckaroo? And why buckaroo, or even more interesting where did -aroo come from, and speaking of that what of -arama?

I had a friend who was a compulsive liar. Like your friend he was kind of cagey about it. He claimed to have been a minor league hockey player, which was kind of cool in our crowd, but not so prominent that anybody would look it up and find him wrong. Sometimes a couple days after I told him something interesting that happened to me, I would overhear him telling the same story to somebody else, only now he was the star of the story. Poor guy. We confronted him once about his lying and he confessed to everything, but then he kept on doing it, because I suppose it was the only thing he knew how to do.

He never got beyond driving a cab, and telling everybody that he was in grad school, in physics I think. I went to his funeral, and since he wasn’t religious they had to give the priest something someone had written, and all of a sudden the priest was reading something about how he had been a skydiver. I like to think the guy went out on a high note.

But normally I don’t mind a guy who tells a fib or two now and then. It makes life more interesting and I always think a good story is better than a true story.

You know Clint wanted me to star in that Sniper movie, but I was busy setting up my art show at the Ten Cat so I turned him down.

Bucks, Sawbucks, and Creative Story Tellers

Sorry, but I have no interest in either the Oscars or sports. I haven't been to a movie theater in decades, but I do like to watch some of the old classics on DVD. I can't remember the last time I was interested in one of the current releases.

It's a good thing that I looked up that stuff over the weekend, or I wouldn't have anything to write about today. First, I found out why a dollar is called a "buck". It seems that money was scarce on the American frontier and they sometimes used things like salt, tobacco, or animal skins as media of exchange. Deer hides were particularly popular and, as we have previously discussed, all tanned deer hides are usually called "buck skins", regardless on the actual gender of the animal from whence they came. When money did become available, it seems that a good deer hide was worth about a dollar, so the dollar became know as the "buck". Of course, a dollar was worth a lot more in those days than it is today but, last I heard, a deer hide was still worth about a dollar. Seems like the dollar and the buck have both depreciated in value about the same amount over the years. The poker player's buck that we talked about was probably called that because a silver dollar was frequently used for that purpose.

I don't know if you've ever seen a sawbuck, but it's basically two X frames linked together by several lateral braces. The log is cradled in the X frames and you have to keep moving it as you cut pieces off the end, otherwise you might saw through one of the lateral braces. That's why a sawbuck is more trouble than it's worth if you're using a chainsaw. Anyway, at some point in history, they used Roman numerals on American money instead of regular numbers. An "X" was used on the ten dollar bill, and an "XX" on the twenty. The ten became known as a "sawbuck" because a sawbuck looks like an "X" when viewed from the end, and the twenty became known as a "double sawbuck".

I also looked up Brian Williams on Wiki. (The stuff about the bucks came from Ask.com.) When I saw his picture, I remembered seeing him on TV. He reminds me of a guy I used to know at the paper mill, back in the 1970s. We were working side by side on a boring job, so we talked to each other a lot. He was a good story teller, and had done some interesting things in his short life. (We were both in our 20s at the time.) At some point it occurred to me that he hadn't been alive long enough to have done all that stuff. I asked him about that and he said that he hadn't done any of it for very long. Well maybe, but others who had known him longer than I had said that he was as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. They said that some of the experiences he reported sounded a lot like movies or TV shows they had seen, and they suspected that he just inserted himself into the scenarios. He never made himself the central character, so it would have been hard to prove, since many movies are at least loosely based on true story events. The guy also said that he read a lot, so some of his stories might have been inspired by books. I only knew this guy for a year or two. Then he left his wife and four kids, took up with a much younger woman, quit the paper mill, and moved away. Years later, I ran into one of his sons, all grown up now and a lieutenant in the army. It was nice to see that he had made something of himself, I never though that any of those kids would ever amount to anything.

the oscars

How about those academy awards? Well how about them, I wouldn’t know. I noticed when I was watching the local news last night it was all about the Oscars, one of the shows even had a little thing on the guy who designed the envelopes that they open to find out who has won. For Chrissake.

I like movies, I have probably seen or will see about half the movies that were up for awards, and I will probably have strong feelings about them. I will love them or I will hate them, and if I run into some acquaintance who isn’t able to get away in time, I will harangue them about why I loved or hated the movie.

But I don’t care what a bunch of, who are they, I think they are people who are or were involved in the movie industry, strangers, think about the movies. Some movies will win and the rest will lose, but winning won’t make the winning movies better and losing won’t make the losing movies worse so what the hell is the difference?

You know we never have gotten into the subject of sports. I think you have said once or twice that sports are stupid, and if that’s the case I pretty much agree. I am a pretty strong Cub fan, kind of a fair weather Bear fan, an even fairer weather fan of the Bulls (just watching a game I smell the sweat like in the Gage Park gym, ugh), and I dally a little with hockey because the Blackhawks won the hockey world series a couple years ago. At first I couldn’t understand hockey, but when I learned more, it seemed like maybe there just wasn’t that much to understand. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t care enough to learn otherwise.

Well I was thinking about the Hall of Fame. Every year they vote in four or five players. And every team has one or two of their former stars who they think should be voted in, and when they don’t get voted in it is like the greatest injustice in the history of the universe, and they go on and on.

Well I guess that’s it. I just wanted to say how stupid these award things are and I guess I have done it. Maybe I should enter this into the Greatest Rants of the Year Awards.  

Yoopers and Lowpers

The Yoopers and the Lowpers don't really hate each other you know, it's just good natured kidding. Ever since the Mackinac Bridge was built in the 1950s, people have been crossing back and forth with alacrity and even intermarrying. People around here just call it "The Bridge", as if it was the only one in the world. I think there are two bridges connecting Michigan and Canada. One is up by the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie), and the other is down by Detroit. It's the Canadians who are famous for saying "ay", although it's usually spelled "eh". Some Yoopers might say it too, but they're not famous for it.

Before I forget: You have asked me twice what I do with my deer hides, and I keep forgetting to answer you. I have never gotten into tanning hides. I understand that it's a laborious process and the finished product is not useful enough to be worth it. I have given a couple of them to people who wanted to try tanning hides, but I don't think either one of them ever successfully completed the job. Commercial tanners are not interested unless you have a semi load of hides for them, they don't want to fool around picking up one here and one there. We used to have a group that collected deer hides each season, sold them all at once, and gave the money to a local charity, but they quit doing that some years ago. The guy I talked to said that they couldn't find a market for them anymore. What I do with mine now is just dump it in the woods with the other deer scraps. It's not littering, it's feeding the critters.  Everything gets eaten up by spring, even the hides. They somehow chew the skin up, leaving only the loose hair, which the birds like to use for nest building, so nothing is really wasted.

I think we talked about shooting preserves before. Some of them are more sporting than others, it depends how they are operated. Some of the bird preserves are for target practice and dog training, and others offer a more natural hunting experience. I don't think there are any big game preserves around here, but Texas is famous for them. Some of them even offer exotic species from Africa, Asia, and Europe. They have thousands of acres fenced in and people pay big bucks to shoot their big bucks. It's just like real hunting except you see more game than you would in the wild. There is a hound club not far from here that has a square mile fenced in and all the deer have been removed. (Deer hunting with dogs is illegal in Michigan.) These guys run coyotes and foxes with their hounds, and they seldom kill their quarry. It's all about the thrill of the chase and the hound dog music. Some of their foxes have even learned that, when they get tired of this foolishness, all they have to do is lead the dogs back to the parking lot and the hunters will collect them and go home.

Northern woodlands like ours do not support nearly as many deer as the agricultural areas farther south. The reason people come up north to hunt is that there is a lot more public land, not that we have more deer per square mile. To hunt private land, you either have to pay and/or make friends with the landowner. There are clubs you can join that either own or lease hunting land. Some of them are more elite than others. My father was a member of a club that catered to the working man but, with some of them, if you have to ask how much it costs to join, you probably can't afford it.

crossing under the bridge in store bought shoes

What is this bridge that the yoopers call you trolls because you live under it, especially if it refers to the whole lower peninsula? Isn’t there some big bridge between the USA and Canada, the Mackinac Bridge, seems like I might have heard of that, but still it seems like the lower peninsula is a lot of Michigan for it all to be under one bridge. I guess that they call you trolls because of that billy goat gruff story, but generally people in one area use a derogatory term when referring to people in an adjacent area.

I assume that they think of you as effete easterners, and maybe southerners too, with all your mint julep sipping Colonels and hoop-skirted ladies. Not that the southern thing is very accurate but they are so far from civilization that they probably don’t know much about the rest of the country. I assume the effete eastern part is sort of accurate because I think you generally wear store bought shoes.

Maybe it wasn’t Uncle Buck, that dollars got named after, maybe it was Buck Rogers, yeah I think it was him. Even though he is of the future, he was around in the thirties, and I think he traveled back in time even further than that.

Even as early as my youth, I thought Buck Rogers was kind of old fashioned. I was a Video Ranger kind of kid. Don’t know what video had to do with it though, like the radio flyer that didn’t even have a radio.

So only male deer have antlers. Well I think I knew that, but then I got confused because I think beeves have horns whether they are male or female or LGBT, so you can see how it gets confusing to a city guy. That’s right, the reason they have antlers is so that when they fight over the does by banging their heads they don’t bash their teeny brains, and I think if one deer has really massive antlers the other deer don’t even bother, they just wander over to the nearest LGBT office and sign up.

Sometimes you have a scarcity of deer up there under the bridge? It seems like we have too many down here where store bought shoes are the norm. They always seem to be rooting in some suburbanites rutabagas or something, and I think they get out into the airport and cause havoc sometimes too. Maybe it’s because you guys are out in your deer blinds while we are buying little corncakes to feed Bambi.

These private shooting reserves, is that like the places Dick Cheney hangs out where they dump a bunch of pheasants out of a box and he gets to blast away? See places like that give you hunters a bad name. Not that we store-shod types ever quite approve of killing woodland critters, but if you have to tromp around to find them, or even fight off naps in your blind, at least you can claim some kind of sporting chance.

Jello in the red sea in Hollywood ay? Do they say ay instead of huh under the bridge. The guy that married my aunt and carried her off to Grand Rapids, was from somewhere that might as well be Canada, like Michigan, and he used to say ay.

I had to do a little youtube research on that red sea thing. Pretty cool, but it didn’t look like jello. Would’ve been nicer if it was jello, then the Israelites could’ve had a nice cooling snack as they fled Yul Brynner’s guys. You wonder why god doesn’t do stuff like that anymore. Parting the water under that bridge you guys live under would be worth hours and hours of the Jimmy Swaggert show.

Trolls, Wild Meat, and Wild Weather

I think I have seen that Michigan map before, or at least something similar. I don't know how accurate it is, but I do know that Yoopers commonly refer to everybody in the Lower Peninsula as "trolls", because we live under the bridge.

I don't think that a dollar is called a "buck" because of that movie. I have heard it called that for as long as I can remember, and the movie is not that old. I think it's more likely that the movie character got his name from passing out bucks, not the other way around. I'll put this on my weekend research list.

No. we are not allowed to shoot fawns. Well, it depends on what you call a fawn. Technically, any deer less than a year old is a fawn, but most people think of fawns as very young deer with spots on them. In this area, most fawns are born in May, and they have lost their spots by about September. I did see a fawn with spots once in October, but that's unusual. The first deer season, for bow and arrow hunters, opens on October 1st, and the regular firearm deer season opens on November 15. The law doesn't specifically prohibit shooting spotted fawns, but the chance of seeing one during the open season is pretty slim. The law only recognizes two classifications of deer for shooting purposes, antlered and antlerless. This is because, every once in awhile, a freak doe with antlers is taken, and they don't want to penalize someone for that. You need a separate license to shoot an antlerless deer. They used to call them "doe permits", but now they call them "antlerless deer licenses". Antlerless licenses are issued by a lottery system, and the quota is different in each county. Regular buck licenses are sold over the counter to anyone who wants one. The antlerless license is used to thin out the herd when they think it's getting too large for its food supply. If deer start getting scarce in a particular county, they don't issue any antlerless licenses there for a year or two in order to let the population recover.

Yes, people do raise deer and other wildlife on farms, but you need a special permit for that. Most of those animals are destined for release on private shooting preserves, but some of them make it to the meat market. It's illegal to sell wild meat that has been taken by hunting, so if you see any game meat on a restaurant menu or in the supermarket, it almost certainly came from a game farm. One exception I can think of is Australian rabbits. They are so abundant that the Aussies harvest them any way they can and export them for sale.

I think that your weather observations are spot on. I always wondered how I-75 stopped all that snow, and now I know. I think you're also right about most of our moisture coming from the Gulf. The cold air usually comes from the north west, but it doesn't become a storm until it meets up with the warmer, moister air coming up from the Gulf. Well, there's also the lake effect, but that's different. I'm not so sure about your California theory, though. I think they used Jello to stage the parting of the Red Sea in that movie. Meanwhile, it's 20 below again in Beaglesonia, and I've got to go put more wood in the stove.

living off of the web

Here’s a map I came across on fb. You may already have come across it. My mother’s sister used to live in Grand Rapids where we used to visit so I am a bit familiar with the Chicago fans, the Dutch people, and the beach bums. The nudists must have been off on holiday when we passed through. I guess this makes you a bridge troll.

A buck got its name from that movie Uncle Buck because the John Candy character was always handing out dollar tips, unless he was at an art fair buying painted saws, and then he always tipped the artist a tenner. I am worn out from doing all that internet research yesterday, so I am just trusting to my common sense, which is pretty sharp I think you will have to admit.

I have heard things referred to as doe skin when they are supposed to be very soft and ladylike. Probably they are lying to us about what kind of deer the stuff came from. What do you do with your skins? I thought you weren’t supposed to shoot fawns. Does anybody raise deer like people raise cattle? Outside of those Buckstop crooks, who probably just claimed to.

Interstates, because they have all those big rigs shooting down them, create their own jet streams which separate one weather system from another, see, didn’t need no stinking internet research for that one.

I think we get most of our water from the gulf, and with the rockies blocking that warm moist air we won’t be wasting it on the Canadians any more. They can flood their skating rinks from Hudson Bay from now on.

I think California is so dry because when they were parting the Red Sea for Moses in The Ten Commandments, they screwed up and never got that water back.

Felling and Bucking

Thanks for looking that up for me. I didn't really expect you to do it, I was just giving you an example of passing the buck, but thanks anyway. I got to thinking later of other uses for the word "buck". To buck a tree is to cut off all the limbs after the tree itself has been felled. The guys who cut the tree down are called "fellers" or "fallers", the guy who bucks off the branches is the "bucker", and the saw he uses is called a "buck saw", not to be confused with a "saw buck", which is a frame that is used to hold a log while you cut it up into firewood lengths. The saw buck was handy when people used hand saws because it held the log up off the ground at a comfortable working height. With a  modern chain saw, the saw buck is usually more trouble than it's worth, but some people still use them for small logs and branches because it keeps you from cutting into the ground, which quickly dulls the cutting teeth of your chain. I don't know how the ten dollar bill came to be called a "saw buck" or, for that matter, why a dollar is called a "buck". Somebody should look that up one of these days.

Clothes made from deer hides are usually called "buck skins", but I have, on occasion, heard reference to doe skins. I suppose that doe skins are softer than buck skins, although the age of the deer would also have something to do with it. I have never heard of something being made from fawn skins, which would have to be the softest of all.

I don't know why the Canadians haven't blocked that Siberian air mass for us. Maybe they don't have the technology, or maybe they haven't noticed it since it's pretty cold up there to begin with.

I believe that idea of turning the Rockies around has some merit. Interstate 75 runs north and south down the middle of the Northern Lower Peninsula, and it blocks a lot of cold and snow for us, since most weather systems move west to east. The TV weather people frequently mention that a coming storm will be worse to the west of I-75 than to its east. On the rare occasion that we get a storm out of the east, off of Lake Huron, we get hammered worse than the people on the west side of I-75. If an interstate highway has that much effect on the weather, I suppose that a whole mountain range would have even more of an effect. We should think this through, however, before we implement it. As it is, the Rockies already block a lot of the moisture that blows in from the Pacific, which is why Washington and Oregon are so wet, and the Northern Plains are so dry. We might need a pipeline under the mountains so Canada doesn't end up with all our water. Then again, with nothing to block the moisture from the Pacific, we might not need any more from Canada. Somebody should do a study about this.

Come to think of it, California isn't particularly wet, and they pipe a lot of their water down from the mountains to their east, the Sierra Nevadas, I believe. Nevada itself is a big desert, so why isn't California wet like Washington and Oregon?

getting our bearings and turning this country around

Of course I know what wheel bearings are. I was just making little joke to move along the narrative. They are tiny compasses imbedded into the wheel so that if the driver were to get drunk and loose his way, the compasses could correct for it and get the vehicle home on their own. Why then, a unschooled person might ask, do people get lost all the time? Because the little needles collect dust and rust and unless they are properly greased in the Trost manner they will not function. But not that many people watched Practical Sportsman and that’s why you see them wandering the roads. And you can take my word on that, because I am from the Land of Lincoln, and out of homage to that great man, we never tell a lie.

I think I knew that about bucks. I guess that would make sense because Davy Crockett wore buckskin. But then you have to wonder, what about doe skin, was that just for the lady?

I was suspicious about your buck passing story, because it seemed a little odd that they would be passing the buck(horn) around everytime they had a round of bets. Wiki agreed with you for the most part except that the buck was passed at every hand so that they would know his turn it was to deal, which made a little more sense.

Oh yeah we are getting hammered by that Siberian Slicer/Dicer also. Normally I dismiss these crackpot ideas of yours out of hand, but this one has that ring of truth to me. It is just like the Russkies, cold is their weapon. It is how they beat Napoleon, and it was a powerful ally against the Krauts in WW II. You would think those Canadians would do Uncle Sam a solid by blocking the air for us after all we did for them, but I reckon every night is hockey night for them.

Around 1980 we had three terrific winters in a row, and the situation was so dire that the gummint inquired of the citizens if they had any ideas. One guy wrote in why don’t we take the Rockies, which are really good for nothing except a big speed bump on the way to California, and turn them around so that instead of going north and south, they went east to west and thus blocked all that cold air. Of course we might lose the northern edge of our country under the mountains, but the people that live there are mostly crackpots, so who would miss them?

I don’t know why we never did that, but I reckon if Fred Trost were prez we would have.

The Buck Stops Here

Come on, Uncle Ken, everybody knows what wheel bearings are. They may not know how to grease them, but they certainly know what they are. I think most people also know that a mature male deer is called a buck, not a bull. Well, elk and moose are in the deer family, and they are called bulls, but whitetail, blacktail, and mule deer males are all called bucks. Pronghorn antelope males are also called bucks, even though the pronghorn is not a deer, or even a true antelope.

Here's something that I don't think everybody knows: When Harry Truman coined the phrase, "The buck stops here." he wasn't talking about deer at all, he was talking about playing poker. It seems that there used to be a tradition among poker players to use a wooden token, which they called a "buck", so they would know whose turn it was to bet. After one guy placed his bet, he would give the buck to the next guy so he would know that it was his turn. If a guy didn't want to bet when his turn came, he would just slide the buck on to the next guy, which was called "passing the buck". I don't think they use a buck anymore, but poker players still say "pass" when they don't want to bet when their turn comes. Over time, the phrase "passing the buck" came to mean indecisiveness or reluctance to commit to any course of action. It also can mean shrugging your responsibility off on somebody else. I understand that Harry Truman was a "take charge" kind of guy who would never pass the buck, even before he became president. When he did assume the office, he placed a sign on his desk that said "The buck stops here." I am not making this up, I heard or read about it a long time ago, but I don't remember the source. Why don't you look it up for me?

Probably the most exciting thing happening around Cheboygan lately is the weather. Of course, it's not just Cheboygan, the whole eastern half of the country has been periodically getting slammed with bursts of arctic air this winter, while the western half has been basking in above average temperatures. Coincidence? I think not! I have suspected for some time that somebody has been doing this to us on purpose, and now I think I know who it is. I heard on the Weather Channel the other day that all this arctic air has been coming from Siberia. (That's in Russia, you know.) For some time now, the U.S. and some other countries have been implementing economic sanctions against Russia because of the thing in the Ukraine. I think that, to get even, the Russians are sending all their Siberian weather over the North Pole, through Canada, to the U.S. They must have developed some secret technology that enables them to do this. We need to get our own people working on that right away, if they aren't already. We can't be letting those Russians win the Weather Control Race, now can we.

Oh yeah, the Unicorn Hunters. That's the group I told you about that banishes words and phrases from the English language because of "miss use, over use, and downright uselessness".

Mr Trost goes into the courtroom

I have to tell you, you may be the the orator of Beaglesonia, but you ain’t no Fred Trost. Where was the gentle humor, the deft twist of a phrase, and the sparkling in the eyes of the otherwise curmudgeonly Fred Trost. Now there was a man who could make you feel like you just couldn’t wait to get out there and grease those, wheel bearings is it? Whatever those are.

I have to admit though that I have never seen Fred Trost. I mean to watch those you tubes thing, but everytime I start clicking my way to you tube I get a yawn attack and I never get all the way through, maybe this weekend. I’ll see if I can find the one where he is pissing in the woods. Why a steak dinner? You would think a burrito would give you more pungent pee or maybe some kind of salad made up of what deer eat. But probably old Fred was a steak and potatoes guy. And I’m sure he was as honest as the day is long, but probably he was able to write off that dinner as a business expense, so he ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

This is just word of mouth, but I’ve heard whenever one of those spatty lawyer types got into it with Fred and his crusty but kindly ways were winning over the jury, they would just say something like how their client was as pure as an ungreased trailer hitch, and Fred, because he was always out to set people straight on things, would step right up with an objection and then go on to explain as how it wasn’t the trailer hitch, it was those wheel bearings, and then he would have to explain what wheel bearings were to the spatty lawyers who wouldn’t know, and on and on.

And then if the jury was still awake they would comment on how somebody must’ve spilled their jug of Buckstop in the parking lot, because they had seen a big bull deer (do they call them big bull deer?) stomping in the parking lot, and the next thing you know Fred would be out there taking a leak.

I don’t know any of this to be fact of course, but it makes a nice story huh?

Unicorn hunters?

Maybe our readers are getting tired of all this trivia stuff, maybe we need to get back to our hard hitting news of the day analysis that drives our readers wild. I am going to go out and get the papers from the hallway and say what this morning’s issues are.

Ah, it’s all local politics. The main issue is that Rahm is edging close to the 50 percent he will need to avoid a runoff, but I don’t imagine you pay much attention to Chicago politics. Maybe you can find something this evening in the Cheboygan Trib.

Greasy Bearings and Slick Celebrities

Okay, I'll explain it again. Try to pay attention this time! It's the wheel bearings that you grease, not the trailer hitch. You might shoot a little WD-40 on the hitch to keep it from rusting but, if you put grease on it, it will just attract dirt, which will get all over your hands when you go to hitch up the trailer to your pickup truck. That said, some trailer hitches have a screw jack on them to raise the hitch to the level of the ball on your truck. There is probably some grease in there but, if you cover the mechanism with a five gallon pail when you're not using it, and shoot a little WD-40 in there once or twice a year, you should never have to take it apart and grease it. The wheel bearings, on the other hand, are the weak link in the system. I suppose, if they made them better, the water wouldn't get in, but then they would be harder to grease and more expensive to replace. As it is, they are not that hard to maintain, and not even that hard or expensive to change out. It's just one of those things that any self respecting  practical sportsman should know how to do for himself.

Fred Trost was kind of rough around the edges for a TV personality, I suppose that's why I liked him. Most of the people you see on TV are so slick and polished that you wonder what they're like in real life, or if they even have a real life. Fred was a regular person, or at least he acted like one on his show. Truth be known, we don't know what he was like in real life either, but I like to think that he was the same. I was impressed when he got his law degree too. I only recently learned that he actually practiced law for awhile. Most lawyers are pretty slick themselves but, once in awhile, you get a maverick type like Fred. It must drive the slick lawyers nuts when a guy like Fred wins a case. I don't think he'd be that good with a jury because juries run on emotion as much as they do on logic. A judge, on the other hand, is a legal professional. If you haul out the law book and show him where it says that you're right, it seems like he would have to rule in your favor whether he liked you or not. Otherwise you might get his ruling overturned on an appeal, and I don't suppose judges like to be over ruled like that.

I think that what they were calling the "polar vortex" last year is the jet stream. There are actually two jet streams, the polar jet and the subtropical jet. The one we usually see on the TV weather maps is the polar one. There are usually dips in it. When it dips north, it's called a "ridge", and when it dips south, it's called a "trough". Sometimes it does straighten out for awhile, which is called a "zonal flow". The jet stream is the main dividing line between warm weather and cold weather. Come to think of it, maybe that's what causes the jet stream. The cold air pushing down from the north runs into the warm air pushing up from the south, and the Earth's rotation puts a spin on it. Remember the Coriolis effect?

You know, I don't believe I ever heard the term "islamofascist" until I heard it from you. I agree that it's kind of a stupid word. Maybe we should ask those Unicorn Hunters to ban it next year, if they haven't already.

 

bring back the polar vortex

I checked out your links and looked into a couple others, Quite a man that Fred Trost. One thing that I found a little odd is that, stung by his loss to the spatty minions of big bucks Buckstop, he took himself off to law school and got a degree in law and actually practiced it. As reported by the sources, he was a lawyer for good, particularly taking on the hated DNR.

Myself, I think if I was to choose between two lawyers and one was honest as the day is long and had integrity up the yingyang, and another guy who would like cheat and steal to win the case, I think I would choose the latter. But maybe I would pick Fred, because no matter how my case went, I would always have a well-greased trailer hitch, though I would have to tell him not to piss on my lawn.

I came come across plenty of Fred Trost’s videos on YouTube. I didn’t watch any of them because, well, I used to come across those shows, and as I said, I found them a little more interesting than NASCAR, but not as exciting as golf.

I saw your posting on facebook this morning. You know the meteorologists got a lot of ink out of that Polar Vortex thing last year. The media jumped on with both feet, and the public seemed to like it to. The image I always had was of those winds that circle the north pole, knocked off course by jet streams I think, took a dip southwards into the midwest.

I think the meteorologists were a little embarrassed about how popular the term became, and maybe it wasn’t strictly accurate, but it was going to be cold no matter what, and it makes the earflap and mitten crowd just a little happier to know that they are suffering from some odd, vaguely apocalyptical weather phenomenon, than to think it is merely colder than usual.

So I guess they are just too self effacing to use the term polar vortex this year, and I think it is a pity. There is something though that I saw on one of those weather shows last night where it did look like these concentric circles around the pole appeared to be slipping southward, a little too easterly to center on Chicago like last year’s did once or twice, but pausing smack fucking dab over your tip of Michigan about the middle of this week. I know we are supposed to get some subzero, possibly record breaking weather, but we will still be many concentric circles from the center so I wonder what you will get. Maybe they could bring back polar vortex just to make the whole thing more exciting.

Whatever happened to islamofascist? Used to be very popular among the right wingers, and now with those ISIS guys beheading and burning and actually holding territory, you would think it would be all the rage, but you never hear it anymore.

Here's What I Found So Far

Wiki didn't have much, but I did a web search from there. Apparently they use Bing, I don't know if Google would have more, but I'm kind of short on time this weekend. This will get us started any way. There was some other stuff, but I think these two links summed it up pretty well. 

This one is a blog posted in 2007. Not exactly an authoritative source, but I'm inclined to give it credibility: http://www.tndeer.com/tndeertalk/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=3005598&page=1

This other one is an article from a legal journal: http://www.michbar.org/journal/article.cfm?articleID=370&volumeID=26

One thing I got wrong was the name of the show. Fred maintained possession of the original "Michigan Outdoors". The usurpers didn't get him kicked off the show, they got the show kicked off of PBS. They replaced it with their own show, which was "Michigan Out of Doors". That show is still on, but with different people. It's okay as far as those kind of shows go, but it's not at all like either of Fred's shows were. Fred changed the name of his show to "The Practical Sportsman" after he lost the deer piss law suit because the court seized all the assets from the old show trying to get their four million dollars, which Fred didn't have in the bank. He started the new show with borrowed money, and I don't think he ever really got out of debt.

The Practical Sportsman ran for several years after that and was not cancelled because of lack of sponsors. The show never did make any money, and Fred got tired of trying to sustain it on a shoestring budget. He also had some family problems that demanded his attention, and it all just got to be too much for him. I seem to remember that he died a few years after that, but I don't know the details.

speaking truth to power

Well hell Beagles, you said deer piss, you didn’t say doe in heat piss, that is a horse of another hue. I guess they could have collected in it some mechanical manner like they do bull semen (which I really don’t want to know how they do that), but still having a whole herd of deer in heat sounds like kind of a risky thing to do.

So it sounds like you think Ol Fred took that into consideration and likely he did, likely he did. And it is not too far off to imagine that one day he took a whiff of that Buckstop stuff and thought it was deer piss all right, but it didn’t have that richness, that organic whole, that promise of progeny, that you get from regular doe in heat piss, but it had kind of an artificial, kind of a chemical taint, like it had some of that stuff you see listed in the ingredients of a Hostess Twinkie.

Well you would think it would be pretty simple case, kind of like a DNA thing, here is actual doe in heat piss, and here is Buckstop’s inorganic brew, and here are their chemical profiles, and they ain’t the same, so that’s that.

Come court day I imagine when Fred was slipping a couple vials into the front pocket of his cleaned and pressed bib overalls, and a couple chemical readouts in the back pocket, his wife might have allowed as how it might be a good idea to bring along that nephew who had gone to law school for a couple years. But Fred brushed her aside. A man with truth on his side, going before a law court in the land of the free, didn’t need no mouthpiece.

He might have been taken aback when he saw that legion of spatty lawyers on the other side, and those money sacks plumping around the leg of the judge’s chair, but Ol Fred, the kind of man we all know old Fred to be, just hooked his fingers deeper into the straps of his overalls and boldly spoke truth to power.

The next thing he knew he was being held upside down by the spatty lawyers as his bills fluttered to the floor, and then the repo men came to his house and took his tv, and then just whatever Fred had earned by the honest sweat of his brow went into the iron vault of Buckstop, whose door slammed shut with a resounding clang.

Ol Fred was never the same.

But what of the deer, because it is all about the deer is it not? I imagine it went well for them. I imagine when they went sniffing there were some who went for that dirty chemical smell, kind of like a deer with a boob job, and others who were more pure in heart and preferred only the real thing, and the former ended up on some Buckstop user’s dinner table, and the latter started a nice little deer family. So the former gene died out and the latter gene prospered, and the deer you see in the woodland are purer than ever.

So all is well that ends well.

Maybe this weekend we can research the real truth of Trost vs Buckstop. Or if the weather is nice maybe we can grab a six pack and put some tunes on the radio and grease our bearings just the way Fred Trost taught us to.

Deer Piss and Duck Calls

I was working from memory on that deer piss case, and it must have been at least a decade ago that it happened. The trial didn't make our local news, so all I've got to go by is what Fred said about it on his show. If he made as good a case in court as he did on his show, he should have won.

The company didn't just claim that their product was genuine deer piss, they claimed that it was deer piss collected from does in heat. There is no way that they could have collected it from wild deer, so it must have come from a captive herd. Does only come into heat (estrus) for a few days each year, so it would have taken a lot of does to produce enough piss to fill all the bottles the company had been selling. Then there's the problem of actually collecting the stuff. What did they do, have a bunch of people follow the does around the farm holding buckets under them? They couldn't let any bucks be in the same pen, because they surely would have taken exception to that. If the bucks and does were kept separate during the does' estrus period, no breeding would have occurred, so the producers would have had to buy new deer from time to time. It's doubtful that a few buckets of piss would have generated enough income to justify feeding a doe all year and, if she wasn't allowed to breed, there would be no other way to make money off of her.

With any kind of livestock, you can only economically feed them for so long, and then you have to either sell them or have them make a baby that you can sell when it grows up. I don't know what the window is for deer, but with cattle it's about two years. Deer are biologically closer to sheep than they are to cattle, and I used to live next to a sheep farm. Sheep are generally bred when they're at least year old and, if they don't produce a lamb, it's off to the slaughter house for them. Wild deer breed at a year and a half, and it's not uncommon for them to lose their first fawn due to inexperience. Deer bred in captivity probably have a better success rate, but I'm sure that no commercial producer could afford to keep a doe more than two and a half years if she didn't produce a fawn by then.

I seem to remember that Fred reported consulting with a chemist about this. The chemist told him that you probably could come up with something that resembled doe in heat urine by mixing up some chemicals, and Fred concluded that was probably what the deer piss company had done. I don't remember anything about cow piss, but a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. I don't know the details of the trial, but the company must have presented some kind of evidence. I'll have to look that up this weekend. Where did you find it, on Wiki?

Like I said, I haven't seen the Duck Dynasty show, but I'm inclined to believe it's a work of fiction. If somebody had gotten rich by inventing a vastly superior duck call, I'm sure it would have been mentioned in one of my hunting and fishing magazines.

Fred Trost, great American, or the greatest American.

Well I guess I get to hear about greasing trailer hitches after all, and from a man who heard it straight from the straight talking Fred Trost. Despite the preface that it’s not that hard and doesn’t take that long, the explanation reveals that it is surely kind of hard, and probably takes up a lot of time, and anytime you get into anything mechanical like that something comes up that you didn’t expect and we all know that everything in the Goddamned world is more complicated than we think it is.

And I have to tell you, not that interesting hearing about it. Maybe someday I will explain how to apply gum arabic to your watercolor paper and ensure that it is evenly spread and how to dry it afterwards and how to adjust your brushstrokes so as to take full advantage of the medium.

I had to do a little internet research on Fred, and it turns out that his downfall was claiming that BuckStop Lure Company Inc’s deer attractant contained cow rather than deer urine, and they sued him and won to the tune of four million smackeroos. I didn’t dig up the details of that landmark case this morning, but I imagine the fatcats at Buckstop Lure lined their bench with fancy city lawyers sporting spats while probably old Fred defended himself with his thumbs hooked into his very best clean and pressed overalls. I imagine sacks of cash with dollar bill signs on the outside were passed between the judge and the spatty guys. Probably at one point jars of deer and cow urine, and the Buckstop potion were passed along the jury.

I don’t know how PBS gets the rep for being notoriously liberal. Once a week for an hour it airs a program called Frontline which is liberal, but otherwise it is all Antiques Roadshow or Downton Abbey. And it seems like every other week there is a pledge drive featuring doo wop singers or Celtic dancers, interrupted every few minutes by minor PBS celebrities pleading for money and repeating the phone number over and over. I would rather be in the jury when they pass the jars of deer and cow urine and Buckstop potion around.

I’m planning on researching that famous case later, but I am wondering how hard is deer piss to come by that Fred Trost thought it was substituting cow piss. This looks like the Trilateral commission to me.

Yeah right, I am going to believe a hunter and fisherman when he tells me hunters and fishermen don’t lie overly much. But then, as you know, I continue to live in the Land of Lincoln whose inhabitants are known throughout the land for not engaging in falsehood, so I just don’t come across lying, except sometimes when I go to Missouri.

Since we don’t have a hunting emporium anywhere near downtown, I can’t say much about the duck calling section, but I find it hard to believe that inventing a new one could amass anybody a fortune. I suppose to really test one you would have to have ducks strapped down with electrodes in their birdbrains and see what their brain scans showed after various calls were, what, blown? Not captivating tv I don’t think, not like watching old Fred grease up a bearing.

Greasing, Lying, and Calling

The thing about boat trailers is that they get backed into the water far enough to submerge the wheels whenever you launch your boat. The wheel bearings are not nearly as sophisticated as the ones on a car, and some water is bound to get in occasionally. This is not a problem until you go to put the trailer away for the winter. If you just put it away without checking and greasing the bearings, they might accumulate rust by spring. Then they are subject to seizing up on you when you least expect it, which can ruin your whole day.

You can have a professional check and grease your bearings, but it's not that hard and doesn't take that long to do it yourself, if you know how. Some wheels are equipped with grease fittings, but they don't work, they just put them on there to give you a false sense of security. What you need to do is pull the wheels, take the bearings out, clean them with gasoline, give them each a spin to make sure they are still good, and repack them with new grease. If any water comes out when you pull the wheels, you need to replace the seals. Like I said, it's not that hard, but you probably couldn't do it properly even after I explained it to you. What you need, in addition to the explanation, is for somebody to demonstrate the process for you, which is what Fred did on his show.

Fred didn't dis his sponsors, the deer piss company was not one of them, but you know how those corporations are, they conspire with each other against the common man. I'm sure the deer piss company put Fred on some kind of blacklist and, after that, no other company wanted anything to do with him. Same thing with the usurpers who got him fired from his old show. That show was on PBS, a notoriously liberal propaganda tool of the Establishment. When Fred started his own show, he had to go on a commercial network because the crooks on PBS had blackballed him. Of course I have no proof of any of this, but that's never stopped me before. I figure that it must be true because no other explanation makes sense.

Although hunters and fishermen have a reputation for lying, that's just an urban myth. I don't think that hunters and fishermen lie with any more frequency than the general population. If somebody were to do a study about that, I'm sure that would its conclusion. Of course, we would have no way of knowing if the people who did the study were lying about their findings, so I guess it wouldn't prove anything.

I'm not familiar with the Brian Williams controversy. I understand that he is some kind of news person, but I don't even know what channel he's on. I'm pretty sure that he will never be playing cards with Fred Trost in Michigan, though, because old Fred has been dead for some time now.

I have heard about that Duck Dynasty show, but have never watched it. I don't think we get whatever channel it's on. Of course it's easy to sound like a duck, but it's not so easy to put out a message that will cause a duck to come into your decoy spread. Animals have a very limited vocabulary compared to people, but they do a lot with inflection and tone of voice. You might think you're saying "Come on in, the water's fine." but, in duck language, you might be saying "Stay away, there's danger here!" Calling in game is a fine art, they even have national contests about it.

The more I think about it, I don't think those electronic callers are allowed for game birds and animals, just for predators like coyotes and foxes. I don't know if they play recordings of real animals or of expert callers using traditional methods, but they are supposed to be more effective than what most humans can produce. To elaborate on what I said yesterday: If you make a sound like a dominant male coyote, you may pull in some females if they are in the mood, but you will scare all the sub dominant males away. If you sound like a sub dominant, you will draw the attention of whoever's in charge, as well as other subdominants who might think they can kick your ass. If you think there are only girls out there, you might try the "pup in distress" call. The "injured rabbit" call is usually a good one to start with, but I have read that coyotes in heavily hunted areas tend to get wise to that one after awhile.

I'm sure that some of the gadgets thy sell to hunters and fishermen have some usefulness in certain situations, but they are no substitute for general knowledge and experience. As in real life, you have to be in the right place and do the right thing at the right time to be successful. Even then, there's a certain amount of luck and uncertainty about it, which is part of what makes it fun.

fishin n lyin n politics

Fred Trost, a true sportsman who spoke truth to power, gotta admire a man like that, even though I admit that I am no sportsman. I don’t know that I could stay awake during a grease bearing demonstration.

I did kind of see the writing on the wall though when you talked about him criticizing sponsors. Seems to me the world of hunting and especially fishing is built on lying, and some of those products seem like the throw your voice or have x ray vision gizmos advertised in the back of comic books.

Speaking of gizmos, I have always been suspicious of those Duck Dynasty guys. I never watched the show but I think the premise that they got filthy rich by inventing a duck whistle, seemed awfully shaky. I mean how hard can it be to sound like a duck? How could their duck call have been so superior? Even if it were how are you going to get filthy rich peddling a duck call?

And speaking of lying, how about that Brian Williams? He seemed like a nice enough guy, certainly had a nice enough job, it’s not like his ratings would have shot up because he was in that helicopter, he had to have known that the guys in that helicopter would have noticed that he wasn’t there?

I haven’t been following the story that closely, but as far as I know he has never explained it in his own words. Seems to me that if he just said, well I told a fib, you know how it is you are hanging around with your buds and they are all looking up to you and you are telling a story and at some point it occurs to you that the story would be even better if you altered a few details, and so you do, and so I did.

I think people could understand that, who hasn’t been there? It’s not like he told a lie on the air, who cares?

But I think he got lawyered up, or PRed up, or something those big shots do where spokesmen read statements and the guy is nowhere to be found.

And now I expect Brian will be found in some rural tavern in northern Michigan playing pinochle with Fred Trost, probably trying to cheat just a little bit, be we all know Old Fred Trost will be having none of that.

Well lying, how can you speak of the subject without bringing up the master, the big dog himself? Haven’t come close to him in almost sixteen years. Bush was the country lawyer who thought he was pretty sharp, but it was always clear he wasn’t. Obama is the city lawyer who can’t believe how stupid you are. But Bill, he could put his hand on your shoulder and give you the earnest look and start up that hoarse voice and you would be reaching for that fiver in your wallet before he even asked to borrow it. Before him there was only Reagan, who was damn good, but if you listened long enough you realize that he didn’t know much about what he was talking about.

The True and Practical Sportsman

Yes indeed, people go to all kinds of far off exotic places to hunt and fish. Others, like myself, prefer to just go out to the back forty and come home for lunch. I suppose what appeals to the far offers is the challenge and adventure of boldly going where no man, or at least few men, have gone before. I talked to some of those people when I was in Alaska and decided that it wasn't my cup of tea. It used to be that only rich people could afford to do something like that, but nowadays some of these kinds of trips are affordable to the average working man, although he might have to save up all year to spend his annual vacation that way. I think that your bear hunting scenario was a bit over the top, but I'm sure that somebody has done something like that at some point in time. To the vast majority of us, a guy like that would indeed be considered an asshole.

I believe the original definition of a sportsman was: a gentleman who hunts and fishes. Before our time, the word "sportsman" evoked a rich playboy who hunts and fishes because he has more time and money than he knows what to do with. My father's generation tried to rehabilitate the word by attaching the prefix "true", as in "true sportsman". As near as I can tell, a true sportsman is a guy who spends so much of his time and money on hunting and fishing that he will never become a rich playboy, or a rich anything else. All kidding aside, a true sportsman is a guy who hunts and fishes in an ethical manner, no matter how much money he has.

I used to watch some of the hunting and fishing shows on TV, but it got so that they were starting to all look the same, so I seldom watch them anymore. My favorite was a guy named Fred Trost, who hosted a show called "The Practical Sportsman". Before that, he was a co-host on "Michigan Outdoors" with Mort Neff. When old Mort either died or retired, I can't remember which, Fred assumed that he would move up and take his place, but a couple other guys pulled some kind of coup and Fred was exiled from the show. Then he started his own show and called it "Michigan Out of Doors", until the usurpers sued him because the name was too close to theirs, so he changed it to "The Practical Sportsman". 

There were two things I liked about old Fred. One was that he did indeed featured the more practical aspects of hunting and fishing. Once he showed us how to grease the bearings on a boat trailer. I previously had other people try to explain it to me, but I never got it right until a guest on Fred's show demonstrated the proper way to do it. Another time he showed us an original design for a deer blind which I built and still hunt out of to this very day.

The other thing I liked was the way Fred was not afraid to step on anybody's toes if he thought they deserved it. He was always criticizing the DNR for some reason or other, which the big sucks who took over "Michigan Outdoors" would never do. His greatest feat was when he took on the companies who make all those scent products that I told you about. He proved beyond a reasonable doubt that many of those products were bogus. I remember one show where took this bottle of alleged "doe in heat" urine and sprinkled it on the ground. Then he filmed a couple of his assistants pissing on the ground not far away. (Their backs were to the camera, but Fred assured us that  they were indeed urinating, and I saw no reason to doubt his word.) Then he filmed both spots when deer were present and proved that the deer were just as interested in the human piss as they were in the doe piss. The only mistake he made was mentioning the doe piss company by name, and they sued his ass off.

Fred should have won hands down, but he was betrayed by his own lawyers, who undoubtedly were in cahoots with the deer piss company. This inspired Fred to go to law school and eventually become a lawyer himself. He proudly announced on his show that, henceforth, he would continue his tradition of fearless journalism,  and nobody could stop him now. Not long after that, his feckless sponsors pulled out, and the show was cancelled. No sir, they sure don't make hunting and fishing shows like that anymore!