Tin Can Cooking

I was 18 when I drove back to Chicago from Alaska. By the time I was 25 I had a steady job, a wife, a kid, a mortgage and a couple of hound dogs. I never did finish that case of Dinty Moore I bought for the trip. I grew tired of it by the sixth day and ate in truck stop restaurants for the last four days. I gave the rest of the cans to my parents, and I don't think they ate many of them either. They probably ended up feeding the remainder to the dogs. I bought a few cans for a camping trip in 1986. Nobody was crazy about the stuff, we ate it, but I never bought any more after that. I haven't done any tin can cooking in a long time, I suppose the microwave made it obsolete. The fact that I never go camping anymore might also have something to do with it.

 I said that I might reconsider my position on gay marriage if somebody could convince me that it was good for the country and it made lot of people happy. Well, it seems to have made some people happy, but certainly not everybody. Like abortion, there will always be people who refuse to accept it. Unlike abortion, I don't anticipate that it will ever be overturned. What would they do about all the gays that are already married? No, I think we're stuck with this one, maybe forever. The best case scenario would be that the younger generation of gays renounce their wickedness and rehabilitate themselves. The existing married gays would die off eventually, and that would be the end of it, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. The only thing I can do about it is stay away from those people as much as possible, which shouldn't be hard to do, since I already stay away from everybody as much as possible.

I don't have the numbers at my finger tips, but I'm pretty sure that the biggest cause of human mortality is not other humans, at least not on purpose. Accidents account for most of the deaths of young people, and illnesses eventually knock off most of the old people. I guess you could say that accidents are caused by people, but not deliberately, which is why they call them accidents. Some illnesses are caught from other people, but modern science minimizes that anymore. It's things like heart attacks, strokes, and cancer that do most of us in eventually. As late as World War I, more people were being killed by disease than by combat, but I think the trend was reversed by World War II. The little brushfire wars they have today don't kill nearly as many. I read somewhere that more Americans were killed in the D-Day invasion than by all the Middle East conflicts we have been involved in over the years.

I am almost half way through our other book, "Lost City", and it's a lot easier to read than the first one. The author doesn't claim that we should revert back to the 1950s entirely, just that there are some things from that era that we would do well to restore. By the end, we are supposed to find out his plan for doing that without dragging all the bad stuff along with it.