Good Morning
Well now, how is everyone this morning?
I hope more of our group head on over to the BMN forum, sign up  and begin anew with dialog. JDogger (Hugh) is doing great work over there inspiring people from the BMN Google Group to migrate to the new board. Thanks Hugh, thanks everyone. If anyone else wishes to help Hugh with administrator duty let him or me know. Anywho, it’s coming together over there with pictures of cute girls, like this:

Ah, those were the days…  No wait these are the days! Yeah, these are the days that we will say, "Those were the days," about, in the future. Yeah, we can’t wait until next week, we can refresh our social networking skills in person with our old friends as well as some new friends too.

Kevin, Brittany, Desi and I began to get organized yesterday about our Tusas Memorial Day Party. We rounded up all the fittings to make the 375 gallon tote work for a 1 PVC pipe, and then we retrieved our two axle trailer from the field, filled the tires and loaded up the tote. We also had a meeting in the shop while the hose was filling the tote with water, and went over the design ideas for the Horno and outdoor kitchen for the camp.

We decided to employ the old wood stove from the shop, you know, the one which was made from a Semi-truck fuel tank. We hauled that stove, the ton of water, potable water I should mention, and dozen long handle hand tools, such as rakes, post hole diggers and shovels, back to the Central Meadow near the stage, and for those of you familiar with where the old flat bed truck was in the meadow, that’s the spot where we are going to build our outdoor kitchen.

First thing we did after unloading the trailer and disconnecting, was hook up to the old flatbed truck using our little Blazer in four wheel drive and tried to pull it loose of the ground it had spent the last five years getting used to resting in. It didn’t budge at first, the Blazer was feeling and looking much too light weight compared to the one ton truck. We unhooked from the front of the truck and reconnected to the rear after moving all the big cants (logs cut square) which were behind the truck in a bleachers arrangement. We had better luck pulling it out backwards, then once it was loose of the holes it was in, we swung around again and grabbed it from the front again, and gently towed it toward the houses but only for now to the top of the rise as you come into the meadow. So, yeah now the meadow is free of the once quaint old truck.

It is our intention to pull the flat bed off the old Chevy and install it on the truck we are buying from Ed. The bed is also a dump truck bed, meaning it has hydraulics to lift it up. I don’t know more than I do know bout how that whole project is going to work out, but we are naively optimistic. The important thing is the old truck is out of the beautiful meadow and now we have room to design and build the outdoor kitchen and wood fired oven and cooking area. 

My goodness, I went off searching for outdoor forest camp  kitchens to see if I could find something to show you about what we have planned for this year. I went everywhere from A to Z and although I found some very interesting websites and chronicles similar to my writings and photography, I didn’t really find any pictures of an outdoor forest kitchen. Go Figure. So, I stuck the image above in there for ya. I like that because of the fireplace, other than that it doesn’t have much in common with what we envision for the meadow.  We do want seats fanning out from the main cook area. There will be an oven above the wood fired stove which will all be encapsulated in a ton of cob (adobe and straw.) The adobe holds the heat into the oven like in an horno, however our design will have the wood heater built in below the oven/horno so we can keep the oven hot for a long as we need to, even while opening the oven door. Also is our crazy vision we will use the Tusas Calderon (giant pot)  and mud it right in on the right side and above the wood stove box so that for the first time in 35 plus annual Tusas camps we will be able to gently cook a group stew.

Sincerely, Brian Rodgers
P.S. Nope we’re good.
Lots of love
——————           

Strange Brew

 
Camp kitchen
—————–       
Agnes

James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
May 11, 2009
Decoupling From Reality

     Back in the golden age of American Flyfishing — say around 1913 — when technical innovation in a prissy and recondite sport was joined by a new leisure class emanating from the white glove canyons of Wall Street, some new-minted guru of angling came up with method for whipping up action on a trout stream when no fish would rise to the fly. It was really lame. The idea was to artificially create the illusion of a mayfly hatch — that moment when the larva of, for instance, Ephemerella subvaria, the Hendrickson mayfly, swims to the surface, molts, and dries its newly unfurled adult wings in the brisk spring air. This is famously the moment that drives trout crazy, and when it occurs en masse, with zillions of mayflies "hatching" off the water, a trout feeding-frenzy can ensue. The idea with the artificial hatch was to pitch a fake Hendrickson fly made of feathers and fur in so many furious, rapid casts that the dumb trout lurking below would get suckered into a feeding frenzy — and, shortly, into the buttered frying pan, with a nice "tuxedo" of cornmeal and bacon.
      In the annals of flyfishing, this gambit has been all but discredited, except among the mentally sub-normal who sometimes venture over from the lumpen realm of crank-and-plug fishing in search of improved social standing. But the tactic naturally transferred into the precincts of finance, where it reappeared in such disparate practices as Ponzi schemes and Keynesian "pump-priming." Now it is being employed at a scale never seen before, on an economy that is the equivalent of a great dead river poisoned by the toxic effluents of the same society that inhabits its banks (no pun intended). The dark secret of this river is that the fish who once ran there are all dead.
     Much has been made in recent weeks of "animal spirits" and the "psychology of markets" in the hopes that mere attitudes might overcome the laws of thermodynamics. Math wizardry has now yielded to self-esteem building, an understandable sequence of events, since trafficking in the mutant spawn of Wall Street algorithms has ended up completely demoralizing the United States of America. Sadly, this is a little like subjecting a man who has just watched his house burn down to twelve segments of Oprah shows about the triumphal secrets of weight loss.
      The Great Wish across America is to resume the life of comfort-and-convenience that seemed so nirvana-like just a few short years ago, when the very constellations of the heavens might have been renamed after heroic Atlanta realtors and Connecticut hedge fund warriors, and the boomer portfolios groaned with earnings, and millions of graying corporate salary mules dreamed of their approaching retirement to a satori of golf and Viagra, and the interior decorators grew so rich installing granite countertops that they could buy their own houses in the East Hampton, and every microcephalic parking valet in Las Vegas qualified for a bucket full of Ninja mortgages, and Lloyd Blankfein could dream of divorcing his wife to marry his cappuccino machine.
      The choices now are stark and the kind of life on offer by the future is rather austere. The job of the current president, and the people who work with him, is to manage an epic contraction — let’s say, to land a very large, loaded defect-ridden airplane that has both run out of fuel and suffered grievous mechanical breakdown… and to bring down that vehicle in an unfamiliar country filled with angry savages. Sadly, the new president and his co-pilots just want to keep the plane up there, circling. The president’s viziers are working round-the-clock to come up with some way, some toggle-switch, that might turn off the laws of gravity (which are not unrelated to the laws of thermodynamics). But all they seem to be able to come up with are mumbled prayers that are pale imitations of the algorithms once concocted by the Wall Street engineers who designed the aircraft they’re riding in.
     Well, that’s enough conceits and metaphors for today.
     We’ve digested the so-called "stress tests" for now with nary a burp and in a few weeks General Motors will step into the dark cave of bankruptcy. All the ancillary businesses linked to the US car-makers face contraction and annihilation. A couple of things occur to me which have not even entered the national debate on these matters: 1.) the US will still need to manufacture engines and chassis for military vehicles. Do we intend to send out to Mitsubishi for those things in the years ahead? 2.) the US will need rolling stock (i.e. choo-choo cars and engines) for a revived passenger railroad system. Do we intend to buy all that from the quaint peoples of other lands? (While the US workforce instead focuses on updated releases of Grand Theft Auto.)
       At the moment, there is tremendous hoopla and jubilation over the start-up of so many "shovel-ready" highway projects around America — as if what we need most are additional circumferential freeways to enhance the Happy Motoring lifestyle. How insane are we? Is this the only thing we know how to do?
      I remain confident that the months ahead will introduce the American public and our leaders to a range of horrors that will begin to penetrate our addled collective imagination. We’re far from done with the crisis of banking and money and the related fiasco in mortgages — which translates into the very real situation of many people become homeless. It remains to be seen what may happen on the food production scene, but the current severe shortage of capital and the intense droughts shaping up around the world will resolve into a much clearer picture by mid-summer. The price of oil has resumed marching up and has now re-entered a range ($50-plus) that spun the airline industry into bankruptcy last time around. Enough carnage has already occurred on the jobs scene that the next act among many chronically jobless may tilt toward desperation, anger, and violence. The sporting goods shops around the nation are already rationing ammunition.
     It’s not just the stock markets that have decoupled from reality as we enjoy the fragrant vapors of spring — it’s the entire conscious consensus of everybody holding the levers of power and opinion. To put it as simply as possible, we’re still sleepwalking into the future.
————-     
Speed Bump

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2009 May 12

Explanation: Why would clouds appear to be different colors? The reason here is that ice crystals in distant cirrus clouds are acting like little floating prisms. Sometimes known as a fire rainbow for its flame-like appearance, a circumhorizon arc lies parallel to the horizon. For a circumhorizontal arc to be visible, the Sun must be at least 58 degrees high in a sky where cirrus clouds are present. Furthermore, the numerous, flat, hexagonal ice-crystals that compose the cirrus cloud must be aligned horizontally to properly refract sunlight in a collectively similar manner. Therefore, circumhorizontal arcs are quite unusual to see. This circumhorizon display was photographed through a polarized lens above Dublin, Ohio last week.

Apologies: Earlier, APOD misidentified this phenomenon as iridescence.

Jeff Stahler

-- 

The End

More From boss

• BMN fantastic Tusas work crew
• BMN Tusas Camp preparations
• BMN Jack’s Las Tusas Ranch Pictures

boss Recommends

• Ten Habits of Internet Millionaires  (longtailedkeyword)
• Raising Chickens  (The Backyard Chicken Craze)

Ask boss To Recommend Your Posts

Related posts:

1. BMN Pre Tusas Campo work party Brian’s Morning Newsletter for May 6th 2009 http://outfitnm.com/forum is open...
2. BMN Tusas Prep, tower work Brian’s Morning Newsletter for April 24th 2009 Good Morning We...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.