While I still subscribe to all of the feeds from sites like Bassfan, ESPN Outdoors, and the like I mostly mark them as read in my RSS Feed Reader and go back later to catch up when I have spare moment.

Don Barone sent me an email back in April announcing his new site and some articles he had posted as he travelled on the road following the Bassmaster and Women's Bassmaster Tours this year. I took some time to catch up on the older articles this weekend and, in true Barone fashion, his commentary kept me in stitches. For posterity and by way of an apology to him for not keeping up, here's a few of the highlights from the past six months:

North of The Creel Limit - Barone Takes Ride on the WBT Release Boat

"Then Chris reaches inside the bass bullies' holding pen, finds a rope and pulls. The pen goes nuts, with bass jumping all over the place. The rope is attached to a trap door and when Chris pulled it, river met bass once again and in seconds, all that was left was an empty pen.

And about a 100 yards downstream, two guys sitting quietly with lines in the water, were about to have a very good day."

Through the Wringer - Brian Clark has a Unique Boat Security System

"She guards my boat at night from people coming by thinking they can snatch up something. I put her food out and her water and lay her dog bed down on the front deck and she sleeps right there all night, and man, you ain't getting near that boat."

KVD & the caveman - Meet "Happy" White

"Happy" came from a CAVE. An underground CAVE!

For the past 28 years "Happy" worked for the Schreiber Cheese Company. "For the first 12 years I ran the machine that made those individually wrapped cheese slices."

At this point I'm pretty much speechless, me and my tape recorder just sat there listening.

"db, it was a pretty complicated device & the cheese would come in one end, mix all up with the wrapping, and come out the other end as individually wrapped slices."

He stops talking, we're sitting in his truck, it's about 95 degrees out with what ever the most humidity can be without flooding. There's silence, "Happy" being the interviewee quite naturally is expecting me, the guy asking the questions, to SAY SOMETHING.

Here's my follow-up question: "So what did you do the other 16 years."

"I worked in the cave."

Bass Babies - db gets invited to a... baby shower?

I'm shuffling down the hall when I run, actually sort of bounce off, Elite Pro Paul Hirosky, who's all perky-like AT THIS TIME of what I still consider LAST NIGHT, and he says to me, "So what's up with you today," or something like that. I say exactly this, "I'm going to a Baby Shower later."

Silence.

db: "They have Cake."

The Elite Pro guy: "Ohhhhh."

The Elite Pro guy is out the door in a flash with a big bag of ice that I'm assuming has to do with something fish-related

biscuits and crankbaits - db explores a southern tradition

But here's the SERIOUS part: later, when I asked someone who lives just down the road here, "What the hell was that?" and we got to talking about eating biscuits and something called "turnip greens," he told me EXACTLY this, I wrote it down: "It's SOOOO good that if you go to getting any of the food on your forehead, your tongue will slap your brains out getting to it."

Enjoy! I always do. Thanks, Don. I'll do a better job keeping up from now on.

If you want to see what I've been up to in my "other life" you can do so here. Here's a few remainders that I've been meaning to blog, but just haven't had a moment to flush out with meaningful content:

Floating Fishing Gazebo

Looking for a unique alternative to your gas guzzling boat? Look no further.

Top Ten Canadian Camping Destinations

Add each one of these to my "someday" list!

Relief for the Rural Broadband Problem?

The gem:

Intel® has announced plans to sell a specialized Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel.

And quite possibly rural areas of America, I dare say. Maybe my dad can finally get off dial-up.

Stunning Photos of Shipwrecks and Sea Disasters

This one is a bit disorienting...

The Obama Doctrine

What the far-right pundits and their parrots can't stipulate or acknowledge is that, aside from his stirring speeches, what he's proposing as a leader is a stronger and more comprehensive foreign policy stance for this country than we've seen since - well - Reagan's Cold War strategy:

An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of Al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

McCain's Consistency Problem

I think very highly of John McCain - I still do. His behavior over the last five years, though, has been increasingly erratic as can't seem to resolve his internal conflict of being a good soldier for his party and following his own conscience. I don't think he will be able to resolve that conflict until the Republican party moves back toward the center from it's current far right, one note, no compromise stance.

Online Continuing Education goes 2.0

Pimping my own stuff here, but earlier this spring I completed a code architecture overhaul and major redesign for one of my main clients. I think it turned out pretty nice - and on the technical side the code runs like a scalded dog.

Peeps Show

Save that one for next easter - and watch for another installment of the annual Peeps art competition.

The cost of CAFOs

The photo below is an example of what happens when liquified manure is sprayed on tiled or frozen fields. That brown stuff flowing on top of the ice of this formerly pristine stream is raw, liquefied manure. America has an emerging and growing water quality crisis and it's happening in small streams like the Wolf in South Eastern Michigan and likely much nearer your home than you think.

This rainbow? was visible over much of the area and was noticed by many people.? It was seen as a partial bow in some areas and completely full and even double in others depending on where the rain was falling.? The photos on this page were taken at the Elam Bend Conservation Area near McFall, Missouri.

The pilot's handling of the crab was by the book. So was what he tried to do 38-40 seconds into the clip: "kick in the rudder," which means quickly swinging the plane's nose around so that, at the instant it touches the ground, it is pointing straight ahead along the runway's axis. Kick out of the crab too early, and the plane will drift sideways off the runway before it touches down, risking a crash on the tarmac. Kick out of the crab too late, and the wheels will still be pointed sideways when they strike the runway, also likely causing a crash.

The pilot crabs the airplane's gear down toward the runway, and kicks the rudder in just barely in time. When everything goes wrong, he does one last thing exactly right: engines are immediately and instinctively thrown in full power to get the airplane as far as possible away from where the danger is: close to the ground

Here's the vid, which is both scary and awe-inspiring:

Via Flickr by imjan.

A nice collection of nature desktop wallpapers over on Flickr.

The one of Glacier National Park in Montana, is also very striking.

The tiny indigenous Kofan community of Santa Rosa de Guamuez in Colombia had it hard enough with pressures from settlers on their reservation, without Roundup Ultra containing Cosmoflux 411F, a weedkiller that is being sprayed on their villages in a concentration 100 times more powerful than is permitted in the United States.

Aurelio, a Kofan village elder, shows us around his village. The Kofan have been here 500 years. Now it looks as though their time is up. Pineapples are stunted and shriveled. The once green banana plants are no more than blackened sticks. The remains of a few maize plants can be seen here and there, but the food crops have been devastated. There is hunger at Santa Rosa. He is close to despair.

Colombian babies and children are falling ill. Peasants, already miserably poor, are getting hungrier. Indigenous tribes are being torn apart and whole communities pushed into exile.

The argument is there to be made that somehow these people are in cahoots with the Drug Lords and there may be some of that in places.

Thing is though, when the chemicals we're paying to drop are making kids chronically sick and what's below becomes their class art project, we might want to re-think how we are allocating funds to this project (It started back in the Clinton years and carried through to the Bush Administration so it's not a partisan thing - despite the title of the linked article):

Via Flickr by simonwgiles.

This photo is part of an amazing set of photographs of the Antartic Penninsula.

It's definitely worth the look if you have the time. There's a combination of color and black and white photos. One titled Whaler's Grave is another one of my favorites.

So true...

Via Flickr by Lensecap.

There's no caption on this photo over at Flickr but I'm guessing, based on others in the set and the tags assigned that it's in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York.

Nice!

Via Flickr by SPAM_King.

Can't resist.... :)