I see no reason

In preparation for Guy Fawkes Day, The Old Foodie shares this recipe from The lady's own cookery book, and new dinner-table director (1844) by Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury:

Tongues, to cure. No. 1.
Take two fine bullocks' tongues; wash them well in spring water; dry them thoroughly with a cloth, and salt them with common salt, a quarter of a pound of saltpetre, a quarter of a pound of treacle, and a quarter of a pound of gunpowder. Let them lie in this pickle for a month; turn and rub them every day; then take them out and dry them with a cloth; rub a little gunpowder over them, and hang them up for a month, when they will be fit to eat, previously soaking a few hours as customary.

I recall reading speculation once that black powder may have been accidentally invented in a Chinese kitchen due to each ingredient's historical use in culinary pursuits, but I expect Mr. Occam would have some words to say about that.

[h/t to Le Loup]

When the penny drops

Note this incident in Portland, Oregon, in which a mom down on her luck was hassled for trying to pay for her groceries with 32 bucks worth of quarters.

Comments and coverage vary from populist rage to "this is news?"

But it also illustrates one of my pet issues: the US coinage system, because it's gone unchanged despite serious inflation, is comically out of step with the value of the dollar.

The Portland woman racked up a modest 32 dollar grocery bill, or 128 quarters' worth of sundries. In 1950, according to the Westegg Inflation Calculator, those same groceries would have cost $3.57. or six half-dollars, two quarters, a nickel, and two pennies.

The lady's purchase was of a level traditionally paid for with coins--just not with our current ludicrously valueless coins.

They're the modern stone aged family

On Monday, LabRat pointed to an article on NPR blogs that sought to dismiss paleo dieting on a variety of collectivist all-seven-billion-of-us-are-in-this-together grounds, with a dash of anthropology thrown in for credibility. But the author--a doctor with some serious anthro training--seems to be going off a bit half cocked in her halfassed snark:

Our ancestors began to eat meat in large quantities around 2 million years ago, when the first Homo forms began regular use of stone tool technology. Before that, the diet of australopithecines and their relatives was overwhelmingly plant-based, judging from clues in teeth and bones. I could argue that the more genuine "paleo" diet was vegetarian.

Uh-huh...

"X predates stone tool use, and Y is only common after hominids started using stone tools. Therefore, X is more authentically paleolithic than Y."

Didn't think that statement through very carefully, did'jya, doc?

Who will bemoan her?

We all know the legend of the Trojan War, supposedly fought for Helen, the world's most beautiful woman.

It's not an uncommon trope in world mythology, and it turns out there's a similar story in Armenian legend. Around the ninth century BC, so it goes, the ruler of Nineveh demanded the hand in marriage of a pretty young thing called Ara the Beautiful. Denied the demand, Nineveh went to war to claim Ara, setting off a long story of war, gods, magic, diplomacy, and mistaken identity.

The things dudes will do to get chicks, amirite?

Ah, but in this story the ruler of Nineveh with the raging libido is the sorceress queen Semiramis, and Ara the Beautiful was the king of Armenia.

If this story isn't already a shojo manga series, there's definitely a buck to be made there.

Walking in a fimbulvinter wonderland

Eight inches of snow is not a big deal for New Jersey.

Eight inches of snow in October, it turns out, is.

We're without water, and have to shovel snow into the toilet tanks to keep them flushing. This is a minor annoyance compared to the people all around us; we never lost power for more than a few seconds at a time.

On my way to work this morning the towns I drove through were dark and there were lanes closed from fallen trees and power lines. At one point four utility poles in a row had been dragged down into the right lane.

Thanks for the early reminder, nature.

Book mircroreview:

I certainly wouldn't call myself a survivalist; I'm nowhere near prepared enough. But I'm a bit of a survivalist enthusiast. People who can do stuff are interesting, and the skills survivalists talk about are often fascinating, so browsing their blogs is an entertaining way to pass some time.

So when Dave Black's new book, Survival Retreats, came across my desk, I gave it a flip through.

I'm no expert on survivalism, but I know guns reasonably well. Let me give you an excerpt from his section on defense and security:

Die-hard survivalists insist on the necessity for the immediate availability of weaponry for a hard response. While going without weapons certainly causes no harm and eliminates the threats of family suicides and homicides with those weapons, the absence of those weapons in an [end of the world] bedlam situation would increase the likelihood of successful victimization.
...
Of all the topics in the survivalism realm, armament is by far the most controversial. The mere possession of a firearm in the home enormously increases the likelihood that you or a loved one will be killed by it. While I have spent much of my life with weapons in the home and did twelve years in the military, in my seven years as a paramedic in the American West, I encountered hundreds of gunshot wounds, and by far, the majority of them were suicides. The rest were accidents or resulted from domestic disputes. None of them were defensive in nature, a fact which pretty much verifies the statistics the gun-control crowd is using...
...
Unless there's an imminent danger of attack, guns should be stored, unloaded, with trigger locks in place. Ammunition should be stored and locked up separately.

This, incidentally, follows immediately after he's discussed the possibility of stopping intruders with buried IEDs and booby trapped foyers that can be flooded with toxic gas.

He goes on to suggest loading your defensive shotgun with birdshot to "mitigate overpenetration", recommend the Hi-Point 9mm pistol as a practical budget option, and to say that if you insist on using "assault-type" rifles because you're drawn "like ants to sugar" by their "romantic silhouettes", then you should consider using frangible ammo.

This is before recommending the Ruger 10/22 as a ".22 caliber sniper rifle".

Flipping further on, I noticed a picture of a certain trendy handgun:

"The perfect traveling companion? The Public Defender variant of the Taurus handgun, "The Judge," is a five-shot revolver that shoots a .45 caliber round or a .410 shot shell. It's small and light, built and promoted as a concealable self-defense or home protection weapon...Loading a Public Defender with alternating .45 and WSE .410 rounds results in a formidable close-quarters personal defense weapon.

...

I don't have the expertise to assess his other sections on history, location selection, food and energy sustainability, and home security, which may be above reproach. I'm not in the market for a survivalist retreat, myself. But on the off chance that you are, dear reader, I'd suggest that--on the chance that Mr. Black brings the same knowledge and wisdom to those topics that he does to firearms--you may want to look elsewhere.

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Get 'em before the feds decide they're a competing currency and bust up the seller's business!"