- Wash your hands, goshdarnitall. To paraphrase an email, a prepper who has more guns and ammunition than their family can carry but no provision for sanitary washing-up when the water heater succumbs to the zombie apocalypse and the Softsoap pump runs dry is not prepared at all. Dysentery and cholera have carried off more corpses than bullets and bayonets in every war up to the middle of the 20th Century.
- Vote "NO" on Justice Steven H. David, fellow Hoosiers. This is a man who has forgotten that the foundation of American jurisprudence is to protect the people from an overbearing government, and not t'other way 'round. Besides, any chance offered to fire a politician should be seized, if only on general principle.
- Quote of the Day from Sebastian: "I don’t think the many Americans that tuned in to the live jump thought too much about the fact that an Austrian was gunning for, and eventually beat several world records held by an American. This is still a country where we celebrate individual achievement — one that doesn’t care much whether you’re Austrian, English, Turkish, Armenian, Russian, Chinese, Kenyan or Indonesian. Joe Kittinger helped the Austrian beat all but one of his own records — people who were 70 years ago a mortal enemy. No one thought anything of it."
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Tab Clearing...
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8 comments:
Just remember, in a pinch one can make soap from wood ashes and lard.
... so you can tell your sweetheart this is why you need to lay in more bacon. It's hygienic. :)
Concurrent with dysentery and cholera being the among the most effective scythes in the hands of the Grim Tyrant, so it is that soap and effective plumbing have done more to preserve the lives and extend the health of mankind than all the medicines yet developed.
gvi
This past summer, I decided to brush up on my Wilderness Survival Skills, "Just in Case." The Instructor (who used to be on a Cable Survival TeeWee Show and left because he was sick of the Hollywood Stupidity the Producers were trying to foist on the Viewing Public) was adamant that the 2 skills we MUST have locked down in our Genes was the Ability to make a Sustainable Fire and to BOIL Water. And the Instructor is a BIG Gun Nut, no "Tree Hugging Allowed." Trust me, after what I learned, I'd rather carry 2 extra Canteens of Clean Water than a Second Glock.
When you say "t'other way 'round," do you mean that the foundation of American government is to protect the people from an overbearing jurisprudence? Because that seems rather appropriate for this case.
Les: Would this instructor be Mykel Hawke?
The English have always had a well reported aversion to water and soap. Odd, when you consider that both the Scandinavians and Celts traditionally sauna'd and bathed daily.
No self respecting medieval Frenchman or German would show up for dinner without having first sat on a stool in a washroom and soaped and lathered himself into a semblance of hygene, then adding a bit of cologne if he had the bucks. The 15th century Augsberg financier/philanthropist Lucas Rem was considered a model of style, and took a bath before every meal.
The Romans thought the Gauls were fops because of their constant washing, even though a Roman soldier in camp would hit the tubs daily after PT.
They weren't terribly big on that soap stuff the Gauls and Britons used, preferring an olive oil rubdown and a good scraping with a strigil, but at least they got the sweat off.
In a TEOTWAWKI scenario, most suburban faucets would keep on working for weeks at least (gravity feed from resevoirs), but what came out wouldn't be safe to wash a dead cat. The typical faucet filter is mostly there to remove lead and improve taste, and would quickly load up from particulate matter.
The "fulacht fiadh" or burning pits found in Scottish, Irish, and Welsh historical sites were used primarily to heat the enormous amounts of water used in the town baths.
Similar functions have been found near all of Europe and Japan's traditional baths.
I imagine it would probably become common in a survival situation, as I suspect individually hunting for fuel could prove a high risk endeavor, and it would make more sense to boil a large amount of communal water once or twice a day rather than dozens of times at individual homes.
"The English have always had a well reported aversion to water and soap."
Oh Ed, the buses don't stop where you live do they? (Ever heard of Joseph Lister, one of those cursed English?)
Whilst those paragons of Celtic lore (otherwise known colloquially as 'Pikeys') are renowned worldwide for their ablutionary skills.
Sadly, the spread of medieval British culture, expressed as the Clearances and Enclosure Acts in Scotland and the wholesale massacre of most of Ireland's population, brought it's concommitant British hygene, or lack of it.
voices.yahoo.com/14th-century-england-hygiene-5673534.html
A question. My Perthshire relatives use the word Pikey to mean Gypsy (Rom) or Tinker.
Irish joke, "A Rom and a Tinker are having a knife fight". "Which one do you want to win?" Answer, "Both of them".
Itinerant and illiterate people who have been marrying close cousins for a thousand years would hardly qualify as typical of ethnic groups that hold them in contempt and regard them as outsiders. The Irish probably far more than the English, as they have proportionally far more of them.
My Irish Son-In-Law over in Galway refers to them, often quite loudly, as Knackers, which I gather is always an excellent excuse for a fight.
Still, as there's a tribe of them set up on property behind one of his petrol stations, stealing 900 Euros of water from him each month, a peevish attitude is understandable.
All while their wives come into the shop and stage a fight while their kids steal 20 or 30 Euros of candy.
The council says they will be able to evict them in probably not much more than six months. It seems they're now a protected ethnic minority.
If they are, then are they still Irish?
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