Fish On

 

There you are, sitting on the porch. It's hot, and you've prayed the morning Office, walked to the Pick 'n Steal, drunk that 20 ounce Yeti tumbler of coffee, checked the news and wondered if "hell in a handbasket" isn't too mild. So what to do? Go fishing, of course.

And that's what happened, put those CDC Stasi guidelines in your knapsack and head off to the water, to what used to be a Cretaceous sea. 20 minutes later, there I was, casting off from the prehistoric reef, sun beating down with ferocious intensity. Would the fish bite?

Sure enough they did, round about Midday. Pretty much every cast a fish, and all Perch/Bluegill, some of them large and full of fight. In fact, they were all full of fight and I lost count. Great result. Then, just as I was beginning to melt, a fierce, predatory tug. Drag out, rod double, what's this? A good sized Bass, in you come.

Walking back to the truck meant walking over countless fossils, the crystallized relics of our primeval past. There they were, frozen in stone, under the glare of a Texan sun. Imagine, if you can, a series of great reefs, breaking up a sea which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Austin and beyond. Or something like that.

Above it glided Pterosaurs and in the water, ferocious beasts. Perhaps today's fish are their descendants, they're certainly fierce enough. In other news, some pals are fishing in the sea, off some island. Blessed are ye poor.

Tight Lines,

LSP

I Am The Bread Of Life

 

"I am the bread of life," says Christ in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. It's a remarkable statement. Jesus claims that he is the spiritual food which came down from heaven, sent by his Father. That he is true manna, "not such as your fathers ate and died, he who eats this bread will live forever." 

He, Jesus, is the very food which endures for everlasting life, the fulfillment and embodiment of the Law represented by the 5 loaves of the miracle performed the day before. 

He is the glory of God which passed by Moses, who was hidden by God in a cleft in the rock, and spoke through the unquenchable fire of the burning bush. He is now unveiled, present, incarnate, "and we beheld His glory, a glory as of an only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." Glory that's given to us in sacrifice for our atonement on the Cross, "the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh."

Bread which we receive by faith, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” And that's just it. Do we dare to believe, to put our humble, perhaps desperate and fearful faith in the Son of Man who came down from heaven that we might live. To put it another way. Do we labor for earthly food, for bread and power, or for the heavenly food which is the life of God himself? 

Christ faced this temptation in the wilderness and answered Satan, "Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God." He said no to "all the kingdoms of the world and the glories therein," and went to the Cross, which became his throne. He invites us to do the same, "take up your cross," so that we, in him, will have life, divine life.

Of course you might want to choose bread and power instead, thus cunningly marking yourself with the number of the beast. Your call, good luck. But remember, it's all a Big Pharma congressional larf until you wake up and a demon's gnawing on your inner thigh.

God bless,

LSP

Excelsior!

 

Do you feel we're living at the very end of an age? That in mind, let's hear it for Procul  Harum. Grand Hotel, what an album. And it reminds me of a South African Latin teacher who used to command us to strike our heads against 18th C desks if we messed up vocab tests.

"I like Harum and Purple," he'd exclaim. "Strike your head against the desk ten times. Harder." Well, it was the '70s.

Cheers,

LSP

Bio-Tyranny

 

A Roman Catholic friend sent this in:

I just got an "effective immediately, until further notice" from my parish:

To help avoid a Covid exposure at the parish, which could result in the church closing for 10 days, and based on current guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, the Clark County Health Department, and the Chancery Offices at the Archdiocese of Seattle:

Based on current guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, the Clark County Health Department, and the Chancery Offices at the Archdiocese of Seattle, St. John the Evangelist asks all individuals visiting the parish campus to wear a face mask at all times. This is regardless of vaccination status and is effective immediately. We realize this is disappointing, but with everyone's cooperation, understanding, patience and - most importantly - concern for our fellow human beings, we here at St John can be part of the solution in stemming the spread of Covid-19. Thank you, God bless, and stay healthy! 

I'm so mad at this irrational stupidity I could spit nails.  Fired off a note to my parish with solid facts of why this was not needed, and got back a note that said " Out of love and respect for all our fellow human beings and following the guidance of the CDC, the Clark County Health Dept, and the Archdiocese of Seattle"   

Told them to spare me the "Out of love and respect"  bull shit.

 

 

Exactly. Out of love and respect bull shit. Behold the gurning, despotic face of our new biomed, corporate sponsored rainbow tyranny. That the Church would be complicit is, to me, outrageous if predictable. 

Be that as it may, imagine your overlords laughing at you, the masked serf, from their private islands and private jets, all in the name of "science," while their masked servants offer them deliciously cooling ice cream.

Just a thought,

LSP

Taking Care Of Business

 

A busy morning. Get up, feed the Blue, make hot tea, enjoy that tea on the back porch while scanning the news, say Morning Prayer, you might say "Mattins," walk to the Pick 'n Steal, observe a new iteration of the Meth Shack, get back to the Compound, answer emails and then... drive over to Tom's Tire to get your rig inspected.

You have to do it every year, the State demands it, and we must obey. But it's no big deal, just 7 bucks and an excuse to go to Montes for a delicious brisket burrito. Tasty and then some. Next stop? 

A dinosaur museum, conveniently next to the diner. It used to be a filling station and then something else, followed by something else, and something else again, amounting to yet another vacant, asset stripped country lot. But now it's a dinosaur museum. 

I ambled over, pleasantly aglow with brisket and homemade tortilla's, only to be ambushed by a fit young fella with a dinosaur T and a Ho Chi Minh, obviously a paleontologist. "What's up, man!" he asked. I looked him straight in his expensively rimless glasses and asked, right on the nail, "Is this museum open?" To be fair, it rarely is, and he said yes, step straight on in, which I did.

What a great little museum! Big fossils of the ferocious beasts that used to roam North Central Texas, and small fossils too, to say nothing of aboriginal artifacts. These, if you know where to look, which I mostly don't, can be found by the boxfull here in Hill and Bosque counties. How old are they? Good question.

Museum over, collect the rig, get it registered, go to the 1st Inconvenience Bank and then to the lake. I won't lie, it was quite chilly, only about 100*. Is it too hot to fish when your eyelids start dropping sweat on the inside of your cunningly polarized glasses? Hardly, all the more incentive to carry on regardless.

4 Blue Gill later it was time to head home, in yet another episode of being glad to be in Texas.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

DFTR

I feel this relevant,

LSP

Cooking With LSP

Typical Cooking Kukri

Ah yes, cooking with LSP, that tired old trope. Tired! No, this is a recipe that's ever old and ever new, equally at home in the wintry wastes of Northern England and the oven intense heat of a Texan summer. (Stop it, I'm warning you. Ed.). OK, here it is, Cottage Pie, and it starts at the grill.

A Grill

You know how it goes. Grill up some 80/20 burgers, yes they're delicious, eat half, freeze the rest, repeat. A week or so later open the freezer and behold the frozen medium rare, seared patties. Defrost the icy offerings and chop up an onion, celery, and a carrot. Saute the veg for a few minutes until it smells and looks right. You'll know, then add a clove or more of minced garlic. I prefer more, you may not, no rule.

Add  Some Flour, It's Not Hard

Next add the meat, stir it 'round, break it up, and simmer on medium high 'til it looks right, as in browned. Perhaps you think that's a sly, racist, reference to POCs. It's not, we're just talking cooking. Meat and veg together as one, add 1/4 cup of flour. 

Chuck it in, don't be afraid, then mix in 4 tbs of tomato paste, 1/2 cup of cheap as you like red wine, 2 cups of beef broth, 1 tsp Thyme, 2 dried Bay Leaves, 2 tbs Worcestershire Sauce, salt, pepper and chili powder to taste. Alright, the chili's not trad, but I like it, and I'm willing to bet that dry English mustard wouldn't go amiss either. Anyway...

Simmer Down!

Simmer this beast until the sauce reaches desired consistency. I let it run on medium high, stirring occasionally, until the oil and sauce start to separate, as in Bolognese or curry. Your call, just don't leave off in a fit of weakness and find yourself with a watery sauce. That's an error.

Just Enough Potatoes

Sauce/gravy achieved, take it off the heat and let it cool down. This will, maybe, prevent the filling of the pie from seeping into its mashed potato top. Not a disaster if it does, but better if it doesn't; preserve the integrity of the pie, as we should the electoral process itself.

Most Awesome

Potatoes mashed, cover the sauce with the creamy spuds, sprinkle with Parmesan or some other cheese, grind pepper over the thing, add a tbs of butter or olive oil, and put it in the oven at 350 until golden brown. Perhaps you want to texture the mashed potato top, maybe add a slogan. Up to you, some say it makes for a better pie.

Cottage Pie

Kick back for 30 minutes, have a glass of wine, sharpen a kukri,  load magazines, clean weapons, whatever, then take the pie out of the oven, let it rest, and fall upon your scoff.

Like a Warrior,

LSP

Rock Apes

 

When you think Rock Ape your mind instantly goes to the RAF Regiment, but not so fast. Rock Apes, Batatuts or Nguoi Rung, people of the forest, are evidently a form of apelike, bipedal cryptid living in the jungles of far east Asia. Travelling in packs, the apemen would attack US patrols along the Cambodia/Laos border. A veteran states:

Rock apes are the real thing. I saw a band of them up on "Carlie Ridge" in Quang Nam Province in the spring of 1970. It was nightfall and I saw them through a Starlite scope. 10-15 of them headed away from us up a steep incline. They weren't VC because they walked as a pack side by side in the jungle and not in a military type line. They all looked to be very broad bodied and up to 5 ft tall.

 

He was lucky, Nguoi Rung were allegedly known to hurl rocks at people invading their territory and attack potential aggressors with utter, apelike ferocity. There were apparently so many sightings towards the end of the war that the Communist Vietnamese Party sent scientists to investigate.

One, Dr. Vo Quy from Hanoi, discovered footprints and made a cast of the imprint, which was wider than a human foot and too big for an ape. Another expert, Tran Hong Viet, discovered similar prints in 1982, in remote jungle.

Witnesses report that Rock Apes grow up to 5' in height, are covered with brown fur, broad shouldered and show no fear, or very little, of humans. It's suggested their remote location accounts for this; having never met the ferocity of Homo Sapiens, the apemen attacked in ignorance. Or, possibly, they regarded seemingly weaker humans as easy prey.

Regardless, some of the few people who read this mind blog have been to those jungles. Have you seen or heard of these creatures? There's plenty of evidence that they're there, and I feel that they're possibly living fossils, like Coelacanths but hominins, remnants of our evolutionary tree, alive today. Or not.

Your Call,

LSP

The Age Of Man

 

It's commonly accepted that modern man, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa in a Kenyan garden of Eden around 350,000 BC (Pleistocene) and spread out from there, eventually reaching Europe around 40,000 BC, and the America's some 30,000 years later across the Bering Strait land bridge.

Typical

All well and good, and the schema runs something like this: Ancient apes evolve into smarter apes, who evolve into still smarter apes, until over millions of years you get apelike semi-humans, hominins. Then, at last, in the middle Pleistocene, Homo Sapiens arrives, following on from Homo Erectus. The latter being the "missing link" between us and the ape people of prehistory.

Eoliths, which you can see are clearly not shaped in any way at all

It sounds good, but what if stone tools were found dating to a far earlier period in the earth's history, say the Miocene (23-5 million years BC), in the earth's Tertiary? What's more, tools which were indistinguishable from their counterparts in East Africa (Olduvai) in the Pleistocene some million years later. Or, for that matter, from stone tools made by modern humans, in Africa and elsewhere.

Yet More Ancient Stone

Without getting down in the weeds in an admittedly complex and fractious subject, what if Homo Sapiens is far older than currently thought, and existed with hominins for many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps interbreeding, as we apparently did with Neanderthals? What then.

Out of Africa?

All the history books would have to be rewritten, for a start, and dates pushed back much further. More seriously, the process and theory of evolution itself would come under question. As opposed to something gradual, taking place in tiny increments over thousands of years, we'd be faced by the sudden emergence of rational man at a very early date. 

Ahem

Gradualism to catastrophism? Perhaps. Maybe the same impetus that drove the explosion of megafauna after the cataclysmic demise of the dinosaurs drove the remarkable rise of our early human cousins and humanity itself. Then again, can intelligence evolve into reason? C.S. Lewis, famously, says no, the two are qualitatively different.

Hmmmmm

In the meanwhile, here at the Compound, sweet and sour pork's on the menu.

Bifacial Chipped Flint Forever,

LSP

Kill Shot?

 

Via Intrepid Reporter:

ALL... of the infected are vaccinated... These reports could be an early sign of ADE, Antibody-Dependent Enhanced breakthrough infections. This would potentially be really bad...

 

 

In order to make sure there's a BIG wipeout later, they made and designed a NonVax, and have been using it to start the process. They used the fear factor to get as many people on board as possible, and set a date to 'trigger' it off. Reason I say that is, they're currently freaking the fuck out because ONLY 56% is supposedly vaxxed. And right now? Part of the freakout is that the naturally occurring mutation (Delta Variant) is starting to activate the kill shot too early.

Oops.

LSP

In The Heat of The Day

 

What is it they say, only mad dogs, Englishmen, and members of tactical signals brigades go out in the noonday sun. Or something like that, and it's what we did, the mission being to catch some fish even if it was 100 degrees in the shade.

Sure enough they were on and before you could say Das Kapital, perch were snapping and tugging at the lines like the voracious predators they are. I pulled out a couple of fierce little beasts, looked over at the kid and boom, something slammed into his hook and it was rod double, drag out action. No fooling.

What was this monster, a cat, a bass, an enormous drum? No, it was a dinner plate sized blue gill, perhaps a Zeta Variant, and easily the best fish of the day. What a great result. Then, after another hour or so of catching we started to melt and headed for home, a good afternoon at the water well spent.

In other news, the Pope's attacking the Latin Mass. There are two classes of being which hate Latin, schoolboys and Satan.

Fish on,

LSP

Mary Magdalene

It's the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene today, who was exorcized of seven devils. We see her in the Gospels at the foot of the Cross and she's the first person to witness Christ's resurrection. In the West, she's held to be the "sinner" in Luke 7:36-50, and the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

The Eastern church believes she retired to Ephesus and lived with the Virgin Mary until her death. St. Gregory of Tours supports this view, but there's another tradition, in which the saint travels to France with Martha, Lazarus, Maximin and others, following the execution of James in Jerusalem. Between them, they convert Provence, with Lazarus and Maximin becoming bishops.

New Advent says this:

When the time of her death arrived she was carried by angels to Aix and into the oratory of St. Maximinus, where she received the viaticum; her body was then laid in an oratory constructed by St. Maximinus at Villa Lata, afterwards called St. Maximin. History is silent about these relics till 745, when according to the chronicler Sigebert, they were removed to Vézelay through fear of the Saracens. No record is preserved of their return, but in 1279, when Charles II, King of Naples, erected a convent at La Sainte-Baume for the Dominicans, the shrine was found intact, with an inscription stating why they were hidden. In 1600 the relics were placed in a sarcophagus sent by Clement VIII, the head being placed in a separate vessel. In 1814 the church of La Sainte-Baume, wrecked during the Revolution, was restored, and in 1822 the grotto was consecrated afresh. The head of the saint now lies there, where it has lain so long, and where it has been the centre of so many pilgrimages.

 

What do I believe? The Ephesus story is more prosaic, perhaps more attune to the spirit of the age. But Provence is romantic, miraculous, and chivalric, so I choose that. You might think otherwise, no rule.

Mary Magdalene, pray for us.

God bless,

LSP