It's a good time to buy a used boat

I'm open to the idea of someone mooring their boat in our pond, if it's a picturesque one. They can even live aboard it for a nominal rent. And they can keep all the snapping turtles they catch in exchange for an occasional couple of bowls of snapper soup.

Hunters are always trying to give us venison which we don't like; but snapper soup is another thing entirely. I think our edition of The Joy of Cooking has a recipe starting with the necessary cutting off of the head of the snapper with an ax. I'll provide the chopping block and the ax.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/01boats.html?_r=3&hp

Meanwhile, in other news: Detroit is reverting to the wild and there's a wide awake fellow selling skinned raccoons for $12 each. Slick Willy took his woman in 1970; but apparently he didn't take the Coonman's hunting dogs or his down home skills. I like his little touch of leaving one paw on the carcass.

"The paw is old school," says Glemie Dean Beasley, a Detroit raccoon hunter and meat salesman. "It lets the customers know it's not a cat or dog."

During the seven or so minute video that accompanies the newspaper article the Coonman channels Julia Child with a nice raccoon cooking demonstration. And that's before he plays and sings a nice blues song that's got a tempo perfect for our level of West Coast Swing skill.

Unfortunately I've only seen raccoons two times since we bought our land in 1978; although there's no question that they're regularly around. Linda just pointed out a raccoon paw print to me down at the creek a few days ago. I may look into learning how to set a snare. That raccoon recipe looked mighty inviting; although I might be tempted to present it to Linda as rabbit if I ever get the chance to try it out.

The Coonman also sells rabbits and squirrels if you happen to be passing through Detroit and want to work up to the raccoon sort of sideways. I bet he would have a field day with the geese around here and up and down along the river drives in Philly.

The quotes from Beasley are priceless. An example - "Today people got no skill and things is getting worse," he laments. "What people gonna do? They gonna eat each other up is what they gonna do." That's a fellow I'd like to know.

http://www.detnews.com/article/20090402/METRO08/904020395/To+urban+hunter++next+meal+is+scampering+by

And, in yet other news, here's a nice, very reasonable, well spoken Arab fellow who wants to come and make an impact on a neighborhood near you.

http://www.tangle.com/view_video.php?viewkey=0861ff3eabea1ceb73e4

Where has common sense gone?

The fact that we here in the U.S. haven't suffered a major terrorist attack since the two muslim snipers killed a bunch of people down in Virginia in 2003 or so has made us all complacent. The post at the link below by Andy McCarthy of National Review is a good reminder that our law enforcement system and our immigration system are run by complete imbeciles. This story has flown under the radar of the big media because it doesn't fit their worldview that all is sweetness and light.

Republicans don't want to publicize it because the idiots in law enforcement and immigration have been working under the orders of President Bush for the last eight years while this cancer has been metasticizing across our country. The Democrats don't want to publicize it because a small but significant wing of their party is composed of outright terrorist and their sympathizers, and another larger wing is composed of people who approve of anything that harms this country. There - I think that's a nicely balanced nonpartisan paragraph.

This is what things have come to. The FBI apparently helped out by flying the shreds and tatters of a muslim suicide bomber to Minnesota so he could be buried "at home." Part of me understands that the feebies are just making nice in the hope of developing sources of information in the muslim community there; since there are 20 young men missing from that community who are almost surely overseas plotting massacres or being trained to carry out massacres. But I can't help but think that the "good cop" routine isn't the most effective way to react to the situation.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDE1ZGQ1MzdiY2NhMTdhYWJlZmM2MTU0OWJhNjg0NWU=

I have a couple of thoughts about this that are somewhat politically incorrect.

1. The FBI should have carefully and respectfully investigated everything about the immigration status of the members of his family, his mosque and the community the suicide bomber came from with an eye toward enforcing every single wrinkle of immigration law, no matter how much it cost or how long it took.

2. Then they should have started as big a task force of lawyers as necessary working to deport every non-citizen in the above groups who had ever been found guilty of so much as a traffic violation or made so much as a mistake with a comma on his or her immigration papers.

If the above course had been followed muslim parents and teachers all over the country and all over the world would right now be explaining to the young people in their communities that it's alright to hate this country, but not wise to attack this country. Also, and this is just as important, there would no doubt arise a big and noisy contingent of lawyers and activists and such to fight the program, and a bunch of judges would no doubt issue rulings impeding the program. The list of such folks would be very useful to publicize the next time there is a big terrorist attack in this country, as there will be.