Where to Get Your Meat

I grew up killing, gutting, and butchering my own meat. When you eat wild animals such as deer and elk you face many risks besides food poisoning. There are other illnesses to worry about. I was taught at a very early age to always cook food thoroughly. By providing meat for ourselves, my family and I at least knew where the animal had come from. The forest service keeps records of animals and herds tested from different areas. If they find something you are sure to know about it.

When I was in middle school one of my neighbors contracted wasting disease from eating undercooked elk meat while acting as a trail guide. I had heard of wasting disease but never truly understood what it could do. My neighbor slowly died over a ten year period as the disease ate his brain stem. His family had to watch as his condition and health deteriorated and then disappeared.

One of the things that I will take away from this book is how public safety will be ignored until negative public opinion affects profits. The fact that it took McDonald's to get companies to comply with the ban on feeding animals their dead relatives is sickening. McDonald's didn't do it because they felt a moral obligation to consumers, but because they were losing money.

Another thing is, just how important it is for immigrants to learn the language and the law of the land. I don't want people to lose their culture and heritage. That is not my point. Immigrants are preyed upon because of their lack of knowledge and status. By educating themselves, they can protect themselves and help change the system. Nobody should be treated the way the meatpacking and slaughterhouses treat their workers.

One of my motivations for going to school is so that I will have enough income to support the causes I believe in. Right now most of my money goes to bills and diapers. In the book you can see how the green being sent to Washington has affected our way of life. Sadly it will take some green prodding in a different direction to curb the harmful effects. That is not to diminish the power of social movement. The more people who get involved the greater the impact will be.

Arrow 2 Da Face

All right, so nobody guessed my one truth: I was shot in the face with an arrow.

I also did a list of ten where there was only one lie. That one lie was: I have flown in a helicopter.

I guess it is time to grumble a little bit. Not that there is a whole lot to complain about this semester. I have a lot of writing to do in my current classes. Besides the essays for English, by the end of the semester I will have written 21 essays between my Engineering class and American Government. Which is actually a good thing. The number one complaint of hiring companies is the lack of communication skills. At least for the field I am studying for, Mechanical Engineering, this holds true.

I think the hardest part is balancing all of the school work with spending time with my kids and chores. There are times when I put off chores to play with the kids because they have been waiting patiently for me to finish the homework. Patiently means they only bug a few times an hour. My daughter has her own homework and she is only in kindergarten. After everything else is taken care of, everyone still needs some personal time. Even if you only get fifteen minutes of quiet.

I have a long way to go before I get a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. In the end I have to take Math 24 and I am currently taking Math 21A. All the while fitting in around 8 courses in Physics, Chemistry, and Engineering into my schedule. Then I can transfer to CSUN or UCSB and finish the remaining two years.

What motivates me is my family and the work I will get to do when I am done. Engineering is a well paying career path that will enable me to provide for my kids. Naturally I want them to have the best chance at life they can. I love to tinker with stuff. That is what Mechanical Engineering is all about. I am leaning towards the design aspect: making things work and look cool at the same time. In my Engineering class, my partner and I designed and built a ballista to fire a golf ball for class. The design process was the best part.

You Think You Know...

A nugget of truth in a heap of bu...


I beat up a grizzly bear.

I am a middle child.

I have never jumped a car.

I was shot in the face with an arrow.

I killed a deer with nothing but a knife.

I collect football cards.



Feeling froggy?

Only one of these lines stinks, the rest smell like roses.


I have caught a fly with chopsticks.

I have had cats named Indiana Jones, Dakota, Hop Along Cassidy, and Tigger.

I can recite the alphabet backwards.

I once used a shotgun to cut down a Christmas tree.

I played pinball through the trees on my snowboard.

I got sucked under a jeep going 45mph.

I drove a stock car around the California Speed Way at 150mph.

I did a back flip and a half on a mountain bike.

I have flown in a helicopter.

I am married to an American of the dark skinned persuasion.

Movies To Look Into

Over the past couple of months I have come across two virtually unheard of movies that were worth seeing. Both are human interest stories that will definitely get you thinking. I figured that I should do the good deed and spread the word.

The first one is called A Man Named Pearl
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2192834841/

The Second one is called American Violet
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3341157145/

Halloween

Halloween is almost here. I have not worn a costume in quite a while. Now that I have children, I find the possibility of wearing some ridiculous get up in my near future. In previous years my daughter has been Tinker Bell and a princess. This year she might just make a very cute pirate. My twin boys are a little young for trick or treating, but if they do get dragged along you might see a little Iron Man and War Machine running amok. For me, I have stated that if my wife does not dress up neither will I.

I have noticed that since we have no general topic to write about this week, a lot of people have chosen to post poetry. Either an original prose or one of the favorite pieces. So I decided to include the poem I had to recite in elementary school. It is from the book "Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep” by Jack Prelutsky. The book has awesome illustrations by Arnold Lobel.

The Ghoul

The gruesome ghoul, the grisly ghoul,
without the slightest noise
waits patiently beside the school
to feast on girls and boys.

He lunges fiercely though the air
as they com out to play,
and grabs a couple by the hair
and drags them far away.

He cracks their bones and snaps their backs
and squeezes out their lungs,
he chews their thumbs like candy snacks
and pulls apart their tongues.

He slices their stomachs and bites their hearts
and tears their flesh to shreds,
he swallows their toes like toasted tarts
and gobbles down their heads.

Fingers, elbows, hands and knees
and arms and legs and feet-
he eats them with delight and ease,
for every part's a treat.

And when the gruesome grisly ghoul
has nothing left to chew,
he hurries to another school
and waits. . . perhaps for you.

Good Ol' Mary Jane

Marry Jane never hurt nobody. That is, she never killed anyone herself. All joking aside drugs are a very serious matter. That is why I can't see any reason to continue prohibiting the use of marijuana. The money would be better spent elsewhere. I could not find one case of cannabis induced death no matter how hard I looked. The con side essay uses the ambiguous number of 100,000 visits to the emergency room as a call for concern. How many people are rushed to the hospital every year due to alcohol consumption? While marijuana has never been linked to a drug induced death, alcohol kills over 80,000 people a year and tobacco kills nearly a cool half million. The real reason it is illegal has nothing to do with the drug's effects on people. If that were the case alcohol and tobacco would also be illegal. Let's not forget that caffeine is a drug too.
In border states marijuana was used as a reason to round up immigrants. Many industries found that if they did not have to compete with hemp products they could carve out a bigger slice of the market. Hemp is a source of many products like paper, rope, alternative fuel, clothes, and medicine. If you dig a little deeper you can find the political motivations behind almost anything.
In school we were always taught about how Prohibition was America's grand experiment. I do not remember one text book mention how oil companies lobbied to get alcohol illegalized. At the time a German inventor named Rudolf Diesel invented the Diesel Engine, which still runs today. That engine used vegetable oil or ethanol (alcohol) for fuel. Henry Ford built his first Model-T cars using this engine design and meant for them to run on ethanol. Mainly because you can derive alcohol from agricultural waste products, and it was cheaper than vegetable oil. Standard Oil and the other Giants of the industry bound together to make alcohol illegal to force Ford's hand to switch to an engine that would run on their product. This new product they cleverly named “diesel fuel.” Shortly after Ford relented and made the change, prohibition on alcohol was lifted. Oddly enough one of the other alternatives Ford explored was fuel from hemp seed oil.
Marijuana was demonized for various political reasons. The end result is that thousands of Americans are jailed every year for something some of our founding fathers grew and smoked. I do not think marijuana should be legal so I can go roll a fatty. In my mind there is no point in enforcing a law that can never truly be enforced. Millions of Americans admit to smoking the icky sticky green. If they really want it they will get it. There is also the forbidden fruit factor. How many kids do something with the only intention being to do what they were told not to? I also believe there is no basis for the belief that marijuana is the “gateway drug.” I have never met anyone who did not smoke tobacco or drink alcohol before they tried marijuana. That does not mean someone like that is not out there, but I think it is fair to say they are a small percentage of the American population.
Lastly, everyone knows there is a vote coming up on November 2nd for the legalization of marijuana for personal use in California. Obviously both sides of the debate have come forward to zealously preach their point of view. The most interesting point of view I have heard comes out of the northern part of California. In the areas already known for marijuana cultivation, the growers do not want it to be legal because they believe it will hurt their business. I can not think of a more political and hypocritical point in case for why things are the way they are. I will leave you with a quote from Einstein, “Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”

Kids of My Own

I remember my mom always telling me that my kids would get me back tenfold for all the gray hairs I gave her. While I know that if this were true, the generations would get exponentially worse and I don't think that she meant it literally. When I was a kid, I had no idea how hard I could make things for my parents. As a kid you do a lot of things that seem like a good idea at the time. Now that I have kids, I realize how easy it is for them to do the same. It is not their actions that are the root of what my mom was saying. Rather it is the fact that I know I did some of the very same things. So while I may have only felt slightly bad at the time (if at all), I now feel ten times as bad when I have to react the same way my parents did. I now understand what they went through. I can grasp the full scope of the situation. Nothing can prepare you for starting your own family. Whether that first pregnancy was planned or not does not make a difference. The scope of what you’ve gotten yourself into doesn’t necessarily materialize until you are elbow deep in diapers. Many people have told me they will “never be like their parents”. The truth is that by simply becoming a parent we are just like our parents. Just like them we are as inexperienced as they were when they first started. While I may not be the same father that my dad was, I still have used what I learned from his parenting methods. My father grew up in a different age. His role models of what a man was supposed to be and do, varies greatly from my role models not to mention my grandfather's role models. Each generation has a unique set of problems to contend with when dealing with their kids. I hope that my kids will learn as much from me as I learned from my parents when they have kids. My children will build upon the knowledge gleaned from my wife and me the way we did from our parents (as much as we might not like to admit it, or hear about it sometimes). Like my parents I will spoil my grandchildren rotten. Using the same excuse, “I don't have to live with them.”