6 Myths About Rural America: How Conventional Wisdom Gets It Wrong – Morning Ag Clips
Times Union Radio Ad – Support Your Local Journalists 🗞️
I guess, go out, buy a paper and support your local journalists if that is your thing. I’m skeptical though, as most local papers grow thinner and thinner, with most of their staffs being college interns and a handful of old timers who hope their company will stay around long enough for them to retire.
Truth is local journalism is a lot like local restaurants in the era of McDonald’s and the interstate highway system. It serves less and less of a purpose, when local and even state government is mostly about implementing the policies set out by science and the federal government. In a complicated, engineered world, where people float freely from community to community, there isn’t a lot of need for the local anymore. Regional, state, and national planning make a lot more sense, whatever is local is quaint and a throwback like that stubborn café that pokes along on the back road, as most people fill up their Joe at Dunkins and Starbucks.
Not only are local papers thin and often just repetitive of national narrative of today, for the most part local news is news like the articles in Playboy make it a series publication. Newspapers are mostly about salecious stories about the latest violent crime and gory traffic crashes, rarely do they provide much of substantive valley. Often they are little more then propaganda for their publisher, giving comfort to ideology of those who read them regularly. News is good, but I’d rather dig into the data myself. Draw my own conclusions. Or read the positions and reports put out by activist groups themselves, reflecting the views put forward by those money interests, rather then hear it second hand in newspaper.
Maybe it’s better people are getting more of their information directly from the government and interest groups. Why read a newspaper article, when you get the original press release or report? Does the news media do that much of a service over what you can find put from the source? Investigative journalism sounds good, but how does it compare to the opposition digging up dirt on questionable institutions? Maybe I’m just skeptical of the lofty position that journalists often write themselves to be in.
Now to test Big Red’s battery 🔋
I totally plan on driving Big Red in this morning, assuming I can get him fired up as he has run since last Monday when I got back from camp. Yesterday was sunny for the balance of the day and I cleared off the solar panel, so I think things will be reasonably well charged to get the engine spinning but it’s only about 5 degrees this morning.
I think it’s a good day to drive in 🛻 as I want to get to the Walmart and the laundromat on the way home, as tomorrow looks like snow and ice, and I think I’d rather be busing it on that day. 🚍 That said, despite the cold, I honestly enjoyed the bike ride both in and back down to the local bus home. No stepping over homeless people as I got my steps in at Concourse, 👣 though there was some black dude smoking mildly shitty weed and drinking a Natty Light at bus shelter by SUNY World Headquarters last night. 🌎 Honestly, I’ve smelled worse weed been smoked by colored and poor in the ghetto before. I know, it’s my high brow liberal urbane tastes when I smoke up in wilderness with my Budwiser and PBR. 🍺 They made a big deal a few years back about adding heaters to the bus shelters, but all year they’ve been off, probably because the Bus Authorities blame the winos and homeless people for hanging under them, but I am sure it’s to save money on electricity at the bus service is completely broke these days. 💵 See when Trump came in he cut funding to bus authorities in many different little ways.
Well I do hope Red starts up, 🔋 as otherwise it will be a pretty cold bike ride in. But maybe it’s an excuse to finish up Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress, as the woke commuters in their warm Honda WOKE-branded SUVs see a Doc Sarvis want-a-bee riding his bike in single temperature down Corning’s Hill. 🚲 I’ll leave early so I have some extra time to head in plus I want to give the engine a good chance to warm up before I head out, being that it’s been eight days since I last ran it. I’m sure at first it will sound like engine is lacking lubrication for a second or two until it gets up to oil pressure. I’ll be yelling at truck, OIL PRESSURE, PLEASE!!! 😱 But even then when it’s so cold, it won’t have much power until it warms up. Got most of the snow and ice off the truck last weekend, including making the sure the solar panel was well cleared off. Sunny ☀️ yesterday, so that should help. But Saturday I didn’t get the panel cleaned off until mid-day, and it wasn’t really completely free of ice and snow until Sunday, but that way was cloudy.
Pea soup last night was good, 🥣 pretty much congealed by the time I got home, and I should have added some water but I enjoyed it in moderation, dipping my homemade bread in it. 🍞 Eggs this morning with onions and spinach. 🍳 Didn’t sleep well last night, not sure why, it was plenty warm under my heated blanket, and honestly on the cold nights my apartment tends to stay warmer, as it’s so dang drafty, that the heat runs far more, plus I tend to push it up to 53 or 54 degrees from 48 or 49 degrees, to make sure pipes don’t freeze. That and leave the cabinets open which brings in even more drafts. But for the wasted energy, it is far less then what I would pay in rent or mortage/taxes if I owned a big house that would take more energy to heat, ♨️ to say nothing of all the gas burned in the commute, even if I didn’t drive a big jacked up truck. ⛽ .
I can’t complain too much, I have this elderly neighbor 👴🏻 the one who drove into the old masonry fireplace next door, who has such a poorly insulated building that their house is always the first on the street with the roof free of snow. I few years back they replaced their old gas or maybe oil boiler with an zero-chimney high efficiency boiler but you can see the condensation coming out the exhaust pipe nearly non-stop on most mornings, they must have real high gas bills. I’m not saying though that the gas heat didn’t run a fair bit in my apartment last night, but it’s off now because I stopped it back a bit now that sun and mercury is rising and I’m up and going. ❄️ I just like the cold, and the heated blanket helps a lot.
I didn’t sleep well last night, 🚜 and ended up pushing my way through about half of the E-book, Shannon Stronger’s The Doable Off-Grid Homestead. Only about 370 pages on E-book version, it actually is a fairly quick read about one family’s vision of how to turn a few acres of raw land in Texas into a sustainable homestead with livestock, gardens composting, out houses, and solar. 🍅 Nothing super out of the ordinary from many other permaculture books I’ve read but still interested. I renewed the Backyard Guide to Farm Animals but this other book got greater priority 🐐 as somebody else has that under reserve, so I need to finish it up before it automatically returns on Thursday. I saw this book before I went up to camp two weekends ago, and got it out but I got reading other things while I was up at camp. 📚 Past few nights I’ve not slept well, a lot of broken sleep, maybe it’s too much caffeine but at least I’ve been in bed by 7 PM and usually asleep before 8 PM most nights, so I’m not that sleep deprived. 🛏️ I want to get raw chocolate when I go to store tonight, ☕
You know the preacher likes the cold ❄️
I think I would be a lot less opposed to the cold if I had a wood stove and a decently insulated house. Indeed, I don’t find the cold too be bad when I am in the wilderness, and have the Big Buddy heater, a good campfire going, or are properly dressed for the conditions.
If anything, the cold is refreshing and good for clearing one’s mind, especially on a sunny and cold day with no wind. The thing I don’t like about winter is when it’s windy, or for that matter icy or snowy and I have somewhere to go out in it, especially if I am the one who is motoring.
A lot of people retire to the south. I am not sure if that is what I would do, though I do get the benefits of not having to deal with the snow and ice, breaking ice in watering throughs and feeding in snow. Or having to chop so much wood to stay warm. But if I had the dry warmth of a woodstove that I could by near, I am good. But there is no such warm in my drafty apartment in suburbs, in part because I refuse to heat much above 50 degrees except in the coldest weather. The electric blanket helps a lot.
Still winters are cold and dark. There is no way to get around that. But maybe when I’m retired in a decade or two I won’t have to worry about getting to town. I just make sure I have supplies I need, the animals get fed, and woodstove full. And then if I need to get anywhere, I can have a snowmobile and ride into town for supplies that I’m missing. And just enjoy the beauty of snowy day, as I did on that day a few weeks back when I wilderness camping outside of Newcomb.
It was a surprisingly refreshing ride in this morning 🚴♂️
Cold but sunny, some breeze but not outrageous. Really beats riding the bus, though less time to read, though I did get more Edward Abbey listening in as I rode in. I have a meetings downtown, so it’s good I have my bike and don’t have to worry about bus or shuttle schedules. Plus I just felt so pumped with that cold in my face.
The spare tube is back on the bike so I can ride in on this frigid morning 🚴
The rear tire I patched on Friday had a slow leak even after the patch, and I tried adding some fix-a-flat on Sunday but that didn’t help though part of it is my fix-a-flat bottle is almost empty. I had to giggle a bit about the plastic recycling label on bottle, you ain’t going to clean out that fix-a-flat from that or recycle it into anything but carbon dioxide. But at least I can listen to more of Edward Abbey as I pretend to be a modern day hillbilly version of Charlie Luce as I ride my mountain bike to work down Corning’s Hill on this icy morning.
At least one of my phone apps 📱 warned it was going to be mad cold with the wind 🌬️ if I was crazy 🤪 enough to ride in on this cold winter morning, but so far in Delmar not much wind though I expect more by the time I get to Erie Boulevard, where the wind always seems to whip down into the valley, off the Cliffs above Pearl Street and down along the river through that industrial zone. Carry the smell of the sewage plant 👃 to my nose but that’s close enough to work where they’ll have that free flavored coffee ☕ to warm me up. Tomorrow, if I ride in it will be even warmer. Add some cinnamon and ginger and it will be good sipping at my desk.
Yesterday I ended up skipping the grocery store 🏬 on my bike in favor of riding out to Five Rivers. After getting up at a 5 AM 😦 I had breakfast 🥣 and then ended up reading for a while and taking another nap under the warm of my heated blanket. Read a good portion of day, finishing the library e-book on Color Theory and then Guide to Home Wiring, then digging in more to the Backyard Guide to Raising Farm Animals, finishing up the section on raising Ducks and Geese 🦆 and getting about halfway into the section about Rabbit raising. 🐰 Maybe it’s because I like carrots so much 🥕 – I’ve used up nearly 5 lb of carrots in past week – but also because rabbit meat is low in saturated fat, good feed conversion ratios, and because the ideas of butchering 🗡️ rabbits makes the penises stick up in pants of the woke women ♀️ in disgust – I’m all about eating lots of rabbit when I own land. I also have a book out from the library about home butchering that I started reading the first chapter last night.
This morning was cornmeal pancakes, 🥞 which obviously included a lot of carrots 🥕 and onions because can you have pancakes any other way? The pea soup cooked down with lots sliced carrots too, and of course tumeric as I don’t know another way to eat it. And to have pea soup you also have to have homemade bread in the oven, 🍞 and if I had the space, you know I had to use up the last of spaghetti squash I had from Shauls. That said, I’ve really gotten into acorn squash this past autumn, wish I had gotten more of that when they were still open for the autumn season.