Nielsen's ra(n)tings

Politics, guns, homeschooling for the gifted, scuba, hunting, farming and somewhat coherent occasional ranting from your average Buckeye State journalist/dad/farmer/actor.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

'I'll give you healthcare, you'll beg for death'

This is one of the funniest mock campaign ads I've ever seen, courtesy of Frank J. and Sarah K. at IMAO.

Enjoy!

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Sunday, August 12, 2007

All revved up again!

It’s that time of year again…to quote Meatloaf, “I’m all revved up, no place to go.”

Damn the Outdoor Channel and ESPN and damn Bill Jordan and Ted Nugent and the whole Dream Season bunch. I’m ready to go hunting and nothing but varmints are in season…it’s maddening. Last year, at least, I was prepping for the boar hunt at the Bostick Plantation in South Carolina…this year, all I can do is watch TV and wait.

Well…and practice my shooting skills. I just came back in from shooting my bow for the first time since December. Not bad, not bad. I shot 30 arrows out of the Hoyt Trykon XL compound bow and the last five-arrow group was a respectable 2-1/2 inches, right in the boiler room, from a little over 30 yards on a new Glen Del deer target (son-and-heir demolished the previous, shot-out target with a sword). I bought a new crossbow for this year, too, an Excalibur Equinox, a recurve which has a bolt-drop compensating scope and flings an arrow 20 feet per second faster than even my Trykon.

Ooooh! Raw anachronistic power! The new bow is supposed to be accurate to 45-50 yards. I figure son-and-heir or the new exchange student (if he’s interested) can take full advantage of what is billed as “The World’s Most Accurate Crossbow.”

In the meantime, however, I wait, wait, wait.

Son-and-heir and I did a little scouting the other night with a spotlight…we shined the light on the 12 acre hayfield and there were deer eyes everywhere – I guess that explains where all our sweet corn is going. The acre patch we planted about 70 yards behind the house is being devoured at such a rate by the local fauna that I’m not sure we’ll even get an ear from it. It’s a good thing we also planted a couple acres of sweet corn at my father’s house – that corn has thus far been spared by the critters there. Our corn plot completes the perfect trifecta for deer palates – it’s adjacent to an old, overgrown orchard loaded with apples and cover and borders our hayfield, which is full of emerging trefoil and clover.

The way it’s going now, I’ll be able to bow hunt from the roof of the chicken coop...woo hoo, that would be some nice footage!

I bought a Cuddeback No Flash trail camera that I’m going to put out today – along with some C’Mere Deer – to start taking a census of the deer running our property. Later, I’ll move the camera to some of the other areas I hunt too…looking for clues to the whereabouts of the monsters lurking in the woods. I’ll post pictures as they become available.

I’m also considering taking S&H and my father on a boar or ram hunt in southern Ohio sometime in September. We’ve been looking at White Oak Exotic Hunting Preserve, near Cambridge, as a possibility. More on that later, too.

But for now I wait for the end of September and deer archery season to begin…and practice, practice, practice to burn off some of the fire of anticipation.

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Thursday, August 09, 2007

New student due Aug. 19

We have a new exchange student, the 14th we’ll have hosted, due to arrive in Cleveland Aug. 16. Following an orientation class at a local school, he’ll arrive at the Rantmeister hacienda Aug. 19.

He’s part of a class of 10 international students to attend the local high school this year. Jordan’s tall, blond, likes basketball and mixing music as a disc jockey. Taking a gander at his MySpace page showed someone creative who likes to have fun – always a good thing, unless the fun is carried too far and results in law enforcement officers calling our home in the early morning hours. This year’s hosting experience will be somewhat different for us as this is the first student we’ll have hosted from an English speaking country (Scotland), so there will be less of a learning curve on household communication. That may be a false hope on my part, though, as the exchange coordinator for the visit said the only students she has had trouble understanding, in all her years of hosting, are the Scots.

But picking an exchange student is always a crap shoot. For the most part, we’ve been very lucky in our selections – of the 13 we’ve hosted, I’d cheerfully host 11 again (excepting an abbreviated visit by a German girl and the most recent Russian.) I think a lot of the success in picking a student depends on the honesty of the student in posting their profile and the prospective host family’s objective flexibility. If the students are honest about their habits, potential areas of conflict can point host families to a different student. If families are honest about their own flexibility and capabilities, they can better choose the high- or low-maintenance student best suited to their home.

This year, we will also be dealing with a new exchange organization, which goes by the acronym FLAG. This will be the fifth or sixth organization we’ve dealt with, though we’ve only had two exchange coordinators. It seems to be a “coordinator’s market,” as the exchange coordinators with ties to local schools and exchange families shop for the best remuneration and support among the many competing organizations.

*****

We have a number of projects to complete before his arrival, including completion of the bookcases in the library (now installed, stained and partially trimmed out) and installation of a new dishwasher – our cheapie expired after only four years of 2+ loads a day! Imagine!

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Out of the Darkness

For the most part, the internet appears to me to be the equivalent of a high school hallway at class change time – noisy, chaotic, filled with rumor and innuendo, laden with hormones and supremely vacuous. But rarely, something comes along of such quality and depth that its publication seems almost tarnished by the media upon which it’s distributed – rather, it should be presented for savoring printed on parchment bound in thick leather.

I feel that way about the latest submission by Mrs. du Toit in her latest weblog entry, “Panem et Circenses.” In the essay, described by her husband as “gloomy,” Connie du Toit writes of humankind as self-obsessed, ignorant rabble eagerly placated with “bread and circuses” by grasping leaders who have interest only in themselves, and none in improving and nurturing that which is best in man.

From her weblog:

”We watch the never-ending broadcasts of modern incarnations of the gladiators of the Coliseum in shows such as Survivor, Intervention, or the great passions of soap operas; marvel at gizmo extravaganzas, or any number of things that make our lives easier or filled with greater status symbols, and base materialism. We focus our attention purely on the business of getting – paying little or no attention to what we are giving away in the process.

“And so it goes from generation to generation, from society to society, and the baton of whatever panacea is in fad or fashion, whatever tasteless gruel is filling their bellies, the masses are placated, even while they watch their civilizations erode, eventually to the point of ashes, while chanting timeless phrases of “Burn down the mission!” “They had it coming!” or “Now things will be fair!” It is a constant litany of the excuse to destroy that which others created and left for their progeny to destroy. It was first recorded as chants as warnings in choruses in the Greek plays, and heard above the cacophony of traffic and ear bending and mind-numbing music at any protest march of today. Voices shouting. Voices chanting. Always the same chants, always the same trespasses, all giving way for Bread and Circuses.”

And after detailing the black abyss that gapes for mankind, she finds a succoring hope in the fact that there are people who defy the “but everyone is doing it crowd” to do what is right, worthy and worthwhile, and to pass that knowledge and those ideals on to successive generations. She calls it rare, and I guess it is, or at least appears that way when one is confronted by the gibbering inanity of the internet on a daily basis. It’s a daunting task to try to separate the wheat from the chaff among millions of voices prattling on worldwide…made even more difficult by the tendency to anonymity and caution among those with wit and intelligence.

But that vast number of voices in cyberspace also makes it inevitable there are voices of reason, thought and worth to be unearthed…to be nurtured…to be celebrated. Though the majority of the internet Bell Curve is comprised of My Space, Quizilla and the endemic porn, there are outliers to either side. And as the jihadists post their murder videos on one extreme side of the curve, there are also people like Mrs. du Toit toiling on the opposite side. The internet makes all manner of perversion possible, and the extent to which we’re drawn one way or the other in some measure is an indicator of our character.

I write a little on a blog that is read by few people, so my worldwide impact is negligible. I do my part in my community to be thoughtful and contribute. I am, however, steward and caretaker to two outstanding children…children in whom I’ve tried to instill a desire to do what’s right, though perhaps not popular. I’ve tried to get them to think analytically and critically about any number of subjects and not to dismiss any subject out of hand because it doesn’t conform to their worldview (“There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) They have an appreciation of beauty, wisdom and duty for their own virtues, not simply for how they can profit from that appreciation. These children, and others raised by like-minded parents, will carry the baton of wisdom, beauty and purpose for Mrs. du Toit and humanity.

A gloomy entry? I didn’t see it that way…I saw it more as hope emerging from the shadows…hope that is all the more effective because now it knows it’s not alone.

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