Wonderful post about the history of the jerrycan.
I’ve given up on anything other than the ‘NATO/Euro’ style cans for gasoline storage. They are more expensive, and sometimes hard to find, but I believe they are worth it.
Author Archives: Commander Zero
Article – School serves 6-year-old meat to TN students
ROGERSVILLE, Tenn. – Meat dating to the year of President Obama’s first inauguration was served to students in some Hawkins County, Tennessee schools last week.
Hawkins County Commissioner Michael Herrell was alerted after a cafeteria worker sent him a photo of the pork roast they used for school meals was from 2009.The 6-year-old meat had been frozen and then was thawed for meal preparation, according to WCYB.
Eating 6-year-old meat is not a big deal if it was stored properly. We routinely eat meat thats been sitting in the deep freeze for a year or two, and the oldest I’ve pulled out and consumed has been around five years old. As long as you packaged it well and kept it frozen, it’s usually just fine. There may be some spots of freezer burn if you didn’t get all the air out of the package, but those don’t affect the nutritional value or the safety of the food.
As an aside, if you’re really upset about the quality of the slop slapped onto your kids lunch tray, either pack ’em a lunch or give ’em five bucks to go get a slice of pizza and a Coke. It’s not .gov’s responsibility to feed your kid. Public government schools already do a crappy job of educating your kid, why would you think they’d do any better job of feeding them?
Range day
Took someone from CrossFit to the range the other day. Took abut a dozen different guns. Everything from .22 to .45. And, as always seems to be the case, what was the most flat-out enjoyment achieved with? The lowly, inexpensive, .22 LR.
We had been shooting the Remington Subsonic at 50 yards and it was okay, but I switched over to standard velocity CCI, which still managed to be subsonic, and groups tightened considerably. Me and my guest both managed to shoot five-shot groups you could cover with a dime.
The gun in question was the Savage FS-VR, a rifle I am developing a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for. However, while the AccuTrigger was awesome, the factory stock wasn’t even worthy of putting on an airgun. I swapped it out for the Boyds Tacticool (now called Pro Varmint) and slapped a Nikon P-22 w/ BDC reticle on top of the rail. So, yeah, I sank north of $400 onto a $200 rifle. (Almost a grand if you include the suppressor and paperwork). But, for five shots, we get this…
I need to back it out to 100-yd and see how it shoots. Problem with the subsonic stuff is you get these rainbow trajectories that can make things….tricky. Also, those suppressors really dirty up a barrel….seemed like there was more unburnt powder or debris in the barrel after shooting with the suppressor than without. Still, awesome fun.
Craigslist wishful thinking
Someday Im gonna have one of these.
1972 Toyota FJ 40 Landcruiser , orig. 6 cyl. , 3 speed manual trans. , new leaf springs and shocks with grease-able shackles front and rear , power steering , Warn hubs , new water pump , new thermostat , new master cyl. , rebuilt radiator , newer soft top in excellent condition ! Original toolkit and jack , new wheels with BFG All Terrain tires and spare , custom heavy duty front and rear bumpers , this is a very clean FJ 40 ! Also comes with a 4 speed manual trans. , orig. steering wheel , Summer top and a few other parts . Come and take a look , you wont be disappointed ! $ 13,500 obo – call
Article – Missing sisters survive 2 weeks in woods on Girl Scout Cookies, cheese puffs
Stayed with the vehicle and survived. This is almost, but not always, the case. However, it is the outcome often enough that staying with the vehicle should be the preferred choice.
Simple lighting project
This post on arfcom caught my eye. Rather than buy a 12v lamp for use with a battery, this fella converted a regular household AC lamp to run an LED ‘bulb’ off his 12v battery.
This sort of thing intrigued me and I decided to try it. While we have several options for lighting around here, I’d like to have something that doesn’t look like the kind emergency lighting youd find in a stairwell. Something very subtle and ‘normal looking’.
A quick trip to Amazon for the necessary parts:
- E26 MEDIUM to 1 Pin BAYONET Base Light Bulb Socket Converter Adapter
– converts a regular screw-in bulb socket to the bayonet-type.
- Roadpro 12V Fused Replacement Cigarette Lighter Plug with Leads
– replaces two-prong AC plug with cigarette lighter plug
- GRV Ba15s 1156 1141 High Power Car LED Bulb 24-5050SMD DC 12V Warm White Pack of 2
– LED light that goes into the screw-in-to-bayonet adapter
The next step was to pick up a lamp to experiment on. As it turns out, I found a lamp that already ran on DC (it used a transformer to run off AC house current) and was LED. Since that was 2/3 of the battle right there, I figured I’d start with that.
Reading the details on the made-in-China transformer said, if they can be believed, that power draw was something like .33 amps. 
Conveniently, they labeled the wires as to +/-. Simple matter to cut the transformer off and connect the wires for the cigarette plug to the lamp wires…keeping the polarity the same.
Once the transformer had been removed and replaced with the 12v plug, I plugged it into my old ConSci battery pack to test.
Unsurprisingly, it works. I’ll tuck it away with the battery box and leave it for the next time I need lighting when there’s no available electricity.
Of course, the bigger plan is to use it in conjunction with the larger battery backup system I’m planning. Nothing fancy..a couple big deep cycle batteries, a smart charger, and a bunch of outlets and wiring to allow me to run emergency lighting and communications for a week or so on battery power. Thats the bigger post Im working on. Gonna be a little while on it, though, since it’s going to take a while to scratch up the cash for the batteries. But…when it’s moved from ‘theory’ to ‘in progress’ there’ll be plenty of posting on it.
Generator run day
Nice day outside. Time to set out the generator and run it for a while to make sure everything is working for when we need it.
I keep a copy of the startup/shutdown instructions attached to the generator so there’s no doubt about doing things the right way. Sure, I commit as much of it to memory as I can but you never know when someone else may be needed to start/stop it and this way they can have all the proper info right there.
In a crisis the only thing I really need the generator for is to keep the freezer/fridge cool and maybe run the furnace blower. In the winter any food can simply go outside and the generator will be mostly for just running the blower and charging batteries.
Household emergency lighting will be mostly LED lights run off a couple deep-cycle batteries. Thats a project I’m kinda working on at the moment.
Canned meats
Canned meats are something that, no matter how objective I try to be, always elicit a shudder and a mental “Ewwww”. I mean, just about every form of canned meat, when opened, whether it is Spam, chicken, beef, hash, whatever, smells and looks like cat food.
It was only with great trepidation and great surprise that I was willing to try the CostCo canned roast beef and discover that, once you fry it up, it’s really quite good. In fact, it was so good we have added it as a regular inventory item to our spreadsheet of stored food.
Up until now, most canned meats are pretty basic: canned chicken, canned pork, canned salmon, etc. But things are starting to get a little more ‘niche’. An example was this that I found in WalMart:
Canned beef fajita strips and canned meatballs. Part of me was quite curious about this stuff and another part of me was slightly nauseous contemplating how badly these things could turn out. Yes, I was a coward and took a pass on these…mostly on the strength of WalMart being known for ‘low prices’ and me not wanting to know where the corners were cut on these cuts of meat. BUT…it is interesting to to think that with some stored pasta, a jar of spaghetti sauce, and a couple cans of meatballs, you could have a hearty comfort-food meal with a shelf life measured by election cycles.
Interesting the things you see when you start mindlessly examining everything on the ‘canned meats’ shelf at WallyWorld.
Patriots Day
‘Tis Patriots Day. Think about it and go shoot at some targets.
Re-watching Jericho
The wife wound up signing back up for Netflix after a long hiatus. (We find Amazon pretty much had everything we wanted so we wound up with them for most of our video entertainment needs.) One thing Netflix had that ‘Zon didnt was ‘Jericho’ available for free.
It’s been almost ten years since the program came out. I rewatched the first few episodes last night and it holds up really quite well. Lennie James, most recently of “The Walking Dead” fame plays, wait for it, a post-apocalyptic hardcore survivor-type. Poor guy..he just can’t catch a break.
A lot of people took issue with the character driven nature of the show. Too much relationship stuff and not enough gun battles with looters. That’s unfirtunate because the real end-of-the-world is going to be all about relationships…people you trust, people you distrust, people you care or, people you fear, etc, etc. Next time you’re in line at the grocery store, imagine having to make it through the zombie apocalypse with the three people in line in front of you….suddenly relationships will be pretty important.
Anyway, the show holds up quite well although there are a few anachronistic touches. (When was the last time you saw an answering machine that used tape cassettes?) As we all know, the second season was abbreviated and very different than the first…not necessarily better or worse, just different.
Watching it still makes you wargame events in your head, play “what if…”, and still makes me wanna head to the basement and admire all my stuff. In that regard, it’s still a timely show.
I cannot help but think how different it would have been had it been done on cable, like The Walking Dead, rather than network television. Certainly more profanity, graphic violence, and those such would be present and probably add a greater dimension of realism.
As of late, the post-apocalyptic genre has drifted solidly into the zombie themes and I can sort of see why. With post 9/11 ‘sensitivities’, a zombie apocalypse lets you explore the post-apoc world but in a manner that clearly keeps it in the realm of ‘it cant happen here’. The majority of the violence is directed against fantasy creatures that don’t exist, in a world that can’t exist, suffering through a crisis that cant exist. By keeping it obviously a ‘fantasy/fictional’ scenario, no one gets their psyche bent out of shape.
Personally, I’d rather see a few more ‘realistic’ apocalyptic movies or shows. Supposedly the EMP-fest “One Second After” is being made into a movie. While the book borrowed heavily from “Lucifers Hammer”, I’d still go see it. Also, before I forget, “Lights Out” is apparently getting the same treatment. Here’s a ‘concept’ trailer featuring some of the folks who played extras in The Walking Dead. In the meantime, it’s fun to sit back and re-watch ‘Jericho’ and try to imagine that Lennie James’ character is basically the same unfortunate guy who later shows up in The Walking Dead.