I sometimes get tickled at some of the ads for “tactical” equipment. Just adding “tactical” to the name entitles the seller to do a BIG bump in price, and honestly, a lot of “tactical” gear is fodder for fanboys, wanna-be’s and posers.
However, some of it is serious stuff. Like this tactical “Battle Mug“. It’s even got an M1913 (commonly called a “Pickatinny”) rail so you can customize it for your mission.
And it’s only $279.00!
Are we SURE it’s not April 1?
Woke up this morning and took son to meet one of his cohorts for him to go off on a day of medieval role-playing. I returned home to do an autumn cleaning of the outside of the house. I spent tow hours with a pressure washer removing dirt and mildew, and now I’m back in the house watching Miss Kitty perform a championship quality power nap on the back of the sofa.
My shoulders did not take well to waving a washing wand around for two hours, but the job had to be done.
Guess I’m just waiting for the quintessential dimmocrat holiday, Halloween. After all, you get to act like something you’re not, and get free stuff…
1517 – Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. This move would result in the deaths of thousands on both sides of the discussion.
1846 – Donner party, unable to cross the Donner Pass, construct a winter camp. “What’s for lunch?”
1917 – World War I: Battle of Beersheba – “last successful cavalry charge in history” done by the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade. Or maybe not. See “1942” below.
1941 – World War II: The destroyer USS Reuben James is torpedoed by a German U-boat near Iceland, killing more than 100 United States Navy sailors. It is the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by enemy action in WWII.
1942 – Colonel Alessandro Bettoni (led) three mounted squadrons of Italians forward at a gallop into the Soviet lines… In the victorious charge the Italians lost 40 cavalrymen (including the commander of the 4th Squadron, Captain Abba) with another 79 wounded and almost 100 precious horses but they inflicted over 150 casualties on the Soviets and captured some 900 unfortunate Siberians along with a collection of sixty mortars, artillery pieces and machine guns.
1956 – Suez Crisis: The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal. You know you’re waaaaay down the food chain when you get bombed by France…
1968 – Vietnam War October surprise: Citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announces to the nation that he has ordered a complete cessation of “all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam” effective November 1. There’s nothing quite like a dimmocrat president “managing” a war. LBJ’s perception of “progress” was as finely developed as his morals, and the war went on until the mid-70’s, and tens of thousands more American soldiers died while the war was “managed” instead of won by Johnson and Nixon.
Po-so-lay… or Pozole. It’s stew of Mexican origin.
When I picked up son after work today the weather was blustery, drizzly, drippy and cool, conditions that the Cajuns call “gumbo weather”, i.e., just made for a pot of simmering, savory soup.
I didn’t feel like making gumbo, though, and I’d heard of a quick way into a bubbly pot of Posole, a soup I’d been introduced to back in my soldier days when one of the families we befriended was of Mexican origin from California. Well, his wife wasn’t, she was a plump and happy California girl who referred to her husband as a “closet Mexican” because despite his completely Mexican name and Mexican parents, HE couldn’t speak Spanish. His mom, however, saw to it that the wife of her son could prepare authentic dishes, and we contributed to many community meals. I was a staff sergeant and receiving housing and station allowances. He and his wife weren’t high enough in rank for him to have his wife over at government expense, so money was tight, and at the end of the month we ended up with that little family and another of similar circumstance over at the apartment for meals. She would often cook if we provided meat, so I ended up introduced to posole and home-made flour tortillas. Her version of posole was the sort of dish you’d find in many cultures, rich, savory, and taking hours to prepare. I can tell you that those smells in a German apartment building gave cause for much conversation.
There are other, quicker versions that come close enough to the original recipes. Note that I said “recipes”, plural, because this is one of those dishes that comes from the kitchens of many people, and everybody wants to think THEIRS is authentic. And they’re probably right.
But here’s my version of quick posole. If you have the stuff on hand, you’re an hour or so from a bowl of goodness.
Quick Posole
Ingredients:
Bulk sausage, half a pound. I used Jimmy Dean because that’s what I bought at the store. I’m sure that if you went to a Mexican meat market you’d get something else that would work, too.
Pork: Half a pound (or more). I used a pork chop cut into 3/4 inch chunks. Now you just know that the “meat” part of this recipe has plenty of room to play. You could use chicken. Or turkey. Or game. More meat, if you want, or less, if you want to be frugal.
Ready-made salsa: Okay, I know that Senora Rios would have DIED if her son’s wife ever resorted to using bottled salsa, but instead Lori cut up tomatoes and onions and green peppers. Using bottled salsa gives me all that, plus some cilantro and chile peppers. Cuts down on the ingredient list. I used one 16-ounce jar of plain ol’ off the shelf red salsa. Since salsas come in different heat levels, you get to pre-load the heat on your dish. I used “medium”. But if you want to do it from scratch (or from your garden) then tomatoes, chili peppers, bell pepper, cilantro, a jalapeno pepper or two or three, and a couple of finely chopped serranos if you’re into heat…
One onion, chopped into 1/4-3/8 inch chunks.
Three cloves of garlic, minced or crushed.
Two cans of yellow hominy. Traditional posole used dried, prepared nixtamal corn that was soaked overnight. Overnight ain’t quick. Besides, the local grocery doesn’t carry nixtamal corn but they have plenty of yellow hominy. Senora Rios regularly sent bags of nixtamal corn to Germany for her son and daughter-in-law. You could probably dig some up at a grocery catering to our Hispanic friends if you wanted to be authentic. It has to be soaked overnight, then each kernel relieved of the little hard pip at the end of the kernel. Or you could just use canned hominy.
Chili powder
Cumin (comino)
Salt
Black and red pepper
Cilantro (fresh) – Chopped, for serving.
Preparation:
In a heavy pot (cast iron works well) over medium heat, brown the sausage meat to get some flavors and some grease going. when the sausage is brown, toss in the pork and let it brown a bit. When the pork is starting to brown, dump in the chopped onion. Stir this whole assemblage around until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic when the onion is translucent, and stir it in a bit until you can smell the garlic happening. At this point add a tablespoon of chili powder and a teaspoon of comino. Stir some more. Nice things are happening in your kitchen now.
Next, dump in the salsa. Add a little water to the bottle and slosh it around to get everything out of the bottle. Dump that into the pot, too. Last thing, drain most of the water off the hominy and dump the hominy into the pot. Now if you want your posole a bit on the soupy side, add a bit more water. Otherwise this is going to be “stand the spoon in the bowl” thick.
Turn the heat up until it’s bubbling good, then turn the heat down, cover and simmer, stirring frequently, for fifteen or twenty minutes. Taste and add salt and pepper as needed.
To serve, ladle into bowls, sprinkle a little chopped cilantro, and enjoy. It’s a one-dish meal if you want it, or you can add some tortilla chips. I used to enjoy toasty flour tortillas with it. Just take them off the griddle, still hot, and roll ’em up. Dip one end into the posole as you eat. It won’t be very fastidious, but it will be good. And beer. A bowl of steaming posole, a bit on the hot side with pepper, and a cold beer, that’s good living.
Good friend and former co-worker John has a job coming up where he has to go to an offshore platform. Accordingly, his employer required that he get safety training suitable for the trip.
Now me and ol’ John are both some good-sized guys, so they neglected a part of his survival training that I consider essential: techniques for avoiding a bunch of guys rowing up in a boat and flinging a harpoon in your large ass…
It’s Halloween. Scary stuff afoot. Like this:
1503 – Queen Isabella of Spain bans violence against Indians. This royal edict is totally ignored as conquistadores run through the New World.
1534 – English Parliament passes Act of Supremacy, making King Henry VIII head of the English church – a role formerly held by the Pope.
1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States. Today it’d cause pants-shi**ing hysteria and we’d have to call out the National Guard…
1960 – Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. On the day before, a guy woke up sitting in a bathtub of ice witha huge incision in his side…
1961 – Because of “violations of Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honor inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlin wall with a plain granite marker instead. The soviets aren’t the only ones who will rewrite history to fit an agenda.
1988 – Philip Morris buys Kraft Foods for U.S. $13.1 billion. Now one of their product lines consists of questionable products known to cause cancer, sold under heavy advertising. The other is cigarettes.
1995 – Quebec sovereignists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada (vote was 50.6% to 49.4%). We were that close to having our own set of cheese-eating surrender monkeys on the North American continent, but hey! our dimmocrat party steps in to fill the gap.
The unique Chrissy writes another post about her relationship with her sister and her “IT” brother-in-law. He hasn’t worked in decades.
Go read the article and then decide what party he votes for. What do YOU think?
If you’re confused, the answer is below the fold. Continue reading What party does HE vote for?
1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ‘29 or “Black Tuesday,” ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression. Leads to the election of a dimmocrat president and the massive expansion fo the federal government. Seconds, anyone?
1945 – The first commercially-made ballpoint pens went on sale — at Gimbels Department Store in New York City. The pens sold for $12.50 and racked up a tidy profit of $500,000 in the first month!
1966 – The National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed. An alternative name, the “National Association of Gals” (NAG) doesn’t make the cut. It gives homely women a way to appear meaningful in mainstream society.
1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
1998 – Space Shuttle Discovery blasts off on STS-95 with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space. Senator Glenn is an excellent example of heroism in younger years NOT translating to wisdom in later years.
They keep losing entrepreneurs.
Name Game fodder follows: Continue reading Why New Orleans is in trouble
(I figured I’d move a couple of stories up from back when this blog got like forty hits a day… Here’s one from my days in Germany)
Another “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” post
My tour in Germany was not entirely composed of peering intently into the Fulda Gap, waiting for the Red hordes to come thundering through…
By the time I was nearing my last year in the Army, I was in my third year in Germany, and suffering from the damage to my ankles from an old motorcycle wreck. After spending a couple of months with one or the other ankle in a cast, my company commander and the battalion commander decided to move me to an administrative position within the battalion headquarters rather than have me risk permanent injury. So that’s how I came to be associated with the battalion S-1 (personnel) section.
Among my varied duties, I handled legal matters, equal opportunity programs (I was the ONLY white equal opportunity NCO in the Eighth Infantry Division) and was the vehicle commander for the S-1 section’s M-113 armored personnel carrier, a vehicle known affectionately to tankers as a “Dempsey Dumpster” both for its shape and the level of armor protection.
The 4th Battalion 69th Armor was noted for its success at tank gunnery, having been the division champs three years running. Tank gunnery is a big deal for tankers, and accordingly, our battalion fostered a fund from which prizes were awarded to the top scorers, $1000 for the top crew, $500 for second place, $250 for third. This was a sizable chunk of change. At the time I was an army staff sergeant, pay grade E-6, and my pay was like $800 a month, by way of comparison.
In order to raise the money for such prizes, our battalion sold things, somewhat akin to a Sunday School bake sale. For adult (more or less) males. Since I was the senior individual without a real job in the battalion, I was “volunteered” to run these events. I kicked off with a Saturday barbecue. Setting up a pit in the battalion square, I barbecued ribs and chicken and served them with baked beans… Big hit! How did THEY know I could cook? You have to know that the wafting aromas of Cajun style doctored barbecue caused a stir. I sold out. Had to send somebody to the commissary for more meat. Had German civilians from the neighboring community coming in to buy it. My first event was a success. We were off.
The battalion sergeant major, a great old soldier, was impressed, and I continued. Phase II of our tank gunnery cycle found us in Baumholder, Germany in July. Europe can get hot and dusty, and there I was with an assistant, the S-1 clerk, a spec-4, and the S-1 officer’s jeep and trailer. Wherever a tank company stopped, we were there with ICEY cold drinks and various snacks. Money rolled in. When the battalion was in the cantonment area for maintenance, we had an auditorium set up to show movies. The movies were free. The snacks and beer weren’t. More money.
The capper: The culmination of a tanker’s year in Germany, yes, even the high point of a Cold Warrior’s career in armor, that was the annual trip to Grafenwoehr. We’re talking three weeks to a month away from home station, culminating in Table VIII, the tanker’s doctoral thesis. Scores on Table VIII meant a lot…promotions, cushy jobs, and to the high crews, $$$$$.
So I roll into Graf with the S-1 officer and when he’s signing for the transient messhall for the battalion, he also signs for a messhall for me to make into the unit lounge. We’re there two days ahead of the rest of the battalion. I have my orders. The sergeant major gives me $1000 from our previously raised fund and a phone book and we’re up and running. A couple of phone calls brings a juke box and two pinball machines. A trip to the commissary and the PX and we’re set up with snacks and a stove to make hot dogs and other delicacies. And a call to Loewenbrauerei Grafenwoehr, and I’m on the delivery schedule for that nectar of the beer-loving gods, German beer. And when the dusty, tired tankers drag in, we’re open for business. I’m cheap. And there. And we do booming business. It’s almost a captive audience, admittedly, because the main post NCO and enlisted clubs’d rather not have all those dusty transients show up. and we’re only a short walk (or stagger) from the transient barracks.
It was a wonderful time. We’d close at ten every night so the troops’d get their sleep, unless, as happened, one of the first sergeants’d call and tell me he had some guys out late and they’d appreciate something. Mechanics out dragging in a broken-down tank? Gotta be there for the troops. Nothing cuts trail dust like a cold Graf Lowenbrau. And we provided ‘em.
Another battalion comes in about a week after we’re set up. Their sergeant major comes to visit and asks if I’d allow his people to come in since his lounge wasn’t on line yet. Sure! More money for our fund. Just make sure he sends a couple of senior NCO’s to ride herd. I told him I’d see that his “supervisors” didn’t have to pay for their beer in exchange for this service. So when MY sergeant major comes in for his nightly inspection, half the people in the lounge are from the OTHER battalion.
We sold hot dogs. The ketchup on the counter was carefully doctored with a little touch of Tabasco sauce. Sold more beer. Salted peanuts at cost. More beer. Pickled pigs’ feet. More beer. The delivery guy for Lowenbrau Graf came by to drop off a load and said I was buying more of his stuff than the main post NCO club. Four tables in back set aside JUST for the pinochle players. And we had flippies! To the old soldiers, a Graf flippey was the ‘56 Chevy of beer, that great Lowenbrau Graf in a bottle with a ceramic and wire flip-top. We sold them by the case.
The place was a mess in the morning, but the medic platoon would send a detail over to clean the place up. I saw that they were adequately compensated later that evening when we opened. That kept them cheerful.
And so it went. The unit fund was greatly enlarged, enough to where we were able to not only cover the tank gunnery awards, but also a lot of other niceties such as awards to support personnel like mechanics and such. somewhere along the line I ended up with an official “atta-boy”, a letter of commendation from the battalion commander, for my tireless service in support of the 1976 tank gunnery training…
And that’s a little glimpse of some of the way the war she was fought…
So there I am, going through the morning’s mail, and I get this stuff:
Books I didn’t have as a child!
(Not safe for work or for sensitive psyches) Continue reading We get mail–