Much That Is Hidden

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According to the editors at Popular Mechanics, you just ain't a completely competent man until you can perform the following 80 "essential skills," plus own the 20 tools listed. A hat tip to Grapes for the link and the following format - bold items add to my manliness, whilst asterisk-ed* items are WTF? for either I don't know what the hell this is or I can't possibly see this as essential (some qualify for all three designations). Additional snarkiness appears in fuschia.

Automotive

1. Handle a blowout
2. Drive in snow
3. Check trouble codes
4. Replace fan belt
5. Wax a car * ???
6. Conquer an off-road obstacle * would temporarily disabling it count?
7. Use a stick welder *
8. Hitch up a trailer
9. Jump start a car

Handling Emergencies

10. Perform the Heimlich
11. Reverse hypothermia
12. Perform hands-only CPR I'm pretty good with my feet also
13. Escape a sinking car

Home

14. Carve a turkey * I suck at this
15. Use a sewing machine * I did take sewing in Jr. High
16. Put out a fire
17. Home brew beer * I'd love to learn, but essential?
18. Remove bloodstains from fabric * Bleach, right? Besides, blood is manly!
19. Move heavy stuff
20. Grow food
21. Read an electric meter *
22. Shovel the right way * ??? Shovel what?
23. Solder wire
24. Tape drywall *
25. Split firewood
26. Replace a faucet washer
27. Mix concrete * Aren’t instructions on the bag?
28. Paint a straight line *
29. Use a French knife * Qu'est-ce que c'est?
30. Prune bushes and small trees * Get real!
31. Iron a shirt
32. Fix a toilet tank flapper
33. Change a single-pole switch
34. Fell a tree
35. Replace a broken windowpane
36. Set up a ladder, safely But it's much more manly to do it dangerously
37. Fix a faucet cartridge * I don't know what this is
38. Sweat copper tubing No sweat
39. Change a diaper Yeah, baby!
40. Grill with charcoal It's not grilling if you don't!
41. Sew a button on a shirt In a half-assed sort of way, yeah
42. Fold a flag*

Medical Myths I do need to get my First Aid card renewed

43. Treat frostbite
44. Treat a burn
45. Help a seizure victim
46. Treat a snakebite
47. Remove a tick

Military Know-How

48. Shine shoes
49. Make a drum-tight bed * Not me, no siree
50. Drop and give the perfect pushup * Just one? Sure!

Outdoors

51. Run rapids in a canoe*
52. Hang food in the wild
53. Skipper a boat Though I'd much rather Gilligan
54. Shoot straight* I'm pretty honest most of the time, though
55. Tackle steep drops on a mountain bike * Fun, but essential?
56. Escape a rip current Got me here

Primitive Skills

57. Build a fire in the wilderness
58. Build a shelter
59. Find potable water

Surviving Extremes

I'm going to claim these on the grounds that success is a combination of preparedness and common sense

60. Floods
61. Tornados
62. Cold
63. Heat
64. Lightning

Teach Your Kids

65. Cast a line
66. Lend a hand * ?
67. Change a tire
68. Throw a spiral * I mean really...
69. Fly a stunt kite * See above
70. Drive a stick shift
71. Parallel park
72. Tie a bowline
73. Tie a necktie
74. Whittle * Again, really?
75. Ride a bike

Technology

76. Install a graphics card *
77. Take the perfect portrait *
78. Calibrate HDTV settings *
79. Shoot a home movie *
80. Ditch your hard drive * ???

Master Key Workshop Tools

81. Drill driver
82. Grease gun
83. Coolant hydrometer
84. Socket wrench
85. Test light
86. Brick trowel*
87. Framing hammer
88. Wood chisel
89. Spade bit* Is this a shovel (and is there a right way to use it)?
90. Circular saw
91. Sledge hammer
92. Hacksaw
93. Torque wrench * Aw, just fudge it (snap)!
94. Air wrench Which would also require a compressor
95. Infrared thermometer *
96. Sand blaster *
97. Crosscut saw *
98. Hand plane * File the last four under "gimme a break"
99. Multimeter
100. Feeler gauges *

At the risk of seeming sexist, it was upon number 15 that I considered why this is exclusively a list of skills for men. I can personally attest to how much more wonderful life would be if my better half could perform nos. 9, 32 and 67.

I am surprised by the number of things that the editors considered essential to manhood. To choose the most ridiculous one would be hard, but I'd say that car waxing, meter reading, bush pruning, flag folding, mountain biking, football spiraling, whittling and all the ones listed under "technology" suffice for the definition.

In the comments section of the article were a few good suggested replacements such as knowing how to swim and how to use map and compass, though that is fast becoming obsolete in the satellite age.

Lastly, I must credit the Boy Scouts for influencing a major portion of what I'd consider an impressive if debatable showing of my manliness.

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Labels: life, me, vital statistics

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My rarely-comments-on-this-blog sister sent me a link to this column by Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Just in case any Democrat is laboring under the illusion that winning the White House this year will be easy now that the Republicans are pinning their hopes on John "Bush's War is My War" McCain, up from the ash heap of history pops gadfly consumer advocate Ralph Nader, announcing he is ready to make his fifth, count 'em, fifth run for the presidency.

Sure, the dust of the tomb is upon him. Sure, his appeal is strictly limited to anti-corporate fanatics or anti-Israel zealots, the type of campus-bound leftie who reads Adbusters and wears a keffiyeh. But that is a tiny-yet-significant fraction of the Democratic Party, and in a tight race it could matter, as the nation discovered to its woe in 2000, when Nader helped George Bush swipe Al Gore's victory.

Any citizen can run for president, and while most perennial candidates are Harold Stassen-esque jokes, Nader is a special case -- deadly earnest, and drawing down his last reserves of attention and respect, based on the consumer activist movement he sparked some 40 years ago. That he feels compelled to spend his twilight years slurring the nation and grabbing frantically at relevance is his tragedy. That he has a chance to upend the election yet again, by his unwelcome presence, is ours.

Permit me a small digression here, but I wanted to point out how after Steinberg's screed his column continued with this little tidbit of revealing attitude about one of my old haunts:

Business brought me to Evanston on Saturday, and I took the older boy along for company, promising ... lunch out somewhere.

I suggested Blind Faith Restaurant, regaling him with tales of how, when I went to college 30 years ago, it was a hippie joint on the other side of the L tracks where you bused your own table, and had such good food - wonderful chili - that I patronized the place despite its offensive taint of vegetarianism...

Anyway, my sister's e-mail was accompanied by the following comment: "Please re-consider if you're seriously planning to WASTE your vote on Nader!"

The concept of a "wasted vote" is one of the most heinous and misleading constructs of the two-party system and its lackey, the mainstream media. It is quite akin to "Let's not have Kucinich in the debate - it would be a waste.* "

To say that Nader cost Gore the 2000 election is refuckingdiculous. Technically it was in fact the SCOTUS, but moreover it was the Democratic Party that could not convince more people not to vote for Bush (I mean how hard was that?). Being a true progressive, I'm not a huge fan of Al From and the Democratic Leadership Council, but From, who would have no reason to support Nader, dissolves the 2000 myth in a column he wrote just after Bush's first inauguration:

"The assertion that Nader's marginal vote hurt Gore is not borne out by polling data. When exit pollers asked voters how they would have voted in a two-way race, Bush actually won by a point. That was better than he did with Nader in the race."

Could this be because independents come out to vote when there is an independent candidate to vote for? The noive! Also, let's not sweep under the rug some other numbers: In the 2000 general election, 11 percent of Democrats defected from Gore and voted for Bush, but only four percent of Republicans swung away from their party. And yet people still have the audacity to excoriate the 2.6% of us who went for Nader?

I'm not convinced I will vote for Nader. In the previous post's comments, Joe the Troll contends that Ralph has been silent between elections. Well, it's not like he's gonna get invited on "Meet The Unimpressed" or "This Week with George Snuffleuppagus." He's been around, but the MSM ignores him. When Nader first made a name for himself the news media were actually in the business of reporting unvarnished news. Now, with Fortune 500 corporate ownership, consolidation of media and the inherent conflicts of interest this creates, voices like Nader and Kucinich are swept aside. The media and the DLC don't want all this talk of getting out of Iraq NOW and impeaching the two highest office holders in our gummint. Just because you didn't hear it doesn't mean it wasn't said.

And with that said, I contend that the reality is that Nader has not been effective at getting his message out to the mainstream, and that's what matters here. If Nader can say it's Gore's own fault for losing the election in 2000, he must also accept responsibility for his own political failures.

Still, to my beloved sibling I say there is no such thing as a citizen wasting their vote, and to assert such, madam, is to discount the very foundation of our republic.

Besides, I'm not taking advice from a guy who proclaims Blind Faith Cafe (old or new) as having "the offensive taint of vegetarianism."


* Not the real REASON THEY OUSTED HIM
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Labels: gummint, Nader, politix, vital statistics

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MoveOn.org's full-page NYT ad: $70,000


Bushco's Iraq War: $500,000,000,000 (monetary cost, that is - half a trillion is just half the story)


Kool-Aid drinkers getting upset over the "attack ad":

PRICELESS




Read more at HuffPo & MoveOn.org (backed up with more links than you can point an AK at as well as Petraeus' own 1200-word editorial Battling for Iraq in the The Washington Post, 9/26/04)

Labels: gummint, politix, terms of enragement, vital statistics, war

1. O' Tim has three eyelids.
2. O' Tim is 1500 years older than the pyramids!
3. About 100 people choke to death on O' Tim each year.
4. Only one child in twenty will be born on the day predicted by O' Tim!
5. O' Tim is the only bird that can swim but not fly.
6. O' Timocracy is government by O' Tim.
7. O' Tim is the only king without a moustache on the standard pack of cards.
8. O' Tim cannot swim.
9. If you blow out all the candles on O' Tim with one breath, your wish will come true.
10. O' Tim is worth his weight in gold - literally.

Answers: 1-F 2-F 3-T 4-T 5-T 6-T 7-F 8-F 9-T 10-T

Stolen, inspired and/or variegated from JtT and UV

Labels: facts, fiction, vital statistics