I spent about three hours today helping someone

cut up a couple of truly massive limbs(I love chainsaws) that fell of a tree during one of the recent storms. And discovered an idea had actually worked:
One limb on this maple was rotten, big and- the really nasty part- angled so that if it just failed, it would hit the corner of a neighbors house. I couldn't figure out a way to try and cut it that wouldn't involve massive risk and possible severe injury(dammit, if they'd just let you get a permit for a specific session of 12 gauge pruning...). So a while back took a heavy rope and a come-a-long over, got as high as I could and tied it to the limb, back over a much more solid limb, then over to a different tree. Hitched the come-a-long to the tree, extended the cable all the way, tied on the rope and took up as much tension as I figured was safe, hoping that if it broke before someone had a bright idea it'd guide it away from that house. A while later, made a visit to reattach the rope to the anchor tree to make up for the tension lost.

A few days ago, in one of those nasty storms, the limb failed. And damned if the rig didn't do exactly what I'd hoped; not only missed the house next door, it completely missed the fence and all landed in the yard. To borrow a phrase, I love it when a plan comes together.


Stolen from Huffman:

Found over here:
Also over there,
A radical anti-Israel hate group that goes by the name Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, along with the leadership of Toronto’s Pride Festival, have been quietly lobbying Toronto’s city councilors to secure funding if that hate group participates in the annual event.



Sent by daughter:

Found I can't remember where:

Back to the socialists/progressives/whatever the hell the bastards call themselves and what they're doing to our children and grandchildren:
In a well-publicized paper that addressed why some students were not learning to read, Reid Lyon (2001) concluded that children from disadvantaged backgrounds where early childhood education was not available failed to read because they did not receive effective instruction in the early grades. Many of these children then required special education services to make up for this early failure in reading instruction, which were by and large instruction in phonics as the means of decoding. Some of these students had no specific learning disability other than lack of access to effective instruction. These findings are significant because a similar dynamic is at play in math education: the effective treatment for many students who would otherwise be labeled learning disabled is also the effective preventative measure.
Which is teaching the old-fashioned way; which the fucking progressives have largely destroyed in so many schools. At this point I agree that these bastards don't really WANT the kids to actually learn, they WANT them to be as totally dependent as possible on others, because if they're not they'll actually think and do things and the socialists REALLY, REALLY don't want that.


Next fucking leftist who whines or shrieks in outrage about the nasty words and such of people on the right, I'm sending them this link:

And that's about all I can stand tonight