Sipsey Street Irregulars: Boy, do I love thrift stores. "The Drunken Botanist."

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Boy, do I love thrift stores. "The Drunken Botanist."

My latest foray to the various doctors left me with some time to kill between appointments and although my pockets were light there was a thrift store between them. Well, with my devotion to (and, it must be admitted, my addiction to) the best source of militia logistics and procurement, of course I had to stop. And what did I chance upon? Why this remarkable book that I had never heard of, but was instantly intrigued by: The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks by Amy Stewart. It set me back, after my old fart's discount, to the tune of 92 cents.

Just leafing through it and picking out topics taught me more than I had ever known about everything from molasses to monkey puzzle trees. I am looking forward to absorbing it from cover to cover in my insomniac reading program, but I have skimmed enough to know that this is a useful work for those of us looking for guidance in post-apocalyptic business ventures like moonshining, beer brewing, wine making and, in the case of the monkey puzzle tree, mudai fermenting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Being a grower of most of the family vegetables i have twenty years experience. The main thing to remember when planning on growing necessities sometime in the future is to have the seeds available. Once that's done you can move on to the finer points of growing whatever it is you want to grow. Like climate & soil conditions. Anything will grow almost anywhere, but how well will it grow. Take opium poppies for instance. Something like that only likes water when it's in it's small stages of growth and once it passes into "adulthood" it no longer wants any water at all. And to get the highest morphology from the plant it must be ready to "milk" around the summer solstice. So if it's grown in an area that's still receiving high rainfall (or worse, severe thunderstorms) in early June it will not be all it can be...Another thing to consider is the "wetness" of the soil when planting certain seeds. If an area stays fairly wet during planting season, a seed like beans will rot in the ground and produce nothing. A "heavy" soil isn't conducive to root crops like potato or radish...I suggest always experimenting with different plants in your soil before the day of reckoning comes. Read plenty. See how other growers in your area operate. Practice, practice; before necessity comes. Soil and ignorance don't mix..; July 29, 2015 at 9:05 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Boy, do I love thrift stores. "The Drunken Botanist."

1 comment:

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