Sugarbush Time  

      Up around here that time of year we call the sugarbush has begun and is in full swing.  Our Canadian neighbors (Up in Manitoba and far western Ontario) will probably be starting any day now too.  The Ojibwe word for maple sugar is zinziibaakwad, and a maple tree is zinziimitig.  It's that time of year when it's freezing at night and in the early morning (when I have to go to work and spend some time working outdoors), and warms up to above freezing, and even into the 40's (F).  This morning it was only 15 degrees F, and I had to wear all my winter coats (yes it is plural), and as the day progressed I had to continue to shed layers till I was in a T-shirt (45 degrees F is T-shirt weather up here in Nordern Minnesoda). Preparing for a work day outside up here is like trying to prepare for the weather at Big Island Rendezvous - you have to have a full wardrobe. 
      Weather like this is perfect for maple tapping.  During the day the sweet, sugary sap goes up the tree to the developing leaf buds, and at night when it cools down the sap says (silently, of course), "holy crap it's cold, I'm gettin' out of here!" and it scampers back down to the trunk and the roots.  As the sap goes up and down some of it flows, or rather drips out of the spigots, which are also called spiles.  The more prolonged this untra-temperate season is, the better the maple harvest will be.  There are other factors that affect the harvest too. 
      You don't have to have a whole forest of maple trees to harvest sap.  If you have only a few maple trees (like 4 - 6 for instance), you can still harvest it, cook it down, and have it as a special treat for you and your family.  I would suggest that you involve them in the whole process.  It's an experience they will always have. 

How to do this

      You could either do this the yuppie way, and buy all the stuff for it in a specialty store or online as your "Happy Yuppie Maple Tapping Sugarbush Kit" for $599.92 + local taxes where they apply and a contribution to the "Green Party", the "Very Green Party", the "Adopt a Garden Slug - They have a Right to Live Too Foundation", and the "Overaged Hippies Who forgot to Grow Up Retirement Fund."  Either that or you can improvise.  Personally I prefer to improvise, and not just because I don't share an affinity of any sort with garden slugs.
      Making the spiles:  (the taps)
      You can pick up some 1/2" PVC or CPVC at the local hardware store Just a small stick of it is all most people should need (it depends on how many trees you are able to tap). 

      You can cut the PVC or CPVC into pieces 4 1/2" to 5" long.  I have a fancy cutter, but you could use a hacksaw.  Just be sure to remove all the little filings.  They would cause a lot of trouble later during the boil phase, and would be almost impossible to filter out.  

      You can collect the sap in gallon size Ziploc bags.  Just punch a couple holes in them, up near the top to tie them up to the tree and hang them underneath the spigots/taps/spiles.    

       You will also need a drill (with a 5/8" bit) to drill the holes in the trees for your spiles.  You might be tempted to use a cordless drill like this one, but it won't work very well.  The dampness and density of the wood makes it hard for the drill to get through.  If you have to use a drill like this you better have a couple good batteries.  You'll run the juice out of them in a short time. 

      If you have access to one, an old fashioned auger will work far better.  This is one of those rare cases when the tools of your grandpa's generation work far more efficiently.  15 t0 20 seconds with this baby and your hole will be ready for the spigot. 
      Don't worry about it wrecking the trees.  It won't.  They will heal in only a few weeks.  In fact that is why you have to really watch the weather and not start this until the weather is perfect for tapping.  They can end up healing over before the sap is done running. 
      You will want to to drill them in at an upward angle, and you should drill them in a couple inches.  The sap moves up through the tree, not through the inner bark layer.  Tap the spigots into the holes with a hammer. 

      With only a one gallon bag, you will have to monitor them closely.  They will need to be emptied daily, and if the sap is running really good maybe twice a day.  Another point to remember; on trees that are about 10"  to 12" in diameter you can put in one spigot, but if the tree is much larger you can put in more.  The most you can put on any tree however, no matter how big is three.  Last year I had a few trees that were big enough for three spiles.  At the height of the season I was getting two gallons a day from each bag.
      To get the sap out of the bag, the best way to do it is with a siphon hose.  Unlike siphoning gas, it tastes really good and even refreshing when you get some of it in your mouth.  I don't even worry about mouth bacteria getting into the sap.  It gets boiled so long and so hot that anything in there will definitely get killed. 

       I siphon it into five gallon buckets, and save it (in a cool place) for Saturdays .  On the weekends I have the time to be able to boil it all down.  I use a strainer to strain out all the pieces of bark or stray bugs or whatever before boiling it. 

       As you can see, all I do is set up a few concrete blocks, lay on some sticks of 1/2" square stock and build a fire.  I use a couple of canning kettles to boil it in.  I only fill them about half way.  They boil much quicker that way.  I pretty much did the whole burn using pieces of dead fall. 

     Sometimes it gets windy and you will need to use something for a wind break.  The day I used this one the wind was blowing the fire right past the pots, and the sap wasn't boiling at all.  It was also so windy that one of my chickens laid the same egg three times, but that's a different story - a very weird, different story.  

      As is pointed out in the next picture, there is another very important tool you will need if you are going to be boiling sap for about eight hours or so - coffee.  

       During the boil a layer of dirty looking foam will occasionally appear.  Use the strainer to scoop it out.  Sometimes the heat was so intense, it would want to boil over.  Simply blow on it and use the strainer to stir it and it will settle down. 

       The finished syrup for 2 1/2 gallons of sap should be about a cup (40 to 1 ratio of sap to syrup).  When the contents in the kettle get down to a little less than a pint I strain and pour it into a smaller kitchen kettle to finish it off in the house at the kitchen stove, as the fire is too hard to control when the sap/syrup gets that low.  It boils away real fast at that point.  As I get it down to the right consistency (mostly judging by how it felt stuck to a spoon) I pour it into another kettle to blend all the batches together (for a consistent batch overall).  You don't want to take it down to the thickness of a commercial, corn syrup brand (like Log Cabin or Something), because if you do it will thicken as it cools and crystallize into sugar inside your jars. One time my friend Mike and I boiled up some maple syrup till it got to that consistency.  It was so much sugar that we were seriously buzzing on a sugar high.  

      I take my blended syrup and heat it up to a boil, and pour the boiling liquid into sterilized mason jars and put on a sterilized lid with ring.  They all seal up fine.  I usually take some and boil down to the thick mass that will crystallize into sugar.  I use that for cooking at the rendezvous and canoe treks during the summer. 

Our Life Hating Universe

Science Fridays

       On Fridays on the MPR/NPR news stations, most of the stories are scientific in nature, and they call it Science Fridays.  I like that so since mimicry is the most sincere form of compliment, I thought I would do the same.
      "Hey!" you might be thinking, "the date up above says Thursday and you're calling it Science Friday.  Are you stupid, or just deceitful?  And if you can't figure out what day it is, why should I pay attention to anything you say about science?" 

     Well, although it might say Thursday for the date, I post it so late that most people won't read it until Friday. 

      So there.  Harumph.


      One of the web sites I have bookmarked is NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day."  I have visited this site every day since sometime in 1998, when my brother first showed it to me.  What this NASA run web site has taught me over the years is that the universe is an extremely violent place that doesn't really nurture life, but rather destroys it at every opportunity.
      People are always hoping, and professional astronomers are always looking to find other life out there in the universe.  Good luck with that.  Maybe in a perfect universe.  Life in this universe is not exactly the norm, in fact it is a statistic fluke.  Most of our own galaxy is nothing but regions of gas heated up to unimaginable temperatures, that they would vaporize not only everything on a planet, but the planet itself.  All those pretty nebulae out there, they are regions of absolute death.  If you were able to travel out that far in space (like if science started looking into Tesla's research instead of being stuck on Einstein and his gang, and finally figured our way out of the light speed barrier), by the time you could see one of these nebulas  with the naked eye, you would already be vapor.
      There are areas between the nebulae that are fairly safe, but they don't tend to stay safe.  It is almost as though the only way for life to exist here, is due to being in some kind of supernatural protective bubble, that keeps out all this destruction.  I didn't make up that term "bubble."  That's actually what NASA calls it.  In the picture below, you will see what is called "The Local Bubble."

      All the colored regions around the sun here are regions of insanely hot temperatures.  we're talking temperatures many times hotter than the surface of the sun.  The picture below is a close up of our local bubble, and the picture below that shows the "heap o' trouble" that surrounds us. 

      Life in the galactic center is unthinkable.  The central 50% of the galaxy is unfathomably hot, and fueled by a supermassive black hole.  The seven or eight dwarf galaxies (I always forget the exact number) that orbit our own are more of the same.
      Then there are the phenomenon of globular star clusters (below).  These things are crazy.  They are clusters of hundreds of stars jammed into an area the size of our solar system.  Now that's a real wonderment.

      What does the world of mathematics say about life?  By randomly throwing various atoms at each other in order to accidentally create a self replicating protein, the chances are 1 to 10 to the umpteen billionth power (if you really want to know the exact figure I'll look it up again - otherwise just suffice to say it's huge).  To make DNA you have to have lots of different accidentally occurring self replicating proteins (say that three times fast).
      Now IF that could happen somewhere else out there in a minute space between the zones of vaporization, how far would it get before it was destroyed?  They say that there were five major extinctions on earth (but really it was six - unless it was really just one with varied causes and effects.  I'd like to see all the data on the various ash and iridium layers to see if all these layers are ever found in the same place).  Anyway, for the sake of argument, the first iridium layer was at the end of the Ordovician era and was caused by a huge gamma ray burst, which in turn was caused by stellar explosion halfway across the galaxy a very long time earlier.  It basically blew everything off 60% of the face of the earth.  That then caused a chain reaction of death and destruction.  Many species were lost forever, and there weren't that many then to begin with.  The other extinctions were three huge volcanic events, one of which was so huge and long lasting that when it was over there were only a couple dozen genus of animals left.  Then of course there was the big hit by the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous.  The asteroid smacked us so hard that our orbit around the sun was forever altered.  Our orbit slowly pushed outward till it finally stabilized to where it is today.  We've been fighting with frequent ice ages ever since.  Yes, the big ice ages were the sixth "unofficial" extinction event. 
      Mars got hit with something early on that was so huge it cracked the planet open, leaving a rift that goes a third of the way across the planet's surface.  This cooled down the core of the planet which caused it to lose its magnetosphere, and in turn bleed out its atmosphere into the void of space.  That one's done. 
      Here's an example of a typical nebula.  The Bubble Nebula.  In the pictures below the spherical shape on the outside is a shock wave from an exploding star.  The whole thing is just an explosion that is so large that it is still going on.  The bubble itself is a little over ten light years across.  The friendly looking orange things on the edge of the second picture are dust clouds that are burning away into vapor and plasma, and are another ten to fifteen light years away, and the temperatures are over three million degrees.  Notice how many star systems are within that area.  IF there had ever been life on any planet within that area that was in any stage of life it's gone now.

      Below is a map of our local group of stars within a 13 light year radius from us.  This is our "protected local bubble.  If any one of these stars novaed this entire map would be wiped out, and then some.

      The basic rule of thumb is that if it looks "pretty", then it's impossible for life to exist there.  In the next picture of Eta Carina take note of how many star systems are affected.  The surrounding blue is reflection nebulae, and is super hot.  The tall pillar things that look like giant space demons are dust clouds so thick and heavy that they are producing all that heat and light.  Some of the stars' light can barely make it out through the clouds, and most of them aren't even visible.

      The Orion Nebula system mind boggling big.  It cuts a huge swath across a whole section of a spiral arm, and includes sights such as the Horse Head Nebula, many emission, and reflection nebula, and this gem above.  It's called appropriately the Waterfall.  At the base of this waterfall there's something I always think looks like a guy standing there holding a magic sword or a light saber.  the waterfall itself is a shock wave, The "rocks" above it are emission nebulae, and the light saber is a stellar jet of a particle blast from a star. 
     If that's not bad enough there are rogue black holes wandering without a leash through our galaxy.  Blow is a star system being sucked up by one of the space vacuum cleaners.

      What about a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?  In the first picture below it shows two galaxies colliding.  As Andromeda gets nearer to us (it's still millions of years away) we are assured that we could collide with it without much notice.  True science is based upon observable fact.  See all the bright colors?  It's too hot for life.  That's observable.  The second picture shows many other galaxies.  They all look too hot too.

 

                                   ______________________________________________

      Here's another "harmless collision. 

      Look at all the nice, bright colors.

      This is a galaxy that being sucked into its own central black hole. 

      What about this one.  This is a case where the entire galaxy is blowing up.  All the squabbles and wars between the Federation, the Empire, the Rebel Forces, and the Lucian Alliance are a moot point right now.

      The universe is basically against life.  The fact that we have life here is nothing short of a miracle. 

Not Just Surviving, But Thriving

Not Just Surviving, But Thriving

      Is this supposed to be a daily journal, like in the days of MacKenzie and Perot?  I didn’t walk twenty miles through the woods in snowshoes today, but I did work a ten hour day at a job that’s physically demanding.  Would weekly work better, or just whenever I feel like it?  As long as I have something decent to say tonight, I will write. 

      Tonight was the night I actually have three different shows I like to watch – NCIS night.  They kept having commercials for that stupid show Survivor.  Although the show must be popular, otherwise it wouldn’t still be on the air after all these years, I personally know no one who actually likes it. 

      When the show was first advertized I had hopes it would really be a survival show.  You know, they hyped it up talking about people having to live in the jungle and eat bugs, build shelters, and stuff.  I expected them to be thrown onto an island with only a rusty gun and a knife, like my dad’s Uncle Eddy did on Iwo Jima during WWII.  I thought it would be a reenactor’s dream – BUT NO!!  The only thing they have to survive is some new, warped form of high school all over again.  From what I’ve seen on the commercials for it, the show is full of backstabbing biotches, and prudish primadonnas.  It’s just like a high school where everyone dresses like Robinson Crusoe.  I guess the thing is all based upon being in some kind of popularity contest with a few weird relay races thrown in.   Praise God that when it first came on I was too busy at the time to watch it.  When the successive commercials for it came out I knew that watching it would cause irreversible brain damage, and I’m glad that with a clear conscience I can say that I have never once watched the show. 

      It was yet another disappointment for reenactors.  Just like those “_____ House” series they had on PBS, CBC, and BBC – “1900 House, Frontier House, and Colonial House.”  I remember the bomb of them all (pardon the pun) was “Air Raid House” based in WWII London.  I don’t know if anyone watched it.  Being a blacksmith, with a vast knowledge of history (with an expertise in the 17^th Century) and survival skills I applied to join in with Colonial House (at the urging of a fellow reenactor friend).  The reply I got was that with my experience I would not make a good fit.  Then I saw the yutzes they chose for the project.  They slept till noon, and quit work at 2:00 pm.  They ate all their peas and only planted a little bit of them.  They never hunted.  They never used the natural clay there to make anything.  They only cut down a couple dozen trees to sell for masts and spars, and the guy they had there for a preacher didn’t believe the Bible, and wasn’t even sure if he believed in God – and there was no blacksmith.  The scenario they used was that he “died at sea.”  They were set up to fail. 

      My sister who at that time was an anthropology major (among the various things she majored in) explained it like this: The purpose of the show was to see if people from the modern world could have survived back then.  I told her that I would have survived back then.  She replied that I don’t count, because anthropologically speaking, I am not really a part of this modern world – I just live here.  They couldn’t have someone like me on the project.  Why would people tune in week after week just to watch us doing good – how boring.  It was much more exciting to tune in and see that everyone is going to die (I would have really ruined things when they went to trade with the Pasamaquaddy.  I not only would have pushed for a trade and a “gift exchange” first, in that Pasmaquaddy is an Annishinaabe language I would have spoken to them in Ojibwe).  My sister’s anthropological viewpoint helped me understand it.  The answer is no.  If those people would be thrown back in a time machine they wouldn’t survive long enough to produce offspring, so they themselves would have never have been born.  Sounds like a great idea to me. 

      And as important and common as a blacksmith was to every community, there was no way they could have had one on the show.  That’s because almost anyone who is a blacksmith is also a reenactor, and it would have ruined the concept of the project.  Therefore they had no choice but to say “the blacksmith is dead.” 

      Speaking of surviving and even thriving in the woods, it is time now for something useful: 

Wild Rice Raspberry Custard 

     I have made this several times, and it's really tasty.  I have ever only made this though over an open fire and in a Dutch oven, but I’m sure it could be made in a conventional oven too.  It makes as much as you want it to (use your judgement based on how many you’re trying to feed).  
 

Boil up some wild rice (manoomin).  Let it cool. 

Stir in enough maple sugar (zinzibaakwad) or brown sugar to make it really sweet. 

Mix some corn starch in with some milk, a little vanilla, a pinch of salt, and one beaten egg – stir that mixture in with the manoomin and sugar. 

Fold in a bunch of raspberries (if you want you could use blueberries instead, or apples, or whatever). 

Bake it in a medium oven or Dutch oven for about 45 – 50 minutes till a light to medium brown crust forms on the top. 

Enjoy it. 

When serving it you can pour cream or milk over it if you want.  IF there’s any leftovers it makes a great and healthy breakfast. 

The Solutreans, The First Americans  

        About four years ago I began writing a history book.  Books take me a long time to write, because I will write like crazy for a while, then stop to think about what I wrote and what I will write next.  Sometimes a year or two will pass before I get back to it (this isn’t due to procrastination, but due to having too many other projects going on, and this is now further complicated by the extreme physically tiring work I now do for a profession.  I once wrote a novel that ended up taking me about six or eight years (I can’t remember, but how long it took to write is written in the preface).  In this history book I had to stop to do more research.  Since the time I began writing it an entire new batch of discoveries have been made that will cause me to rewrite the entire first chapter.  I may just make the information from these new findings become the new “chapter one.” 

          So, what is this history book?  To answer that I will have to go back to a series of almost frustrating conversations I had with my dad.  He and I both have a very high affection for history.  We both have a pretty good understanding of the very early history of Europe, North Africa, the Mid-east, and the Near East.  Being Native American (on my mother’s side), I also have an interest in Native history.  In trying to discuss these matters with my dad he kept saying erroneous things based on a lack of understanding.  He kept getting nations and nation groups mixed up.  He would say that such and such nation was related to another that actually has no relationship at all.  Why is knowing this important?  Knowing who a people is related to helps you understand the dynamics between them.  At least he didn’t express the common sentiment of, “well aren’t they all just injuns?”  In order to help clear this up I decided at first to make a map; showing all the native nations and where their homelands were.  I would color code it according to which nation group they belong. 

This quickly evolved into an atlas of the pre-Columbian history of North America.  Each plate or map has an accompanying text.  Some inferences have to be made based upon available physical evidence.  Building styles, clothing styles, and other customs also help point to a nation’s origins and time of origin. 

In the first chapter I went through the main nation groups that were present around 2000 BC.  Since I first started writing this I know of some very important discoveries that push me back to about 2500 BC.  Besides this, my first plate has to go back to 17,000 BP.  (What’s BP?  It means “before present.”  So many people in academia today hate the concept of God so much that they refuse to use the old “BC” dating system.  Maybe they’re afraid they’ll burst into flames for even uttering the initials for Christ.  The flaw with a dating system like this is that besides massive confusion, the “P” [ present ] keeps changing – duh!  For instance in some sources that I read the dates of the Roman Empire even get confusing.  Even the super-novice knows that the Roman Empire was from about 50 BC to about 400 AD.  Now they read as from about 2000 BP to 1600BP). 

Anyway, 17,000 BP/15,000 BC is the new date for the arrival of the first Americans.  This was during the last period of glacial maximum.  I, like everyone else, drank the kool-aid of the accepted theories from the land of academia and followed the Bering Strait hypothesis.  All the Native Americans crossed over the Beringia Land Bridge because everyone then was too stupid to have invented boats, right?  WRONG!  The Beringia theory is pushed, despite claims from some nations’ written histories, such as the Ojibwe people who that say they did not come from across the land bridge in the west, but that they crossed the eastern sea (as found in the Birch Bark Scrolls in Ottawa).  Academia always responded to this by simply saying that the natives were wrong.  They (the lords of academia) said that by “eastern sea” they meant the St. Lawrence River.  To add punch to their theory, someone did a series of DNA tests on a slice of native populations with test subjects representing all the nations.  The findings? – all Native Americans have Asiatic DNA strains.  Is that the end of the story?  Not by a long shot.  I won’t go into all the details, as you can watch them in the video that I linked, but here’s the crux of it.  

                                                   Clovis points

Clovis point spearheads are found in abundance on the east coast and around the southern Great Lakes, and the Ohio River valley.  There was another cluster of finds around the Idaho-Montana border, and another cluster around West Texas.  They are not found anywhere else in the world… except in western France around the Gascone region.  In France they are actually just very similar – like a Clovis prototype.  Recently these same proto-clovis points were also found in Virginia and Maryland.  I had known about this “French Connection” for a while and the idea of them coming across from Beringia just bothered me.  Are you seriously trying to tell me that a group of people with proto-clovis points walked all across Europe and Asia, crossed the entire continent of North America and did not drop or otherwise lose a single spear head till they got to the coast of Virginia?!!! 

 

Not only is that ludicrous, but the time frame is all wrong.  A massive ice sheet blocked the way into North America from Beringia.  This didn’t recede enough to pass through till about 11,000 to 12,000 BP (9000 to 10,000 BC).  At the same time the people of western France were hemmed in by the main ice sheet in the north (it covered everything from Brittany and northward), the Alps and Savoy to the east, and the Pyrenees to the south.  Glaciers confined them to a small triangle of land bordering the sea.  They couldn’t have even gotten out to make the long, ludicrous walk of not dropping proto-clovis points.  

                           The ice extent during the last Glacial Maximum

 A third point is YES, they did build boats.  They weren’t too stupid or un-evolved to figure out travel by water.  Pictures of what appear to be hide skinned boats (like an Irish Curragh) have been found on cave walls in the Gascone region of France along with pictures depicting seal hunting.  During this last period of glacial maximum, they would have had to travel out several hundred miles across the Atlantic along the ice sheet to find seals.  That was the closest place to find the plankton, which the sardines feed on, and in turn feed the seals.  

                                                   Types of Curraghs

The final clinker though was our hero – mitochondrial DNA.  DNA from the Solutreans (the name given to these early dwellers of western France) has been found in every population of Native Americans at no less than 10% of the test subjects, and in 25% of the Ojibwe and other Annishinaabe. 

So what’s the story?  These ancient (non-Indo-European) denizens of France came over here (and maybe after a while went back and forth) and lived here all by their lonesomes for about 5,000 years.  After the passage opened up through the ice sheet they were joined by the Asians (specifically the Siberians, and probably also people from the Jomon culture).  Rather than ruin the neighborhood, they proved a good addition, and the two peoples mingled together.  In other words, every Native American is descended from people who crossed the Bering Strait, and every Native American is descended from people who didn’t cross the Bering Strait, but rather came from France. 

The video linked here is a documentary about this subject.  It has great, well researched information.  The reenactment narratives are good too and they used some recognizable Canadian actors and actresses.  

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maziRFPYU14

 

My Blog About Blogs  

      In that this is is my first entry ever, I will discuss the very concept of a blog and its historical precedences.  I have been thinking about doing this for a few years now, and am finally getting around to it.

      NASCAR was over and nothing else on TV was anything I thought I would want to watch, at least not until 9:00 when "The Mentalist" comes on.  Creating this has actually been on my "to-do" list for the last few days, and I don't have any other writing projects due right now, so now is the perfect time to do it - to get "around to it."
      Why are they called blogs in the first place?  Blog is supposed to stand for "Web Log," but the first people who created them had a sudden bout of dyslexia and spelled "web" backwards (bew) and took the b and added it to the word "log."  Therefore it should really be hyphenated - "B'Log" like the name of some Jaffa or Goa'Uld.  It was either that or they thought that "W'Log" would be too hard to pronounce (which it is).  This is ironic though, because B'logs are read, and there is no need to pronounce anything, unless they wanted to tell their friends what they had created while they were playing Halo or Dungeons & Dragons or something, and then it would have still been just as confusing.  While trying to understand it all someone must have certainly lost a long standing player character to some 40th level monster of some kind.
      From what I have seen over the years this is an incorrect spelling.  It should be "Blah'g" (still with the Jaffa/Goa'Uld apostrophe).  Most Blah'gs are just that - somebody using up several MB of cyberspace to just say "Blah, blah, blah" about the most mundane things possible.  "My bunyans are almost as big as my great-grandfather's and I never even got my foot run over by an oxcart." or "I ate corn flakes today instead of oatmeal."  and "That girl in the office, ...blah, blah, ....blah."  They might as well just start all the headings with "Dear Diary."  It's a good thing that space is infinite, and cyberspace doubly so.
      Of course, then there are also "vlogs."  At least it's easier to pronounce than "w'log."  Video logs is what they are, and Youtube is full of them.  Nevertheless people insist on calling them "video blogs."  The bulk of them are also just a bunch of "Blah, blah, blah."  Therefore in keeping with the theme here they should be "V'blah'gs."
      The root origins of the blah'g (and the V'blah'g) go back to an era when men were made of a much stronger material than they are now (specifically they were made of wrought iron).  Men such as the great explorers of the North West Fur Company (NWCo) Jean-Baptiste Perot and Alexander MacKenzie would travel twenty miles a day by snowshoe, set up camp, cook supper (which often involved hunting it first), repair or make new shoes or moccasins (on the Lewis and Clark journey the men had to make new moccasins almost every other day), and then still find time to write in their journals.  Yes, people back then were literate - in fact they were very literate, and we've been going down hill ever since.  And never once in their journals did they write things like "TTYL, by4now, OMG, LOL, or LMAO."  They wrote in complete sentences, with good grammar, and had excellent handwriting. 
      They wrote about the things they encountered on their journeys, what landmarks they used to navigate, the types of food available in an area, the relations they had with various people groups they encountered, and even the social dynamics of the members of their party.  This was intended to be useful for the reader who may have intended to travel in these regions after them.  Their days were busy, and they had no time for "Blah, blah, blah."
      By the end of the following century the meaning of "journal" came to mean something more like a periodical, like a newspaper or a magazine, and the people who wrote articles for them became known as journalists.  In many of the paintings by the early cubists, such as Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Picasso one can notice in their four dimensional still lifes an image of their favorite periodical simply titled "Le Journal." 
      Today there are a wide variety of subject matters for blah'gs.  There are political blogs (a veritable plethora of them), shopper blah'gs, travel blah'gs, religious blah'gs, history blogs, science blogs, and basically every subject you can imagine.  I was looking at some statistics and articles about blogs on line and was disappointed (but not surprised) that the most common blah'gs are various kinds of porn blah'gs, and those of the weirdest kind.  These "pervo-blah'gs are often gathering places for pedophiles to share images of underage girls (and boys) of which possession has been internationally banned by Interpol for decades.  Their sites get shut down, and the images pop up again on some new blah'g a short time later.  I think they need to go after the people in possession of these images first, then shut down the sites - but that is an entirely different blog entry.
      Behind the "pervo-blah'gs" for commonness are blahhh'gs for conspiracy theories and aliens (and these blah'gs are often one and the same.  Anti-government blah'gs are extremely popular too.  Many of these are also mixed together with alien and conspiracy stuff (crap [ from the Latin - crapus - shortened from bovocrapus ] ).  I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere out there, there are blogs that combine them all - underage lizard aliens with weird fetishes conspiring with the government. 

      My Blog will not be about things like that, nor will it ever be about blah'gs again.  I will cover a wide variety of subject matters.  There will definitely be articles about history, science, and the arts.  Sometimes there will be information useful for the historical reenactor - from clothing to cannons, and everything in between.  Sometimes there will be recipes; both historical and modern,  I will cover some new inventions and review some old ones.  There will also be articles/entries about various crafts, such as, woodworking, blacksmithing, leather working, leather tanning, fishing, hunting, guns, and maple sap collecting.   I will also include whacky observations from a whacky world.  This could be fun. 
      The Mentalist is coming on now.  Time to post this thing