Give Me the Barrel

Give Me the Barrel

The year was 1998.

The place was a bend in the Yellow River, just south of Porterdale, about 40 miles east of Atlanta.

The movie was False River, a film best viewed while intoxicated, being savaged by weasels or in the throes of a malarial fever dream.

We had just returned to work after a weekend of torrential rain and the river was high. Really, really high.

Remarkably high.

Dark shapes keep appearing along the top of the churning, rock-strewn rapids then slipping below again.

Those were turtle heads.

Snapping Turtle heads to be precise…. and they were everywhere.

Dozens of them covered the width of the Continue reading Give Me the Barrel

Battery-Powered Birth Control

RF Basal Thermometer
Old magazines are awesome. Frozen snapshots of singular points in history, within the context of the age in which they were published. Take for example this 1966 issue of the magazine Science & Mechanics (which would later become ‘Creative Computers’, ultimately absorbed by ‘Creative Computing’, which ceased publication the year I graduated high school). This issue provides a glimpse of the future of birth control using a battery-powered radio transmitter and a strongly argued case by Brigadier General J. H. Rothschild for the use of gas warfare in the ongoing Vietnam War.
Continue reading Battery-Powered Birth Control