National Geographic “Origins”, “Spark of Civilization”, another swing, another miss

I stayed up the other night (despite being very tired) to watch the premier episode of National Geograpic’s new series “Origins”, entitled “Spark of Civilization”, which promised to enlighten us as to the importance and origins of our use of fire as a species, a subject I find fascinating.

Book – Survival Hacks by Creek Stewart

In the 21st Century it is spectacularly difficult to get completely away from trash. If you’re in the suburbs, or rural areas, or even the trails and parks that pass for wilderness in most people’s experience you’re bound to have access to some of the junk that these hacks utilize, and might be very, very grateful for some clues as to how to use it someday.

Survival – Tip – Real DIY Ranger/Pace Counting Beads

Beveled faucet washers make good sense too. If you think about it their normal use requires to resist abrasion and to be constantly immersed in water without ill effect, so they have to be durable and reasonably weatherproof. I have no idea what their ultra-violet (UV) light resistance is like over long periods, it’s probably fine, but if you’re worried you can always hit them with a little spray of Armor-All or similar plastic/rubber preservative, that’s what it’s designed for.

Survival – Hazard 4 Evac Plan B Sling Pack (in black)

I’ve always lusted after what is probably their most classic and successful pack, the Plan B, or more properly Evac Plan B (I don’t think “Evac” was always in the name, I’m not sure when it was added or why). It’s somewhere in-between the two extremes, large for a “day pack” and small-to-mininalist for an overnighter. I’ve had one in the “to buy later” section of my cart on Amazon off and on for a couple of years…. but I’ve got a LOT of packs, some of them never saw much use, it’s hard to justify the expense, so there it sat.

Knives in Space… 1

I don’t mind going into more detail about any or all of this, at least what I know and can find out about the subject, in fact I’d rather enjoy it, but my personal interest is even more about the future, and especially the key question of how useful and necessary knives are likely to be for those leaving the planet in the decades and generations to come… or not.

A Great Bit of Kit, the USMC Watch Cap

These things are right up there with the venerable P38 can opener near the very top of the list of generally-useful stuff that the military has come up with. I buy mine on Ebay, I don’t know if they’re factory overruns, or “seconds” (I’ve heard that the USMC inspectors are really tough, and will fail a sewing job if there is one letter of the tag partially blocked or the USMC globe is distorted) or “fell off of a truck”, and I guess I don’t care, I’m just glad they’re available.

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools

I subscribed to the mailing list as soon as it started, and while the quality has varied somewhat and there have been times when I felt that it wandered too far into non-utilitarian (non-useful) selections, I’ve never been tempted to un-subscribe, and I’ve learned of a great many useful things from it that I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

Inexpensive, durable, air-tight, waterproof storage – the enhanced plastic paint bucket.

So, what you get for for $11.26 is a five gallons of very durable, air-tight, waterproof, easy-to-open and easy-to-close storage, which, if you think about it, is one hell of a lot cheaper than ammo cans, or fake ammo cans, or Chinese fake ammo cans, or plastic fake ammo cans, or… just about any other option I can think of, if you really need durable and water-tight.

EDC and Man as the Tool-Carrying Animal

Speculating about the evolution of thought in early hominids is risky, we all suffer from the “explaining water to a fish” problem in that basic ideas that were once hard-to-grasp inventions to humans and proto-humans are now so inherent in being human that we can barely perceive them at all. Still, it seems fairly certain that tool-use must have gone through some distinct phases:

Sling Packs- The Best Type of Short-Term Survival Pack

‘m a pack junkie. I spent a large part of my spare time in my youth on trails with everything I needed on my back, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, and it made some sort of permanent impression. I feel sort of naked out-and-about anywhere without one, at least in a nearby vehicle. I’ve got a lot of the things, mostly smaller sizes now just for kicking around, not the huge ones I used to live out of, but I highly value a good pack and it seems I can seldom go for much longer than a year without acquiring another one for a specific purpose or feature.

Early lessons on the Prehistory of Civilization and Survivalism from Gobekli Tepe

If true, this is huge.

This isn’t just “stones and bones”, folks, this is about understanding ourselves, who we are, and how we got where we are today from nothing. Every insight we gain into the progress of early man or proto-humans from being as helpless as any other animal (more so, apparently) to our current level of interconnected technologies adds to our “blueprint” of how it is done, should it ever need to be done again- whether it is just an individual caught without the support of technology, or entire peoples recovering from disaster, or human colonies having to deal with reduced availability of technology in starting the process over somewhere else, knowing how we boot-strapped ourselves as a species from no-tech to high-tech is knowing how to do it again if we have to- hopefully without taking tens of thousands of years, or longer, this time.

Survival – The Magic of the Crooked Stick… and Why it Works

Even at that age, though, I had some rudimentary research ability, and I remember looking up “boomerang” in different references and finding out to my surprise that returning boomerangs were only one category of a larger type, and that larger type was in itself a part of the still larger category of throwing sticks as weapons, all of which seem to have been crooked. This puzzled me greatly, I understood that a fairly specific shape would be required of a throwing stick that would return to its owner (at least if it didn’t hit anything), but why would it be that throwing-sticks in general, that did not return to the thrower, should be crooked?

An ice storm

The first thing I noticed while driving out of our neighborhood in the still-mostly-dark was that the power was out for a lot of our neighbors just blocks away, and for a lot of other neighborhoods. The first traffic light I hit was dark, but there was nobody around. The second light, in a much bigger intersection, was down- literally down, the cables that strung the light across the intersection had failed and the lights themselves were scattered around on the road. Still nobody around, so I carefully drove around the fallen lights and toward town.