I first wrote this when I learned of the 2008 hunt, but guess what? It’s time for them to do it again. This year the hunt is scheduled for April 10-12 and information is at the site cited below. (Cool homophone – ing, huh?)

Don’t want to read further down? Well, here it is again – THE SITE.

Featured again this year are:

James White & the Outlaw Handlers– Grandbury, Texas — Performing Feats Daring and Courageous in a pit filled with LIVE Rattlesnakes.

They were at at the 2008 show and I rambled a bit about therm:

I saw that James White and the Outlaw Handlers were going to be putting on a show – a “continuous” show. He sounds interesting and I guess he has been doing this snake business for a number of years – as in decades. I found one article about a Sharon Springs roundup in which he appeared, although then the group was known as the Fangs and Rattlers. I don’t know much about what they do, but I think he puts a lot of snake tails in his mouth . . . and the rest of the snake is attached to each tail. I think I would be too nervous to watch.

Well . . . They’re back.

Then also, when you go from link to link about snake hunting, you stumble on things, maybe like walking across the prairie without looking where you step. I landed on a site about a 15 second Film Festival somewhere and one of the clips was of a beating rattlesnake heart – after it had been taken out of the snake. Hey, I am not going to provide a link because I don’t want to cause problems for you. I didn’t realize what I was going to see and I didn’t push replay. Yes, though, the snake’s heart can be stripped out and still keep beating – They may be Snakex , like Timex, for those of you who remember John Cameron Swayze.

However, the Snakehunt site itself is HERE and they have been doing it for 46 years and on April 11-13, they will do it again! Now, I must go do the Indian Dance for no rattlesnake dreams.

And here’s some right good news from last year:

According to the Waurika hometown paper, it was a big success and the concession stand actually could have sold twice as much snake snacks. And I guess no one was bitten.

I happened upon this website, The Gospel Station, yesterday and saw an ad for Plak Man

I looked it up and it referred me back to The Gospel Station, and here is WIKI PAGE about the station, but you don’t have to go there, I’ll just reference the paragraph:

“THE GOSPEL STATION” is a part of The Gospel Station Network…a ministry founded to provide a radio alternative for the whole family, Christ centered Gospel music Radio. We play the best of the New and the Old of Southern and Country Gospel Music.

Our mission is to lift up Jesus Christ through music…spreading the Gospel one song at a time. We have a vision to put this format on radio stations all over America.

Randall Christy (pictured) is the founder of The Gospel Station Network, which owns and operates 4 FM radio stations in Oklahoma, and www.thegospelstation.com

But, if you want to read more, you can click HERE. This doesn’t tell me any more about Plak Man, though. I think I could use a bunch of Plak Men in my arteries, chomping my cholesterol and plaque – I guess it is sort of like Pac Man. Go, little guys, go.

UPDATE: Here’s the link for Plak Man info (I clicked the picture of the ad, duh) and here’s my favorite part of the ingredients:

Wild Blueberry Extract, Red Raspberry Fruit Extract, Red Raspberry Seed Extract, Cranberry Extract, Prune Extract, Tart Cherry Extract, Wild Billberry Extract, Strawberry Extract, Green Tea Extract,Pine Bark Extract, Broccoli Extract, Tomato Extract, Carrot Extract, Spinach Extract, Kale Extract, Brussel Sprout Extract. I have crossed out the parts I am not fond of.

Seriously, I am not poking fun at this product; I am a great believer in the power of natural herbs and medical knowledge gleaned from the study of them. After all, aspirin is willow bark and digitalis is foxglove. I just like the mental image of those little Plak Man guys scurrying through arteries after the bad guys.

It’s dark. Oh, yeah, It’s dark.

Well, it’s not going to change until we let nature happen, so I’ll shut up.

Oh, not much to say if I’m not complaining and muttering; since I don’t have Andy Rooney’s job, that doesn’t work out either.

Silence . . . silence . . . I must have SOME positive, upbeat words to greet the new day?
Okay. Hi there, day. How are you doing? Think your sun will shine or are you putting on clouds.

I guess some people are destined to be glum boxes. I have no talent for this cheery stuff.

I have known this for a long time. A lot of people have heard my first grade story, but I’m repeating it. Ahem:
When I was in first grade, another girl – one who was always smiling and well-liked – and I did something nice for someone else. I have no memory of what it was, but the teacher gave us a compliment and a pat on the head. I thought to myself, “I should have received two pats on the head because it doesn’t come naturally to me.”

We need to do what Emily Lou Who did in “Horton Hears a Who”.

Mitch, we are here;

we are here;

we are here.

Fool that I am, I emailed the governor about our distaste for Daylight Savings Time for the State of Indiana. Oh, it would be okay if we were on Central Time, but we are not.

We are pseudo–Easterners. Ew!

I do not believe we will get any answer other than a form letter, but at least we are letting “that boy” know that some things just don’t go away for his constituency – especially the 81 year old one who was born in LaGrange County, whose mother was born in LaGrange County in 1881, whose grandmother was born in 1848 right across the state line in Michigan, and whose great-grandmother walked out here from New York.

Mother lived through the Depression here in LaGrange County; she sat in the Scott High School gym and listened to Roosevelt address the nation on December 8, 1941. Maybe Governor Daniels, you could take a take a moment to email, “Well, Ma’am, I have my reasons and I’m sorry you don’t agree with them.”

Say, anyone else want to email him? This is his page and this is his address: www.in.gov/gov/2310.htm

You can tell him Sarah and AmeliaJake say “Hey”.

UPDATE: Already the first phase of the response:

Thank you for emailing Governor Mitch Daniels.  The Governor appreciates
that you took the time to contact his office and play an active role in
the discussion about making Indiana a better place to live, work, and
raise a family.

Your email will be shared with the appropriate staff for a response.

Again, thank you for contacting Governor Daniels’ Office.

We used to call this fast time, back in the day. My mother and I still do; my younger son had to ask me what it meant. Of course, that may be because for a long time Indiana stayed on standard time all year, which was great considering how incredibly west we are in the Eastern Time Zone. Here we are in Indiana, getting up and going to bed with New York, Boston, and all the folks in Maine who can’t get there from here.

Then a few years back, Mitch Daniels got himself elected governor and, gadzooks, we found ourselves on daylight savings time. Mother calls it GDT – for Governor Daniels or, more likely, God Damn Time.

I have yet to move my watch forward; my mother doesn’t. I sent the governor an email back then but only got an intern’s form reply. Aha, apparently Mitch does not understand he has lost Mother’s vote – she calls him “That boy.” And while she does not have a “Ditch Mitch” bumper sticker on her car, she just might be getting there.

Earlier today I wrote about the “Before You Go” CD/DVD that thanks the soldiers for what they have done. Then later, I was upstairs, brushing my teeth of all things, and it occurred to me that we certainly weren’t saying a very good thank you by making crappy cars and losing out to the Japanese and having a bunch of people who are happy to stay on welfare. Let’s get personal: I whine about not losing weight. Well, for Heaven’s Sake, surely I can take off ten pounds. Surely I can keep my lawn in better shape; surely I don’t need to use obscene language; there are lots and lots of “surely’s”.

Rats, AmeliaJake, let’s shape up.

Is it the camera business – and software that brings editing and enhancing to the amateur, not to mention printing – that is behind some blogs today. Well, yes, I would say so. Now, I don’t know what was the chicken and what was the egg with the Pioneer Woman but along with her stories of her life, there is a pictorial place that few of us experience – the Old West, the New West, the prairie, nature and so forth. So, yes, Nikon and Hewitt-Packard would take notice of the potential for marketing. And Adobe Photoshop – hey, is there much difference between being talked through a recipe and talked through photo editing? Probably not. And she is starting a whole new blog devoted to it, along with the Pioneer Woman Cooks blog.

Now, on the upper right sidebar of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, Beside the Stream is featured – a blog with lots of pictures about the mountains and Colorado. This lady, I think her name is Alice, starts right off telling you she hadn’t really taken pictures until a “professional” camera arrived at her house. And now she has a tutor. I don’t know what brand of camera she has and it probably doesn’t matter. I think the idea is to get people wanting to take more photos and do more things with them and that leads to overall growth in camera sales, software and accessories.

This is okay with me. Perhaps soon I will be looking each day at photos of living in a bayou, in a bunch of cities, in the desert, in the High Plains, in the Sierras, in resorts, and so forth. Well, it should be educational.

Say, anyone want to give me a fancy camera to capture a small Indiana town in photos. I’m from Lagrange County; I can do farms and Amish and Shipshewana. I’m from the pioneer stock of the area – I’ve got old photos that can be resurrected.

Nikon, Canon, Olympus . . . if you’re interested, remember I’m ameliajake@theleaningcow.com

I am in the lucky generation; I am the daughter of those who were young during the Depression and in early adulthood in WWII. My grandmother made my mother a winter coat out of an older one, sprucing it up so it looked nice. When Roosevelt spoke the day after Pearl Harbor, she listened to it over the public address system in the school auditorium. My father went in the service in 1942 and came back to Indiana in late 1945 and was discharged at Fort Benjamin Harrison.

He was in the signal corps and said he never was a “real soldier”. He’s gone now. His hair was white and he had become frail.

I look at these pictures of old men and the pictures of young men in combat and realize they are the same. I feel for them; I feel for me. Something so important, something that reaches so deeply into your soul and it passes in a lifetime. Maybe that is the real reason they made stone and sculptors – because at least there is something to touch, something as strong as they were.

(Well, okay, bronze is good as well.)

A musical and pictorial tribute and thank you in in album form on the Internet now. My husband sent it to me and I send it on to you.

I have always wanted to feel that which is the  ‘whatever’ – zest, passion, determination, courage – of an adventurer, an explorer, a “what if we did this?” person. Today I saw another link to the Apple commercial that so many people like because it salutes those who take a different path. Yes, I like it also; but I think the writers stole it from Walter Lippmann. I know when I heard the partial narration of this on a made for TV movie, I sought it out and committed parts to memory. It is here at the bottom of this link and here is a bit of it (well, around half of it):

The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.

Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighed by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints and the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.

No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.