Worried the world is going to end, you get stuck on a desert island, or {insert natural disaster here} ruins your city and you have to survive on your own? Then you need to quick - while there is still an Internet - build your own portable survival kit. The following guide will help you put together some essentials so you can survive in an emergency.
Lexan Wide Mouth Bottle
This bottle will serve two purposes. The first and most obvious is as a drinking bottle. Its second and more creative use is as secure storage for non-liquid items that you would like to keep safe, waterproofed, and away from damage. These things are virtually indestructible and virtually waterproof when sealed tightly, so almost everything in your survival kit will go in here.
Swedish Firesteel
Fire has been essential to humankind’s survival since we first harnessed its power. There are some nice windproof matches available that would fit nicely inside your survival kit, but even if you fill the thing completely with matches, you won’t get the 12,000 strikes you will from a single set of Swedish firesteel - and it takes up much less space. I don’t own any of this myself (yet!), but I’ve seen it used and I can tell you right now that this would be a life saver if you need to start a fire in the wind and/or rain.
Leatherman Multitool
Just as essential as having fire is having a good knife. A knife that can also serve as a pliers, saw, wire cutter, bottle opener, and much more is certainly a must-have for any survival kit. There are dozens of different brands of multitools out there with probably hundreds of models, but Leatherman reigns king when it comes to quality. Most of the small to medium sized models will fit in your survival bottle without issue, but make sure to get one that does.
Hand Warmers
The purpose these serve in your survival is obvious - they warm your hands. They can, however, also warm your feet or just about anything else. Stick a few packs of these in there for when you aren’t near the fire.
Band Aids
For when you cut yourself. Get a variety of sizes for different types of wounds. You’ll probably want to take them out of the box to better utilize the space in your survival bottle.
Mylar Blanket
This blanket isn’t made out of fabric, it’s made of foil-like material called mylar. When wrapped in it, it can reflect up to 90% of your body heat back to you, so you can stay warm in the coldest climates.
Compass
It always helps to know where you’re going, so get a decent quality compass. Most hand held compasses will fit in your survival bottle without any issues, so if you’re wandering around lost, you won’t have to wait until dark and rely on the north star.
Rain Poncho
If you’re going to survive the apocalypse, you’re going to need to stay dry when it rains. The easiest way to stay dry is to wear a cheap plastic bag with a hood, also known as a poncho.
Emergency Radio
This is the only thing so far that you will not be able to cram in to your lexan bottle, but many of the radios have a strap so you can easily attach it to the bottle. There are plenty of models available, so choose one with features you like and think you’ll need, but I highly suggest one that has a hand crank for self powering. Some even offer a small solar panel so it can be charged by the sun. You certainly want one that offers AM/FM radio frequencies, but many also offer emergency weather frequencies or UHF/VHF audio. This is essential in helping you find safety with living humans in the case of an alien attack, zombie uprising, or artificially intelligent robots take over the planet. Also, it can be handy to find out the weather forecasts during a storm.
The above items are all essential survival tools, but there are a few extras that you might also consider getting, such as tea light candles, batteries, a mirror (for signaling), weatherproof matches, and probably plenty more things that I’m forgetting. Know something else that you feel belongs in this list? Leave a comment and tell me about it.
I’m not normally one to encourage John McCain to make a change that would help his campaign, as I’ve made it pretty clear to regular readers here that I lean left, but he desperately needs to stop using the phrase “my friends”. It comes out of his mouth in just about every other sentence during his stump speeches and, frankly, I shudder every time he says it. During last night’s debate, for example, McCain uttered the words “my friends” nineteen times. He said “my friends” more than he mentioned the middle class, health care, energy, deficit, debt, and change — combined. I know he isn’t going to read my humble and insignificant blog, but someone needs to get across to him, for the sake of his dwindling political career, that referring to his audience as “my friends” makes him come across as sleazy. It is the kind of phrase you expect to hear at a used car dealership, flea market, or pawn shop, where someone is trying to sell you something whose value is clearly less than the price they’re pushing. The argument can be made that what the presidential candidates are doing is selling themselves to the American people, but any good salesman knows that you don’t get happy repeat customers with sleazy tactics. That said, for the sake of his stump speech and so that I can stop cringing whenever I watch the news, someone close to him needs to tell John McCain to stop saying “my friends”. In fact, I have typed the words “my friends” fewer times in this post about John McCain excessively using the term “my friends” half as many times than he said “my friends” in last night’s debate.
He’s visibly full of shit when he refers to voters as his friends, so do you want to know who his friends really are? Here’s the answer:
Not only is it totally true, but it’s absofuckinglutely hilarious. It’s all over the ‘net and being talked about at high holiday dinners everywhere, but just incase you missed it: The Great Schlep.
The Great Schlep aims to have Jewish grandchildren visit their grandparents in Florida, educate them about Obama, and therefore swing the crucial Florida vote in his favor. Don’t have grandparents in Florida? Not Jewish? No problem! You can still become a schlepper and make change happen in 2008, simply by talking to your relatives about Obama.
Watch the following video by Sarah Silverman, as featured on the website.
Although the registration information is hidden, if you swing by the domain VoteForTheMILF.com (Creation Date: 30-aug-2008) you will notice that without passing go and without collecting two hundred dollars, you will be instantly redirected to JohnMcCain.com. If you’ve never been before (or if you cleared your cookies) it will first direct you to Palin’s intro video.
Sure, this could just be some crazy supporter’s idea, so here’s the proof:
The URL was registered within about two days of McCain’s decision to select Palin.
The dot net and dot org counterparts also redirect to the McCain site.
The URL is held by the same registrar as JohnMcCain.com.
A simple trace route shows that voteforthemilf.com/net/org and johnmccain.com are hosted on the same IP: 64.203.107.149
This campaign never ceases to amaze me with its underhanded political tactics.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a tirade about how what you do should be made illegal. I respect the rights that you have in this country to smoke cigarettes and for the most part I in turn tend to avoid places where it overly affects me, namely poorly ventilated bars and restaurants. The exception, however, is when your smoking habits directly endanger me, without my choice. I’m not referring to second hand smoke, because I know you’re going to come back at me with studies funded by the likes of Philip Morris “proving” that second hand smoke is harmless. What really gets to me is when you feel that the absolute best way to dispose of your cigarette butt is to toss it, still lit, out your car window. In case you didn’t pay attention in high school physics, the airflow around your moving car will cause what you throw out it to be sucked behind your car and thus ends up going directly under my car, still lit. When I call your cigarette “lit”, think of it as a nice easy way of saying “your cigarette is on fire” and, despite the inexplicably slow development of alternative fuels, cars do still run on a very flammable liquid called gasoline. Given, the chances of you throwing your butt directly under a car that happens to be leaking gasoline are slim, but the chances of it blowing over to the side of the street in a dry pile of leaves and starting a fire or leaving a burn mark on my car are much higher.
You may now be wondering what I propose you do with your cigarette butt if you longer simply throw it out the window. If you look around your vehicle, you’ll probably find a little drawer that you’ve likely been keeping your extra change in. Turns out, that was actually meant to be an ashtray. Try using it for its intended purpose (Note: If you don’t smoke, keep using it for spare change). If you happen to drive a newer car that does not have an ashtray, swing by your local Target, K-Mart, Walmart, or whatever other store you have in your area and pick up one of those handy cup holder ashtrays that they offer. If, like me, you prefer to shop online, Amazon has a nice variety of ashtrays for your cup holder.
I hope that you consider what I have said above and I look forward to being able to drive around without having lit cigarettes thrown at my car.
Politicians love it, the MSM (mainstream media) loves it, and apparently the general public loves it. So, what is the most overused and clichéd political term in the last few decades? The suffix “-gate”. For some reason every single new political scandal, no matter how big or small, needs to be renamed by the MSM to {insertscandalhere}gate. This all obviously stems from the original “gate”, Watergate, and it was funny, witty, and original for a while there, but now it is just plain overused. How overused, you might ask? Wikipedia has a list of 60 scandals which have been given a “-gate” suffix, and that isn’t including the original Watergate. The most recent excessive abuse of this politicized suffix, Sarah Palin’s home grown “Troopergate“, is repeated countless times a day over the last few weeks on every single MSM outlet to the point where a scandal that should have just stayed localized to Alaska is now a household term across the united states.
When will it end? If the MSM has their way, probably never. They seem to love the -gate suffix. Networks like MSNBC and CNN seem to use it more than common words like “the”. What I’m proposing is that we give some dignity back to the English language and instead of just creating a new word for every single scandal ever, how about just going back to using the word “scandal”. Troopergate has nothing to do with gates, so why don’t we just refer to it as something more descriptive like, say, “Governor Palin’s State Trooper Scandal”. Sure, it’s a bit more bulky, but every time the MSM says it that’s just five fewer seconds of worthless filler.
If you are privy to the major experiments going on within the scientific community, or if you’ve listened to any of the main stream media over the last few days, you’re probably aware that today was the day that the Large Hadron Collider was turned on. This is the largest, most powerful, and most energy consuming particle accelerator ever. So powerful, in fact, that conspiracy theorists everywhere and even some scientists were convinced that when it would be turned on, tons of microscopic black holes would be created, expand, and consume the universe as we know it. Well, guess what nut jobs: We’re still here. It was powered up this morning and is so far working better than expected without any issues. It will likely take several months before the scientists operating it can really get it up to its full potential, so I suppose the universe could still end when they do that, but I’m feeling confident that we’ll be just fine.
My wife and I were quite literally laughing out loud through this entire segment. There’s nothing I can say that would properly set up this clip from last night’s Daily Show, so just watch it.
That not enough for you? How about an encore with the Daily Show’s version of McCain’s biography:
available that would fit nicely inside your survival kit, but even if you fill the thing completely with matches, you won’t get the 12,000 strikes you will from a single set of Swedish firesteel - and it takes up much less space. I don’t own any of this myself (yet!), but I’ve seen it used and I can tell you right now that this would be a life saver if you need to start a fire in the wind and/or rain.
I’m not normally one to encourage John McCain to make a change that would help his campaign, as I’ve made it pretty clear to regular readers here that I lean left, but he desperately needs to stop using the phrase “my friends”. It comes out of his mouth in just about every other sentence during his stump speeches and, frankly, I shudder every time he says it. During last night’s debate, for example, McCain uttered the words “my friends” nineteen times. He said “my friends” more than he mentioned the middle class, health care, energy, deficit, debt, and change — combined. I know he isn’t going to read my humble and insignificant blog, but someone needs to get across to him, for the sake of his dwindling political career, that referring to his audience as “my friends” makes him come across as sleazy. It is the kind of phrase you expect to hear at a used car dealership, flea market, or pawn shop, where someone is trying to sell you something whose value is clearly less than the price they’re pushing. The argument can be made that what the presidential candidates are doing is selling themselves to the American people, but any good salesman knows that you don’t get happy repeat customers with sleazy tactics. That said, for the sake of his stump speech and so that I can stop cringing whenever I watch the news, someone close to him needs to tell John McCain to stop saying “my friends”. In fact, I have typed the words “my friends” fewer times in this post about John McCain excessively using the term “my friends” half as many times than he said “my friends” in last night’s debate.
