by T. Edward Nickens

A little bit here and a little bit there. You keep your eyes open. That’s how you learn. You pick up a new knot from a new fishing buddy, or try a decoy trick you saw in a magazine. You make mistakes. And if you’re lucky, like I was, there will be a mentor along the way. An unselfish someone who cares enough about you that he wants you to know everything he’s ever learned.

That’s the good thing about hunting and fishing and camping: You can never know it all, and you’re never as good as you could be.

Over the years, I’ve learned from the best—mentors, buddies, guides, story subjects, and some of the most dedicated outdoor-skills competitors this world has ever seen. Put them together, and they’ve got a half dozen different ways to shoot a double or cast a fly rod. Here’s the best of what I’ve learned from them, and on my own, in 35 years of hunting and fishing. And this is what all sportsmen should do with such knowledge: Pass it on.

by David E. Petzal

If you’d really like to depress yourself some evening, watch “Doomsday Preppers” on the National Geographic Channel. The show details the plans of normal, well adjusted people to cope with the aftermath of fiscal collapse, nuclear holocaust, the eruption of Yellowstone, solar flares, and so on.

The New York Times noted with outrage that many of these people were accumulating guns and ammunition in order to defend their 1,500 pounds of MREs and dried brown rice, but stockpiling guns is fine with me. My concern is that most of them seem pretty inexpert with guns. One prepper was counting on a Ruger Number One single-shot which, despite its many splendid qualities, is not what you’d pick to blast the mob at your door. Another managed to shoot off several fingers during a practice session. Yet a third, a resident of the Oligarchy of Bloomberg, took lessons in knife fighting because he was unable to get a gun, ignoring the fact that everyone in the Oligarchy of Bloomberg who wants a gun has one, or several, and when the pistol-waving mob comes to this fellow’s apartment I don’t think that he and his knife will last long.

--Chad Love

Two Utah wingnuts are behind bars after setting a series of bizarre booby traps on a popular hiking trail. Then (as all master criminals seem to do these days) they bragged about it on Facebook.
 
From this story on Gawker.com:
 
Two men whose parents did not raise them well have been arrested in Utah after allegedly setting up potentially deadly homemade booby traps to ensnare travelers along a popular hiking trail. One of the traps was designed to send a tripped victim tumbling into a bed of pointy wooden stakes protruding from the ground. Another, pictured above, was to be triggered via a fishing line trip wire; when crossed, it would send a 20-pound boulder, to which several sharpened spikes had been affixed with what looks to be just tons and tons and tons of rope, speeding at a victim's head. The traps were set around the entrance to a makeshift wooden shelter used by hikers as a sleepover and campfire site. 

--Chad Love

It's one of the eternal coffeehouse debates of earnest naval-gazers everywhere: Does life imitate art, or does art merely imitate life? Who knows, but when it comes to dealing with m***********' snakes on m***********' planes, I think I'll go with the latter, because everybody knows that anything, anything that Samuel L. Jackson appears in is high art. However, I'm not sure the Australian pilot of this airplane would agree...
 
From this story on msnbc.com:  
 
A pilot made an emergency landing during a flight in Australia, reportedly telling air traffic controllers, "Look, you're not going to believe this. I've got snakes on a plane." Australia's ABC News reported that Braden Blennerhassett, 26, swiftly put the Air Frontier plane on the ground after making the unusual mayday call during a flight from Darwin to the remote town of Peppimenarti on Tuesday. Air Frontier offers charter and scenic flights throughout Australia’s northern territory.