Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing posted this interesting net gun that you can build for around 50 bucks.

The net is 90 square feet and will travel 15 to 25 feet using compressed air.

This could make catching extra zippy chickens a bit easier, and it provides a non-lethal way of dealing with those neighborhood kids who keep jumping into your yard to retrieve their ball or frisbee.

Here's a picture of Lucy with our footbridge in the background where the creek has a curve in it. The panoramic nature of the photo is thanks to the Fuji Finepix S1000fd. It has a pretty neat built in feature that allows you to stitch three pictures into one long image.

After you take the first shot you save it in the memory and the next frame has about a fifth of the last image in a ghost like form that allows you to line up the picture exactly where you need it.

The Gorilla glue bond was not quite strong enough to hold up against the heavy pounding a few weeks of wood splitting will tend to put it through. The wiggle is back, and parts of the bond are breaking away from the handle.

The maul has not flown off the handle yet, and as long as it gets the job done we will most likely continue to put it through the many paces of log splitage.

Lucy is often on hand for wood chopping, waiting for just the right piece to snatch up and carry off for safe keeping. We can never seem to get that kind of enthusiasm out of Huckleberry.

When Sheila sent me Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice a week ago, I flipped it open to peruse the recipes then got sucked in and stayed up until after midnight reading it.  First, let me be up front about the book's downside --- I don't think I would ever try a recipe out of the book since every single one calls for exotic ingredients I am unlikely to own.  (Orange blossom water, anyone?)

But the text, which makes up about three quarters of the book, covers a fascinating range of history, myth, and psychology about our relationship with food.  I particularly liked one of the winter chapters which asserted that electricity has changed our winter sleep patterns which in turn has changed our winter eating habits.  The author says that without electricity, we would sleep for fourteen hours on these long winter nights, half waking in the middle for a few hours of near meditation.  (In passing, she also notes that in nature most women give birth between midnight and 4 am for this very reason --- that at that point in the night, you are in a slightly altered state of consciousness and don't feel pain in the same way.)

I know that as the nights get longer and longer, my body wants to sleep more and more, and I have to poke it to get up right at dawn to match my usual summer wake-up schedule.  The book makes me wonder if perhaps I should be sleeping more in the winter.  I'm such a creature of habit and efficiency, I find myself pondering how I would get all of my winter chores done if I slept more in the winter.  And how sound is her science --- after all, didn't humans evolve in the tropics where the nights would have always been the same length?  Needs more thought....  Still, I recommend the book to anyone interested in how food affects our lives.

Have you ever wondered what a world would be like where humans and chickens shared the top of the food chain?

Gerry Alanguilan has created such a world in his unique graphic series titled "Elmer". He actually makes a chicken look natural in a three piece suit, which might not be a good idea in the real world.

I'm sure the dynamic around the farm would be altogether different, and maybe you could expect to get bigger eggs, but the increase in attitude would be a high price to pay.

Click on the link in the picture to download a free copy from the artist.

Clark Howard is my favorite consumer advocate who always seems to have solid advice on saving money. I think he might be the best out there right now when it comes to looking out for the little guy.

Clark's latest piece of advice is something I've known about for years now, but am only now ready to blog about because I just assumed everybody already knew.

Internet Explorer (the browser most computers come with) is a deeply flawed product that makes surfing on the internet slower, uglier, and more dangerous than it needs to be.

It's free and easy to switch over to Firefox and importing bookmarks and any other data from Internet Explorer can be done in just a few clicks or less. You'll still have your old browser to use as a backup, but I doubt if you'll ever open it again once you realize how zippy the internet was meant to be with a program like Firefox.

The TC1840H steel yard cart with collapsible sides has proven to be a real work horse for us. We've had it going on two years now and it's held up under some serious abuse. I did seem to break one of the supports...but it was easy enough to repair. Like I said...we have probably overused the poor thing and it's a testament to its makers that it's still doing the job and doing it well.

A friend of mine emailed me this photo of what looks like the same model cart being deployed in the secret tricycle surge in Iraq. This could be just the kind of secret weapon our troops really need to wrap up the current Middle East Crusade so that they can all finally come home and get some well deserved rest.

The traction chains started slipping after a few days of back and forth in the mud.

I took each wheel back off and doubled the amount of rope and weaves. I also secured the rope ends with some metal wire.

After doing a bit of research I discovered that for about 5 dollars per tire you can get 100 percent nitrogen pumped into your tires. Nitrogen is more stable and will not fluctuate when the temperature changes. It is also reported to decrease the amount of inner tire decay.

Helium might seem like it could make your vehicle lighter, but it won't.... and then you have to deal with your car talking in that high pitched tone.

If you like stories told with a farm as the backdrop then you might want to check out the lush work of Jeff Lemire.

"Tales From The Farm" has won several awards, but I was drawn to his work by this cover art, which brings back fond memories of my own personal Batman cape my mom made for my brother and me back in the late 70's.

I feel like his drawing style captures that magical space in a boy's imagination where anything is possible with a bit of time and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The additional bead of Gorilla glue eliminated the wiggle and is still holding up well. Now it's a question of time. How much pressure can the bond take and for how long?