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Continuing my train of thought from my previous article, but off on a tangent as usual:

This is just my personal opinion, and some might disagree… but RVs are for road-trips, extended stays away from home while you visit far off lands… not camping. Camping is supposed to be roughing it, just you and the elements. If your campground allows open fires, bringing a coleman stove isn’t even canon, you need to cook in a heavy skillet over an open fire, damn it.

“RV camping” is basically almost the same as “hotel camping” – it’s not really camping. You’re away from home enjoying stuff, but I just don’t consider it camping.

It’s no secret to most people attempting to keep up with search engine optimization that Google and other search engines only really score you well if you’re linked from relevant websites. The downside to this is that spam comments looking for a home tend to gravitate to relevant posts instead.

I can understand, because of it’s powerful search engine, that when you post on Twitter about a certain subject you’re bombarded with spam tweet responses. But how the heck are people doing it with blogs?

Google’s Blog Search looks practically useless for that purpose, because almost none of the articles that are spam magnets on my site appear in those searches. I posted an entry called “Updated WordPress Plugins: Profit” and I was immediately inundated with spam comments about profit and banking.

I post something about feeling overweight and unhealthy and Akismet’s beating away comments about the current best diet pills with a heavy baseball bat.

It seems to take less than 24 hours for them to start pouring in too – so I’m left wondering exactly how the heck they’re accomplishing it.

I read a post a while back about the town I live in, which basically said that everyone here were ratty people and even though you have to drive through it if you’re heading along SR-18, there’s no reason you have to stop.

It made me laugh, because this place is pretty back-woods. At least it’s not one of about four cities who won’t stop arguing over who’s the Meth capital of Indiana – I have no idea why you’d want to lay claim to this title, unless the government funding for police is based off how likely someone is to call the police when I buy 5 gallons of anti-freeze, some stove gas, and a couple bottles of sudafed… because apparently changing coolant in your vehicle before going camping while you have a headcold is a crime.

At least it’s not Marion, IN… if we’d bought a house there I might very well have hung myself in it – it’s more or less everything I hated about Sacramento, and you have shitty weather.

I have nothing against the majority of the people who live here, but there are a few of them that piss me off. The trailer-park-without wheels across the street is a pretty good example – whose idea of outdoor furniture is the front seats torn out of a car that rusted in two.

Then there’s the fact that most of them seem to think there’s nothing more to life than procreation. I’m not going to insist that everyone wait until they’re married, but can we at the very least wait until you graduate high school? Your genitalia will still be there.

Perhaps it’s because of the wealth of government assistance you receive when you have a kid and no job – because I do so love standing in line behind you while the clerk has to figure out what you can and what you can’t buy on your food stamps card, while I’m staring blankly at your ugly three month old kid who’s in the bottom of a shopping cart wedged between two slabs of Aquafina and a bag of ice.

Yeah, I love that.

I was sitting in Taco Bell yesterday (a pretty rare occasion these days) thinking about how glad I was that I’m no longer addicted to fast food. Growing up, I’d have sold my soul for a Big Mac, and even then I didn’t know why – it didn’t actually taste good, but perhaps because my parents wouldn’t indulge in it that often there was just “something” about it.

Now, every time I eat at McDonalds I not only don’t enjoy it, I actually get sick from it – so we’ve pretty much scratched that off the list of places to go. There’s a Mexican restaurant in Hartford City called La Palmas which is absolutely fantastic, and given the fact that for a little over half as much again my wife and I can eat substantially more and not have it be rapid-fire processed garbage, well… I don’t think I’ll be volunteering to go to Taco Bell too often any more either.

It’s so funny how much garbage is in our food, and what it all boils down to is for the sake of “keeping garbage out”. Think about it, we eat highly processed shit, rationalizing that because it’s uniform in quality it’s okay… better than the alternative of raising our own meat in a healthy way and having to get rid of a bad batch of meat once in a while, most of us would much rather buy stuff that’s been injected with co2, hormones, and all other manner of crap on the flimsy promise it’s not going to be bad.

A friend of mine was pondering catching and selling the crawfish that grow on his property, and I warned him to be pretty careful because there’s been a rash of raids going around where the FDA or whoever’s involved have been raiding “organic co-ops” because they trade in meat and such that hasn’t passed through any type of inspection. I just didn’t want him to have his door kicked in over some crawfish, but it also got me thinking about how silly we are about the “quality” of our food.

I think the root cause of the problem is that people in the west want to have their cake and eat it too (pun unintended). We want the FDA to stay out of our business and keep off the farmer’s backs, yet we want to give them hell when there’s a bad batch of food. We piss and moan about how Country X has had Pill Y for 6 months now and the “damn FDA” hasn’t approved it for use here yet. Then when the FDA approves something, or worse, when something is sold that skirts the FDA’s jurisdiction, we scarf them down and then complain when the latest batch of diet pills makes our brains bleed.

I think personally, for my own well-being, I’m going to stay the course I’m on right now. I’m going to endeavor to eat real food, and exercise it off. If we reach our end goal of coming into some property, I’m going to grow my own beef and try to minimize the amount of crap I ingest.

Who the heck wears crocs?

I can understand people like nurses or whatever, I guess… I mean I still don’t get it. But honestly who the heck voluntarily wears these things?

They look like someone took some low-end Danskos, drilled some holes in them, and spray painted them some fluorescent color so that their stupidity attracts the attention of everyone around you.

I’m not seeing as many folks wearing them these days so maybe the fad is leaving in favor of something slightly less stupid, like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet.