ABA Reports That the Kobo Partnership With Indie Booksellers is Now Twice as Large as the Google Partnership it Replaced

ABA Reports That the Kobo Partnership With Indie Booksellers is Now Twice as Large as the Google Partnership it Replaced

5/23/2013 -- Global Earthquake Overview -- Pacific unrest -- Volcanic EQ Uptick

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2n1GGQEcsY&feature=em-subs_digest


God I love dutchsinse.

thank goodness my mother found this gentleman's youtube channel.

otherwise I wouldn't be totally terrified about yet another awesomely powerful conspiracy/global fuck-up (pardon my french, mother dearest, I'm only bleeding).

CAST NET BASICS

Cast Net General Information

Wherever you may fish, live bait is always the best lure. To save time and money, you need to keep live bait ready. Cast netting is the most economic tool for catching your own bait. You can also use a cast net to catch shrimp, larger fish, mullet, etc.

Cast netting is very popular, either in fresh or salt water, and can be used in different applications from Sport to Commercial fishing. Many people use cast nets, from kids to experienced professional fishermen, almost everywhere in the world.

        CAST NET BASIC STRUCTURE

• Swivel: two metal loops or rings attached together, that turn at both ends.
• Hand line: a rope which is attached to the swivel on one end, with the other end attachded to the caster's wrist.
• Horn: a ring with an indentation around the center, where the top of the net is tied.
• Lead Line: a rope with sinkers attached. This rope is at the outside perimeter of the net to sink it.
• Brail Lines: lines attached to the swivel at one end and to the leadline at the other. Their function is to pucker the net, thus trapping the catch.
• Netting: made from nylon multifilament or monofilament to form the desired mesh.

HOW CAST NETS WORK

Throwing the net creates a driving force that causes the lead line to open the net to a flat form, the lead weights then sink the net. After the net has sunk, and the brail line is pulled, the lead line is forced to close,thus, creating a pouch in the net which holds the catch, trapping a school of shrimp or fish. After pulling the net from the water, opening the leadline will cause the catch to fall out.

	STEP 1: With net straightened and lying between your feet, fasten the tag end of the retrieved rope to the right wrist. Then coil the rope in small coils and hold them in your right hand. Place the throat of the net on top of the rope coils in your right hand. Then slide your left hand about a third of the way down the net.
	STEP 2: Coil the length of the net you just measured and place it in your right hand. Now slide your left hand down the net to crotch level. Make a coil of this second length of net and also place it in your right hand. You should now have two roughly equal coils of net in your right hand and about two-and-a-half feet of net left dangling.
	STEP 3: Kneel on your right knee and place your left foot forward. Pull one loop of the lead line from the rear of your bundle and lay that loop across your right elbow as far as it will go without pulling in your right hand.
	STEP 4: Starting at your right elbow, go clockwise around the lead line for approximately four feet. Now lay that lead line over your left thigh. Continue in a clockwise manner and lay the net across your left thigh until you have approximately half of the remaining net and lead line draped across your left thigh. You should now be supporting half of the lead sinkers with your left leg and the other half with your right hand.
	STEP 5: With the net divided into roughly halves, put the pinkie finger of your left hand through the net mesh of the first lead line that you laid over your left thigh. The proper location is through the bottom mesh (next to the lead line) right on top of your left thigh.
	STEP 6: This is the way your left hand grips the net. The pinkie finger is through the mesh at the lead line and the third finger lays by the pinkie as a sort of guard. The mesh of the net is held between the thumb and first two fingers and rests against the top of the third and pinkie fingers.
	STEP 7: This is what the net looks like when you are holding it properly and are prepared to throw it.  The small loops of the line and two loops of the net are held in the right hand. The retrieval line is tied around the right wrist. One loop of lead line lies across the wrist. One loop of lead line lies across the right elbow. Approximately half of the lead line is supported by the right hand and is hanging about two and a half feet below the right hand. The balance of the net and lead line is held in the left hand and in the grip described in Illustration 6. The lead line is hanging about a foot to a foot and a half down from the left hand. Note that there is no call for lead line held in the mouth or for draping wet net across your shoulder.
	STEP 8: The windup is the first part of the throw. Ideally the left foot is forward and pointed about 45  degrees to the right of where you intend to throw. The right foot is behind the left at just over the shoulder width distance, and is roughly parallel. Rotate your arms back to the right and shift your weight to your right foot. As you spin back forward your weight will shift back to your left foot. The throw is more of a slinging motion in which both arms naturally extend to aim the net.  The release is just to let go with your hands. The net will naturally peel off your right elbow andoff your left pinkie finger. Experience and practice will help perfect your aim.
STEP 9: With a little practice you can have results like this, also. This is a truly easy method of throwing the big cast nets. It is an easy method that uses gravity and centrifugal force to open the net. A caution is that this method does not work on smaller nets. It overpowers the smaller nets due to their lack of weight. An excellent way to practice, without getting wet, is to throw the net in your back yard. Grass is an excellent cushion and allows you to see how the net opened. You can practice from ground level or you can use a pickup tailgate to give you some elevation. An old tire makes an excellent target for improving your aim. Remember, practice makes perfect.
Choosing Nets Correctly Depending on what kind of catch is targeted, examples are shrimp, pin fish, shiner, mullet, sardine, etc., the correct size of mesh and net will provide more accurate hauls. As with any fishing equipment, the bigger the targeted catch, the bigger size of mesh and stronger netting material needed.
BAIT SIZE MESH SIZE NET BREAK STRENGTH 1" - 3" 1/4"SQ (1/2" STR.) 5 - 9 LBS 3" - 6" 3/8" SQ (3/4" STR.) 7 - 15 LBS 6" - 9" 1/2 " SQ ( 1" STR.) 9 - 20 LBS 9" - 12" 5/8" SQ (1-1/4" STR.) 12 - 25 LBS 12" OVER 1" SQ. OVER (2" STR. and OVER) 20 LB and OVER Cast Net Care The most important thing in cast net care is rinsing your net after every use. Washing the net not only washes away the salt water; it also removes fish particles and slime remaining on the net. The fish slime is particularly harmful in deteriorating the net. Simply rinse well with a garden hose and allow the net to dry. Then place the net into a bucket or any other dry storage area.  Sunlight is another harmful element to the cast net. Do not allow your cast net to stay in the sunlight for long periods of time. This is especially important for monofilament cast nets. Overexposure to sunlight will cause the netting to become brittle and weak. Another secret in cast net care is fabric softener. By using fabric softener you can prevent the net from becoming stiff and help in the overall spread of the net. Just take a pail of water, add a cup of softener, and place the cast net in the pail, for about one hour. Remove the net, rinse, and store the net after it dries. This process should be done when the net is first purchased and repeated every six to eight months. If you have any further questions, please feel free to email me or drop me a line at my office anytime and I will be glad to go over any questions that you may have.

 

Q&A with Stephen Hunter, author of the Bob Lee Swagger books, on writing, aging and guns

For novelist, writing and aging aren't in conflict

By By LAURA HAMBLETON Special To The Washington Post

- As of Monday, March 25, 2013

Nearly every day, 66-year-old novelist Stephen Hunter does two things: He writes and he shoots. He writes about guns and then shoots them at a firing range near his Baltimore house. His knowledge of guns is encyclopedic and the details show up in his novels. Guns often give him a germ of an idea for a story.

Hunter’s newest novel, “The Third Bullet,” about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is the eighth in a series about a former Marine sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, who has reached the age of 66.

As a younger man, Hunter wrote and edited for the Baltimore Sun; in 1997, he became the film critic for The Washington Post. In 2003 he won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Hunter has written 19 novels and three nonfiction books. He is working on his 20th novel, about a female sniper in Russia during World War II.

He recently talked with The Post at a coffee shop near his home. This is an edited excerpt.

Q: Let’s talk about aging.

A: I understand that I get tireder now, but I don’t ascribe that to aging. I understand that my fine-motor coordination is all shot to hell, but I don’t ascribe that to aging. I understand that my memory is a parody of what it once was, but I don’t ascribe that to aging. I just sort of cultivate the fantasy that these things are unrelated. I am aware that that is an illusion, but for me it is a helpful illusion.

The other day, I was at a party talking to a few people, and I was up against the food table. Someone bent over to try to get something that I was in the way of and he bumped me. He said, “Excuse me, excuse me.” He was 14. I said, ‘That’s all right. I’m old. You can push me around.” We both laughed.

I enjoy doing that, but I don’t walk around feeling old.

Q: Is being old bad?

A: In and of itself, no. Being ineffective is bad, being of a complaining mood is bad, being in chronic pain is bad, being slow to react is bad, not getting it is bad. On the other hand, I am attracted to ideas of wisdom. I am attracted to the image of the old dog. I am attracted to the image of the professional with a sensibility to certain experiences that are unique. I know what I can do. I know what I can’t do.

I feel old when I have to get up to go to the bathroom for the fourth time and it’s 5 in the morning. On the other hand, getting back to bed after that event is enormously satisfying.

Q: What is easier in old age?

A: I don’t want to say I have mastered the craft [of writing books], but I feel a lot more confident. I am capable of doing things and seeing things and making things happen in ways that I was not even five years ago. I feel like I am smarter than I was 10 years ago. I feel like I’m a lot smarter than I was 20 years ago, and I feel like I’m a lot smarter than I was 30 years ago.

Q: What do you mean by “smarter”?

A: I mean book-smart. I mean understanding the systems of governance and culture. I mean sort of understanding those things that are worth investing anger or emotion in and those things that aren’t. I mean social smarts, the ability to interact with different kinds of people and to be comfortable in different, challenging professional situations. I mean verbal quickness.

Q: Tell me about your day writing.

A: I am not one of these guys who gets up at the crack of dawn and works for five hours, then has breakfast, answers the mail and works for another five hours. That is entirely too Viking-like for me.

I am a night person. I get up at the crack of noon. I spend a couple hours drinking coffee and just browsing on the Internet. It is terrible and pointless, but I do it anyways.

I have two things I do most days. I write and shoot. It depends on what my mood is which I will do first. [With writing,] I’ll work for two hours, maybe three, maybe one hour. I don’t kill myself. One of the things I’ve learned — I give speeches, and I use this in every speech I’ve ever given — is that writing a book is baseball. It’s not football. And what I mean by that is that it is a long, grinding season. You’re going to have very bad games. You’re going to have failures. You’re going to make errors. You’re going to do stupid things. You just have to trust over the long haul you will overcome all of those mistakes.

It takes more energy to get into the world of the book than it does to write the book. The more frequently you visit the book, the easier it is to get into it. That means you have to work every day. You have to make that transit from this world to that world as energy-free, as habitual, as easy as possible. Every time you skip a day, it is twice as hard the next time. If you skip two days, it’s not two times, it’s four times; it’s exponential. The way books die is that you reach a point where the energy to get back into the book overwhelms you

I’ve had books die on me [like that]. It is really painful.

Q: Your protagonist, Bob Lee Swagger, is aging. He is 66. How do you write about a guy getting old?

A: I know a lot of these professional writers whose heroes are in an eternal 34-to-38 age bracket. I can’t begin to remember how a 34-year-old mind works or body works. I know how a 66-year-old body works. I don’t recall making a coherent decision that he would age with me. He is obviously a hopelessly idealized version. I couldn’t begin to do one-thousandth of what he does, but many of his thought patterns, some of his family history and a lot of the physicality of aging is taken directly from my life, even if he is much stronger and braver and has far more stamina than I do.

Q: How about your hip?

A: I was never shot in the hip [as Swagger was]. My hip is profoundly uninteresting. One of the duller hips in Western civilization. Not even my wife is interested. I did have some pre-arthritic symptoms a few years ago where one of the qualities of my life was a lot of pain and a lot of stiffness. I may have inflated that grotesquely in his constant problems with his hip.

He is getting so old. I keep hearing, “How can this guy do this stuff?” I try to be wise about it. He no longer gets in fistfights. He no longer runs. He tries to use his intelligence as opposed to physical strength. [But] old men can shoot. Old men can be superb shots. I always have to get him in gunfights because they’re about skill, courage and cunning, and not about strength.

Q: Have your books always begun with a gun?

A: Many of my books do. I will have an image of a gun, and it will create a world and a story. For example, the very first book I wrote was called “The Master Sniper.” It was a World War II book. It did not exist until the moment I saw a picture of a German assault rifle with an infrared-mechanism night vision. I was sitting in 1978, I was sitting in the Baltimore Sun newsroom. I was the book review editor. This was in the Rand McNally encyclopedia of World War II. I saw that gun. I knew the gun, but I didn’t know the Germans had infrared until that second. And the second I saw that, I knew I had a book.

Writers have their subjects. Faulkner was obsessed with grappa. Hemingway was obsessed with the code as it plays out in extreme situations. Updike with the peccadilloes and nuances of bourgeois. Believe me, I’m not comparing myself to any of these. What I’m just saying is, you get a theme. It seems almost genetic.

From the very first second I saw a firearm, I found it incredibly interesting. To me, the gun was . . . let’s call it a cluster of possibilities, history. It was drama, behavior. It was engineering. It was manufacturing. It was ergonomics. It was action.

Q: So the shooting range is your muse?

A: I wouldn’t say the shooting periods are particularly creative. I don’t get ideas while I am shooting. This might — and it will be seen as hideous by millions of people — be a form of mind relaxation. What I do love about it is the totality of the engagement. Whatever issues I am facing are temporarily disconnected. I cease to be Steve Hunter. I cease to be a movie critic. I cease to be a novelist. I cease to be father. I cease to be an uncertain supervisor of a shaky financial situation. I am just a pair of eyes, hands, musculature of wrists and arms, and I find that purifying.

The act of shooting is very formal. In other words, every time I do it, I do it according to physical principles. Like any athletic thing, from shooting baskets to throwing touchdowns, it is fundamentally athletic. It is a function of hand, eye and muscle.

Given the amount of shooting that I’ve done, I should be a lot better than I am. I wish I were a better shot.

Q: Have you changed your stance on guns?

A: Though I am not a liberal anymore, I was for many, many years. The guns have pulled me far to the right. I will say [that] on The Washington Post, everybody was very decent to me. They understood who I was and what my beliefs were. No one ever got in my face. I’ll always be grateful to them. In that newsroom, tolerance was real.

Q: Do you still care about movies, or has that changed as you’ve aged?

A: I don’t care about modern movies. I occasionally will see a modern movie. Now and then I will go as a guilty pleasure to see some movie filled with ridiculous gunfights. One of the pleasures of my life is freedom from the America movie. In my opinion — and this is typical old-guy rant — the movies are just no longer speaking to me. One of the reasons I left [The Post] was that I could see myself becoming a parody: “In my time, we did it much better. It ain’t no good no more, no siree. I don’t know where they find these young fellas with all that hair. In my time, men had real faces.” It was time to go.

Q: That’s interesting.

A: Here is what I am surprised you haven’t asked me, but I am going to answer it anyways because I thought about it.

If you asked me for the wisdom, here is the one thing I would say for people approaching and getting ready for retirement. Three words: Avoid the bitter.

Bitter will kill you. The artists of the 20th century I most respect would be Ernest Hemingway, John Ford and John Wayne. In many ways, the same men. Alpha males.

Extremely, mythically successful with enormous sexual opportunities, enormous financial resources, able to indulge their every impulse, and yet all three of them ended up isolated, bitter and angry. That seems so tragic me.

Nobody succeeds to the degree they think they should. You have to make peace with the fact that you didn’t get exactly what you wanted and what you felt you were entitled to.

Q: How do you do that?

A: It helps to have a passion. For me, it happens to be guns and the firearm world and all of that. I always have a place to go, a place where I feel at home. If it is reading or shooting or thinking, there’s always a place where I can go which I find nurturing and stimulating. It helps enormously at the center of your life.

The second thing: I am a writer. That to me is a noble calling I fulfill very proudly.

Q: Do you ever see a day when you can’t write?

A: (Long pause.) Yeah. I’ve imagined a life without it. I see this idealized life on a small ranch out West where I’m able to shoot and work on my guns every day. I have my own range and I have my own large shop. I see that as how I might finish my life. Unfortunately, I don’t see my wife in that, because she is sophisticated and cosmopolitan. She and Montana does not compute. Nope. Does not compute.

The reality is, I will stay where I am and enjoy what I’ve got.

 

Natural’s Not In It

Thanks to Klintron over at Technoccult for cluing me into this article and book!

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/naturals-not-in-it/

By ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN

image by banksy

How do you make a food fad appeal to libertarians? Invoke human nature.

Every dietary preference has its corresponding political stereotype. Vegans are to Ralph Nader as meat-and-potatoes types are to Dubya. Artisanal pickle-loving hipsters gravitate towards the Obamas, and anti-soda activists have a friend in Mike Bloomberg, at least for now. Omnivores, though seemingly agnostic, are split into two camps: those who will truly eat anything, and those who will eat anything so long as it contains organic ingredients their grandmother could pronounce.

 Then there are those who are concerned not with their grandmother, but their great-great-grandmother’s ancestral state of nature. Where does the Paleo diet fit in the politico-foodie spectrum?

Proponents of the Paleo, or Caveman, diet believe that to achieve optimal health, we ought to subsist off of foods that were available to our Pleistocene-era forebears. The Paleo philosophy rests on the notion that humans adapted to vastly different circumstances than the ones they live under today — that before the relatively recent shift to an agriculture, industry- and internet-based society, we lived for millennia as hunter-gatherers, and did so without the current very high levels of cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. For Paleos, the primal lifestyle is our true state of nature — our blueprint, as one advocate puts it — and we must mimic it as best we can.

In practical terms, living like a caveman typically means shunning all sugar, save a dab of  (raw) honey or an occasional piece of fruit, and banishing grains and beans in favor of vegetables, meat, fish, and poultry. White potatoes aren’t recommended, but yams are fine and dietary fats, including the maligned saturated kind, are upheld as the holy grail of nutrition. Milk is high on the Paleo blacklist, but butter, on the other hand, is encouraged. Nuts are acceptable, but don’t even think about peanuts — they’re actually legumes. Bacon occupies a sacred space on the plate of the Paleo dieter.

The trend is, for the most part, food-based, though the principles are sometimes applied to childbirth and parenting, exercise and fitness, and mental and emotional health. Some Paleo acolytes forgo shampoo; others complain about the “unnaturalness” of antibiotics, hormonal birth control, or monogamy. Judging from various Paleo forums online, homeschooling is fairly popular, as are hairy men, eating with one’s hands, and exercise that mimics the Primal life: running barefoot (or with fancy five-fingered shoes); lifting heavy rocks; avoiding “chronic cardio,” also known as distance running; and practicing sprints, even in the absence of pre-historic leopards.

Grok, a 30-year-old hunter-gatherer, is upheld by marksdailyapple.com, a leading Paleo site, as a Paleo a role model. Grok, a caveman composite, is “simultaneously his own person/personality (incidentally male) and an inclusive, non-gendered representative of all our beloved primal ancestors.” He’s “a likeable fellow” who has a “strong, resourceful wife and two healthy children.” By modern standards, Grok “would be the pinnacle of physiological vigor . . . a tall, strapping man: lean, ripped, agile, even big-brained (by modern comparison)” with “low/no systemic inflammation, low insulin and blood glucose readings, healthy (i.e. ideally functional) cholesterol and triglyceride levels.”

Grok is healthy because he has relatively low stress levels and subsists on what nature designed him to eat: “Wild seeds, grasses, and indigenous nut varieties,” seasonal vegetables, roots, berries, meats and fish, small animals, and big game. Chasing animals made him a “solid, nimble sprinter”; foraging gave him “impressive physical endurance” and lifting beasts made him “tough and burly.”

***

Given the semi-mythical position of imaginary Groks in the Paleo world, it’s easy to accuse the modern cavemen of inconsistencies. How prehistoric is it to be living in condos, ordering grass-fed steaks from FreshDirect, enjoying heat and hot water, and sharing recipes online? The irony is not lost on Paleo advocates themselves — and, to be fair, if they shed their clothes and took to the woods they’d only be mocked the more for it. Charges of hypocrisy, however amusing, are facile. Paleo is an improvement on a diet of processed, sugary junk. It’s not the first diet to banish starches, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, by any other name, the Paleo diet would be just that — a diet.

But more substantial problems lurk in the reasoning behind Paleo principles. By assuming that all that was once natural is now good, militant Paleo leans on biological determinism to back up its theories. While it may not advocate for a complete reversion to cave-dwelling, it accepts that we evolved in a certain way to do certain things and not others, and that advances in technology, civilization, and culture can do little to change that. This logic, however seductive, is incomplete. You can’t get an ought from a was.

There’s evidence that the “was” is vastly oversimplified, too. Marlene Zuk, a biologist at U.C. Riverside, appraises  the Paleo lifestyle in Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live (Norton, March 2013). Zuk notes that even if the good old days were, in fact, good, there was no singular primal lifestyle or even period for us to mimic. And while it’s true that humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years before forming societies around agriculture, that doesn’t mean we’ve been wholly unable to adapt to the so-called ravages of modern life. Rather, the time that has passed since the shift towards agriculture — about 9,000 years, though estimates can vary — has provided our bodies with ample time to adapt to diets that include grains and dairy. “What we are able to eat and thrive on depends on our more than 30 million years of history as primates,” writes Zuk, “not on a single arbitrarily more recent moment in time.”

A key example of this kind of adaptation can be found in our ability to consume dairy. A great many people in the world cannot digest milk, but there are nonetheless some lactose “persistent” individuals who can. Their ability to do so, writes Zuck, is a result of lactose persistence being passed along through natural selection. “People able to drink milk without gastrointestinal disturbance passed on their genes at a higher rate than did the lactose-intolerant, and the gene for lactase persistence spread quickly in Europe,” Zuk writes, citing research that suggests this took place over just 7,000 years — “the blink of an evolutionary eye.” What this shows is that humans can adapt over the course of a few thousand years to better absorb whatever nutrition is readily available to them — on a farm, for instance, or in a herding society.

Human adaptability doesn’t end there, though. When the genes aren’t passed on, other bodily functions step in: One example is the gut bacteria found in some Somalis that aided in their digestion of dairy, even though they lacked the gene normally associated with lactose persistence. And when all else fails, civilization comes in and ferments the milk to create yogurt or cheese — more easily digestible forms of dairy — that a greater number of people can consume. We even thought of Lactaid — lactose persistence in pill form.

Illustrations like these help Zuk undermine the Paleo assumption that we are not made for these times. “Consumption of dairy exquisitely illustrates the ongoing nature of evolution, in humans as in other living things,” she writes. “Our ancestors had different diets, and almost certainly different gut flora, than we have. We continue to evolve with our internal menagerie of microorganisms just as we did with our cattle, and they with us.”

That isn’t to say we’ve adapted perfectly — but according to Zuk, the idea of being perfectly adapted to any environment is a myth unto itself: “Paleofantasies call to mind a time when everything about us — body, mind, and behavior — was in sync with the environment…but no such time existed. We and every other living thing have always lurched along in evolutionary time, with the inevitable trade-offs that are a hallmark of life.”

***

Meet the One-Handed Man Behind America’s Most Dangerous Mail-Order Kits

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Klint Finley over at Technoccult.ne

I've been a big fan of this guy since I was a kid and found his mail order catalog, along with Loompanics Unlimited, lying around in the dusty recesses of my father's bookstore.

From Wired:

Meet America’s mad professor. For nearly 40 years Bob Iannini, founder of Information Unlimited, has been mail-order mentor and parts supplier to electronics hobbyists willing to take on some of the most dangerous DIY projects in the world.

Need kits, plans or supplies for a Tesla coil? Pick a size — Information Unlimited carries itty bitty 2-foot science-project-type Tesla coils, all the way up to terrifying 6.5-foot, 2-million-volt monstrosities. More practical consumers can pick up laser components, bug zappers and high-voltage transformers and switches. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, Iannini offers a massive EMP blaster gun kit capable of disrupting electronics or igniting explosive fuels with a radiating electromagnetic pulse — a pre-assembled unit will set you back just $32,000

Full Story: Wired: Meet the One-Handed Man Behind America’s Most Dangerous Mail-Order Kits

How to Cook on Your Car Engine, and Other Vehicle Survival Tips

Harvested from http://survival.outdoorlife.com/blogs/survivalist

December 27, 2012 - 2

by Tim MacWelch

During a winter storm is the worst time to get stranded in your vehicle. It’s also the most likely time you could be stuck in your car for a few days.

The ice storms, deep frozen slush, and thick snow that would bog down a perfectly functional vehicle can create some dangerous survival conditions inside the vehicle, and deadly conditions outside if you were to try to walk for help without the right gear and clothing.

Unless your ride is on fire or about to slide off a cliff, you should always stay with the car or truck in a stranded winter survival situation. The vehicle provides shelter and a bigger target for searchers to find. So how do you get by for a day or two or more until help arrives?

Here are some important things to consider before and during a stranded vehicle scenario.

Don’t Drive Around Empty Handed
Your vehicle should be stocked up for emergencies, especially in the winter. Shelter items, spare clothes, first aid, food and water should be plentiful in your vehicle, along with jumper cables, road flares, starter fluid, and some quality hand tools.

Don’t Use Up Your Gas All At Once
As long as your exhaust pipe is clear, you can run the engine periodically to run the heater for warmth. But even with a full tank, you’ll only have a few precious hours to idle the engine for heat. Run the vehicle for no more than 20 minutes at a time, with the heat running as high as you can get it. Try to hold off as many hours as you can between periods of running the engine.

Be Obnoxious With Your Signaling While The Engine Runs
The battery alone will only honk the horn and flash the lights so many times before it runs out of juice. But while the vehicle is idling, you can honk the horn and flash the lights as much as you like. The engine is providing the power, not the battery.

Insulate
Insulation is the key to keeping warm in any situation. All of the metal in a vehicle will make it hard to keep it heated in cold weather. So rather than trying to heat the whole cab with your body heat, insulate your body with any material you have. Ideally, you would have a good sleeping bag for each seat in the vehicle, or at least a few blankets. Failing that, try wrapping up in clothes, outerwear, or even the carpeting ripped from the vehicle.

Car Cooking And Heating?
If you have food that you would like to warm up, pop the hood and place the food securely by the exhaust manifold. I’ve heard of a guy who had enough engine compartment space that he was able to weld a small Dutch oven to his engine block. He’d clamp down the lid to keep the food secure and away he’d go. A two-hour drive would cook a pot roast to perfection. Building on the concept of portable heat, you can turn rocks and bricks into space heaters that could be brought into the vehicle. First, you need to set up a heat-proof platform in the vehicle’s cab. Try tearing out the floor carpet to get down to the metal. A platform of bricks or rocks in the floor board will work, too. Then, get some rocks from a dry location, or maybe a few bricks if you have some in the vehicle. Next, you can build a fire outside of the vehicle, and throw the rocks or bricks in the fire to heat them up. Heat them for about 30 minutes in the fire and then scoop them out with a shovel or any other tool you have. Dust all the coals and sparks off of the bricks or rocks, and carefully set them on your fire-proof, heat-proof platform. Repeat as needed every few hours.