Knife Lost in Fog of Cybercommerce

I am quite frustrated. My hunting knife has not arrived yet.

I know everyone wants to read about this. No need to thank me.

I went to Amazon and ordered an Entrek Javalina from Knife Center. I like Knife Center. I have bought stuff from them before. The knife didn’t ship, so I contacted them. They said they didn’t know when they would receive it. What? This would have been good information to have when I placed the order. I thought the website said it was in stock, but they didn’t have it. I canceled and ordered from a different outfit. I elected to pay $7 extra for faster shipping. Squirrel season is nearly over. I can’t let the squirrels down.

I placed my order on the 23rd. I kept getting tracking updates saying the knife was in “pre-shipping,” meaning a label had been printed but the Post Office didn’t have the package yet.

This is 2018. An Amazon “seller” can be a fat guy who never gets out of bed except to go to the Post Office. “Pre-shipping” could mean he put the knife in a box and dumped it in a pile in his bedroom next to a mountain of dirty Star Wars underwear. I contacted the seller to get the facts. All I got back was the shipping date, order date, and tracking number, which is information I already had. I didn’t even get a note. “Sorry; we mailed it yesterday.” Whew! It would be exhausting to type something like that. I guess.

Long boring story short and still boring: I have no sheath knife. The squirrels are mocking me.

On the up side, I have a game camera on the way. I have to find out what’s roaming around in my yard. I thought a coyote dug up my blackberry plant and deposited a coyote stool in its place, but as I spend more time examining poop on the web (not on German websites; don’t worry), I am beginning to think it may be bobcat poo. My friend Mike says cats bury their poo==>bobcats are cats==>do the math.

Should I shoot the bobcat, if it exists? Interesting question.

I never really thought about shooting a bobcat. They don’t sound appetizing. I am not Chinese, after all. Also, I assumed they were protected and sacred on account of being semi-big cats. Turns out they’re not. You can shoot the bejeezus out of them. There is a season, but there is no bag limit.

This is a cut and paste of the bobcat rules:

Dec. 1 – March 31

By all legal rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, crossbows, bows, pistols and air guns.

Those with a hunting license may possess no more than 1 bobcat pelt between April 1 and Nov. 30, unless pelt has CITES tag. Also, bobcat pelts may not be taken out of Florida unless tagged. Bobcats may be chased with dogs year round.

Bag Limit: No Limits

Explain that if you can. If I can shoot 3,000 bobcats during the season, Florida will have no problem with it, but I can only keep one skin.

I don’t want a bobcat skin. Cats smell, and bobcat pelts probably smell, too. And what would I do with it? But it makes me angry that I can’t keep them. What am I supposed to do with them if I can’t keep them? Make a big cat-smelling pile of pelts in the pasture? Is it better for bobcat hides to rot than to adorn my tractor seat or whatever? I guess it is.

Why is there no bag limit? What does Florida have against bobcats? Why is there no explanation? Why are we tagging animals we want to get rid of? Once you have it tranquilized in the back of the van, why not put a pillow over its face and get it over with?

I will never understand hunting laws.

I don’t really plan to shoot a bobcat, although maybe I should, because I suppose it’s possible that a time will come when the ability to kill troublesome predators will be important. When Oprah wins the presidency, the economy tanks, and BLM starts sending reparations squads into the suburbs to confiscate groceries.

It would certainly improve my hunting skills.

If only I had a knife to skin bobcats with.

I found a bobcat recipe online. Come on. Seriously?

I remember cutting up a dead cat in college. Let me stress: this was for a course. I didn’t find it on the sidewalk. Anyway, the meat looked pretty good, and through the formaldehyde, there was a smell that could conceivably have been inviting, but there was also a catty sort of musky stankness in there. I would expect bobcat meat to be fragrant, and not in a good way. I can’t help wondering, though.

I did a couple of bad things with that cat. For one, I used its tail to decorate an elevator. One of the elevators in my dorm was missing a button. I uninstalled the cat’s tail and inserted it in the hole. It looked like a cat had somehow shoved itself through a 1″ aperture and gotten stuck inside the panel. It was hilarious. To me, anyway. Also, there was an occasion when I wanted to do some dissection at home, so I checked my cat out and walked across campus with it. I had the option of covering it up, but, well…

They gave us those cats in clear plastic bags. They were stiff, spreadeagled, with startled expressions on their faces. “I thought I was going to be adopted!”

I wonder what people thought.

Final thing: I had a buddy who went to that class with me. He could be squeamish about certain things, including cat whiskers. Every so often, I would yell, “HEY!”, and then when he looked, I would pull out one of the cat’s whiskers with a hemostat.

Good times.

It was not alive. I want to make that very clear.

My knife may not get here for a coon’s squirrel’s age, but the game camera will help keep me amused while I wait. I should call it a trail camera. That’s what Amazon calls it. It will turn on automatically when it sees movement, even at night. I’ll probably get a bunch of videos of squirrels mooning me and giving me the finger.

I’m thinking of getting surveillance cameras for the house. If we ever have to travel and leave the house empty, I would like to have video of any “dreamers” who show up to celebrate the American dream (or Cinco de Mayo) by stealing it. Is that not a PC thing to say? Sorry, but 92% of foreign-born federal prisoners are illegal aliens, so the facts are on my side. For a few hundred bucks you can get wifi cameras and a special router. The cameras will send video wherever you want. You can upload it to the cloud (i.e. Uncle Sam’s secret 4th-Amendment-destruction server farm).

I don’t know if I want video of my property in the cloud. I am completely aware that the government has ways of looking at stuff it has no right to look at, and I shouldn’t help them. I’m not doing anything illegal, but what if that changes? What if the government and I have a falling out and I decide to do something which is moral and correct but illegal? I guarantee you, they’ll be able to subpoena my security footage. Let me check.

Yes, I am correct. My two minutes of research indicate that there are two ways for prosecutors to get your home surveillance footage. They can get a warrant, which takes a little effort, or they can use a subpoena, which is about as hard as placing an order at Denny’s. And if they use a subpoena, they may not have to tell you. Nice.

What if I decide I want TWO bobcat pelts for some compelling reason, such as my truck needs seat covers? I better not tan them in front of my surveillance system.

I think a good alternative would be to store the data on a laptop hidden in the house. Burglars would be too stupid to look for it, the fuzz wouldn’t know about it, and if they found out, they would have to get a full-blown warrant to come get it. And I might not have what they wanted when they asked for it. You don’t have to preserve your home surveillance videos for all eternity. Mainly you want them for the immediate past, so you can nail thieves.

I’m sitting here trying to foil a government grab for bobcat-related data I will never possess, and the actual people who will end up using my plan will most likely be drug dealers and terrorists. Oh well. I’ll be in the cloud, being lazy, hoping for the best and trying to get by with one bobcat pelt. Uncle Sam will get whatever he wants, and eventually I’ll start eating Soylent Green and hating Goldstein every morning.

Did you know there might be cameras on your property right now? Uncle Sam doesn’t really need warrants for yard cameras that are sufficiently far from your house. The law on cameras is extremely oppressive. The government can put cameras in your trees and bushes without consulting you, for no good reason at all. Putting them in your house takes some legal maneuvering, but if you have a pasture or some woods, forget it. They can watch you swimming in your creek naked all day, and there is nothing you can do about it. You don’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” a few hundred feet from your front door, on a remote property in the middle of the woods, where you are not suspected of doing anything illegal. How about that?

How about this: a bobcat jacket and matching pants?

Just spitballing.

Liberty is drying up and dying, so maybe there is no point in brainstorming about ways to preserve it. At least if I’m on a big spread in the woods, I’ll have the comforting false impression that I’m free.

I hate to quit when I’m making such a great contribution to western thought, but I have to go to the dump now. I hope my knife gets here while squirrels are still legal.