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CalicoPenn

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Everything posted by CalicoPenn

  1. I had a 1975 Ford Maverick - inherited it from my sister - when I finally got rid of it by calling Victory Auto Parts (Yeah - I got a whole $35 for it), the tow truck driver took it in to the street, drained the oil, then spent the next 30 minutes revving the engine trying to get it to seize. The drivers were having a contest 0 the first person to get a Maverick to seize within 30 minutes won $100. Apparently Mavericks had a bit of a reputation for loose pistons. I had a Ford Explorer Sport Trac - I traded it in with 225K miles on it - I changed the oil regularly - just don't tell my me
  2. Well that's a rather harsh judgement to make about other Eagle Scouts, don't you think? They appear on this show, try pulling out some tried and true (and truly awful, frankly) BSA cooking techniques, and you're first thought is the quality of Eagle Scout may have gone down because the cooking techniques weren't as successful being translated in an indoor setting as they might have been in an outdoor camping setting? We've had a whole thread on here that pretty much boiled down to Cooking Merit Badge isn't very good at teaching cooking. And it isn't - its not supposed to be some
  3. I know this is late in the game but I'd like to point out that London, Ontario is about halfway between Buffalo, New York and Detroit, Michigan. Its about 550 miles away from NYC.
  4. I'm gonna counter-vent here. When the BSA announced this, with the barest sketch of what they thought would be how things would shake out for the Cub Scout program (and giving no details on what the Boy Scout program might look like), they also made it pretty darn clear that they would be releasing the details later - sometime in 2018 for the Cub Scout program and a stay tuned for the Boy Scout program. Ok - I get it - folks are frustrated by what they see as a lack of communication on the details but my question to everyone is simply - why is it National's and/or your local Council's fa
  5. J. Depp moved to France so at least one of them kept their promise.
  6. Skeptic, Seton is a bit of a mixed bag. Yes, he found the bones of the wolves involved in the incident reported by the trapper (who actually made it to his cabin before the wolves could get to him) which proved the trapper's story to be true. But, his writing about wolves and other animals were highly anthropomorphic which led people to question the factual items in his stories. William Burroughs named Seton as one of the "sham naturalists", a nature faker that confused the American public by publishing fictional animal stories and embellished true tales from the viewpoint of the anima
  7. Until the late 1300's, the equivalent term for Girl referred to any child of any gender - girl or boy. If you were a "boy" in 1320, you were publicly called a girl. So how about we just keep the name as Boy to make up for all those years boys were once known as girls? Or keep it as Boy since I suspect most girls that will want to join the Boy Scouts will be those girls stereo-typically called Tomboys anyway. Or how about we just call it the BSA, or take a page from the US YMCA, that since 2010 has called themselves the Y, and call the BSA the B? No one told the YMCA or the
  8. I consider Baden-Powell, Seton, Beard and Audubon to be primarily naturalists. They studied plants and animals and/or encouraged others to study nature. They didn't spend much time on thinking about or encouraging the conservation of natural resources. Hornaday and T. Roosevelt I put in the ranks of conservationists (though Hornaday was zoologist which pretty much automatically makes him a naturalist too). Both were leaders in the forefront of conservation. Were any of them environmentalists? I would suggest no - they weren't really concerned with the systems of nature, the syst
  9. The people she is describing as naturalists are not naturalists (ok, they could be naturalists also but not in the context she is using the term). Naturalists study nature - especially plants and/or animals. In the context of climate change, naturalists are only concerned with it as a way to study how animals and plants react to it - they aren't advocating a position either way. Environmentalists work to preserve the environment - and yes, these days, it's pretty much done in the political zone. What she is comparing environmentalists to are better referred to as Conservationis
  10. What are the parameters of the gift? Maximum cost? Is it a random choice type gift - everyone that brings a gift leaves with something? What movies were being discussed at camp - maybe a DVD of it (if it's within the cost parameters). The most popular song/artist - Lady Gaga? Someone else? CD perhaps of that person or with that song? Or maybe go with a Christmas theme - Target has the Jim Carrey Grinch movie for under 15 bucks. Or get the classic - A Charlie Brown Christmas. Or make up a Frosty the Snowman Kit - a cheap porkpie hat, cheap scarf, cheap pipe (corncob
  11. I get where you're coming from but I think you have the right answer to the wrong question. If the question was does the committee (chair) have the right to tell the den leader to promote the sponsors troop, then yes, I fully agree with you. But that is not the question being asked. The questioned being asked is does the Committee Chair (or Chartering Organizatoin) have the right to tell the parents what Troop they MUST transition to and the answer to that must always be no. They can encourage it, they can try to force it by banning den visits to other units, but they cannot tell P
  12. RH Macy would and the Gimbel brothers would. They used to send people to other stores all the time if they didn't have something. It may seem counter-intuitive but since customer service is the number one reason people have loyalty to stores, it makes perfect sense. Want to really impress a customer when you don't have something in stock that they need? Call a competitor to see if they have it in stock and then ask them to put it on hold for your customer. Yes - you might lose a single sale, but that customer is coming back.
  13. Yes - it came from the BSA Health and Safety Team - they issue a lot of health and safety hints and tips - its one of the ways the BSA tries to educate folks. But they weren't creating policy or rules when they created this and made it available. They were providing folks with safety tips. No where does this say these are policies and rules of the BSA. I think you are missing my point - and my point is that too often, Scouters take these things that National sometimes creates and believe that they are now policies and rules when they are not meant to be. I can understand how peopl
  14. Yes - we have a responsibility to adhere to established program policies and rules - ACTUAL policies and rules. We also have a responsibility NOT to create our own policies and rules. Part of that means not turning things the BSA sends out as helpful hints or safety reminders that have nothing to do with policies and rules into some kind of defacto policy or rule and then get even more people upset about the ridiculous policies and rules that the BSA creates when the fact is the BSA never did so in the first place. These are NOT BSA policies and rules. They are simply safety tips t
  15. I'm calling foul at use of a certain word here (which is included in the thread title). These are NOT BSA rules. These are not BSA policy. These are safety pointers - suggestions for using a hammock safely and without doing damage to trees. No where in any of this is the word must or any other word that would require you to follow these pointers. Everything is written on a "should" basis. We spend more than enough time going back of forth on actual rules and policies. Can we stop getting people all hyped up over things that are not intended to be policy or rules?
  16. I think you need to get a lot more information about what it is the Pack is "supposed" to pay the Troop for. There is a possibility that no one's brought up yet - if your Pack has "Scout Accounts" where a portion of any fundraising you do is set aside on a per cub basis to help them pay for things like registration, outings, day camp, etc., it may be that the Pack at some point agreed to forward any money in those "Scout Accounts" to the Troop if the boy crosses over. My suggestion would be to flat out eliminate the Scout Accounts - they're a record keeping nightmare, and are
  17. Can we take a step back a bit and go back to some basics? We're discussing one thing in the context of another which is getting both wrong. There are very few laws written to have a zero tolerance in them. Legislators don't like writing them and the Judiciary doesn't like being constrained by them. Even mandatory sentencing laws can be overcome with creative effort by a judge. By laws, I also include ordinances of municipal governments. What is being discussed are policies and not laws. Policies are created by non-legislative governmental bodies like school boards and lib
  18. Scouting magazine's purpose - its reason for being - has always been to promote the agenda of the BSA. I remember getting Boys Life when I was a Scout - as a Cub Scout, I was excited to have my own magazine subscription with a magazine coming to my home addressed to me. I couldn't tell you about any of the articles in it. As a Boy Scout, it was just something that came in the mail - we dropped my subscription when I was 12 - my two younger brothers were getting it - I could read theirs. I will tell you flat out that the only things that I can remember reading (other than a few ads) wer
  19. Brother moved to Phoenix - bragged about it being 115 degrees and a "dry heat". Called to gloat when it was 15 below here - I responded "yeah, but it's a dry cold". Big City Snow Day Thresholds: Nashville = 1/2 inch Washington DC = 1" New York City = 8-10" Cleveland/Milwaukee = 12-14" Boston/Buffalo/Chicago/Minneapolis = "what's a snow day?" Winter Camping in Great Lakes States - many inches of snow - temps below 20. Winter camping in Orange County - 75 degrees and cloudy. Good luck building a quinzhee with sand.
  20. Not that the Scouts pictured could have earned any of those merit badges anyway.
  21. I'm going to suggest that the disaster you had was the Troops fault. You planned a Boy Scout outing an invited families. My Troop had a family camping weekend every other year - and never had the kinds of issues you faced. Why? Because we didn't plan a Boy Scout outing - we planned a Family outing. We camped in the same Boy Scout camp ground - used the big shelter for a "dining hall". The adult leaders cooked. The Scouts ran food from the kitchen to the tables (just like summer camp "waiters"). Dishes were washed by Scouts and adult leaders (we did cheat though and used pape
  22. That's a good question - my answer would be that the Social Security Administration does not consider sleep apnea to be a disability qualifying someone for disability benefits so no, it is not a disability. It is a medical condition and just because something is a medical condition doesn't mean its a disability.
  23. Remember why he created the Boy Scouts in the first place - he was disillusioned on the battlefield by the lack of preparedness his soldiers had for basic outdoor skills needed by soldiers. Orienteering, cooking outdoors, first aid, signalling, setting up camps, etc. So keeping that in mind, and that one of his goals was to better prepare boys to be better prepared to become soldiers, I think if he were around now, with the military we now have, he would be insisting girls be part of the program since women are now soldiers so both boys and girls should be better prepared for that, and t
  24. I'll be blunt - if an adult can't go to summer camp for a week, or camp out for a weekend, without using a CPAP machine, then they don't belong in the woods with the Scouts in the first place. These machines are being used to treat something the doctors like to call "obstructive sleep apnea" and I like to call snoring. The medical community has come up with a new way to separate people/insurance companies from their money by declaring something that has been happening for millennia a "severe health problem". Severe? Deaths by sleep apnea are extremely rare - like immeasurably rare.
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