BHM employee Toby Stanley, Jr, and I won the Tin Cup Golf Tournament at Cedar Bend Golf Course near Gold Beach this weekend.  Actually, we won the “net score” championship, that is, after deducting our handicap. Toby is a 12 handicap and I am a 22 so we got a 17 handicap for the tournament. We were in 7th place at the end of yesterday, but pulled out the win today on the final hole when Toby sunk a long birdie putt. We both shot an 84 today, which is the lowest score I’ve ever shot in my life. There were eighteen two-man teams.

Toby is a former member of the GBHS golf team, and he is accustomed to shooting in the high 70s or low 80s. Two other former GBHS team members, Tyler Ward and Dane Ross, won the “gross score” championship. Two current members of the GBHS team, son Robby Duffy and Matt Anderson, took second place for lowest gross score.

I am, needless to say, really jazzed.

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Son Robby and several friends graduated from high school this evening. Robby was among the 49 kids graduating from Gold Beach High School. He’s headed for Oregon State University to study engineering. We gave out four scholarships, three to kids graduating tonight and one to an employee, Toby Stanley, who got his GED last week.

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The TMEN Fair in Puyallup, Washington was terrific. It was better than the old preparedness shows and even better than the MREA fair in Wisconsin, which had been the best fair in the country. It is almost exactly the type of show I have envisioned for many years since the preparedness shows ended, but I didn’t have the deep pockets to take the financial risk of putting on such an event. Every aspect of self-reliance, from sawing big logs into boards to classes in canning food. My hat is off to Bryan Welch, publisher of TMEN, for putting this fair together.

I hadn’t planned on attending TMEN’s next two fairs in San Rafael, California in September and in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, also in September, but after this experience I’ll probably attend both. Mother Earth News has come a log way back to her roots under Bryan Welch; John Shuttleworth would have been pleased. I’ll help Mother promote their fairs however I can.

By the way, she’s slender and tall, and damn good looking. No photo here though. I didn’t even ask. We had a very enjoyable two-day conversation.

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Claire Wolfe, Lenie, and I will be hosting a Backwoods Home Magazine booth at The Mother Earth News Fair in Puyallup, Washington this Saturday and Sunday, June 4-5. In the old days, TMEN would not have allowed us in the door, but current TMEN publisher, Bryan Welch, has a more enlightened view of the world. I’m grateful to him, and think he has done a lot of very smart things for Mother since he took over several years back. Obviously, this is one of them.

It will be at the Puyallup Fair and Events Center, which is well south of Seattle. Here’s the info from their website:
Mother Earth News Fair hours: Sat: 9 am – 7 pm, Sun: 9 am – 6 pm
Admission: One day: $15, Two Days: $25, Ages 17 & Under: FREE
Phone: 800 234-3368
Email: customerservice@ogdenpubs.com
Website: http://www.motherearthnewsfair.com

Claire Wolfe, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, will be autographing copies of her book, Hardyville Tales. You may have noticed that we have never, ever published a photo of Claire Wolfe, either in the magazine’s print issue or on the website. Now is your chance to see this mysterious woman in the flesh. I’m certainly curious. I’ve never seen her either, since the one time she visited our Gold Beach office I was traveling. Is she tall, is she small, is she skinny, is she fat? I can hardly wait to find out all of that!

We always have lots of specials at these shows, so you can save some money by dropping by. You’ll know me and Lenie by the Backwoods Home Magazine T-shirts we’ll be wearing. If you wear one too, I’ll give you an anthology FREE. If you don’t have a T-shirt, I’ll sell you one there.

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BHM has sponsored the Gold Beach High School boys’ golf team the last four years, so I get the major perk of getting to play golf with some of the players quite often during practice rounds. Since they outhit me from the tee by 40 to 60 yards, it’s a challenge for me but my game has steadily improved by trying to emulate their picture-perfect form.

I tend to be a talker during our matches, imparting the wisdom of my years. And I occasionally throw out a challenge to them. During one of their pre-shot routines on the par-4, 277-yard Hole 8 at Cedar Bend, I’ll sometimes blurt out, “”Twenty bucks cash if you can reach the green!”

I like to put pressure on them this way. I think it helps focus their minds. They always respond with excellent shots, although a 277-yard shot to a small green definitely favors me keeping my money so I seldom have to pay out.

The other day I decided to team up with a former high school player and current employee of BHM, Toby Stanley Jr., and we challenged GBHS’s two best golfers, Matt Anderson and my son, Robby Duffy, to a nine-hole contest. It would be a five-dollar match-play scramble, that is, we’d each use the best shots of our team for the next shot, and we’d win holes rather than keep track of our overall number of strokes. I asked them to give us a stroke on the three hardest holes to make up for my obvious lack of length off the Tee and relative lack of accuracy with my wedges. They agreed.

On the day of the scheduled match, Matt, the number one seed, said to me, “Dave, we want to sweeten the bet. If we win, you let us take a half day off of school tomorrow to watch the girls’ final day of play at District (the girls’ team’s League championship), and if we lose we’ll work a day in your yard.” I agreed, although I cautioned them I couldn’t officially sanction them skipping school for half a day.

On the very first hole of the match, a par-3, I topped my Tee-shot and it bounced up in the air two feet, then landed an inch behind the tee. Toby’s tee-shot went left of the green and Robby and Matt put both of their tee-shots on the green. They won that hole easily to go one-up.

On the second hole, a par-5, one of the holes where we were getting a stroke, I sliced my tee-shot way right across an adjacent fairway, and Toby hooked his left behind some trees. Robby and Matt both hit the ball 270 yards down the center of the fairway. It didn’t look so good for Toby and me.

So I huddled with Toby and told him that this was our time to strike back because Matt and Robby thought they were in a cake-walk. “We can get into their minds right now,” I said “if we can at least split this hole.” I suggested he try and hit his second shot to the right near some trees, which I knew were about 60 yards from the green. “That’ll make our third shot a back-yard shot for me,” I said. “We’ll have a chance to ‘up and down’ it from there.”

By a back-yard shot, I meant it was a shot I practice every day in my back yard. I hit hundreds of balls about 60 yards to a horse trough off my back deck. I’ve got that shot down pretty well.

Toby delivered a perfect shot to the designated spot and I chipped the ball to the green, about 8 feet from the pin, just like in my back yard. We made the putt for a birdie. The boys put their second shot on the edge of the green and needed two puts for their birdie. Since they were giving us a stroke on this hole, we won the hole and evened the match. We were back in it, and the boys suddenly realized it wasn’t the cake-walk they were expecting.  I told Toby, “Now we’re inside their heads.”

From then on, Toby and I ‘Mutt and Jeff’ed’ it, meaning that he would hit a good shot, especially from the tee where I lacked length, then I’d follow with a good chip. We complemented each other just about perfectly, each coming through when the other one faltered. We set up a couple of more back-yard shots and one of us would deliver on the chip while the other delivered on the putt. On Hole 8 we won when I made a short chip that was identical to a shot I practice every day over a small pond in my back yard. Instead of a pond, I had to hit over a mound and let the ball trickle down a sloping green to within a foot of the hole. They conceded the putt and match.

Today Robby and Matt are working for free — and Toby for pay — digging up Lenie’s big garden in a drizzly rain. A victory made possible by the wisdom of age is very sweet.

I’ve proposed another match to them. This time they would not have to give us any strokes, but they’d have to let me hit from the forward tees to make up for my lack of length off the Tee. They are considering it.

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I thought it kind of peculiar this afternoon when I saw a hen carrying around half an egg in front of the chicken coop. I mentioned it to Lenie and she said, “Maybe we’ve got a rat!” Rats often carry an egg outside the hen house rather than eat it where they find it.

Since they typically carry out their egg raids in pairs, I went back to the coop and opened up a closed nesting box we use as a rat trap. It contains four rat traps, and sure enough we had caught a big one.

I’m pretty careful of rats since they carry disease. I used gloves to handle the trap, put both the trap and rat in three layers of plastic bags, then set it in the back of my truck for deposit in the dumpster at work. I won’t keep a dead rat in my house trash.

Sam reset all the traps, so I’m hoping to catch the other one soon. We wash our hands pretty thoroughly after messing with a dead rat.

The good news is there were twelve eggs in the nesting boxes.

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I began accepting silver coins for subscriptions and other books five months ago when the price of silver was about $25 an ounce. Today it is over $45. My motive for accepting silver was to guard against anticipated inflation, but I didn’t expect silver to rise this quickly. I can only assuume it means that inflation is going to accelerate more quickly than I had anticipated.

If you do buy products from BHM with silver, I’ll either donate the excess your silver buys to our “free subscriptions to GIs” fund or you can email me first and I’ll adjust upwards the products your silver can buy.

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Backwoods Home Magazine’s Senior Editor John Silveira signed a movie contract yesterday to allow a classified advertisement he created for BHM in 1997 to be featured in an upcoming movie to be titled, “Safety Not Guaranteed.” The advertisement, on page 92 of Issue No. 47, is about time-travel and it has become a minor internet sensation in the past 14 years with several “pretenders” claiming authorship of the ad and many thousands of fans wondering if the ad’s creator really did go back in time.

The idea for the movie has been in the works for several years, and the screen writer, Derek Connolly, and director, Colin Trevorrow, had  been searching for the “real” author of the ad so they could get permission to use it. John was aware of the internet chatter surrounding the ad, although he had not realized just how big and extensive the chatter had become, and he did not know someone was creating a movie around it.

Since at least 2003, I had been after him to write an article about all the letters he was getting in response to the ad, but he resisted, saying he wanted to continue the mystery. I had a lot of other important stuff for him to do, such as creating “The Coming American Dictatorship” series, so we let the ad lay in the dust while the internet buzz got louder and louder.

Finally, in 2010, while preparing Issue No. 125, John gave in to my badgering and we agreed to start a new series called, “Do you remember when…,” which would begin by revealing the facts behind the time-travel ad. By then, several other people had taken credit for writing the ad, so I think he wanted to set the record straight. The first article in the series was titled, “The time-travel ad.” In it, John not only revealed himself as the author and gave incontestable proof of that fact, but he disclosed that the ad’s creation had actually taken place nearly 10 years before its 1997 inclusion in BHM; it had been part of an unfinished novel he had written with the working title of “Time Travel.”

The Issue 125 article became part of the internet lore. Colin Trevorrow read it almost immediately, called John and said, “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

Over the past several months they worked out an agreement for use of the ad in the movie. John asked for nothing (they’re paying him anyway) except for the opportunity to have some of his novels read by a big-time agent. He’s always wanted to be a novelist; his job as a BHM editor these past 20-plus years has just been a temporary job while he pursues his novels. (His latest are called “Danielle,” the first of a trilogy, and “The Devil You Know.” He’s never published any of them and he’s rebuffed my offers to do so, saying BHM doesn’t have the ability to distribute a novel. So I hope the movie catches the eye of a big-time agent.

Coincident with the signing of the movie contract yesterday, I also signed an agreement relinquishing BHM’s interest in the ad. Technically, BHM held the copyright to the ad since we copyrighted the issue in which it appeared. In exchange for my signature, the movie makers promised not to hold the magazine up to ridicule in the movie. That’s a reasonable request, I thought, since BHM has suffered through a number of unfair journalistic attacks over the past 20 years by reporters who thought the magazine’s politics were too far right.

Although neither I nor the magazine will benefit monetarily from the movie, it was agreed that both John and BHM will be allowed to “ride the coattails” of any success the movie experiences by bragging about where the ad first appeared. John will also be allowed to publish — simultaneously with the release of the movie — (sometime in 2012), a book containing some of the more than a thousand letters he has received in response to the ad. We’ll help him do the book.

Stars in the move, so far, are Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, and Jake M. Johnson. For more details, you can go here. For even more entertaining, and often downright ridiculous, information surrounding the time-travel ad, just google “time travel ad” or a similar combination of words. You’ll even encounter a few sites claiming authorship of the ad. But John Silveira is the real author, and now he’s going to be in the movies.

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Want to see a very effective ad against government overspending? Click here. It’s made  by Citizens Against Government Waste.

Here’s another ad, called “The Deficit Trials,” which was rejected by all three TV Networks in 1986. The debt was only about $2 trillion back then; today it is more than $14 trillion.

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One of the obvious lessons we can take from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami is the need to be individually prepared for any catastrophe, no matter what the cause. There have been many news stories coming out of Japan about people having to go for several days without food or water. Fresh drinking water, or the ability to purify contaminated water, is obviously something that needs to be part of your preparations. Many people in Japan probably thought their government would help them in the event of a catastrophe, but it is clear the government is not able to cope with such a large emergency.

A central theme of Backwoods Home Magazine through the years has been the need to take individual responsibility for yourself and your family, and that includes having enough food and water and other supplies on hand in the event of an emergency. If you get forced out of your home, we’ve stressed the need to have a “grab and go” kit. We’ve warned that the stores would quickly run out of food and everything else in an emergency, and that has happened in Japan.

I’ve asked Oliver to create a special section on the BHM home page that links to some of our past preparedness articles. (They’re in the box located just below the photo of the new issue.) Please take the time to read some of them, and take a lesson from the current catastrophe in Japan and reexamine your preparedness. Beef up your pantry and other supplies if need be, and check out the adequacy of your “grab and go kit.” Don’t expect others to help you in an emergency; you must be able to take care of yourself.

You have the luxury of time on your hands now to plan your preparedness. Don’t miss this opportunity.

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