Simple Living and Simple Travel

I ordered a pack of Swiss Safe Emergency Mylar Thermal Blankets & Bonus Gold Foil Space Blanket. Designed for NASA. One for my daypack and one in my pickup (the old boy scout thing). On short hikes, I frequently just take a good size hip pack, one in there. Anyway, one of the 4-star reviews caught my eye. The person wrote there are quite a few homeless people in his area, with temps near freezing with heavy rain in the winter. “It's not unusual to see someone sleeping on a bench, the ground, under some bushes, etc...There is one woman who sleeps on the same bench pretty much every night wrapped in blankets. She's out there in the open, every day, even in the rain. I drove by her one day on my way to work and she literally had frost on her blanket. Frost, on a human being. “These blankets are cheap enough that I buy them to hand out to houseless people who look like they need to keep warm/dry. They are small enough to be carried in a pocket, have many different uses, a

I recently read somewhere that Sherlock Holmes never said, Elementary, my dear Watson. What?! I’ve listened to quite a few Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce (my favorite duo, well maybe not Nigel Bruce) episodes on the SiriusXM Classic Radio channel and watched them on youtube. I could have sworn I heard that. So I looked into it. Apparently, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote those exact words for his detective. But Doyle’s character did say ‘elementary’ and ‘my dear Watson’ quite often. It seems the whole phrase started with other authors. Could be wrong. I never had a Taser and can’t see me ever purchasing one. But recently, I came across the story behind the idea. It brought to mind some books I read as a kid. It’s actually a loose acronym of the book, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. Jack Cover, the inventor of the modern ECD, named his prototype after the YA sci-fi novel he loved, and the very idea for a less-lethal electric gun was largely inspired by the fictional one descri