SilverMallard

Fishing reports about getting skunked and losing the lower unit on a hump or snag are AT LEAST as valuable as the ones where a blind guy with one arm caught 40 lunkers in 4 hours, used less than 1/4 tank of gas, and stumbled upon a cove full of naked, sunbathing, supermodels who said they do that every day in the same spot and he lists the GPS coordinates. Well, OK, maybe all but the naked supermodels w/GPS coordinates part. Knowing what NOT to do and where NOT to go is FAR more important than knowing where everyone else will be...especially on a lake as large and busy as Table Rock. In my opinion, "dittos" are also important. They confirm the original report. Among fishermen, confirmation is good. I have known guides and amateurs who posted false reports on purpose to congregate folks AWAY from their hot spots they wanted to go back to for a few more days. I don't know of this happening around here, but it was a common guide tactic in TX when pressure was getting high or there was a tournament coming up.

Ah! Yes, that is a great price on Frogg Toggs. But they made those by the millions. I'm sure there are some lots out there somewhere that are dirt cheap. Kind of like Big Lots and MacFrugals do things: buy up containers full of stuff that got stalled somewhere in the supply chain or was inventory with a chain or store that went out of business or filed bankruptcy.

Michael, talking about the low-end one. It's new. He has two other wading jackets that run about $120 and about $250 (approx). But they also have the "shell" version that is listed at $65 on the Redington website right now. I just happened to look at it this morning before I posted this. It's called the Hunter River Wading Jacket.

Redington also has a new breathable PVC jacket out for $65.

Education Outdoors Inc. has agreed to donate 10% of their sales revenue from the outdoor education game CAMP to Southwest Missouri Fly Fishers for the next 6 months on all sales generated in the Ozarks. You can purchase the game at Backcountry Outfitters in Springfield, River Run Outfitters in Branson, or at Lilley’s Landing in Branson. We will be contacting most of the fly shops throughout northern Arkansas, southern Missouri, eastern Oklahoma, St. Louis, and Kansas City in the near future. So look for the game at your favorite fly shop in any of these areas soon. If they don’t have it, ask for it…and tell them to contact Ken Morrow at 417-230-5282 for ordering information. CAMP is a fabulous new outdoor education board game featuring four unique levels of play in one game. So you can play with the grandkids, kids, and other adults all at the same time without anyone getting bored or frustrated. It plays much like Trivial Pursuit, but when you draw a question card, the level 1 question might be a picture of a Canada Goose and the question asks what bird it is. But the same level 4 question is how many sub-species of Canada Goose there are. The answer is 7, and only someone pretty knowledgeable about waterfowl would know that. CAMP’s design and production are top quality, rivaling that of Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. And the average time required to play a game with four players is about twenty minutes. It is being heralded by educators and parents as the best family-oriented and outdoor education game they have ever played. The suggested retail price of CAMP is $24.99. And it makes an excellent gift or addition to your family, resort, or lodge game library. So support SMFF, your local fly shop, and outdoors education by picking up your copy of CAMP right away!

100% agreed, jOrOb.

WJ has two NEW rain jackets out in their 2007 line. They both look way awesome! One is designed to be a cold-weather jacket and the other is designed for warm-weather rainwear. The ultralight rain jacket is still available as a pack jacket.

All I said was those 3 people on the tailwater side of TRD were no threat. I didn't say there is no threat. Blowing a dam like TRD is not a simple feat, folks. This I KNOW. A truck bomb in the parking lot wouldn't do it. About that much high-grade demolition explosives in the right place WOULD. But the parking lot isn't it and a few scuba divers operating in broad daylight would be pretty obvious due to the amount and type of ordnance they would have to place properly to do it. And folks with those skills and access to those munitions are actually being monitored pretty closely...but not by the USACE! The Murrow building changed a lot of things and 9/11 changed a whole lot more. Just because you don't SEE counter-terrorist security measures does not mean they do not exist. As a matter of fact, if you DID see most of it, it wouldn't work very well...in the context of a free and open society. But here's the really big question I had in MY mind when I read these posts: If you see something you consider threatening or suspicious, why...after all that has happened and all we have been told...do you not call 9-1-1 and report it? THAT is the first line of defense. If we sit around and wait for the big boom to see if our suspicions were correct, the first line of defense...the most important line of defense...has been neutralized. Obviously, in spite of the rhetoric here, the posters instinctively knew what they saw was not a threat. Either that or they were secretly hoping to see a catastrophe...which I want to doubt. FYI, there is tons of good, authoritative info on the Internet about these threats and about para-military and military demolition and munitions. If you want to be informed as to what a REAL threat would entail, it's there for you to educate yourself about. But here's the bottom line: in a free society, if someone really wants to commit an act of terrorism or mayhem, they CAN. The BEST way to prevent it is for the citizens to be informed and observant, and to notify the authorities the MINUTE their alarm bells go off. There is no criminal or civil penalty for being WRONG about such a thing...unless you're doing it repeatedly and on purpose, in which case YOU would be a terrorist. FYI, Powersite would be relatively EASY. But the damage would be next to zero...comparatively speaking. One more thing, do you really think that with all the fishermen running around with Aquaview cameras on their bass boats that the gov't hasn't employed some pretty cheap and effective technology to monitor high risk targets? I was a surveillance and comms expert in counter-terrorism for the US gov't in the 1990s. I was operating against Al Qaeda when most Americans had never heard of them. The gov't does a LOT that we don't know about. They even did a lot that I didn't know about...as I occassionally discovered accidentally. But the gov't cannot do too much to protect us from ourselves without getting in serious trouble. Thus, Tim McVeigh and the Murrow building.

The reality is that Disney does use proxy companies to speculate and scout real estate all over the country both for development of future projects and for flipping. The Disney name drives property values up. So they buy stuff, leak that they bought it, wait for values to jump due to speculation, and then dump it. They make a LOT of money doing this. And every once in awhile they actually build something on a piece of it...which perpetuates the whole deal. It's a byproduct of what they do. There ARE, in fact, such entities scouting property in the Ozarks and have been for about 20 years now. But that does NOT mean Disney has any intention of ACTUALLY building a park here. And even if Disney WANTS to build one, they are a LONG WAY from actually doing so due to lack of infrastructure (high-volume highways and airports). And there was truly a group looking to build a raceway S of Branson a few years back. But NASCAR was just one organization's name being kicked around. Being the "big dog," the name sort of "stuck" to the proposal. But NASCAR had made NO commitments. I haven't heard anything about that boondoggle in over 2 years now. Just because someone asks about a piece of property...whether it is for sale or not and what would someone take for it, or if the gov't would improve infrastructure IF such-and-such were done...does not mean it's a REAL development project with legs. It just means people are considering it and exploring the situation to determine the feasibility/attractiveness of a given idea. But folks get wind of these things, think they have the "inside scoop," and start rumors flying about how it is HAPPENING. Undeveloped land and even developed residential property values in the Ozarks are VERY low when compared to other regions of the country. This has attracted speculators and developers for decades. It won't stop anytime soon. There is nothing new about the big boys sniffing around our neck o the woods. But you have no idea whether or not they are at all serious until the PULL PERMITS for construction. And those are a matter of public record.

troutchaser and Phil, that's my point about subject matter expertise. When you have a whole cadre of teachers with degrees in SOCIOLOGY (education degrees), that's about all they know. And you cannot teach what you don't know. Sociology is all about group behavior and dynamics. So they know a little about making sheeple. And that's what they teach. A FREE society cannot thrive on an education system that makes sheeple. The Nazis and Communists thrived on such an education system. It works great for authoritarian societies. And this was all done intentionally and began with a core group of educators from the University of Chicago who were devout communists and socialists...not exactly interested in developing independent, free-thinking, self-sufficient citizens of a FREE society of equals. I graduated from HS in 1984. And most of MY teachers had subject matter degrees and taught in their fields of expertise...until I moved to TX for HS. There most were coaches with degrees in PE and minors in education. Luckily, I had the foundation to take my education upon myself. I spent 1/2 my time in the school library and 1/2 my time...literally...TEACHING the school's computer science classes with a coach babysitting and taking the credit. Our speech and drama teacher had a degree in Spanish. Our Spanish teacher had no degree. Our biology and chemistry teacher had degrees in biology. And our English teachers had degrees in education. Two of the best teachers I had were coaches. But they had subject matter degrees in History. The 1980s was really when the change occurred and most teachers no longer had degrees in the subjects they taught because the teacher programs had changed in the 1970s to requiring a degree in education with tiny concentrations for certification in subject matter areas. taxidermist, you are dead right in your last post except for that bit about getting rid of school sports. But I still say that testing is one of the first steps in the right direction. Without testing, you cannot diagnose the problems. And if you cannot diagnose them, you cannot fix them. I'm not suggesting that standardized testing is perfect or the end-all-be-all solution to the problem. But it is a necessary element of correcting a 40 year society-wide screw-up.

When y'all read my posts you need to bear in mind that I am the guy who is always saying there isn't but a hair's width difference between the two parties on fiscal policy. They both love tax-n-spend, pork, and are DEEP in the pockets of Wall Street and the oil companies. But there is a difference I mentioned above that triggered some discussion about D v. R. The oilco's KNOW they have a VETO right now. They won't KNOW that with almost anyone else who gets elected...from either party. When GW was considering running for President, his FIRST phone call for advice went to King Faud of Saudi Arabia. Drilling in ANWR, ordering the EPA not to enforce the Clean Air Act, making backdoor attempts to gut the ESA and CRP, hocking the scam that is ethanol, etc. GW is sold out to the oil industry through and through. Oh, one other thing to keep in mind: I am a Republican and worked for the GW Bush campaign in 2000 and voted for him twice.

It's a bad deal. They've got us over a barrel. Pun intended. It is actually cutting into my fishing. And I already down-sized from a 4x4 4dr truck to a small sedan to increase my gas mileage by about 50%. The oil co's have 2 years left during which they KNOW they have a veto protecting them from the gov't...thus, the consumers. I don't expect to see it get any better until Feb 2009. And I expect it to get ridiculous in the meantime.

I was making a broad generalization...comparing our teachers of today to our teachers of yesteryear, Germany's teachers, and Japan's teachers (where I lived for 3 years and got to know a few). Of course there are some outstanding teachers, admins, and counselors in the public education system. God bless them! I don't know how they do it anymore. My best duck hunting buddy for many years was one such teacher who just recently retired. His wife is an excellent guidance counselor. I have two teachers in my family...the SIL I mentioned before and a niece. The SIL tries very hard and is way above average in today's public school system. My niece is severely learning disabled and barely snuck through college and certification. And I wouldn't want either of them teaching MY kids. I have dozens of more public school educators as friends and former teachers...who are now retired. Funny thing...I don't know but maybe 1-3 of the 20 or so who would disagree with me or take issue with anything I've posted here. Many of my opinions have been heavily influenced by them. I don't know you Thom. So I am not categorizing you in any way. My statements are about the PROFESSION and INSTITUTION. I meant no offense to any individual. But I realize my words and opinions on this matter rub many the wrong way. I wish they didn't. But I will not apologize for my opinion. And, Thom, if YOU have a right to one, so do I. We just happen to disagree. But stop acting like I attacked you, because I did no such thing.

In my experience, guidance counselors are usually burned out or incompetent teachers. Administrators are personally ambitious teachers who really don't like hanging around with kids that much, but prefer bossing around other teachers. And school systems today have boatloads of both compared to what they had when I was in secondary school. It is these folks who run our schools. When folks infer or argue that school administrators and counselors are not "teachers," they are really out in left field. You cannot find a public school admin or counselor who does not have the same education credentials and then some as the classroom teachers, and they have some classroom experience. That makes them all teachers in my book. The Executive Chef might not be in the kitchen working over a hot stove, but he's still a chef. You folks can argue about this until the cows come home. But there isn't a successful large organization on the planet that doesn't have standardized performance monitoring against an objective standard. And American public school teachers are the laughing stock of the global education community. My wife and I once walked into a room where our sister-in-law was doing "homework" in her last Masters in Education class. She was using 3-ruled paper and a jumbo pencil to print the alphabet. My wife asked her what she was doing. She said that this was her assignment for class. My wife looked at her very funny and asked quite seriously, "Didn't you master that skill already in the first grade?" This SIL is a VERY successful teacher a few years later. She commands top dollar at a very "respected" school district. And she gets rave performance reviews. Her students out-perform the average by quite a bit. But my wife and I recently had to sit her and her husband down and explain to them how to teach their 13 year old son how to organize his homework assignments so that he would not lose/forget them. I'm sorry, but we have NO respect for American school teachers' competency and training. And we DEMAND that these people paid with tax dollars to prepare tomorrow's good citizens are routinely TESTED and MONITORED to ensure that they are meeting at least some sort of gross minimum standard. All you have to do is hire a few recent high school graduates to flip burgers or change oil at Jiffy Lube to figure out that our public education system is failing miserably.

Being as I am married to a product of the German system of public education, I think I can address this. It has positives and negatives. And both of you guys have nailed the major ones. The system is good at guiding kids toward their strengths and working on their identified weaknesses. They do NOT ignore the weaknesses. They ensure a satisfactory mastery of those areas for independent adult function in their society. They DO give kids incentives to pursue their identified strengths. And that does mean some relative disincentives should they choose to pursue areas in which they do not show strong aptitude. And it does mean certain coursework choices are limited for the kids with lower academic aptitudes. What their system does NOT do is push EVERYONE toward the lowest common denominator or coddle mediocrity like ours does! Interestingly, it was taxidermist who advocated the German model. Yet he opposes standardized performance testing, which is the foundation of the German educational system. NOBODY there gets a high school diploma without passing a rigorous standardized graduation examination. Schools and teachers with too many kids failing that and other intermediate exams along the way get FIXED...PDQ! It is comical to a German to think that they will not be judged by a standardized, objective performance test and strict minimum performance guidelines in everything they do but sleeping! And they have a very strong social premium places on excellence in all aspects of life. And they do not fear competition and merit-based rewards. They understand from a very early age that such is the nature of life. On the other hand, if you want to own a photography studio (for example) in Germany, what you study in secondary school and how you perform on the exams will play a key role in several ways. First, it will determine whether or not you can get into a photography school. Second, your performance in that school will determine what kind of job you can get afterwards...working in the photography industry as an EMPLOYEE. Third, you will need to return to school after a few years (minimum) of job experience in the industry to get a Masters in photography. These programs only admit the BEST and BRIGHTEST performers from school and job with the strongest recommendations from outstanding employers/supervisors playing the tie-breaking role in many cases. Once you have that Masters in Photography...which includes the equivalent of a BS in Business Administration...the gov't MIGHT give you a license to operate your own photography studio. MAYBE! And they may tell you that you have to relocate to a different part of Germany where there are not enough photography studios if you want the license. Now, if you do well all along the way and showed aptitude for this work, then the gov't pays for EVERYTHING. If you choose something for which you do NOT show strong aptitude and/or for which the gov't doesn't think there is a need, but you can get into the schools, then you have to pay for it yourself. In the end, they have a strongly monitored public education system that doesn't coddle poor performers and significantly rewards the top achievers/competitors. The needs of the economy and society are balanced against the aptitudes of the students in a well-reasoned and coordinated way to produce the workers and professionals that are needed AND to give kids the best possible shot at being economically successful. Everyone is still free to choose what they want to do, but the gov't only pays for it if it makes SENSE. My wife had two choices coming out of high school: hospitality/travel industry management training or commercial art and design. These were the vocational programs the gov't would pay for if she wanted to pursue either. She chose commercial art and design. That was a 3-year program. The Masters was another 2 after a minimum of 2 years work experience in the field. You cannot open so much as a printed Tshirt shop in Germany without that Masters! But that degree also qualifies you to run ANY sort of printmaking operation up to a global enterprise level advertising firm. She can build her own cameras and printing presses, or run Hallmark...and everything in between. You can't even find anyone at Kodak or Hallmark who can do that. But every Master Printmaker in Germany...every printed Tshirt shop owner...can. So you end up with an economy full of businesses run by competent professionals who can do every job under their authority and a bunch of highly skilled workers. You don't end up going to a Goodyear tire store to buy new tires and have the place tear up 4 new tires and one of your rims trying to put them on your car because they don't KNOW HOW! That's because the German gov't won't issue a business license to a guy with a degree in music appreciation and 3 years of work experience at a candy store for a tire shop. But we will! On one hand, it is nice to be able to try whatever we want to and can afford for a career or business idea. On the other hand, it really sucks to constantly have to deal with a bunch of under-trained, uneducated dilitantes messing stuff up and taking our money without doing a good job every time we want to purchase a good or service. If a German school teacher is teaching History, they actually have a degree in...get this...HISTORY. If they teach math, they have a degree in MATH. And if very many of their students don't pass their standardized exams, they won't be teaching for long. Teachers in Germany are HIGHLY respected professionals who make a very good living. Their opinions carry a LOT of weight even outside the classroom. And when very mediocre German public school students move to the US, they COAST through our public education system with straight A's and bored to tears. I've seen it happen SEVERAL times. As a sharp contrast let me tell you a little story about my wife's interaction with Arkansas public education... She's a REALTOR now, as many of you know. Well, she was showing property one day to the guy who runs the entire continuing education program for Arkansas public school teachers. He's "the guy" responsible for teaching the teachers. They were looking at some maps, and in the course of the discussion, the guy could not find the state of Washington on a map of the US that had the state outlines on it, but no names. Nor did he know what the capital city of Missouri was or where it was located.

John, OK. I now understand the background better of your situation. I agree that the PE system failed your son. I've seen it many times. I did not intend to imply any differently. But my own siblings facing somewhat similar situations eventually pulled the kids and home schooled them when the public ed system failed to comply with the IEPs. In our family, we believe the ULTIMATE responsibility for the training of a child lies with the parents. And if the systems fail them, they must pick up the slack themselves. That is NOT to suggest that things SHOULD be this way. It's an UNFORTUNATE and UNACCEPTABLE reality that they had to pull their kids out of schools and teach them at home themselves. BUT...you're trying to toss the baby out with the bathwater just because the world isn't perfect. Of course all kids don't learn the same way, teachers don't all teach exactly the same way, etc. Duh! Standardized testing and evaluation regimes take these variables into account. We don't fire a teacher as incompetent because ONE student fails the test! We fire them when TOO MANY fail OVER TIME. If you understood statistical analysis, this would be obvious to you. The larger the sample, the less impact of the variables. It's a law of nature...basic mathematics...something I was taught in about the 6th grade, and taught over and over again all the way through grad school. But you MUST have an objective standard against which to measure. If you don't, you're just whistling Dixie. Teachers and schools CHEAT? Is that what you're saying? Well, again I say DUH! Cheating is also mitigated by larger sampling and standardization. But it does continue to skew results to some extent. Shame on teachers and administrators for cheating! I guess we should test ALL students, huh? That means MORE testing...not less, as you have been advocating.

Sure, let's have EMT's who don't have to take a test to get certified! LOL No testing just means there is no standard. And that's just ridiculous. And teachers being able to get a certain % of their students to pass standardized tests OVER A PERIOD OF TIME that is significant enough to dilute the potency of many variables most certainly does help to identify problem teachers AND under-peforming schools. We tried the no standard approach for decades. Once upon a time...when teachers knew their subject matter and taught the 3R's by wrote in a classical education model...we got good results. But since the U of Chicago based communist education revolution in the 1960s, this "no standard" model of zero accountability has gotten us CRAP. And THAT is why we now need objective performance monitoring standards. If teachers and schools were doing their JOBS, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Well, if they weren't carrying large, heavy backpacks full of explosives, they weren't much threat to anyone but themselves. Do you know what it would take to breech that dam from an external explosion? A LOT!

Hey! At least it's ACCURATE!

1. No Child Left Behind is a GW Bush initiative. Teachers LOVED Clinton! But they immediately started griping about GW the first time he said the words, "No child left behind." 2. Your son, at 23, graduated from high school about the time GW took office. So it isn't the fault of No Child Left Behind! He never experienced it. 3. Did I understand right that your wife is a teacher? And your son is developmentally disabled? And you had an IEP, but are blaming the public education system for his disability? I'm sorry, but are you suggesting that your wife failed to comrehend the IEP also...or that she couldn't communicate that effectively and educate other teachers your son dealt with to understand his needs and their legal obligation to meet them? Did you ever stop to think that perhaps your son's disability is what limits him, and not a failed education system? There are people in wheelchairs out there who will NEVER walk. That's not the fault of shoddy doctors and hospitals in 99.9% of such cases. It's just the nature of their affliction. I know that's tough to accept when it is YOUR kid we're talking about. But I am disabled and I have dealt with learning disabled nieces and nephews with parents who are teachers, psychologists, and lawyers all of my life. I'm well aware of what IEP's are and how they work. I'm also familiar with the unfortunate public education system in AR...as well as the public ed systems in MO and TX. I do not doubt most teachers blew your son off. That is why my nieces and nephews were eventually home-schooled by their parents...and now ALL have college educations, careers, etc. One is even a school teacher now. But all of this is exactly why we NEED objective, standardized performance monitoring of teachers and schools.

Bad Directions Send Tourists to Mo. Home Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 10:14am KIMBERLING CITY, Mo. Travelers looking for Ozark Mountain Resort must be disappointed when they pull up to Tish and Lyle Ashley's place. It's a three-bedroom ranch-style home, not a 150-acre vacation spot, and it's on the wrong side of Table Rock Lake. For the past two years, a lot of visitors have pulled travel trailers and boats up the Ashleys' one-way street _ and gotten stuck _ thanks to wayward directions from the computer search engine MapQuest. "We've had them from Nebraska, Wisconsin, Chicago and Minnesota," Tish Ashley said. "I feel sorry for those people who've driven so far and end up on our one-way street in the middle of nowhere." Ozark Mountain Resort is a popular, lakeside condo rental spot in Kimberling City, located in southwest Missouri about 10 miles from Branson. A MapQuest search for the resort places it several miles off the mark, next to the Ashleys' home on a one-way residential street on the opposite side of Table Rock Lake. MapQuest is operated by internet giant America Online. Spokeswoman Melissa Gordon said the company would investigate the situation at Kimberling City. Tish Ashley said some tourists "are pretty unhappy when they end up on our one-way street." "We tell them we've tried to do something about it, but you can't even get ahold of anyone from MapQuest to get it solved," she said Travis Tucker, Kimberling City's public works director, said the city put a "dead end" sign on the Ashleys' street to warn lost travelers. He's also made numerous calls to MapQuest over the past two years. "They said they were going to have some of their engineers look at it, but the problem seems to be continuing," he said. Ashley said it's not just tourists who end up lost. Big trucks trying to make deliveries to the resort have ended up on her street as well. Marie Rasso, general manager at Silver Leaf/Ozark Mountain Resort, said her company used to have a MapQuest link on its Web site, but removed it after reports that it was incorrect. "We've gotten to where if they call we tell them not to use MapQuest," she said.

This dentist = teacher analogy is weak and full of holes. Taneyville...one of the poorest school districts in the state...has one of the highest aggregate scores on standardized performance tests. Well water has no impact on education. All those kids in Taneyville are on well water, too. Public education is free. Dentists cost money. That's why the less affluent do not take their kids to the dentist as often as they should or until there's a problem. But they send the kids to school EVERY day because it is free daycare, the kids get fed for free, and this lets mom and dad both go to work to try and pay the bills...or lay around and smoke crack or make meth. And wealthy kids or poor kids in the same school get the same education. At least they are supposed to. And if they don't, that too is the fault and problem of teachers and administrators. Teachers don't like standardized performance testing because it is OBJECTIVE and EFFECTIVE at identifying bad teachers over time. It is effective at identifying under-performing schools and districts over time. And today's teachers simply do not believe that they should be held accountable for their students' educations.

That was Russ's first white bass fishing with a fly rod. He had a blast! And we got to teach two young fellas how to catch 'em on flies. It was a good day in spite of the cold, wet, windy conditions. I couldn't believe how cold the water was!

I thought about photoshopping it out of the pic. LOL

Yes, I did give it away in another post. I figured someone would pick it up. But I didn't want to give it away easily to the casual web surfers with an old fishing pole, a stringer, and $5 for a carton of minnows. LOL I'm going to say this now... I HOPE that everyone will be sensitive this year to the reality that the past few years on upper Bull Shoals has been HORRIBLE for White Bass; and that it would be a good idea for us all to release these wonderful fish back unharmed into the stream to spawn this year...at least. We need a couple of good spawning seasons to help this fishery recover from whatever has been ailing it. Eating Whites THIS year might mean NOT eating them for years to come because we cannot CATCH any! That's just my opinion and my hope. It is, of course, legal to keep a mess of them. And I won't disparage or harass anyone who does so. But I do feel compelled to try and EDUCATE folks so that we can ALL enjoy great White Bass fishing far into the future.