Al Agnew

I don't think Missouri's is all that difficult. A lot of guys I know catch Master Angler size smallmouth half the times they go fishing. Same with good reservoir bass anglers catching largemouth. I counted up all the species that I've caught that would have qualified, and it came to 18 different species, maybe more. I've never submitted any of them. Probably several hundred smallmouth over 50 or more years. Quite a few largemouth. Only a couple spotted bass. One hybrid bass. Quite a few white bass, though that was a long time ago when we'd catch 3 pound plus white bass a lot while fishing for bass on Wappapello. Quite a few bluegill...that is pretty much dependent on finding a good small lake where the bluegill aren't overpopulated, then you can catch a hundred of them. One grass carp that was homegrown...and is still in my pond so one day I might catch it again--the thing is about 25 years old by now and I don't know how long they live, but it's still there. A few crappie over the years. A couple eels many years ago. A couple longnose gar. A few rock bass. One muskie, fishing for bass on Pomme. A couple chain pickerel winter fishing on Current River. Used to catch huge longear sunfish in the spring at a certain spot right below a low water bridge on Big River. Redear are like bluegill...find a good pond and you'll catch plenty of big ones. One brown trout in Missouri. One walleye.

Nope, the so-called masks that most people are wearing. Mary has made a bunch. We've been experimenting with how to make one that actually seals decently around your face, which is difficult, which makes me think that my figures are maybe on the optimistic side when it comes to what most people are wearing. My biggest problem was leakage around the sides of my nose...my glasses continually fogged up, which obviously means a whole lot of air is leaking out there. But we've finally solved that problem by buying a load of the metal strips that go across the top of your bag of coffee so you can reseal it. Sew one into the top of the mask and bend it to fit around your nose. Works well. Mary has been making them for everybody in the family. I have a couple N95 masks. Haven't used them because, to be honest, we haven't been anywhere that I think they'd be necessary, and since ours AREN'T going to be professionally fitted, they probably aren't going to be foolproof anyway. We haven't been anywhere in public since this thing started except the grocery store a couple times, and then it was during the 6-7 AM period set aside for old people. Mary goes in, I stay in the car. Both times there haven't been more than 3 or 4 other people in the store. I did go into Tractor Supply in Farmington early one morning, after reading on their website about how careful they were being and all the measures they were taking. Big joke. None of the workers wearing a mask, no sanitizing wipes to wipe off your cart, had to ask a worker where something was and he had no qualms about coming up to within 2 feet of me to get me to follow him down the aisle. Had a small plexi screen at the checkout, but it was basically useless. I was glad to get out of there, and it's been well over 2 weeks now so I guess I'm not infected from it. Won't go back to that store.

Regarding masks...nope, from everything I've read, they aren't more than about 10% effective in screening out virus particles coming in through breathing. Somewhat better than that screening out particles breathing out if you're already infected. Good for keeping you from touching your face, good for slowing the velocity and thus the spread of particles with heavy breathing, talking, even sneezing and coughing. Velocity and spread is important. So no, they aren't great protection. But they do some good. They lessen the amount of the virus you might get in a single exposure, or that you might give others. At the same time, they can make things worse if you aren't careful about the way you use them, clean them, etc. The way I figure it, if you're wearing a mask, it's more likely that you are going to be careful and conscientious about the other things you might be doing to limit exposure to yourself and others. I feel a lot more comfortable about being around somebody wearing a mask because of that. And there are a whole lot of people who feel the same way, whether or not it is totally justified.

I have to say that I am sick and tired of these stupid comparisons. To "achieve" that 102 deaths per day from auto accidents, how many person hours are spent in cars? 300 plus million people and probably at least half of them spend an hour a day or more in an auto. When you look at THOSE statistics, driving is one of the safer activities we do. And we tried alcohol prohibition, but because people LOVE alcohol, it didn't work. People don't love Covid. They don't WANT Covid. Many love cars, and for most they are a necessity. So we take the small risk of dying in an auto accident as part of life. This virus is NEW. It's a potential cause of death OVER AND ABOVE all the causes of death that we've learned to live and die with. I can control the amount of risk I take from drinking (though many can't). I will accept the tiny risk of dying in an auto accident. But I know that IF I am infected with Covid, I have a significant risk of dying...one exposure, one illness, and since I'm in the high risk group I just might die. It's comparing apples to oranges, or eyebolts. So I do what I can to avoid the exposure in the first place, and I EXPECT anybody else who wants to be a member of society to do the same. If you don't, you are putting me and my loved ones in danger, and I will NOT accept that.

Had a friend who sweared that blackened drum was as good as blackened redfish, since they are in the same fish family even though one is saltwater and the other freshwater. I never tried blackened drum, don't even know for sure how you prepared blackened fish, but blackened redfish was really popular for a while.

Back around 1986 or 87, I hosted a writer from Field and Stream magazine for several days of fishing Ozark streams. He was a big fly fisherman but had never fished for river smallmouth, and wanted to do an article on the Ozark smallmouth rivers. I was recommending to him by somebody, and he called me and arranged to spend five days at our house and fish at least four of them. I wanted to show him a variety of Ozark streams, so the first day we fished one I always thought was really cool, Big Creek down to Sam A. Baker Park. Super clear water and great scenery, including a small shut-in with a couple interesting rapids to run. The fishing was okay; we caught quite a few mostly small smallmouth. He had come to the area expecting to stop and fly shop and buy flies for smallmouth, but there wasn't any such animal in Southeast Missouri, so he was using some of his trout streamers, all of them too small. I riffled through his fly boxes and picked out a couple of big white streamers that he'd used for tarpon or something, and he caught a few decent smallies on them. Second day we floated the upper end of Big River, just to see another smaller stream with different scenery. Did pretty well. He had gone to Walmart and bought some fly rod poppers and they produced a few fish. Third day we floated a section of the lower middle Meramec, hoping to get into a big smallmouth, but the fishing was pretty slow. Last day to fish, we floated a lot farther upstream on the Meramec. I was really feeling the pressure for ONE of us to at least hook one big one. I still remember the exact spot. I was using my homemade crankbait along a vertical clay bank, kind of a nothing spot really, no logs or even chunks of mud that had calved off the bank for a big fish to use for cover. But the big one was there, and it hit my crankbait. A bit over 20 inches, and he was as impressed as if he'd caught it himself. In all the years since then, I've floated of boated past that spot hundreds of times. I've fished it when it was warm weather, and always note that it really hasn't changed. You'd think those exposed clay banks would really keep being eroded, and a hundred yards farther downstream this one has, but the exact spot still looks like it did back then. So I was fishing that stretch today. I motored past the spot, and thought to myself that I'd never hooked another good fish off that bank in all those years. And then I thought, "but today will be the day." So I'm drifting back down the river and come to that spot, and I think again, "there's gonna be a big fish there." I was using my homemade crankbait just for old time's sake. I landed it 6 inches away from the clay, started the retrieve, and there was a huge bronze flash, a swirl, and I was hooked to a big fish. There are no pictures, because I lost it. Got it up close to the boat, got a good look at it...for sure 20 inches or better. But then it shook its head while it was facing me, and the hooks came loose. But I called it, and after all those years, there is still something about that spot that attracts big fish!

Mary and I had the antibody test, since I had had that horrific respiratory illness back in January. Our doctors have it set up where you call and make an appointment, and at the appointed time a pair of nurses wheels a gurney out into the far corner of the parking lot, you drive up, stick your arm out, and they take a blood sample. You're wearing a mask and so are they. So we had it done Monday, got the results back yesterday...both of us negative. So alas, I haven't already had Covid. The test they are using is supposed to be 97% accurate.

Why wear a mask? Well, I don't know how effective it is, but it DOES, according to what I've read, stop SOME of the virus particles, and as has been stated here and elsewhere many times, you don't want to get a big load of virus particles at once. A few, your body can fight off better. A big dose is worse. So yeah, that's one reason to wear a mask even if it doesn't protect you all THAT much. The other reason is to protect others, and there I think it's the same principle, except more so. The fewer germs you put out if you happen to be infected, the less likely it is that somebody else will take in enough of your germs to get infected. But there is what I think is a very important third reason. We all have to live in society as it is, and that means getting along with "strangers". If you are not wearing a mask, the people who are worried about getting it are NOT going to be happy with you when you're in the store buying groceries, and that includes the workers there. I know it pisses me off to be someplace like the grocery store right now and see people not wearing masks. So to get along with society, whether you think it does any good or not, the polite thing to do is to wear one. As far as lessening the effectiveness of your immune system by being too clean, I don't think that's the way it works. Yup, I think you can build up a hearty immune system over a lifetime of being outdoors, playing in the dirt or otherwise getting dirty, drinking questionable water now and then, or whatever. But if you have that healthy immune system, I don't think it matters to spend a few months being cleaner than normal and avoiding contamination as much as possible. Nor can you build up a healthy immune system by suddenly being unsanitary when you were not unsanitary before.

Ah yes, the old "he may be educated but he lacks any common sense" thing. Which is sometimes true, but is just likely to be true of the guy who never graduated high school...not everybody has "common sense", whatever that is. And it's irrelevant anyway. I don't go to the doctor to find out what's wrong with my outboard, I go to somebody like you. And I don't go to you to find out how come I have a stomach ache that won't go away, I go to the doctor. I don't value the doctor's common sense, I value his education and experience in his chosen field. And while there have been times when the few voices crying out in the wilderness ended up being right and the vast majority in the field have ended up being wrong, those times are few and far between. A few doctors saying one thing do not equal the vast majority saying something else. I'll believe the vast majority before I'll believe the few.

More people are going to college than ever before because more people believe that you HAVE to go to college to get a decent job. But, you can believe that and still be anti-intellectual. It isn't the education that they think is important, it's the piece of paper saying their kid graduated, which they look upon as a key to unlock one of those good jobs. And there was once a time when nearly everybody thought a college education was a great thing, and college professors were respected and even revered. Now, it seems that a whole lot more people who DIDN'T go to college look upon those who did with contempt. So you can have more people going to college and at the same time have more people not valuing an education nor the educators.

Yup.

You are looking at this as an either/or situation...either the government does everything or the government does nothing. Think of it this way...the government funds the military. But a whole lot of private companies make a ton of money off supplying the military, and they spend a lot of money coming up with better war planes and weapons systems. What is to stop all the medical supply companies from doing the research to come up with better medicines, equipment, etc. and selling it to the government-run health care system? The innovations in American health care are not in the hospitals or the health insurance; how much has a basic hospital stay changed in the last 100 years? They are in the basic research and the private companies that come up with better stuff to sell to the hospitals; the hospitals didn't invent all those diagnostic machines and drugs. Why would that change under a government-run health care system? Remove the profit motive from the people who are actually interacting with the patients, the hospitals and health clinics. Don't remove it from the people who are supposedly doing the innovating. As for treatment like my wife went through, there are plenty of countries that could have and would have provided it just as well and timely. But this is another thing you're wanting to make either/or. How about basic healthcare, accepted treatments, hospital stays all funded by the government, but if you want Cadillac health care, you pay for Cadillac insurance? But...I don't expect any of this to happen any time soon, if at all. There has got to be a better way of doing things, but maybe a government-run system isn't even close to the answer in a country as big, heavily populated, and basically "unhealthy" as America. Heck, none of the politicians have a clue on how to improve on what we have right now, which is a mixed bag of improvements and problems compared to what we had prior to the ACA.

What Gavin said. Your most versatile craft would be the kayak...a trolling motor is practically useless on streams like the Huzzah...the places where you need it most are too shallow to use it. If you can't paddle it easily and really maneuver it with the paddle, it will be nothing but a pain in the rear to get down narrow, twisty streams with plenty of log and brush obstructions like the Huzzah. You could use it okay on larger rivers like the Meramec that have nice boat ramps at nearly every access. Huzzah and Courtois aren't like that. Bring the kayak, and bring the other thing for pond fishing.

Of course they do. But some of us do at least try to understand both sides of an issue, and strive to make informed decisions. All too many never see anything but the side they've already picked.

The guy who graduates last in med school still had to go through med school. Not everybody can do so. And the guy that graduated first is also a doctor. I don't know whether doctors on average are higher IQ than the general population, but they darned sure are better educated on average. The rub? Really, it's our totally for profit health care system. A lot of people making the decisions aren't doctors, and they are making them purely on the profit motive. And there are plenty of greedy doctors out there, too. But...it's the best we got. I'll listen to doctors before I'll listen to former researchers with a proven agenda. As for our freedoms being taken away...we STILL get to go to the ballot box. We can STILL vote out anybody that appears to be responsible for taking away "freedoms". Temporary restrictions are not necessarily a slippery slope to permanent loss of freedoms.

It's a no-win situation for them. If they ignore the people like this woman, they give her free rein to smear them. But if they go after her, people will say that the big bad government or big bad corporation is bullying this little person and since they have deep pockets for high priced attorneys, of course they are going to win.

Yes, IF they let you link to the source material they used to fact check. Most do. This is one thing that drives me nuts. Way too many people never even go to the fact checkers, because they either don't trust them and think THEY are biased, or they don't care, they'll believe what they want to believe. I'd say the vast majority of people in America that frequent the internet ONLY go to sites that tell them what they want to hear and want to be true. Not only do they never get information that contradicts what they want to believe, but they only get THEIR side's version of what the other side thinks or believes, which is almost always a distorted or even false representation of the other side. So we have all these people who are convinced that people who don't think the way they do are either stupid or evil. We know each other well, and we both know neither one of us is evil or stupid, we just have different world views and ideas on some subjects. But to all too many conservatives, liberal ideas are evil and liberal people are the enemy, and vice versa.

Ill counter that with this...read carefully and note the links to sources. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QwU4jcRw-qb77BLCLs99af05S1mL2E2vUz2x2M1396U/mobilebasic

Mitch, I honestly don’t think it’s Youtube doing it. I suspect the producer of this slick, professional video are the ones doing it. I think they have figured out a way to make it go down after a certain amount of time or certain number of views in order to make it look like the powers that be are suppressing it. Think about it. This woman has misrepresented who she is, where she worked, and what she published.

Mitch, you know the way science works is that if somebody publishes a paper challenging conventional wisdom, it gets peer reviewed by a bunch of other scientists. If it has merit, it will eventually be accepted by the majority of the scientific community. This peer review process, ideally, works to weed out those who are either incompetent in their research, or have an agenda--they already believe something and are looking for evidence to support it (and ignoring or downplaying anything that refutes it). But since this whole thing started, we've seen a ton of research just thrown out onto the cyberworld PRIOR to publishing and peer review. The media jumps on it. People think it's gospel--until the next one comes along that tells them just the opposite, and then they get angry and confused. The politicians glom onto it, too, if it fits THEIR agenda. The opposite comes out, and the other side gloms onto it. Meanwhile, a ton of people in this country have already decided that they know more than the experts, and seeing conflicting experts, they become more and more convinced they are right. Also meanwhile, the drug companies get into the act if they see that what one side or the other is saying might mean profits for them. The use of animal tissue and fetal tissue (stem cells) is widely accepted as valid and useful in the scientific community, but both are controversial with the animal rights people and the anti-abortion people decrying them. It's an issue ripe for a researcher who happens to be a "true believer" to already have an opinion and an agenda and go looking for evidence to support it, so I have to look upon the good research doctor as POSSIBLY being biased. But I don't take Fauci at his word, either. I will look at what a lot of OTHER "peers" say before I make up my own mind.

On an individual basis that works fine. It's pretty much how I'm dealing with it...getting into the routine of being very careful and avoiding other people I don't know as much as possible. But on a societal basis, it's gonna suck for a long time. When will it again be anywhere near safe to have events with large numbers of people? Cardinal ball games with one person per every 5 seats every other row? How well do you trust businesses like hotels to be diligent about cleaning between customers? And as long as there are a lot of people NOT being careful, the rest of us are going to have to be extra careful, especially anyone as old as I am. Routine is nice, but being routinely worried about this is hard on your mental (and physical) health. I trust myself. I trust my wife. I somewhat trust some of my relatives. I do NOT trust the general public nor a lot of businesses to be as careful as they need to be.

It always was except for the Current and Jacks Fork.

I actually resent that. I actually DO care about this country, and about other people, and about the environment. Yeah, I've had it good under Trump up until the virus. I had it just as good the last 5 years of the Obama administration. But I'm NOT voting strictly on what's good for me. I'm voting for the future for my nieces and nephews. And I think Trump has done FAR more harm than good to this country, to its reputation around the world among those who used to be our allies, to the divisions within it that he has done absolutely nothing to lessen and a whole lot to foment. It simply blows my mind that so many people think he's done a good job and accomplished all this stuff. I've seen lists of his accomplishments. Guess what? Nearly every one of them would have happened just as quickly and easily under ANY Republican President with a supermajority like he had his first two years, and surely most of the other Republican choices wouldn't have been this combative, lying, and embarrassing. And some of the stuff he's tried to do was shot down by some in his own party. For every promise he made that he's tried to keep, there's been one that he let quietly slip into obscurity. Remember the terrific health plan he had that would replace Obamacare with something better? It didn't exist. When he got into office, he quietly waited for the Republican Congress to come up with something he could put his name to, and they couldn't do it, either. He has come up with nothing on his own except for the wall, a simplistic idea that won't do a lot of good unless it's combined with spending a LOT more money on surveillance, patrols, high tech drones, etc. Otherwise it can be defeated by a ladder or a tunnel (and there is a LOT of cheap labor for the tunnel). Oh, and Mexico ain't paying for it. This will be my last political post. I don't come on here to argue politics, and I don't expect to change anybody's mind. But once in a while I do like to speak my own.

Term limits is just something people want the guy they don't like to have to adhere to. Don't like that your Congressman is a Democrat? Term limit him outa there!

I'll preface this by saying that I don't think gun laws work, at least they don't work well enough to justify the inconvenience and worse that they inflict upon law abiding gun owners. So I wouldn't be in favor of a ban on so-called assault weapons. But I must admit I get tired of the same old tired assertions that anything can be a weapon. Some things are inherently more EFFECTIVE weapons than others. Say you're in a room with a whole lot of other people. Some nutcase enters and starts trying to kill people. Which would YOU rather he be armed with--an AR 15, a handgun, a knife, a baseball bat? Take your choice. And which would you LEAST like him to be armed with? Anybody that's sane and sensible will say the least effective of those weapons is a knife or a baseball bat, because you can probably outrun the guy armed with those at least, and you have at least some chance of fighting him off even if you're cornered. And every sane and sensible person would prefer he be armed with a handgun rather than the rifle. For nearly everybody, it's a lot more difficult to shoot a handgun accurately. So there is a hierarchy of weapon effectiveness. We knew that when we banned full auto firearms for most people. This is one of those arguments that sound good to the people who are already on your side, but the people on the other side and a lot of people on the fence are not going to buy it.