The U.S. in 1906 Versus 2006

I generally ignore most of those ubiquitous thrice forwarded pieces of Internet trivia and humor, but I thought that the following one was worthy and would be of particular interest to SurvivalBlog readers in the U.S.: The year is 1906. One hundred years ago. What a difference a century makes! Here are some of the U.S. statistics for the Year 1906 : The average life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years. Only 14 percent of the homes in the U.S. had a bathtub. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. A three-minute call from Denver to New …




Letter Re: Stocking Up on Stanley Knife and Saw Blades

Dear Mr Rawles, Congratulations on a great blog, which I have just discovered. I am in the U.K. and am probably one of the few people here who has a copy of “Patriots”… a great read. Two things it may be worth mentioning to your readers: I haven’t seen mentioned before the importance of stocking up with small tool consumables — I am thinking of Stanley knife blades, “Olfa” type snap off blades, hacksaw blades and especially jeweler’s/gunsmith’s saw blades (who will want to make their own 3/0 saw blades WTSHTF?). You might also note the importance of keeping the …




Odds ‘n Sods:

Japanese canned bread: Bread that comes in a can and stays fresh for up to three years    o o o SurvivalBlog reader C.K. recommended the book Marion And His Men or The Swamp Fox Of Carolina. It is the true story of Francis Marion, an American Revolutionary War hero. Marion was the basis for Mel Gibson’s role as “Benjamin Martin” in the movie The Patriot    o o o The folks at The Daily Reckoning (one of my daily “must reads”) quoted a very telling letter from one of their readers about the U.S. housing bubble: “When you mentioned …