Day: March 20, 2024

Preparedness Notes for Wednesday — March 20, 2024

March 20th is the birthday of writer Mel Tappan. (Born 1933, died 1980.) His perennially popular survivalist books Survival Guns and Tappan on Survival have a well-deserved following. I designated March 20th National Survivalism Day, in his honor. It is also apropos that National Survivalism Day falls in March–one of the months that both Northern Europeans and Native Americans refer to as The Starving Season–when stored food runs low, but before spring bounty appears. Plan ahead. Stock up. Don’t let your family starve. I’m sure that Mel Tappan would approve. — On March 20, 1854, a meeting of Whigs, anti-Nebraska …


Two-Ingredient Hygiene Treatments, by Mrs. Alaska

Have you ever wondered how people cleaned themselves for centuries without access to a thousand different commercial soaps, shampoos, and lotions? Several answers lie in the treatments below, which largely utilize kitchen staples, and, in many cases, only one or two ingredients. Ancient Romans, for example, slathered olive oil on their skin and then scraped it off with a dull blade (called a strigil), removing dead skin cells and moisturizing the skin at the same time. Contemporary friends in India swear to the efficacy of coconut oil for their luxuriant hair and lovely skin. A clay tablet, from about 2200 …


SurvivalBlog Readers’ & Editors’ Snippets

This weekly Snippets column is a collection of short items: responses to posted articles, practical self-sufficiency items, how-tos, lessons learned, tips and tricks, and news items — both from readers and from SurvivalBlog’s editors. Note that we may select some long e-mails for posting as separate letters. — I recently ran a test with Google’s publicly available AI tool, called Gemini.  I asked it: “Paint me a picture of a famous 19th-century English inventor.”  It replied: “We are working to improve Gemini’s ability to generate images of people. We expect this feature to return soon and will notify you in …