Category: Book, Movie, and Web Reviews

Pat’s Product Review: Clearly Filtered – Additional Products

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A few months ago, I did a review on Clearly Filtered water purification products, and the response was overwhelming to say the least. You can’t survive for more than a few days without a source of clean, safe drinking water. We aren’t necessarily talking about surviving out in the boonies, with only mud puddles to drink from. There are many times, when your tap water isn’t safe to drink. Think about it, how many times have you heard on the television news about contaminated drinking water, from a big city water supply,and “boil water” warnings? This happens too often if …


Pat’s Product Review: SIG-Sauer M400 Enhanced

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Without a doubt, the hottest selling long-gun these days is some sort of AR-15/M4 type of gun. Thanks to the efforts of anti-gunners like Dianne Feinstein and Barack Obama, with their proposed bans on certain classes or types of firearms, there has been a run on these types of guns that has never been seen before. With looming threats of banning certain types of firearms, as well as magazines over 10 rounds, the American People are waking up, and are spending their hard-earned money on what they presume will be banned or regulated. Without a doubt, this has led to …


Harry’s Book Review: Ashfall by Mike Mullin

Book Title: Ashfall Author: Mike Mullin Copyright Date: 2011 Publisher: Tanglewood Publishing Inc. ISBN: 978-1-933718-55-2 Audio, e-book or foreign translation avail? Yes–Kindle Suitable for children? Perhaps late teens, but very dependant on the values you want to pass on to them. Ashfall is the first book in a trilogy of novels by Mike Mullin. This is a story of what the world could look like if Yellowstone blew up, portrayed through the eyes of a 15/16 year old boy who must quickly become a man in order to survive. Alex Halprin is alone in his home in Cedar Falls Iowa …


Pat’s Product Review: Bear & Son Damascus Hunter

Awhile back, I tested some automatic folding knives from Bear Ops, which is a division of Bear & Son Cutlery and was favorably impressed with the little tactical folders. Now, while I sincerely enjoy all the new types of stainless steel blade materials used on knives these days, I’ve always been fascinated with Damascus steel. Bear & Son is one of the few commercial knife manufacturers offering knives with Damascus blades. What we have in Damascus steel is a combination of different steels with different properties, that is hammer forged and folded back onto itself, to give you blades with …


Pat’s Product Review: Springfield Armory Champion Operator 1911

Over the years, I’ve received hundreds of e-mails, always asking me if I had to pick just one gun, for the rest of my life, what would it be? Of course, there is no easy answer to this question, and thankfully, I don’t have to make that choice – right now. And, depending on how I’m feeling at the time this question is asked, then my answer has changed over the years. There is no one gun solution , at least not in my mind. I said for years, that I’d pick some kind of 4-inch barrel, stainless steel .357 …


Pat’s Product Review: Maxxeon WorkStar 2000

Way back before computers completely took over our lives, life seemed a lot simpler. If it were up to me, I’d live without computers, microprocessors, cell phones, texting, e-mails and tweets (whatever that is). I long for the time when cars were more simple to work on, I used to love tinkering with my own cars, improving on them, repairing them, and just playing around with them. Heck, I even worked as a dune buggy mechanic in Hawaii for a time. Today, with all the computers running cars and trucks, I can’t hardly figure out anything on new vehicles, you …


Pat’s Product Review: The Inner City Survival Pencil

On a daily basis I hear from many SurvivalBlog readers with a variety of questions. Most of these have to do with wilderness survival, or weapons for hard-core survival. Rarely do I hear from folks who think in terms on city survival. Seeing as how a large portion of the population live in urban areas, I’m always stumped, that the readers, don’t have a lot of questions about urban survival. Many readers that I hear from live in big cities, and they always have questions about bugging-out to the wilderness. Hmmm!!!!   I was born and raised in Chicago, one of …


Letter Re: Storage Food At COSTCO Stores

Jim, I just noticed while in COSTCO today that they have 6 gallon buckets of freeze dried food on offer. For $99, you get a one-month supply of 2100 calories a day, enough for one adult. I wonder how many people caught in the megastorm that hammered the East Coast recently had any food stored in, and how difficult it was for most folks to get provisions before the stores were stripped bare?  Just another reason to keep something one hand. For more variety, though, folks should really consider storing other stuff, as taught in your Rawles Gets You Ready …


Letter Re: Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

  Hi Jim; I accidentally stumbled into a documentary film on Netflix which I am sure your readers would enjoy. It is titled Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. I’m not sure if it is available anywhere else. The film critic web site RottenTomatoes.com gives this description: With Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Werner Herzog and Russian co-director Dmitry Vasyukov takes viewers on yet another unforgettable journey into remote and extreme natural landscapes. The acclaimed filmmaker presents this visually stunning documentary about indigenous people living in the heart of the Siberian Taiga. Deep in the wilderness, far …


Pat’s Product Review: Blackhawk’s Gideon Knife

I believe I first started writing about knives for Knives Illustrated magazine back around 1994. Since that time, I’ve probably had the opportunity to test literally thousands of knives, both fixed blade. folders, and out-the-front knives. Most knives I’ve tested are really pretty good blades. If something is junk, I just won’t waste my time writing about it because folks don’t want to read about junk! Once in a while, something new catches my eye, and I sit up and take notice, when it comes to knives. Blackhawk Products caught my eye with their Gideon drop point fixed blade knife. …


Mahaffey’s Book Review: The Disaster Diaries

The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse Reading level: Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (January 24, 2013)ISBN-10: 1594205272, ISBN-13: 978-1594205279 This book goes way beyond the beans, bullets and Band-Aid counsel. In fact, he’s kind of ‘out there’- in one of the finest ‘structured’ swashbuckling adventure sprees that I have read in a long while.  The Disaster Diaries is fun, rousing, thoughtful, and provocative.  Zany (can that word be used today?) might describe more of the unconventional catastrophes depicted in the storyline. The dark humor orientation is evident by the Dr. …


Pat’s Product Review: Infidel Body Armor

In the past, working as a police officer, security officer and private investigator, I used to wear soft body armor – it only made sense to give myself every advantage available, and to afford myself a better chance of going home safely at the end of the day. Body armor isn’t anything new, I believe it was used as early as the 1920s – in a more modern form than the armor that knights used to wear into battle. Richard Davis, who started Second Chance Body Armor (now out of business) paved the way for much of today’s soft and …


Harry’s Book Review: Rora

Book Title: Rora Author: James Byron Huggins Copyright Date: 2001, 2007 Bronze Bow Edition Publisher: Bronze Bow Publishing, LLC ISBN: 978-1-932458-51-0 Audio, e-book or foreign translation avail? No Suitable for children? Teens and up Rora is a work of historical fiction revolving around the defense led by Joshua Gianavel in an effort to save his people, the Waldenses, who lived in the Rora valley in 1655. This is a story of religious persecution, but it requires no great leap of imagination to see how this relates to our own civil rights today. At its core, this is a story about …


Pat’s Product Review: Ruger SR22 Pistol

If you’re serious about survival, you have to have some type of .22 Long Rifle (LR) firearm in your battery. Some will argue against the effectiveness of a .22 LR but I’m not one of them. You can take all manner of small game and fowl, with a well-placed shot from a .22 LR handgun or rifle. And, in a pinch, it will serve as a self-defense weapon as well. No, I’m not advocating the .22 LR as your one and only self-defense firearm, but it will sure do in a pinch, and make the bad guys wish they were …


Pat’s Product Review: The Power Pot

Living in the country, is really great, but there are a few problems that one can expect. One is loss of electrical power – especially in the winter months, where I live – in Western Oregon. We have a lot of rain, and it causes trees to fall across power lines, knocking out power, and we lose our power at times, for days. I have a back-up generator, and I use it to keep my refrigerator and freezer cold, so I don’t lose any foods. I don’t have a need to watch tv all the time, or surf the ‘net, so …