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The Club PUB  04/30/2018

4/30/2018

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          The Club PUBlication

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Hi Everyone!
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I have long favored the use of  technology. It has brought a world of information and communication to our fingertips.  We have seen, however, technology can also be used in ways to "control" citizens behavior.  Witness the intrusions from the Russian government in our 2016 election process.  Reckless and false news reports were published on our trusted Facebook, Youtube, Google and all manner of electronic delivered media.  "Fake news" but really hard to detect!

​This is the first stage of technology being used in a "controlling" manner.  This is not a rumor, it actually influenced peoples opinions in our election process.  I know some of you will not believe that it happed but "stay tuned"  more proof will emerge. 


We need to take the time to "fact check" the news we're consuming.  When it comes to "fact checked" "verifiable news" "go analog"!  Most trusted newspapers still print news that has been fact checked.  It's hard to erase an article that's printed on paper.  "My" favorite source of news outside of the newspaper is NPR news and documentaries such as PBS Frontline.  There are certainly many other sources of "reliable" news.  Just make sure your sources are verified.  Think about it this way . . . would you eat food that is randomly presented to you by strangers?  Probably not!  But that's what we do when we read unverifiable stories on the internet. 

Now another form of "behavior control" is emerging in China.  Looks like life will dramatically change for the Chinese people.  Welcome to China's social credit system!

Check this out!

Our Club PUB has been created to entertain and inform.  If you have an issue you wish to share let us know.

Harv
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The Club PUB  04/23/2018

4/23/2018

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    The Club PUBlication
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                                                      Maple Syrup - Final

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My son Christopher started this hobby just out of  high school and continues to this day.
                                                                                                                         
​Author:  Sharon Magnusson 
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This year, Chris collected approximately 500 gallons which resulted in a yield of 13.75 gallons of syrup.  The actual boiling rate is about 9 gallons/hr, so that is about 56 hours of just boiling time.   The actual collection time varies from 45 min to 2 hours, but always includes 30 minutes of round-trip driving from his house to ours.  Then there is the set-up/take-down and cleaning of the equipment at the end and beginning of the season.  Good thing this is a hobby and not for profit, and especially important is that he enjoys and looks forward to this each year!
We begin with a view of  our woods decorated with green collecting buckets and VOID of snow
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​The collecting process is a family affair when the kids aren't tied up with other things on the weekends.  Stephannie is helping Dad empty the buckets.
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​Although the weather was perfect for collecting sap, Christopher needed to "pull the plug" on the project, due to his upcoming trip to Franklin, North Carolina, where he will mine for gemstones.  
I'm helping with the sap and dismantling process. ​
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Most of the items in this photo are self-explanatory.  The metal  graduated cylinder is placed inside the boiling kettle to collect a sample of the liquid during various periods of the heating process.  The thing that looks like a thermometer is really an hydrometer which is placed in the graduated cylinder to measure the sugar concentration versus the water concentration of the liquid.  Please note that, like most of the Coachmen, beer is involved in almost everything, INCLUDING the canning preparation.
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Ninety-nine percent of the boiling/evaporation process is done outside.  Then it is brought inside and boiled until it is almost table ready -- about 99.9% done.  ​
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​What looks like whitish/grayish scum is starch (complex sugar) and is scraped off the top at various times during this boil while some sinks to the bottom. Then, this "almost ready" syrup is removed from the stove, covered and allowed to sit for two weeks. During this two week period, debris and starch  precipitate to the bottom. This is the "poor man's" filtration process.  U
nless one has an expensive filtration  machine, which costs close to $3,000, one has be patient! 
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Once the debris has settled, the liquid is transferred to a different container and reheated to 219 degrees.  Then it is immediately poured into sterilized glass canning jars and sealed.  According to Chris,  it's hard to put a time frame on the whole process.  "Preparation, boiling, and clean up all add up to a long season." But, oh how the family loves his syrup!!
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This shows the 13.75 gallons of deliciousness!
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The Club PUB  04/16/2018

4/16/2018

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           The Club PUBlication
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________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Member Profile 

R.T. Wallen 
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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R. T. "Skip" Wallen (born in 1942) is an American artist based in the state of Alaska. He is best known for his stone lithographs of Alaskan wildlife and native peoples and for his monumental bronze sculptures.[1] His original prints, watercolors, and small bronzes are found in museums and private collections around the world.[2] His monumental bronze sculptures are found in major institutions and public spaces in the U.S. and Europe. He was one of only two living artists included in the landmark New York Kennedy Gallery exhibit, Alaskan Masters, in 1976.[3] and has had one-man exhibitions of stone lithographs in Europe.[1]He was recognized with an honorary doctorate in the arts in 2006.[4]


​Early Life and education
[edit]

R. T. Wallen was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin on January 3, 1942. While still a student at Lincoln High School (Manitowoc, Wisconsin), he spent his summers in Petersburg, Alaska commercial fishing with his uncle.[1] As a zoology major at the University of Wisconsin, he worked on archaeological digs in the Anangula Archeological District, in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, identifying bird and animal bones excavated in the 3,000-year-old site.
PicturePeacedancer stone lithograph by R.T. Wallen

​Career

Wallen began his career as a field biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, where he participated in the re-introduction of sea otters to southeast Alaska and the introduction of muskox to Nunivak Island. He spent six months in 1965 as an observer on Little Diomede Island, living in a semi-subterranean house and hunting with the local men in a traditional skin boat known as an umiak.[2] While in the field, he began sketching the fauna near his camp. His drawings were used in the original Alaska Wildlife Notebook series.[5] He became a full-time staff artist at the headquarters in Juneau.[2][4]

PictureWindfall Fisherman stone lithograph by R.T. Wallen

​Wallen left the Fish and Game department in 1967 to become a full-time independent artist. He set up a small art gallery in Juneau called the Kayak Gallery and later renamed the Wallen Gallery. From there he sold charcoal sketches, watercolors and hand-pulled lithographs from limestone that were printed by the notable New York printers George C. Miller & Sons in editions of between 25 and 185.

PictureWindfall Fisherman by R.T. Wallen
He and a friend invented a new method of printing using eraser block and fabric for the color print entitled “Arrival of the Seabirds,” based on his experience of the spring hunt on Little Diomede Island. They called this printing technique Pointigraphy.[2] While it achieved a completely new look, it was so laborious that they printed only one edition of 170 prints, entitled “Arrival of the Seabirds", based on Wallen’s experiences during the spring hunt on Little Diomede Island. Other original color prints and stone lithographs also featured Alaska wildlife and Native peoples.

PictureGift of Sight bronze by R.T. Wallen
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Alaska Statehood in 2009,a group of private citizens formed a nonprofit organization to commission Wallen to create a life-scale humpback whale sculpture with waterworks to simulate the cascade of water off a breaching whale.[9] After creating a maquette, Wallen scaled up the whale to one-third life size (eight feet) and cast the intermediate bronze for the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau in 2013.[10][11]
In 2011, Wallen began work on maquettes for a monumental bronze sculpture for the Lake Michigan shoreline between his hometown of Manitowoc and Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Entitled Spirit of the Rivers, the work consists of a Native American man portaging a birch bark canoe accompanied by a woman and an elder. The full-size figures are approximately 10 feet high. The sculpture celebrates the birch bark canoe as the origin of the maritime tradition in this region.[12][13][14][15]

PictureA figure from the Alaska-Siberia WWII memorial in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Philanthropic works
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Wallen was a pioneer in the conservation movement in southeast Alaska in the 1960s. He worked to get protected status for places such as the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve, the Mendenhall Wetlands,[16] Admiralty Island National Monument, Petersburg Creek-Duncan Salt Chuck Wilderness, and the extension of Denali National Park. He has donated his artwork to state and national conservation fundraising efforts as well as to public television.[4] In 1990, Alaska governor Steve Cowper appointed Wallen to the all-volunteer Alaska Board of Game in 1990.[17]
Wallen donated his time to the River Blindness Foundation to create a small sculpture of a blind African man being led by a child, a common sight in many parts of Africa where River Blindness (Onchocerciasis) blinds many people.[18] John Moores (baseball), founder of the River Blindness Foundation, paid for the casts, which were intended to be given as gifts to major donors to the foundation. The foundation eventually partnered with the Carter Center, which asked for another edition of small sculptures to give to donors who contributed $1 million or more to the effort to eradicate the disease.[19] With the World Bank and other organisations, they led the programs to distribute the drug Ivermectin (Mectizan) which had been developed and donated by Merck and Co.[20][21]
The Wallens initiated and raised funds for a project to carve a traditional spruce canoe in Glacier Bay National Park under the direction of George Dalton, Sr. in 1987. Two canoes were created. One is on display in Bartlett Cove in Glacier Bay and the other went with the clan to Hoonah.[22]

Personal life
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In the mid-1960s, he was adopted into the Dak Dein Taan clan of the Tlingit people of southeast Alaska. In 1982 he married Dr. Lynn Price Ager, an anthropologist and author.[23] Following their wedding in Sicily, she was adopted by his Tlingit family into the Kaagwaantaan clan. Together, they published a biography of their adopted parents, George and Jesse Dalton.[24][25] They have one son.
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