Some of you Louts have been busting my chops to get the ticket engine online for the 12th annual gathering of whisky swillers and bald-faced versifiers that we assemble in Gladstone each year. Well, go here and ye shall find what you’re looking for.

If you haven’t been to our annual Bacchanalia, I can tell you that it’s: a) educational, b) provocative, and c) the funniest assemblage of manly talent in one place since Doc dined alone at the Roscoe Diner.

Y’all come, y’heah?

I bagged, tagged and dragged yesterday and was out of the woods by 8:15 am.  Venison for the Louts!  Don’t ask about the rack - as the old saying goes “you can’t eat the horns”.  He was legal and will be tasty.  I’ll head out Saturday and look for his grandpa on the final day of shotgun season here in Jersey.  Should I score again, I’ll bring along the backstraps, perhaps the finest morsels ever to be cooked over a wood fire!  If not, there are always venison skewers for the Trout Louts come June.

Some people bookmark favorite websites that they expect to return to again and again. Others forget to check back and count on Googling a website by name the next time they’re inclined to catch up. Still others wait for email from someone else to prompt their attention to a site’s latest content.

Well, we Trout Louts are nothing if we’re not high-tech.

Www.troutlouts.com provides a much easier way to stay current on recent events in the continuing calamity we call Troutism. All of our pages feature the latest flavors of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom to alert subscribers whenever a new post has been added.

If you know about RSS or Atom and have a browser or news aggregator that supports them, you’re probably already receiving our feed. If not, these technologies are worth learning about.

The simplest method I’ve found is to use the built-in feed reader utility included with all modern web browsers, such as IE or Firefox. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.0 include excellent feed parsers built into their standard toolbars and they work great! Just look for the universal orange and white feed reader icon and you’re good to go.

You could also load up one of several free Browser Plugins such as the popular Sage widget for Firefox or Google Toolbar for IE and FF. Google Toolbar is one of the more useful all-in-one innovations since browsers were invented, and its reader distills any page’s RSS feed service directly to your personal Google Home page.

For Louts who prefer their content delivered offline, tools like RSS Popper provide freeware solutions to add RSS and Atom feeds to Micosoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express email clients. With Popper installed, new web content arrives automatically in your email inbox.

Finally, dedicated feed aggregators like NewsGator Online, a free web service news reader (or its more powerful commercial cousin, NewsGator FeedDemon) are another way to view your RSS subscriptions without spending a lot of time surfing.

However you find your way back here, RSS is the wave of the future and we Louts intend to face it as squarely as we might a full bottle of the noble Macallan 18 on a dark and stormy night.

Be there or be square.

Look closely and you’ll spot Linden, Dave, Doc, Brian and yours truly at the seventh (and last) annual Robbie Burns Memorial Supper & Poetry Slam to take place at Chatfield’s, a once-venerable saloon in Gladstone, NJ. 

Chatfield’s is long-gone but poetical mischief endures, and Trout Louts have remained a big part of it. Maybe it’s our finely-pickled livers, or the propensity for fishermen to prevaricate. In any case, it’s nearly as much fun as listening to Doc snore from two cabins away and betting on whether he’s swallowed the pillow yet.

We’ll be celebrating the 12th consecutive edition of what some are calling New Jersey’s oldest ecumenical men’s poetry jam on Saturday, January 27, 2007. Look for complete details soon at Burnsnicht.com.

Brother Lipkin is all smiles as he shows off this beauty, taken on the Connecticut River near Pittsburg, New Hampshire.

These are a couple of snapshots of past adventures that Doc sent me several weeks ago. Whatever stories may be told behind these photos will have to wait until Doc and Bert get their login credentials. Observant Louts will doubtless notice how Guide Wayne Aldridge isn’t trusting Doc to handle that little trout.

David Lipkin sent along a couple of photos of his new digs on the Connecticut River in New Hampshire and reports that “Trout Lout Camp North is open for business with fine spring fishing on the mighty Connecticut River from Pittsburg south. Great float and wading in many areas with best floating from Colebrook to the Columbia bridge.”

I can’t wait to inaugurate this tasty-looking spa with a fragrant $10 cheroot.

Doc Hatton forwarded along this photo of Bert Minerley and an unidentified guide. I don’t have any other information about the location, date, tackle used, or content of Bert’s flask, but the fish was just too impressive to keep to myself. Perhaps when Doc and Bert show up here in-person, they’ll supply a backstory worthy of these critters… 

I went out wading with JD on small Ontario tributary a couple weeks ago. Had a real good time in spite of rain and sleet. He knows his stuff. Caught a steelhead around 15 pounds and a 10 pound brown. Late in the day hooked into a something that let me get my leader butt over the top guide, then took off like the Midnight Special, took a hundred yards of backing, went under a bridge, wrapped around a snag and broke off a 1X tippet. We never got a good look at it but JD guessed it was a 30+ pound salmon fresh out of the lake. His comment: “That reel’s not so bad after all. I thought it was going to explode but it didn’t.” Like they said in the movie, I’m gonna need a bigger boat.