“Louts, wha hae wi Wallace bled,
take winter breaks for verse instead…”

It’s that time again when Trout Louts everywhere raise their beakers and cheer the poet’s Immortal Memr’y and all that rot. Our 2008 Burnsnicht gathering has some serious work to do to improve upon last year’s event. But if you weren’t there, you’ll never know what you missed. Suffice it to say, no fish were harmed in the making of this party. True, some English was mangled and a few too many bottles of the noble Lagavulin drained quickly and without proper genuflection. But hell, there was a bagpiper and cigars! Louts who attended will tell you it was exactly our kind of evening.

Click the screenshot below for details you’ll need to participate in this year’s happy mayhem!

Calling all Louts. The NY DEC has proposed a ban on fishing from inside a boat on the upper West Branch of the Delaware. This proposal is in no way based on science - it is purely the work of a lone biologist who prefers wade fishing over boating. This is just another attempt at limiting our fishing freedoms and I strongly urge each of you to click on the link below and speak out against this proposal! Imagine if the reverse were true and boaters outnumbered waders and passed legislation to ban wade fishing. How would waders feel then? Since the Louts participate in both types of fishing, please speak out during this public comment period. If you had done so previous to Feb. 6th, you need to do so again as the DEC has revised its original proposal and any and all comments posted prior to that date will no longer be considered. This is a trick used in the past by the DEC to avoid or greatly reduce negative comments on a particular topic. After they’ve passed limiting (to the fishery or to fisherman) legislation in the past using this trick, they’ve stated that “there was little opposition to the proposal”. Remember that NY’s DEC does not answer to an autonomous fish and game council as does New Jersey and other states, so politics are alive and well in the DEC! I urge each of you to email the link and tell the DEC “NO on # R4-5″. You do not need to live in NY to do so.

Tell the DEC NO WAY on #R4-5! 

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?

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.

In case you Louts haven’t checked it out yet, you should know that Float King has been on a do-gooder kick recently as the catalyst for an important new Trout Unlimited initiative to teach conservation education to New Jersey middle- and high school students.

Trout in the Classroom is a nationwide TU program where local chapters sponsor teachers who agree to install fish tanks in their classrooms. New Jersey’s Fish & Wildlife authorities supply each class with brook trout eggs in the fall, and the kids get to watch them mature into regular little aquatic predators. During their academic interval, these fish will inspire participating teachers to create lesson plans involving stream habitat, fish biology, various modes of scientific inquiry, art, literacy, and more. Fish that graduate will be released into the wild in the spring, so you big eaters among us shouldn’t get too many ideas unless you plan to fish for these hatchery babies!

Aside from leading the charge in making New Jersey’s program one of the largest in the country, Brian’s vision as NJ State TU Trout-in-the-Classroom Coordinator was to create a common web “lab notebook” where teachers and students will compare notes and observations throughout the 2006-7 school year. I was fortunate enough to get the gig for web design and development.

Check out the site when you get a moment and be sure to pass along an attaboy or two for Brian’s initiative.