On March 4, 1681, William Penn secured from King Charles II of England the colonial province of Pennsylvania in North America, hoping to provide a refuge in the New World for Quakers and other persecuted people and to build an ideal Christian commonwealth.

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And on March 4, 1955, the first radio facsimile (or “fax”) transmission, was sent across the continent.

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I mailed out the first four-page hardcopy issue of the SurvivalBlog Old School (SOS) Newsletter on Friday. If you’d like to get a copy of that first issue and become a subscriber, then send a donation of $55 or more to:  SurvivalBlog, P.O. Box 303, Moyie Springs, ID 83845.  Be sure to include some mention of  “SOS” or “505” inside the envelope. For your privacy, I recommend that you send payment via money order, USPS PMO, or cash. Also, please use the same address in the upper-left corner of your envelope.

To clarify: The blog is updated with fresh daily, almost without fail. It has been operated this way since 2005. We’ve never had any e-mailings. We keep NO e-mail lists! The voluntary Ten Cent Challenge is intended for donations to support the blog. For a separate fee, we recently added the SOS hardcopy U.S. Mail newsletter, but that is just a contingency mailing list, for the event that blog posting becomes unavailable, due to government or Internet service action. I’ve only promised one issue per year, and perhaps a few others, sporadically. More frequent or longer issues will be added only if SurvivalBlog itself is disrupted from WWW posting.

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Today’s feature article was penned by SurvivalBlog Field Gear Editor Tom Christianson.

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We are seeking entries for the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. More than $875,000 worth of prizes have been awarded since we started running this contest. In 2023, we polled blog readers, asking for suggested article topics. Refer to that poll if you haven’t yet chosen an article topic. Round 111 ends on March 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how-to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.