Boy Scout Service Hours Log: Fill & Download for Free

TL;DR: bamboo wood doesn’t exist, and bamboo is not very good at replacing real wood in most situations.Okay, here is the long answer. Bamboo is the collective name for several dozen genera of grasses, all in the Bambusoideae branch of the “BOP” clade.[1] While most bamboo species are either shrubby or relatively short plants, a couple genera include particularly large species, typically called “timber bamboo” or “giant bamboo.” These are the bamboo of relevance.Being in the grass family, bamboo is not a tree. Thus, material cut from bamboo stalks is not technically “wood.” Because of its roughly similar properties, however, and for marketing reasons, it often is referred to as a wood.With that pedantry out of the way, let’s consider the uses of wood, and how bamboo compares. The big ones are fuel, lumber, and paper.FuelThere are basically three different forms of fuel that bamboo can be consumed as.As FirewoodWhen I was a young boy scout, there was a large patch of giant bamboo growing beside our scout hut. We would often cut some for use as poles to practice lashing with. Every now and then we would have some sort of fire going. Who am I kidding? We were young boy scouts, we had various sorts of fire all the time. And, of course, “every now and then” some brilliant greenhorn would get the bright idea to add bamboo to the fire.The Scoutmaster was rarely pleased.Bamboo burns all right, if it is dry. Unlike wood, however, bamboo is mostly hollow. Look at the picture below. Notice the segments along the length of the stem. It has pockets or cells of air that take up most of the volume of each segment.Those pockets get extremely hot as the bamboo starts burning on the outside. What happens when you have a sealed pocket of air that becomes extremely hot? It stops being sealed. While not really cinematic (usually), the bursting pockets do tend to throw burning shards of bamboo with adequate vigor. That is part of what makes bamboo a poor firewood—it explodes and shoots burning bamboo skewers like shrapnel.While not likely to impale spectators with flaming spikes, bamboo is a noisy[2] fuel with an elevated risk of burning people, heretic or not, and setting things on fire that are not meant to be set on fire. It also has a higher proportion of ash, which sometimes presents problems.Perhaps more importantly, bamboo does not last long in a fire. One of the more important aspects of using wood for fuel is the longevity of the heat. Well-seasoned hardwood fires may only need additional fuel every few hours. Bamboo, being hollow and thus having a much higher surface to volume ratio, burns up faster than solid blocks of firewood.Overall, bamboo is an inferior firewood.As charcoalChopping it into chunks or even grinding bamboo up and forming it into briquettes alleviates most of the problems above. As far as efficiency is concerned, I do not know how effective the pyrolysis of bamboo is. In particular, I do not know what proportion of the material becomes tar and gases and what proportion remains as the actual charcoal, but I doubt it is much different from normal woods. As mentioned before, bamboo does produce a bit more ash than wood, and ash residue is probably more of an area of sensitivity with charcoal, since it is used in cooking applications. Worst case, the grill has to be emptied of ash more often with bamboo charcoal.Overall, no major difference from real wood.As biomass or feed stock for bio-fuelThere are currently no methods of converting bamboo into bio-fuel, so that is a bust. Corn and sugar cane are the kings of bio-fuel specifically because the saccharides in those plants are predominantly simple and easily converted into fuel. As for biomass, it is certainly possible that bamboo would be better than wood, but that is assuming biomass is even a realistic form of “progress.” By all accounts, going back to the good ol’ days of burning wood for mankind’s energy needs seems just the sort of romantic backwardness that hippies would have happened to seize upon as the solution to the ills of industrialization. It is hard to be harmed by industrialization if you send civilization back to the bronze age, I have to admit. Further, it seems to be the case that biomass power and coal power have similar air pollution potential.[3] [4] [5]Overall with bamboo biomass, probably no major difference from wood biomass in that both are equally stupid.LumberHere, the difference is quite striking. Untreated, bamboo is a pale off-white or light yellow color, lacks visible grain pattern, has no sapwood or heartwood distinction, and ranges in hardness from comparable to balsa to as hard as tropical hardwoods. Trees vary (immensely) in hardness and strength by species. Bamboo, generally, does not. Unlike trees, a piece of bamboo does not have generally uniform hardness and strength. Instead, bamboo is softest on the inside, and becomes progressively harder closer to the outside, in much the same fashion as palm.[6] Bamboo fanboys (they exist) often cite the exceptional strength of bamboo. While they are correct, the values they tend to cite are often only accurate for the outermost portion of bamboo, or, more commonly, refer to bamboo composites. In a word, the strength and hardness of bamboo is inconsistent. What is consistent, however, is bamboo’s durability, or lack thereof. Untreated, bamboo rots easily on account of its high starch content and lack of any natural decay inhibiting chemicals (eg tannins), and it is very attractive to a host of termites, ants, and other bugs.[7]Bamboo has a tendency to splinter badly when being cut, and tear-out is common when being machined; both problems are made worse by bamboo’s strong dulling effect on tools. With up to 4% silica content, bamboo can dull blades and cutters as badly as even the more infamous tropical hardwoods,[8] so using carbide tipped tools rather than steel is strongly recommended.[9]But, physical properties aside, bamboo has one particular feature that makes it unique.It is round and hollow.On the face of things, that sounds good. Theoretically, round hollow things are really strong. However, being round and hollow is precisely why bamboo is difficult to use as lumber. Lumber, to be practical, has to have flat surfaces. Wood, to be useful, gets cut up into boards, and bamboo is geometrically extremely hostile to that process.Similarly, bamboo is not amenable to being turned into plywood. Plywood is produced by peeling logs along their growth rings. Bamboo, being hollow and having no growth rings and huge differences in strength in different parts, cannot go through the same process. Instead, it has to be sliced into very thin layers that are then glued together—a process that is less efficient and involves thinner and thus more plies, which means more glue.Finally, I have seen very mixed accounts of its stability. Sometimes, I read that untreated bamboo has terrible dimensional stability, roughly two to three times as much movement in service as normally used woods do, and sometime I read it has amazing stability, though in the latter case I have never seen it explicitly referring to unprocessed, natural bamboo, so my doubts are stronger than my hopes.For these reasons, bamboo “lumber” is almost never sold untreated. Indeed, even the bamboo chopsticks that go with your Chinese take-out (actually, they are probably made from aspen wood) have been processed (leaching, drying, possibly carbonizing, and milling, typically). Woodworkers who use bamboo work with engineered bamboo sheets or boards or more highly processed products.Flooring deserves special mention, on account of its popularity.Given the above, it should be obvious that bamboo “hardwood” floors are a little more than just bamboo cut up into boards.The process is fairly involved. Typically, bamboo is harvested, leached in water to remove starches (so it does not rot so quickly) or boiled in hydrogen peroxide (or both), dried, and baked at high temperature to darken its color. Sliced into thin strips, it is arranged in layers, usually with some degree of weaving to improve strength, mixed with resins, and then subject to high temperature and pressure to set the epoxy.[10] The resulting “board” is then stained and sealed, much like a regular hardwood floor.This product, if made well, can be a viable flooring material. While it is about as natural as wood patterned vinyl tiles, it at least makes a good effort of pretending to be wood, and at an acceptable price. Because the fibers have been crossed linked and are embedded in glue, the board has better physical characteristics than untreated bamboo.Overall, it compares all right. There do seem to be a lot of disingenuous claims about how “natural” it is, about its physical properties, and about its alleged environmental benefits.[11] [12]Call me a purist, but I prefer the real thing.PaperBamboo is not very useful for making paper, though I have seen some use in producing “fluff pulp” which is a constituent of tissue, toilet, and other absorbent papers.While it does have a similar cellulose content to most woods,[13] [14] the high silica content, mostly a nuisance in woodworking, is a show-stopper in paper-making, causing a problem called silicon influence.[15] While there has been research into how to effectively remove the silica, bamboo has as of yet only seen limited use in the paper industry, though there is continuing research and effort in the industry to change that.[16]It is certainly possible that in the future bamboo will be a more realistic alternative to wood in some situations if the manufacturing process for engineered bamboo and the chemical treatment of bamboo pulp for paper-making improve. Until then, however, it is unlikely bamboo will play a much bigger role in industry than it currently does.Footnotes[1] Bamboo - Wikipedia[2] Bamboo gets its name because it goes BAM when in a fire[3] Biomass power plants and health problems among nearby residents: a case study in Thailand.[4] ScienceDirect[5] Lancet[6] The Wood Database[7] Durability of Bamboo[8] Woodsense: Bamboo[9] Bamboo Woodworking: How to Use Bamboo in Fine Furniture[10] What Is Strand Woven Bamboo Flooring?[11] Bamboo Flooring Really Is Eco-Friendly, in Some Ways[12] Environmental Impacts of Bamboo Flooring[13] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.553.9762&rep=rep1&type=pdf[14] Cellulose Content of Hardwood[15] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4660/6c2c1d5a56e40f1bda9294be47c5681dc555.pdf[16] Why Kimberly-Clark is banking on bamboo

I am uncertain whether or not many will find this as amusing/entertaining as I did, but here goes, nevertheless….Straight off the bat, I’ll ask any of you unfortunate enough to have come across it, to ignore that pile of garbage they screen on television; that utterly laughable, appallingly “acted” and even more poorly researched dreck named (funnily enough) “Shetland”. There. Now that that is done….I had been in CID (Criminal Investigation Department, plainclothes detectives) for a number of years, working in the Shetland Islands, which was, as one colleague pointed out, as busy or as quiet a place as you chose to make it. Sexual offences were a semi-regular thing, as were domestic assaults - both slightly higher than national average - incidents fuelled by alcohol (the Viking heritage, perhaps) and a LOT of Class A drugs, consumed (strangely) by a tiny minority of the population of a strictly criminal bent, some of whom were able to hold down relatively high-paying jobs, but most were simply stealing anything not nailed down to fuel their addictions.Acquisitive crime (thefts by housebreaking/HB etc) wasn’t that much of a problem, as - the odd “safe job” aside, committed by a travelling team of crackers, from the Central belt, who we eventually identified (three safes later) - the Shetland criminal fraternity are a ‘captive audience’.We are surrounded by sea, 150 miles from the nearest piece of Scotland, taking an hour by plane (expensive) or else 12 to 14 hours on the ferry (on good days, over 24 hours at times of bad weather) with some of the worst waters in the world around our little domain, nicknamed Fraggle Rock, by some of my humorous chums. So when that kind of crime occurs, you have a small pool of suspects. The scene in CID would go something like this:-Sgt: “We had an OLP last night.” (a Theft by Opening Lockfast Place)Me: “Aye, someone hoofed a rock through a side office window and climbed through. Cash stolen, a good few boxes of loose confectioneries and a load of soft drinks - either they had a car, or it’s someone local. Fibres and blood recovered, they cut themselves on the glass. I got a few good (finger)prints and a cracking footprint - Nike AirMax, size 10 - at the point of entry.”Sgt: “Who do we have out at the moment?” (referring to our list of Class A drug addicts - by and large the first call for any such crime).Me: “There’s only X, Y or Z. Z did this the last few times. The other two, one likes cars, the other usually jemmies the door. My bet is Z.”Sgt: “Go pay him a visit, see what he has to say, once you’ve checked for witnesses.”Me: “On it.”Now, this was the situation, on the morning of which I speak. A cold slate grey Autumn morning, with that crisp zing in the air that only being no more than 5 miles from a bitter just-south-of-Arctic sea gives to a day. Door to door carried out, in the area, with a view to witnesses or else best evidence - video footage. Four properties later, we found black and white CCTV, slightly blurred, as it was from within a neighbouring shop, which overlooked the side of the shop broken into. It showed a skinny figure in grey, black and white (strangely enough), picking up a broken piece of kerbstone, checking the area and IN it goes, through the window. Frantic scrabbling and the hood on the “Nike! It’s says Nike!” (yelled my colleague, redundantly) top pulls back and we see shaggy dark hair, a big nose, not much else. We look at one another, “Definitely Our Boy,” says I. “But he is on a tag, at his new house?” reports my puzzled colleague. “It couldn’t be him?”Our Boy had been up in court on 16 charges of Theft HB, just weeks prior, where this silver-tongued Glaswegian ‘immigrant’ had represented himself, as an old hand when it came to the courts. He was practically on first name terms with the Sheriff, who described him as “oddly charming and persuasive”, and had afforded him bail, as long as the Council found him a new home, away from the “bad influences” Our Boy had cited as being responsible for his poor life choices, “dragging” him into crime. So the local Housing Department had moved him, from an area where pretty much all the petty criminals lived in one square block, to the very centre of Lerwick - a town where folk trusted one another to the extent that no one locked their doors (house or car) at night. I remember my heart sinking and incredulity flooding me, when I heard that decision. “But it’s okay,” the Bosses thought, “they still have him tagged!”And now we return to our thrilling tale….We went round to his palatial new Council house, neat tidy gardens all around, as far as the eye could see. Then there was his garden gate, slats kicked out, hanging off, litter and rusting junk littering the gravel laid “garden”. But, most interestingly, the front door was lying slightly ajar.My eyes lit up. No locked door - not even a closed door to worry about! (I was the guy who knocked all the doors in, in Shetland, having received special training in this, ten years prior to this event, and having enjoyed slamming two-man battering rams through doors across the Highlands & Islands ever since. If you’re big enough, a two man ram is easier and more effective for a single “operator” than the pokey stubby wee lump of metal which they try and give you! Tsk!)Carelessly dropped in the hallway and wedging open the front door was a large trade box of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, entirely empty, twisted and torn Creme Egg foil wrappers lying like cherry blossoms in a Tokyo park, littering every available surface, floor, stairs, blowing out into the front garden…. We smiled at each other, my colleague and I. Addicts have a sweet tooth, and no mistake. I nudged the door open with a knuckle, and there were packs of Coca-Cola, Fanta, Irn Bru - all full fat, none of that Diet nonsense for Our Boy, ooooh no! These were behind the door, stopping it from opening, and there were more boxes of confectionery sealed, or burst open, in the living room doorway. Cadbury’s Fudge, Galaxy (chocolate bar), Aero (bubbly scrumptious chocolate treat), Wispa, Mars Bar, Snickers….. Our Boy had that sweet tooth bad and no mistake!We made our way into the living room, knocking on the door, where I announced myself, even as I nudged it open. No reply. There, lying on the couch like some ungainly pile of broken broomsticks held together by rubber bands, crowned by a long, ugly, misshapen head with shaggy hair; his gaping maw drooling white and pale yellow flecked sputum onto his sallow green-tinged pock-marked and acne-ridden flesh, his rotting teeth - or was that tooth?- on show, below the single largest nose I have ever seen upon a human visage, as he snored raucously enough to set up vibrations which were doubtless being picked up by DARPA’s Alaskan HAARP sonar arrays, was Our Boy. Fast asleep, hypodermic syringe next to him, with his “works” (heroin) kit - his cigarette filters, spoon, lighter, lemon juice and an empty wrap of tinfoil. The tourniquet was still around his arm, lying loose (or he’d probably have had gangrene, by this time - more’s the pity).There, on the floor, at his feet, was a pile of shopping bags from the store which had been broken into, containing the cash from the registers and the charity collection boxes he had liberated from the chains which secured them to the counter, with the aid of some boltcutters, also handily in the same carrier bag. A regular Boy Scout, Our Boy! He had been prepared.I woke him with a nice (ahem) gentle pinch to his ear lobe and a “sterno rub” - other officers and medical staff (possibly some bouncers) will understand the technique I am referring to. Reviving someone who is otherwise dead to the world. It’s always worked for me, in the past - well, either that, or iced water over their testicles, and I thought we had best leave that until the questioning started (I’m kidding about the questioning, but not about the iced water to the testicles - it would wake a dead man, trust me).Our Boy comes to, somewhat groggily, and I help him to his feet and present him with a fetching new pair of cufflinks, connected by a solid steel bar. “I am detaining you, blah de blah de blah.” (I went through the whole procedure, minus blah de blahs, before any bright pedantic Quoran complains that I acted incorrectly).Back to the station we trot (or drive, as the case might be) having loaded all the goodies carefully into the rear of the Police van, which I called for this purpose, gloves worn (Unlike Our Boy). Before we left, I snagged his hooded jacket (a pale grey “Nike” hoodie - imagine!) and a pair of size 10 Nike AirMax trainers, to give him to wear - my real reasons shall become apparent, shortly.We booked him through the custody system as a detention, popped him in the Detention Room (police are nothing if not imaginative in naming these facilities) and then I set about logging all the productions (items seized at the home address) as well as the results from my Crime Scene Examination (I am a dab hand at lifting dabs, you see - the very dab, to use a Scots phrase).I updated the Detective Sergeant who was suitably thrilled, (“Uh Huh”, was his response, as he shopped for his next holiday, online) and then…? Then the time had come for Daniel to enter the Lions Den; Theseus to beard the big horny beastie in the twisty-turny maze thing; Our Boy to do battle in a duel to the finish with my good self - battle of wills, and of witlessness, with the dumbest man losing. I had a small advantage on my side, for I am no drug addict - although I confess I am partial to the odd Barratts Sherbet Fountain (Whisht! Speak of this to no man, I tell you!).Into the Interview Room we went (I told you we are an imaginative bunch, did I not?), fingerprints, blood swab, footprint from the locus, his shoes (seized as a production, unknown to him), his jacket (also seized, unknown to him), the boxes, bags and piles of sweets, trays of soft sickly sweet fizzy beverages and the collecting tins, all laid out upon the floor behind me.Now, to establish “territory”, the given practice is to set up the room and have your colleague bring them to you. I did so, sitting like wise old Solomon, upon my judges throne, staring loftily at the door. In waltzes Our Boy, followed by a uniformed colleague, who takes a seat and whispers to me that the other detective had received another call and had to dash off, but all was well, I had my trusty compatriot, with all of six months service, by my side - what could go wrong?I commenced the interview and battle was joined. Our Boy finally lifted his head from his folded arms, upon the tabletop, once I had gone through the formal caution and detention procedure, which he accepted, grunting his answers, acknowledging his status and the caution, like a billionaire utterly bored with life.When he did lift his ugly fizzog from his arms, I noted him gaze, cunning and remarkably clear-eyed, at the Productions he could see behind me. I asked where he had been the night before and he lifted his trouser leg to show his tag. “Ah cannae leave my fuckin house, you daftie!” he sneered. “Big brain, youse, eh?” I smiled back. I took him through his movements on the preceding evening and his answer was always the same. “Tagged. Hame. Is that it, can ah go hame noo?” Then his tone changed and he became increasingly more obstreperous, as the interview entered the 20 minute mark. “Ah’m sick o’ youse lazy basturrds blamin me fur awthin! Ah’ve done sweet fuck all an’ youse cannae prove nuhin!”“Which brings me to…” I commenced, bringing over the CCTV still from the neighbours’ security camera, showing the Nike jacket, the shaggy hair, the nose. “Have ah been arrested fur huvin’ a big nose? Are youse fuckin kiddin’ man? Yur havin a fuckin laugh, ye prick! That’s aw youse got?!” and he laughed. Until I lined up the footprint, the shoe, the blood swab, the fingerprints and his jacket, on the floor and told him they’d all been seized as productions. I was explaining about comparisons with his prints, the sole of the shoe with the impression I had lifted, his DNA with the blood swab and that’s when it happened. I was just beginning to explain about the multiple productions seized from his home, including the cash and charity tins - which he would have claimed to have been left there by an unnamed friend, I had little doubt….Which is when the fun started.To explain, our taped interview rooms were just that. Interview rooms where suspects were recorded on tape. Audio tape. Sound only. It had been this way for years and it was all Our Boy knew. And he knew it well. Sound only.So when he yelled suddenly, “Aaah! Leggo of me! Stop it! What are ye daein’, Big Man?” (Glaswegians are, on the whole, rather short - with exceptions, of course - bringing the average Scottish male height down to just below 5’8”, so to most Glaswegians, everyone is “Big Man”, or “Big Yin”, as is the case with the celebrated Mr William Connolly, Esquire), the young uniformed officer was so surprised that he nearly fell out of his seat. “Eh? What? What?” he burst out, mystified. I merely sat, watching the show, of which this performance was merely the overture.“Aaah! Stoppit! Yur hurtin’ me!” cries Our Boy. “No! Ah’m no’ sayin’ nuhin’ an’ youse cannae make me! AAAAAAAH!” and with that, he reared backward and slapped himself, hard, three times to the face.Now, he and I had been here before, and in the past, at this point, I would have interjected, in a calm and dispassionate/bored tone, “For the benefit of the tape, Detective Constable Souter and Constable XXXXXX are sitting back from the table, arms folded, while the suspect XXXXXX is striking himself to the right side of his face, with his open right hand.”Not today. Today, I was intent on enjoying the show. When the young Constable made to reach across the table and try to stop this episode of earnest “self-harm”, I barred his reach with my arm, firmly, across his chest and upper arms, shaking my head. He looked at me, mystified, but eventually sat back and did nothing, when I smiled, nodded once and winked at him.Meanwhile, Our Boy was shouting all manner of objection to the ‘brutality’ he was inflicting upon himself, and had taken to striking himself around the eyes and lips, with clenched fist (avoiding his knuckles, of course, the cunning little sod). Soft tissue was swelling and discolouring, rapidly, as he grinned at me, between landing these blows, blood dribbling from his mouth. “Ah didnae dae nuhin’ an’ ye cannae make me say ah did! Stop! Stop him, please? No! Fur fuckssake stop hittin’ me, Big Man, please? You’re mental, you! Owwww! Oooow! OOOOOOW!” he cried, as he went for the coup de grâce, palms flat on the table, rearing back and then headbutting the wooden surface repeatedly, while pretending to mewl, bawl and cry like a baby (Opium is primarily, used medicinally for pain relief - Our Boy still had enough of his morning dose to keep him, in the immortal words of Roger Waters, “comfortably numb”).When he was done - the skin of his enormous nose split across the bridge, blood trickling impressively from said injury, his right eye swelling beneath the socket and blood dribbling out of his slack puffed and swollen lips - I paused a moment, wanting to be quite sure.“Are we done?” I asked. “Is this Academy Award-winning performance over, now, or is there an encore?”“Aye, very good, Big Man. We both ken (know) whit ye did tae me. You’re fucked, aye? The injuries speak fur theyselfs. Polis brutality. Youse can deny it all youse waant. Look at me, ye sayin’ ah did this tae masel’ (myself)? Youse think onywaan will believe yez aboot that?” he asked, fairly chuckling to himself at his ingenuity.“It might well be enough to introduce reasonable doubt into the mind of a jury, maybe even a sheriff,” I responded. “The thing is, XXXX, it’s been over a month since you were last detained or arrested, am I correct?” He looked at me quizzically, “Aye. So? So whut?” he sneered.I pointed upward. “We had digital video recording equipment installed, three weeks ago. Smile, XXXX. You’re on Candid Camera.”His response was extensive, voluble and not fit for ears unsullied by the kind of invective, which is only to be heard from the cream of society’s underbelly.Suffice to say, I ended up having to arrest him for a breach of the peace. Such was his towering rage, that all 5’6” and 95 lbs of him, he stood and tried (and failed) to lift his chair to chest height, threatening to kill me - then 6’4” in my bare feet, and around 220 lbs - and just would not calm down. Apparently he felt I had “set him up”. It is not my fault that he felt so bored by the process, which he had been through literally hundreds of times before, that he practically slept through that part of the caution where I warned him that “…anything you say will be recorded, on digital video system apparatus, (or words to that effect) and may be noted down and used in evidence against you….”It was subsequently found that the local Sheriff (akin to English magistrates, one step below a Judge) had received so many reports of minor breaches of Our Boy’s offender ankle tag - 20 minutes here, 10 minutes there, etc - over the period of the first week it had been fitted, that he had instructed the monitoring agency not to bother him with such “minor nonsense”, and so they were expressly forbidden from reporting any incident of less than an hour, in future! This, having been said in front of the accused, in effect, gave this habitual recidivist housebreaker, who had dozens and dozens of previous convictions, 59 minutes and 59 seconds to burglarise each of his new neighbours, one at a time, in the nicer part of town where he had been placed, following his plea to the same Sheriff (to be spared the “bad company”, who had been “dragging him into criminality”). Christmas presents were stolen from beneath the tree of a young, single mother, working two jobs to try and provide for her young children. She could not afford to replace them (the cops in our station replaced them, with extras, out of our own pockets, after I made her plight known), and Our Boy didn’t care a single jot. He sneered, in fact, when this was put to him, in court. Elderly people were particularly favourite pickings for him, as he figured that even at his size and weight, he could handle them, if disturbed during a break-in. This spree culminated in his sweet tooth leading him to the nearby shop, on the evening in question.It was said of him that, with 16 housebreakings already attributed to him, directly, before he had been (incredibly, inexplicably) bailed to his new address, he had adopted a “hung for a sheep, as for a lamb” approach, and I actually proved a further 17 dishonesties, including 12 more housebreakings to him, all committed whilst on bail, as some householders hadn’t come forward, initially, either through embarrassment or not having felt the theft was great enough to warrant police attention (until they heard the culprit was in custody and police were seeking any further information)!When Our Boy then threw himself upon the mercy of the Court, and made a direct plea to the Sheriff, swearing upon his mother’s grave (she was still drawing breath, as I pointed out to the Sheriff, later) that this had changed him and that the Sheriff’s “previous faith” in him had resonated in him, making him see that he needed “bail, not jail”, it was astounding that this same Sheriff publicly stated that he found Our Boy so persuasive that he was moved towards actually granting him the bail, with some further minor conditions. It was left to the Procurator Fiscal (our prosecutor) to protest this consideration vehemently, pointing out, amongst other things, the theft of the presents, preying upon the elderly, his utter lack of remorse or empathy for his many victims and that this man “singlehandedly changed the way a community - previously trusting and open - live their lives.”This last was a direct quote from the ‘Remarks’ section of my crime report, and formed the headlines in the local newspaper, that week. The PF loved it. Our Boy not so much. His bail was denied, he was remanded to prison and ended up serving 3 years for the 33 dishonesties (27 of them being thefts by housebreaking). A pittance for the hurt and suffering he inflicted, the violation of those families and pensioners’ homes, and the abiding fear and concern he instilled in them, that having happened once, it might well happen again.He never used that tactic in interviews under caution again, though.For such a scabrous and repulsive little rodent, it tickles me no end to recall his beating himself up - every self-administered punch, slap or headbutt recalled in loving detail, granting me vicarious pleasure - and the rumour that I recorded his cries and pleas for “me” to stop beating him up and used them as a mobile phone ringtone, for some years afterward, are of course entirely unfounded.Ah. I must go, my phone is ringing…. “Aaah! Stop it! Please Big Man? …..”

Q: When should I be receiving first class in Boy Scouts?A: As soon as you earn it, with a reasonable amount of time allowed for the troop committee to procure the patch.The guidelines that the BSA provides your scoutmaster is to encourage and support you completing all the requirements within 12 months of joining scouts. But many people are different or differently motivated. Your scoutmaster nor your parents can make you do it. The more you want to work for it, the faster it will come.So, you are awarded your First Class rank when you have completed all the requirements for First Class in your scout handbook and have the signatures on each.You can only be awarded First Class if you have already earned Second Class, Tenderfoot, and Scout ranks. You can work on requirements in any of those ranks in any order, but you have to complete the ranks in the prescribed order.Read your handbook and find a few things to be working on every week. Since many things are better with a buddy, find a buddy that wants to put in the same effort as you do. Go to every meeting and outing. Keep a log such as the one in the back of your handbook.Plan ahead for the longer term requirements and get them started as early as possible. Here are a few I pulled out of the requirements on meritbadge.org:You need three hours of pre-approved community service for First Class 9d (this is not cumulative with the tenderfoot and second class requirements). Pre-approved means your scoutmaster has given you permission to do X for Y on Date. Check with your scoutmaster on your troop’s procedure to get community service projects approved.You need 10 activities that are not troop meetings and 6 of them with overnight camping for First Class (these are cumulative with the tenderfoot and second class requirements).You need two hours of pre-approved community service for Second Class 8e.You need 28 days (4 weeks) between doing Tenderfoot 6c and Second Class 7a.You need 6 activities that are not troop meetings and 3 of them with overnight camping for Second Class.You need one hour of community service in a pre-approved project for Tenderfoot 7b.You need 30 days to do Tenderfoot 6b.You need 1 patrol or troop campout to complete Tenderfoot 1b.After completing all the requirements and getting signatures in your book you may have some small amount of record keeping for each rank — your book is an official record but the adult leaders in your troop have to hear about it from you that you’ve completed everything.For all ranks you need to complete a scoutmaster conference. For nearly all ranks you have to complete a board of review. These are opportunities to find out how you report to the troop advancement committee to officially complete your rank requirements. You can also ask about your troops’ policies and procedures on awarding ranks which will be more accurate than strangers on Quora.The scoutmaster handbook suggests to scoutmasters to award ranks as soon as possible after a youth earns it. The scout store requires paperwork to purchase any rank insignia. Ask your troop committee (or advancement committee) how they deal with this. As I alluded in my first sentence, sometimes they need a little time for an adult to turn in paperwork at the council office/store and buy the patches.Some troops do all awards together at a Court of Honor which is encouraged to be 3–4 times per year.Our troop inherited many insignia patches so our custom is to award the cloth patch immediately — usually at the same event that the board of review is successfully concluded. Then the rank card and parent pin will be awarded at the next Court of Honor. We want everyone to be able to wear their rank immediately. We would still do all the paperwork and buy a new patch and replace the stocked insignias so we would have more for the next award.I hope this helps you on your journey! Good luck!