Odds & Ends: October 9, 2026

Riding the Rails Through Tulsa. I thought hobos riding the rails got left behind in the 1930s, but the tradition is still alive in 2026, and there’s a guy with a YouTube channel who gives you a peek at what it’s like, including the perils that come with it. In this one, he rides a freight train through my fair town of Tulsa, OK, and I got to see the place from a perspective I’ve never seen before. Rail riding is illegal and dangerous, and I won’t be trying it myself, but it’s fun to watch somebody else do it. For some interesting historical insights on how to hobo, check out this primer from 1937. 

Lock Pick Training Kit. Our tutorial on how to pick a lock is one of our all-time most popular articles on the site. If you’re looking to get started with this skill, this lock pick training kit is cool. It comes with a tension wrench and four picks (and a key, of course, just in case). The lock is transparent so you can see what’s going on with the tumbler pins, which helps you understand what exactly you’re doing with the picks. I’ve used this with the teenage boys I lead at church when we have lock picking night. 

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram. Apparently IG and TikTok influencers have discovered John Boyd and his OODA loop and are starting to talk it up to their followers, which got me thinking about this biography again. I read it several years ago and had Coram on the podcast to discuss Boyd. The book also inspired several AoM articles, including “To Be or to Do” and my deep dive into the OODA loop. Boyd is an incredibly interesting figure from military history. He was an Air Force fighter pilot who never lost in mock dogfights with other American pilots and then came up with a theory of conflict the Marines built their doctrine around. He also pissed a lot of people off along the way. While he made enemies of nearly every general in the Pentagon, Boyd ended up being right about a lot of stuff. It’s a really good book. Fun to see Boyd get some attention, even from the IG girlies.

Unusual Suspects. This is a fun online game to while away the time with. Witnesses describe a suspect in vague, unreliable fragments, you draw what you think they saw, and then the game shows you how close your sketch was to the suspect. The suspects usually end up being well-known cartoon or brand characters, so it’s always hilarious to see how your drawing doesn’t match up at all with what the game had in mind. 

On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Humility: The World’s Most Overrated Virtue and Sunday Firesides: Time Itself Will Not Get You There.

Quote of the Week

I meet with a great many persons in the course of the year, and with many whom I admire and like; but what I feel daily more and more to need, as life every year rises more and more before me in its true reality, is to have intercourse with those who take life in earnest. It is very painful to me to be always on the surface of things. I want a sign, which one catches as by a sort of masonry, that a man knows what he is about in life, and when I find this, it seems to open my heart as thoroughly as when I was twenty years younger. 

—Thomas Arnold