Infranoir.

Occasionally I've noted hits in my site meter coming from the blog Kick Him, Honey, the web digs of writer Benjamin Whitmer.

After a good review of his debut novel, Pike, by friend Marko, I'd been meaning to read it myself, and Sunday noon-ish I Kindled up a copy...

...and didn't put it down 'til I finished that evening, feeling like I'd just taken a good shot to the jaw. Wow.

Was No Country For Old Men too relentlessly cheerful and bubbly for your tastes? Dirty White Boys too morally unambiguous? Then this is your feel-good family hit of the summer, right here.

Words like "bleak" and "gritty" don't really do it justice. At the same time, it is beautifully written and deftly paced. There are times when he paints a picture with words right on you, so real that you want to go and shower it off, but you have to stay and turn the page, as stuck in the story as the characters are in their lives, drawn on by the faint hope that maybe there'll be a happy ending to this mess after all.

Be aware that the book is rated R for... well, pretty much everything for which you can get an R rating.

Buzzkill.

In comments to Marko's post about pedal pubs, Joat linked to an interesting news story:

Almost the instant they stopped at a red light, a crowd of "25 to 40 young African Americans" suddenly materialized and surrounded the pub, as Ranney told police later. The teenagers jumped up on the bar, shaking the whole contraption and screaming indecipherably. Ranney says a couple of the kids tried to grab purses from an overhead storage compartment...

Here's some ofay suburban types looking for a leisurely, if somewhat boozy, tour around their fair city, and instead they get a pedal pub trip through downtown Minneapolis as envisioned by Joseph Conrad, and it's not like they were pedaling through the 'hood, either: Nicolette Mall is right in the commercial heart of downtown, analogous to Circle Centre here in Hoosieropolis.

Look, folks, the whole "social contract/rule of law" thing is based on good citizens receiving a modicum of protection from stuff like this in exchange for not driving the wrong way down the freeway while snorting fat lines of coke off the dashboard and shooting anybody who gives them the finger for it. If you can't deliver the former, where's the margin in refraining from the latter?

Overheard in the Office:

I may have mentioned before that one of the more entertaining parts of my morning is overhearing the rambling chatter that comes out of the shower while my roomie is alone in there with nothing but her inner mental dialogue, which occasionally burbles over into outer mental dialog. For example, this is what just wafted over the metaphorical transom:

RX: "Today on Battle of the Bands, it's The Dave Clark 5 versus SEAL Team 6! Oh, no! Dave is down! It looks like a headshot..."

Oookay, then...
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Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

D.W. Drang has a pretty interesting piece mulling the utility of a computers in various disaster preparedness situations.

I agree that a little netbook could come in handy in a lot of scenarios, and the hardened USB thumb-drive is rather clever. I'm wondering if that wouldn't be a good way to store scans of important documents, as well?

Tools required for disassembly...

Colt's little M1903 pocket pistol field-strips pretty easily, no tools required. There's even a handy arrow etched on the slide showing you exactly how far back to withdraw it to take the piece down.

Elbert Searle's Savage pocket pistol is similarly simple, at least as regards field-stripping, while the H&R is a little more complex, requiring a tool like a screwdriver (although the lip of the magazine floorplate is shaped for this) to pop down on the trigger guard while you're holding your mouth just right...



The Remington, on the other hand...

"Don't try taking it apart 'til you come down here," said Gunsmith Bob over the phone, and not in a "Ha-ha, get it? It's complicated," way, but in a "No, really, I'm serious: don't," sort of tone.

See, what you do is you push the muzzle against something hard, causing the slide and barrel to retract a bit and then use a small screwdriver to poke and pry the slide stop out. Then you retract the slide a bit again, by itself this time, and pull forward on the barrel, using the grooved ring.

And then nothing happens. So you pull a little more while holding your mouth different, maybe with your tongue out the corner so the gun knows you're concentrating. And there's a sort of *click* but nothing else. This is the part where the NRA Manual says the slide should come off, so you say "Shannon, what am I doing wrong?" and hand him the gun. Then Shannon, who can crack walnuts without the aid of a nutcracker, tugs at the barrel a bit with no result before hucking it up in the padded jaws of a bench vise...

This is not something you want to be doing around the campfire.

"No wonder it wouldn't come apart," says Shannon, "this thing's drier than a popcorn fart," and hands it to you in two parts, frame and slide. As you examine the underside of the slide, looking at the interplay between the barrel, the moving breechblock, and the very serious-looking recoil spring, wound concentrically around the barrel and of a size and thickness more usually seen pulling screen doors to, the whole assemblage wobbling under very obvious spring tension, Shannon mutters over his shoulder "...and be careful in there, those things'll pinch up a blood blister."

So you decide to just oil it up and reassemble it without further disassembly while listening to Shannon tell about the guy who got the bolt out of his Remington 742 by prying the receiver open until it dropped out the magazine well, and then brought it in to see if it could be fixed.

I'll take it apart next time.

If you want to get smarter...

...on using carbines to mess up people who are trying to hurt you, F2Sconsulting has a class in the NoVA area at the end of February. There may be some spots left. The instructor knows a thing or two about using a carbine...

Wisht I was closer.

Guns, lots of guns.

When I was younger, I worked briefly in the seafood department of a grocery store. Come break time, it was always easier, and practically as cheap, to steam up a mess of shrimp as it was to go get in the car and get some fast food for lunch. Did you know you can get heartily sick of shrimp?

Once upon a time, I really, really, really liked guns. There were guns I wanted soooo bad: I remember when getting a Spectre, or a P7M8, or a Mateba Unica-6 was the highlight of my whole month. I fear I've burned myself out a bit: the Specter was as useless as training wheels on a jumbo jet, the HK was hard to find leather for, the Mateba was a pain in the butt to clean...

There's nothing that really lights my fuse like that anymore. Oh, sure, I usually find something of interest at a gun show, but a lot of the thrill is gone.

There are still a few guns, though, that pique my interest enough that if somebody handed me the winning lotto ticket, I'd try to find one for the collection. Robb Allen asked "What would you get if you could get any five guns, cost and practicality be hanged?" Good question. So in no particular order, here's the answer:

• M1868 Papal States Remington:
  Because if the dead rise and walk the earth in search of human brains, there's nothing better with which to put them back into the hereafter than a rifle with the Keys of St. Peter stamped right into the receiver, no matter what Hornady may state to the contrary. Too bad the 12.7x45R cartridge is a handloader-only proposition these days; maybe we can get them to do a run of Z-Max, just in case.


• Webley Mars Pistol:
  Because it's cool. Ammo is completely unavailable, but you don't even need to shoot it: You can go on at length about Sir Gabbet-Fairfax's long-recoil pistol that drew the cartridges rearward from the magazine and fired a bottlenecked .45 that was the most powerful handgun cartridge around until the hot .357 Magnum barely edged it out, and the ejection pattern would... and your assailant will be bored to death. Like the Webley-Fosbery semiauto revolver, this thing's practically a Trivial Pursuit answer in solid steel.
  


• Russian military contract Winchester M1895:
  A box-magazine-fed, Browning-designed, fully-stocked, 7.62x54R Winchester levergun with a bayonet lug that may have been used to shoot Bolsheviks in Russia and Fascists in Spain. What's not to like?


• Mauser M712 "Schnellfeuer":
  If you don't at least kinda want one of these, I'm not sure we can be friends anymore.


• Swedish m/35 LMG:
  It's a Browning BAR with a finned quick-change barrel and it's chambered in 6.5x55 and it's about dead sexy.

Most of those are pretty much fantasyland, for fiscal reasons if nothing else, but I figure I actually have a shot at the M1895 and/or the Pope Gun someday...

How 'bout y'all? What are your five?

...and practically every murderer was once a misdemeanant.

Linoge, among others, discusses the glaring idiocy of the latest antigun nonsense statement, "Fact: Every criminal was once law abiding citizen[sic]" which as an argument is a giant logical goose-egg. Every Nazi dictator was once a baby, too, but that doesn't mean we should chuck them all out with the bathwater just to eliminate the possibility of future Nazi dictators.

However, there have been studies done that point out that, except for the rare nutcase who "just snaps" one day or the honest-to-god "crime of passion", the overwhelmingly vast majority of convicted murderers have long criminal records before they ever get put away for homicide. It's a rare killer who first meets the cops over a cooling body; they're often already on a first-name basis with the local constabulary and nobody's very shocked that "ol' so-and-so finally up and shot somebody."

(Among my readers here, there are enough cops, as well as lawyers who play on offense, defense, or special teams, that hopefully somebody's memory will get jogged enough that I can find a link. I first read the study in the mid-'90s...)

Reboot.

Friend Jenn has moved house, both literally and on the internet.

Personally, I'd have titled the new blog katabasis instead of HedgeRoot. Orpheus only went to Hades for love, but she went to Massachusetts.
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Tab Clearing...

• It depends on how you define "practical": Wilson discusses allocating more gun money to "practical" pieces rather than collector arms in 2012, to which I replied "If you think that things are going to go all colander-on-the-face, then yes, an M4gery is worth a pile of K-22s and Colt Gold Cups. But if you're expecting civil order to remain relatively intact through a period of economic turbulence and inflation, collectables historically perform well in those periods, as people are desperate to turn fiat money into tangibles as soon as it hits their hands." And you can't shoot a looter with a Willie Mays rookie card or a Gibson Les Paul, but a 1912 97% NRA EXC Smith & Wesson Triple Lock is still a .44.


• I want the Broad Ripple franchise for this.


• Monster Hunter International: confusing hippies since 2008. Check out this thread on a discussion forum. You gotta love the original poster's claim that a great big accountant who shoots guns is an unbelievable character (gosh, where could Larry Correia have come up with that idea?) My favorite was the guy on page three who implied Eric Flint somehow wasn't authentically Left Wing because he wrote for Baen. Listen, you patchouli-reeking tea-room radical, Flint's a frickin' card-carrying Trotskyite! You get any farther out the left wing than that, you'll trip over the winglet and fall off.

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom:

Roomie's TV goes off at 0530. I go in and take advantage of the fact that it doesn't wake her up to do some channel surfing until it's breakfast time for Huck and Rannie, looking for blogfodder.

At 0600, I flip from the O'Reilly Report to the Rachel Maddow Show*. Spock now has a beard. Rachel does not. (But she should get one or people might start talking.)

Rachel Maddow: "...and meanwhile, Ron Paul is just gathering up all these delegates. What is he going to do with them?"

Me: "Build a moon rocket and threaten the world!"

(Incidentally, I found this photo of Rachel's bookshelf interesting.)

* I just can't bring myself to watch Fox & Friends. I swear to Vishnu, Fox's morning show looks like a parody of a conservative morning talk show you'd see in a dystopian Verhoeven near-future SciFi flick. Five or ten minutes' exposure to that bubble-headed prattle sucks IQ points from my head like a shop-vac in a Dixie cup.
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Early morning commercial notes...

• Apparently, prospective customers of Colonial Penn life insurance trust Alex Trebeck a lot, and probably consider him a nice young man. Although, considering the target demographic, constantly repeating "...and I've been representing Colonial Penn for ten years..." is a questionable tack. "Ten years? I've been president of the mall-walkers club & neighborhood shuffleboard team longer than that!"


• Saw a Newt Gingrich campaign ad. During the Rachel Maddow show. You'd have to open a Big Ed's Pig & Pit in Riyadh if you wanted to throw money away with less effect. (Either that or it's a clever ploy to reach GOP voters who monitor the enemy freqs. Newt is supposed to be the smartest guy in the room, after all.)
  


• Bobbi's Theory of TV Products: If they offer to throw in a second one free, it is definitely garbage.


• The forthcoming sporting contest in our fair city has local car dealers struggling to find a way to capitalize on it without actually speaking the trademarked words. One is offering a lucky customer a pair of tickets to "the real big football game in Indianapolis!" I thought another had actually uttered the expensive shibboleth, until I looked at the words on the screen and saw they were announcing a "Super Bold Sacrifice Sale". Ah.
  

Go, Canada!

Obama, take note: In the immortal words of that visionary military genius, General "Buck" Turgidson, "Mr. President, we must not allow a spaceborne Lego figurine gap!"

Americans are going to be jittery about this, knowing that little thing is overhead, going "Beep, eh? Beep, eh?"

This is the chance to capture the imagination of a generation, Mr. President. You need to get out there and claim that we will put a Lego minifig on the moon by the end of the decade!

(H/T to Blunt Object.)

Salem's Lot.

Imagine what the Salem witch trials would have been like if we'd had television back then. Young, excitable teenagers suffering mysterious symptoms "beyond the power of Epileptic Fits or natural disease to effect" would have gotten on the Today show, and the attention and excitement would have caused more kids to get possessed by demons, and the Malleus Maleficarum would be at the top of the NYT best seller list.

Of course, we're way too sophisticated for that nonsense now. Now we call Erin Brokovitch.

At least the girls of LeRoy haven't fingered the social studies teacher as a witch yet. (And a good thing, too, because the gullible naifs of that pathetic township would probably have the poor biddy hanged by nightfall.)

Meanwhile, Oklahoma is becoming a vanguard state in the struggle to ban the use of aborted human fetuses in food products to be consumed by humans, a problem heretofore unknown by anyone, save that narrow demographic consisting of insomniacs who own shortwave radios.

My god, it's like the Age of Reason never even happened.
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Finding a balance between Paul Revere and the boy who cried "Wolf!"

Every time the military holds an urban warfare training exercise on U.S. soil, people freak right the heck out. I remember the Birchers complaining about it in the pages of The New American in the late '80s/early '90s. I remember using a 1200-baud modem hooked to an IBM XT to debate the hidden meaning of USMC training exercises in Atlanta on a dial-up BBS*.

Tell me, if the US military is going to train in a realistic urban environment, are they going to:

1. Build a completely realistic duplicate city. (No, I don't mean one of those fake training camp cities.)
2. Use a foreign city. (And boy, won't the city fathers of Sydney be surprised!)
3. Use a handy, dandy pre-built city right here.

Incidentally, do you remember where you were the night the U.S. military actually deployed against U.S. citizens with live ammo on those very same Los Angeles streets twenty years ago this April? I was riding through the nearly deserted city streets of Atlanta that night, leaning out the passenger window with a Canon AE-1 loaded with 1600ASA film to snap photos of a column of GBI guys in riot gear jogging down the street. "Make sure you get my good side!" called one...

The redcoats in Boston drilled every day, had guard mounts, helped little old ladies across the cart path, did soldier stuff... for decades.

If every time they had stepped outside the barracks door, Paul Revere saddled up and rode around yelling "The Regulars are coming!" how many people would have just ignored him come April 18th? "Oh, it's just that Revere guy again, always goin' on about the government..." All I'm saying is that desensitization cuts both ways.


*And, having done this for a number of years, I will note that it is a dead cert that I will get a commenter saying "Gooo to sleeep, citizen! Nothing to see here! Gooo tooo sleeep!", or some variant thereof.

Overheard in the Dining Room:

*RING RING*

Me: "Hello?"

Man On Phone: "Hello, this is Joe Blowski calling from the AFL-CIO for Tam-air-uh K."

Me: "Uh... speaking?" (Oh, jeez, they're gonna want to know where Hoffa is...)

MOP: "What I'm calling about is we're trying to get people together for a demonstration against the 'Right To Work' bill, and we have..."

Me: "I'm not interested. At all."

MOP: "Oh. We had you down as a member or family member of the Electrical Workers'..."

Me: "I am neither."

MOP: "Well, I'll correct that information. I'm sorry, a..."

Me: "Good day, sir."

*CLICK*

Me: "And furthermore, I wouldn't piss in your mouth if your teeth were on fire, ya goddam Wobbly!"

At least the Super Bowl will be over in a week. Lord only knows how long this Right To Work stuff could drag on. And on. And on.

File Under: "Things To Which I Am Not Looking Forward."

There's been talk of the Teamsters protesting at the Super Bowl and possibly a church group from Kansas.

A "church group from Kansas"? Oh, boy. The Super Bowl in our Super City is going to apparently attract Super Douchenozzle Phred Phelps. (And that's not libel, Phred. A true statement cannot be libelous, and I am sure I'd have no problem rounding up a few million people on short notice who would be willing to testify under oath that you are, in fact, a super douchenozzle.)

You kids today and your modern art.

Somehow tenuously connected to the Super Bowl in our Super City comes a Super Art Exhibit, cryptically yclept "TURF", in the old city hall building.

I'm watching the reporter describe it, and he's wandering through a bare room that, as Warhol is my witness, looked like it had been vandalized by a graffiti artist. And not one of the good ones, either, just some kid with a lot of black spray paint and not much talent, albeit with a larger and more polite vocabulary than your average tagger.

Some of the other exhibits are pretty cool though. And for the ones that don't make sense, I just remember that the thing is put on by the Indianapolis Downtown Artists and Dealer's Association: IDADA.

Why did the Dadaist cross the road? Electric dumptruck!

You had to have been there...

Matt discusses his new fireman boots, each one of which uses purt' near an entire cow, in a recent post, and that reminded me of seeing Ambulance Driver discover one of Matt's flip-flops and launch into a soliloquy that had me laughing until it hurt...

Overheard in the Office:

The instructions on the Patio burrito instruct one to "wrap loosely" in a paper towel when microwaving. I thought about cooking a second one, changed my mind, balled up the paper towel in my hand, then changed my mind again and wrapped the now-wrinkled towel loosely around the burrito-flavored texturized food product. Setting the microwave, I wander back towards the office.

Meanwhile, Bobbi goes into the kitchen...

RX: "What are you cooking?"

Me: "Huh?"

RX: "It looks like you're microwaving a used kleenex!"

Well that's just Super.

Apparently someone accidentally shelved their copy of The Sum of All Fears in the non-fiction section, because as part of the Super Security for the Super Event happening next weekend in this Super City for which we the taxpayers are getting squeezed for Super Bucks, downtown Indy is getting brand new Super Snooping CCTV Cameras*. Further, like the stink of a cheap cigar, they will remain long after the party has moved on.

They're awesome cameras, says IMPD Deputy Chief Michael Bates:

"They both move up and down side to side. What's nice about the new cameras we've got is they're digital cameras. They're more of a high-definition camera, so it allows us a much more clear picture and ability to zoom in more than we could with the other cameras," said IMPD Deputy Chief Michael Bates.

That means clearer up-close images of license plates and faces, too. But there will be no facial recognition software hooked up to the cameras, at least not in the near future.

Right. And the check's in the mail.

We're told that they will have additional public safety uses, such as... um... maybe helping clear traffic jams? And that they will make downtown safer and so more people will want to go spend money there. I guess that's the sort of thing that makes some people feel safe, but I'm not one of them.

No word from the Indy po-po on when they will implement my own public safety suggestion: Breathalyzer ignition interlocks on IMPD squad cars. That'd be a guaranteed crimestopper right there.


*Although, knowing the way these things work, it wouldn't shock me to find out that all y'all helped pay for them, via some Department of Homeland Security dolecheque program or another.
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