Pick a weather pattern and stick with it!

So far, the zomg snow! that they were predicting last night and this morning has not happened. Instead we got snow this morning followed by more snow this afternoon. And before, they were saying no snow tomorrow. Now they're saying yes snow tomorrow. And maybe more snow this weekend, too.

I'm not deaf, I'm ignoring you.

Well, actually, I'm not ignoring you; I'm just learning about Savage pistols. I've got the great big book of Savage Pistols open, as well as the NRA's Firearms Assembly: Pistols and Revolvers, and both of my roomie's Savages to poke and prod at.

I'm hoping to get an Arms Room piece on them in detail, including some of the cool advertisements they ran back then. I mean, dig this ad copy from the Saturday Evening Post, circa 1910:

Woman's Turn Has Come

Ten women of Noroton, Conn., on April 15th, tried shooting a Savage Automatic. Eight of them had never handled a fire arm before. They shot at a man-shaped target thirty feet away. Eight women made vital hits, each with her first shot. The other two made vital hits with their second shots. Thus, with the first trigger pull, those women novices found that they were dead shots.

First shots are the shots that count.

Next they tried a common revolver, one of the finest built. Not one made a hit with her first shot; only one scored on the second.

Could there be any better proof that the Savage does not require practice? Anyone can shoot this wonderful arm accurately, because it points instinctively, as you point your forefinger.

This was a full page ad in a national, mainstream general-interest magazine. Interested readers could put $15 in cash or cheque in an envelope and receive a brand-new Savage 10-shot .32 caliber semiautomatic pistol in the mail. It was a different world.

Tonight on Gun Nuts Radio:

Michael from The Holster Site (aka EvylRobot) will be the guest to talk about skinning that smokewagon. Be there!

This makes my head hurt...

If you look on ahead of us down the identity politics turnpike, you can see Sweden, currently pulled over to the side of the road with its hood up...

STOCKHOLM (AP) - Sweden's unemployment agency has been found guilty of discrimination for expelling a Muslim man from a job training program because he refused to shake hands with a woman.

So, apparently in largely atheist, egalitarian Sweden, religious discrimination is worserer than sex discrimination. Check.

I am all out of shape for the Oppression Olympics, too; I'd better get my "Oh, my rights are being trampled!" game face on before next season.

All you White Christian Hetero Males are playing with a slight handicap differently-abled score modifier, but you shouldn't let that stop you! Anybody can find their inner Identity and go get someone to Oppress it! Judging from the comments I've seen elsewhere on the internets, some of you have already figured out how to sound like stands-to-pee versions of Germaine Greer. Sack up, already.


(H/T to The Shekel.)

A functioning perpetual motion machine!

From the department of "WTF are they thinking?" comes this tidbit:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employers are getting hit with a massive tax hike at a time when they can least afford it.

Companies in at least 35 states will have to fork over more in unemployment insurance taxes this year, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.

The median increase will be 27.5%. And employers in places such as Hawaii and Florida could see levies skyrocket more than ten-fold.

Gosh, what could higher taxes on employers lead to? Class? Anyone? Bueller?

"We have too many people drawing unemployment! The system is drained! We need to raise taxes on employers that are already laying people off!" Jesus wept, Skippy, are you trying to get everybody on the dole? No, wait... Don't answer that.

Thank goodness I remembered...

...to fetch the snow shovel back in from the garage last night. It will make tunneling out this morning ever so much easier.

The Legionary's Guide: FM VII-XXI.XIII

Just finishing up a fascinating little read: Legionary: The Roman Soldier's (Unofficial) Manual.

Written like a Field Manual for someone intent on joining the army circa 99AD, it's a clever little grunt's-eye view of the imperial war machine, with sections on selecting the best gear, preparing for arduous training, how to get a coveted immunis slot so as to get out of shovel work, and proper salary management to ensure a good pension.

A novel addition to the library of any Roman military buff.

It's spinal reflex now.

Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

I know that it's blatant argumentum ad MCMLXXXIV to go here, but after eight years of going after the previous Maximum Leader by describing him as a cunning, buffoonish, Machiavellian, moronic, imperious puppet of a loose cannon who was out of control and carefully steered by various éminences grise, there are some who can now engage in effortless doublethink even faster than their eyes can focus.

QotD: At least waste my money on something cool.

As a conservative, I feel outraged enough that the government profligately wasted Chinese bondholder money on an ad in the Superbowl. -Brian J. Noggle

It's like finding out that not only have you been robbed, but the burglar used your money to buy a baggie of oregano and lawn clippings

Today In History: A little off the top, please.

On this day in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was barbered to the collarbone for getting cross-threaded with her relative, Elizabeth.

The Parable of the Stick:

Once upon a time, the chief caveman of the Ug tribe decided that his guys didn't have effective enough sticks. They just didn't have that authoritative *thwack!* he was looking for when whopped over the head of neighboring Thog warriors, and some of their womenfolk even struggled while they were being dragged off by the hair.

So Chief Ug put out a contract for a million new sticks for his guys. His chief stick contractor put his head together with his chief R&D guy, and announced they could deliver the new Fifth Generation sticks, made of superstickium and guaranteed to have 50% greater *thwack!* than any forseeable enemy stick, for fifty-one clams each. Chief Ug was delighted, and the program got underway.

Unfortunately, the clam harvest was bad that year, plus a new peace treaty and trade agreement was signed with the Thog tribe, and suddenly the chief realized that maybe he didn't need a million shiny new sticks, and so he cut the order to 100.

"Sorry, Chief," said the guys at Stick Dynamics, "But a lot of this program is sunk costs already: engineering the superstickium, planting the superstickium orchards, training guys to whittle superstickium, cleaning up the superstickium waste in a way that won't piss off the Cave Protection Agency... Those are gonna be some mighty expensive sticks."

The Stick Dynamics accountant started counting on his toes, always a bad sign. "For a hundred-stick production run, you're looking at... um... carry the little toe... About five hundred thousand and one clams per stick."

The chief was apoplectic. "You promised me fifty-one clams a stick! The shamans are going to go ballistic when they hear this; they'll be joking about gold-plated sticks and hundred-thousand clam stick whittlers from now 'til when the moon is eaten by the night dragon!"

"That was based on a million stick contract, Chief. Actual production costs are only about a clam per stick, the rest is amortizing the R&D and developm..."

Nobody heard the rest because the chief whacked him over the noggin with the sole prototype stick and stalked off. It did *thwack!* just as promised.

The Chief never used the stick in war again, though: A stick that cost fifty-million-and-one clams is just too valuable to risk in combat. If it broke, the bad press would be horrible.

Annoyance.

I haven't been much of a football fan for years. I think the last time I followed a football team with any sort of ardor, Steve Bartkowski was the quarterback.

It is therefore mildly annoying to be dwelling someplace where you can't fricking escape the stuff; TeeWee news covers The Colts, politics, business, The Colts, weather, traffic, The Colts, and sports. The local catbox liner is much the same, with a slightly heavier emphasis on the Colts.

I am given to understand that the Colts lost the Super Bowl last evening.

I am given to understand this because I had to wait for them to interview everybody down to the water boy's third cousin's dog about how they felt about the game before they got around to the trivial news items, like the blizzard that's coming this way or the apartment building that burned to the ground nearby. (Which explains the helicopters orbiting overhead last night.)

Down the memory hole.

Anti-gun New York liberal Democrat Harold Ford Jr. (aka "the politician formerly known as pro-gun Tennessee conservative Democrat Harold Ford Jr.") once gave a speech for the NRA extolling the virtues of Guns, Mom, and Apple Pie. Except now it has apparently unhappened.

My new retirement plan...

Given the state of the economy, my new retirement plan is to buy shares of the jackass that claims to represent my best interests in Congress for what he's worth, and then sell them for what he thinks he's worth.

Given the fact that his P/E ratio makes the business model of the Underpants Gnomes look sensible and well thought-out, I can't lose.

Simplicity by design.

In writing yesterday's post about pocket autos, I spent some time examining the actual pistols as well as exploded drawings. I also looked at the drawings of the two early American autos of which I don't yet have representative examples on hand, the Remington 51 and the Smith & Wesson .35. Most pocket pistols on the market after World War Two sprang from one of three evolutionary families: The 1903/1908 Colt/Brownings, the Walther PP, or the Beretta. That's what makes a look at the pistols from the Cambrian Explosion of self-loader design so fascinating: All manner of solutions to the problem of constructing a reasonably powerful, pocketable, self-loading pistol were tried before the market was thinned to the few that survive today.

The Colt is easily the most familiar, and not only because Colt's made more than half a million of the things over forty-something years. The basic structure of the John Browning design is elegant in its simplicity and several basic features have been copied down through the years by numerous handgun manufacturers.

The Savage is probably the second best known, and it should be, with a production run of several hundred thousand guns in a little over twenty years. The brainchild of one Elbert Searle, it's another simple and elegant design, if a little odd to our eyes, being somewhat of an evolutionary dead-end. Blowback-operated with a slight mechanical delay, its double-stack magazine was futuristic for the time and it contained even fewer parts than the Colt, but a combination of constant redesigns, overproduction, and a slumping market put paid to Savage's pistol efforts.

The H&R took a fairly simple, if odd-looking, Webley & Scott Police Pistol design and, through conversion to striker-firing and addition of a magazine safety, managed to up the parts count to 49; over a dozen more than the Browning design and almost two-thirds more parts than Searle's little pistol. They can't have been making money on those, and the fact that they disappeared from the market so fast suggests that they weren't.

Smith & Wesson, like H&R a revolver company, shopped for an outside design as well, finally settling on the Belgian Clement. With controls that were counter intuitive (the manual safety was a thumbwheel on the backstrap that pretty much could not be operated with the hand in a firing grip), baroque mechanicals (a parts count that far outstripped even the H&R), and extremely complex construction, S&W hammered the last nail in the coffin by arrogantly designing their own pocket pistol cartridge in 1913, when the rest of the market had already settled on Colt's .32ACP. Smith's .35 cartridge got Betamaxed, and the gun itself sank without a ripple; 8,000 were made in an eight year run at a time when Colt and Savage were selling tens of thousands a year.

Remington was the last player to arrive, showing up in 1917 with a graceful, futuristic-looking pistol designed by the great John D. Pedersen: The Remington 51. But its graceful, futuristic-looking lines concealed a funky, floating breech/indirect blowback mechanism and complex innards; Browning's pocket pistol contained five springs while Pedersen's had seven (S&W's Clement clone had nine!) Despite the greater complexity, Remington attempted to undercut Colt's on price, selling its offering for less than sixteen bucks when Colts catalogued for just over twenty. Late to the market, the Remington autos didn't survive the Depression.

And if you think there were some weird ones on the domestic market, well, that's just the start...

Snowmageddon, Round Two:

The TeeWee weather gnomes are saying that if I liked Friday, I'm gonna love Monday night and Tuesday, because it'll be more of the same only maybe more so.

Since we ate all the sled dogs, we'll have to catch the neighbors and harness them to the sled to run to town for provisions before a fresh blanket of white death lands on us.

An afternoon's work...

I should get snowbound more often: Pocket Autos, Part One at The Arms Room.

Contact your Congressman.

Our Representative in Congress asked for his constituents' opinions. Bobbi sent him hers.

I did not know that...

Frank Chadwick, the game designer indirectly responsible for so much wasted time in my adolescence, has a blog.

Also indirectly, it was exposure to the '80s-era U.S. military through his games that caused me to predict, when a couple of older friends tried to tell me that the Gulf War was going to be a stalemated bloodbath and I didn't understand because I didn't remember Vietnam, that the whole thing would be over in "a week, tops, once the first tanks roll. It's going to be the most one-sided ass whuppin' in the history of modern warfare. Care to bet?" As you know, the Army beat the point spread and I won twenty bucks.

Trapped beneath the Great Broad Ripple Glacier...

Supplies gone. Ate last of sled dogs early this A.M. For God's sake, send help. I hope this signal makes it out.


Actually, we got just over six inches of snow, and now we have some wind coming in behind it; out of Mordor to the northwest and gusting 25-35mph. It was a fluffy, wet snow, too, and when you combined that with the breezes that kicked up last night, you could hear the occasional branch letting go in the greenbelt along the Monon Trail.

On a related note, does anyone know why one is supposed to run to the grocery store and buy French Toast fixins when snow is in the forecast?

Only the lonely, Part Deux.

After you've successfully scored with Roxxxy, now you can celebrate with congratulations from your good buddy, U.S. Patent Number 5,356,330!

The Loophole Loophole.

“Loophole” = “People Doing Legal $#!t I Don’t Like”.

Later on, I will exploit the Carbon Footprint Loophole to take my Mass Transit Loophole to the Starving The Poor People Loophole and get some Unhealthy Food Loophole for dinner.

Because we don't like it, that's why.

More whining from the Indianapolis Parakeet Primer, this time on the issue of letting anybody other than muggers carry guns on the Monon Trail:

We have made these points before, and that has not stopped government from permitting firearms in Indiana state parks or national parks. So Coleman has a precedent, albeit an unfortunate one.

"Unfortunate"? I must have missed all those stories about CCW permit holders flipping out and shooting up state parks...

Why the sudden sloppy wet kisses for Ballard, anyway? The "No Enemies On The Left" editorial board at the Star hates his Republican guts, so the public hand-holding here is more than a little unusual.

Speak, Clippy! Speak! Now roll over!

One of the more interesting jobs I've had was working as the dispatcher-in-all-but-name for a corporate flight department operating a fleet of Cessna twins out of a suburban Atlanta airport.

I'd sit in my office off the hangar and do my paperwork and coordinate couriers and suchlike until my second-to-last flight had landed at around 0100. (My last guy would already be homeward-bound from MSY by then, but even with a tailwind he wouldn't be on the ground at LZU 'til 0migod30...) Then I'd roll my motorcycle out of the hangar, lock the place up, and head home. Good times, good times...

But it'd get pretty lonely late nights at the airport, waiting for my last flight to get in on the far side of the Witching Hour. The FBO was all closed for the night and there wasn't a soul for a quarter mile in any direction except for the coyotes who lived out between the taxiways. And we had just had MS Office installed on the new PC.

As a consequence, I am probably the only person on the planet who has fond memories of Clippy the Annoying Anthropomorphic Paperclip. It was either him to keep me company, or the droids on the Weather Channel, and they weren't as lifelike...

Next round in the magazine.

Leafing through this month's issue of SWAT Magazine, I notice that next month there will be a review of the Awerbuck course I attended last summer. I hope there are no pics of me looking old and fat in the background.

(Erick Gelhaus reviewed the Guncrafter Industries .50 GI Glock conversion and, without coming out and saying "it sucks", basically said it sucks. This joins Denny Hansen's Nighthawk Custom review and Louis Awerbuck's Benelli M4 review as some of my favorite moments in gun review journalism...)

Snowpocalypse Now?

So last weekend they were saying that this weekend would be nice, but cold. Then, early in the week they started making noises about rain. Or maybe some of that "wintry mix" stuff. By Wednesday, they had changed their predictions to "zomg it's teh snowmageddon!!!eleven!"

We are up early here at Roseholme Cottage because roomie has to go tend starship engines at some ungodly hour of the morning and when one person is awake in a tiny little house like this, well, then both people might as well be. And I'm watching the weather to see if Bobbi is headed off into howling white death or not.

The Full Color 360-Degree Ultra Doppler Weather Radar says it's busy wintry mixing already. My trusty Mark 1 Mod 0 Window says differently. I'm skeptical; we'll see.

Stay away from the brown acid.

Courtesy of Snowflakes In Hell, I have seen the most incredibly dadaist political advertisement ever:
I was mildly disappointed that a flaming midget clown on a tricycle never pedaled furiously through the meadow yelling "Verboten!". Other than that, it was very nearly perfect.

Oh, what the heck.

Since it won't go away, more on DADT from Abby and ASM826, who bring interesting (and well-written) thoughts to the table.

Overheard in the Kitchen:

Me: "Wow, Rannie made good time running across the house as soon as my back was turned. Quiet, too; I didn't even hear her."

RX: "That's what they were made to do."

Me: "Run silently across hardwood floors?"

RX: "Run silently in general."

Me: "Still, that's bothersome. I'm normally pretty solid at hearing the pitter patter of running cat feet up to no good. I must be getting old."

RX: "Well, Tamara, you know what it means if you stop getting old."

Me: "Yeah, you become a vampire and have to feast on the blood of the living."

RX: "Uh, that's not where I was going with that."

Today In History: ...by the fiends you leave behind.

On this date in 211AD, Septimius Severus choked on his last cookie, leaving the empire to his two sons, the brothers Geta and Caracalla.

Severus had been, on balance, a mediocre emperor. Suspicious to the point of paranoia, he had job lots of senators whacked for conspiracies both real and imaginary, and elevated fawning toadies to replace them. Similarly, he had no head for finance, and could be talked by his buddies into doing all manner of silly things, like appointing them Praetorian Prefect.

On the other hand, he knew which end of the spear got stuck in the barbarian, and he kept the heathens on the right side of their rivers, and when the woad-wearing savages north of the wall got uppity, he administered them a stomping, too. And he was popular with the plebs and those aristocrats he didn't decapitate because he possessed the charming quality of Not Being Commodus, a trait that was very much appreciated in Rome at the time.

History will judge him harshly, though, because he either had some demons lurking in his Y chromosome or he was a lousy parent. His younger son, Geta, was merely petulant and greedy, but that's to be expected from one raised to the purple. Geta's elder sibling, Caracalla, however, was a poisonous toad as psychotic as a Julio-Claudian on a bad hair day. He barely waited for dad's corpse to cool before having his brother iced by soldiers while in their mother's arms, and his conduct got worse from there to the point where he was finally shivved in the liver by one of his own bodyguards while answering nature's call along the roadside.


EDIT: After writing this, I discovered that I had discussed it last year as well. I can't help it; it's just such a colorful bit of history. Especially the "having your brother whacked in your mom's condo" part. That demonstrates some serious issues, you know?

I'll bet if we subpoenaed Maxis' warranty cards from 1989...

...we'd find one filled out by a certain young Harvard law student...

Seen in comments at pdb's:

"Buh-buh-but, SimCity taught us all that we don’t build public transportation, then the pixels get unhappy and start a riot or something. We also learned that if you put in the right cheat code, you get unlimited tax money!" -kbiel

HK: Because you suck and we hate you...

There are HK fanboys who paid well over a grand for a warmed-over Armalite AR-180 with an awkward plastic thumbhole stock, mediocre optics as an extra-cost option, and a single-stack magazine made of compressed unicorn tears, so this thing should sell well to that demographic.

Like a fish needs a bicycle.

Outside of the downtown area and some older streetcar suburbs, most American cities just really aren't laid out to use mass transit, bicycles, or electric cars with the performance of golf carts and the range of a hard-thrown paper airplane.

I live in an old "streetcar suburb" that, fortunately, allows me to do most of my necessary shopping and suchlike by foot or bike if I choose. The times I use the car are because either the weather is miserable or I am going to be making the kind of shopping trip that doesn't lend itself to lugging my purchases on a bike rack and in either of those cases, why would I want to use a bus? I'd still wind up standing in the freezing rain waiting for IndyGo or having to schlep the 24-roll-pack of TP and a case of soda on and off the bus and a couple of blocks back to Roseholme Cottage...

Mayor Ballard gets his Anti-Gun on.

First Frank Straub, now this...

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard vows to veto guns-in-parks. Apparently he likes folks getting mugged on the Monon Trail, or something.

If he has the sack to pay for his usual table at the next Indy 1500 gun show, trying to schmooze his GOP base, make sure you tell him you remember. And that you'll remember at the ballot box, too.

QotD: LabRat wins teh intarw3bz!

Los Alamos weapons-grade snark:

If Tiffani Amber the eighteen year old who happened to be blessed with the genes for a great rack can manage to not crack under such pressure, I think soldiers we expect to send into combat can probably find it within themselves.

Now that's funny, right there.

Ritual de lo Habitual.

Some years back, when we were deer hunting out on Byron's old family land, it was observed that MattG used his turn signals so habitually that he was signaling turns on rutted sandy single-tracks, on private property, with not another moving vehicle for over a mile in any given direction. We all agreed, however, that it was a good habit to have.

I was reminded of this when people commented on the video from our little Blackwater field trip last summer; a lot of folks described Todd Jarrett's gun-handling as borderline OCD, with his chamber checks every time he juiced up the gun, and they said it as though it was a bad thing.

When I juice up the gun administratively, I check the chamber. When I pick up a pistol that has been out of my control or observation, such as when I get dressed in the morning, I check the chamber. Now, does that mean that I think that gremlins have sneaked in and unloaded my heater overnight? No it means I check because I always check; this is the purpose behind things like safety checklists for everything from pistols to Piper Cubs to pebble-bed nuclear reactors, you are removing the question of "Do I or don't I?" from the loop. You do. Period.

This is tied in to another thing I often read on the internet "You carry a gun to the (grocery store/restaurant/nice neighborhood/sewing circle/whatever)?" No, I don't. As Kathy Jackson phrased it so well, I don't carry a gun "to" anyplace; I just carry a gun. I put the gun on in the morning with no more emotional freighting or special foresight than my shoes. In fact, probably less, because I may wear different shoes, but I always carry the same gun.

When I put my shoes on, I did not run though a complex internal calculus of "Well, there's a 'No shirt, No shoes, No service' sign at the bank, and I think I have to wear them at the grocery store, too. On the other hand, it's warm out, and I could put those errands off and not wear shoes today..." I just put my shoes on. It's the default state, just like putting the pistol in the holster on my belt. As I go through the day, I don't constantly think about my shoes, and whether I might "need" them at my next stop. Ditto, the gun.

What makes this hard for some people to understand is that, to them, a gun is an object of heavy totemic significance. They have not been exposed to firearms except via the entertainment industry or the six o'clock news, where they are constantly being used to deal death and mayhem, whereas I've been around them more or less constantly for my entire adult life and they've mostly just sat there. An object that to many people contains heavy emotional freighting is about as significant or shocking to me as an ashtray or a steak knife (to name a couple of other frequently-used murder weapons,) and I think this is the source of the massive disconnect between viewpoints. What to do about it? You got me, there; I haven't a clue.

New martial arts style:

Aussie cops trained in Line-Dancing-Fu.

Iranian astronauts declared haraam.

(CNN) -- Iran said Wednesday it had launched a rocket carrying a rat, two turtles and some worms into orbit...

All of which were wearing teeny, tiny explosive vests, no doubt, making it the first Persian MIRV.