Overheard in the office...

I'm going to take roomie to drop off her car at the shop this morning...


RX: "Just so you know, I'm almost ready to go."

Me: "No you're not. You don't even have trousers on."

RX: "Trousers? Phhhtthhttt! I think Robb Allen has proven that that's not necessary."

Mighty strange.

It's Wooby weather this morning. In July.

The definition of insanity.

If it doesn't work, do it again, only harder!

Of course "doesn't work" is subjective. If you were expecting it to boost the economy and make life better for the average American, then it is indeed not working so hot*, but if you were expecting to use it as a tool for dispensing patronage and arrogating yet more power to the fed.gov, then it's working like gangbusters.


____________________________________________
*Indeed, it can't work so hot, as anyone who has tried to fill a swimming pool by drawing buckets of water out of one end and dumping them in the other could tell you.

Odd Foods.

Crash at my pal Oleg's place, and you may get offered a halved avocado by way of a snack or a meal while he natters on about suppressors or f-stops or concealment holsters. I always thought that this was a charming eccentricity of his.

Now, I've never been the world's biggest avocado fan, having once likened their taste to that of a light green Crayola, but I was in the grocery store last night, wandering through the produce section and avocados were on sale and...

Y'know, a halved avocado, especially with a light dash of salt, is darned good food. I don't know if my taste buds have matured or what, but... YUM!


(Trivial Pursuit Factoid: Avocado made its appearance in sushi, specifically the California roll, as a stand-in for toro. Its taste and texture mimics the fatty bluefin tuna belly quite nicely.)

An inane metric.

"One Gun A Month" laws are perhaps the dumbest pieces of anti-2nd Amendment legislation to come down the pike. Usually passed by knee-jerk reflex in the wake of some nutjob's rampage, they more or less ignore the fact that spree killers and mass murderers usually only use just the one gun to complete their grisly chores.

The Anti-Bill-Of-Rights crowd claims that they don't affect "normal law-abiding gun owners" (whatever that's supposed to mean,) in complete ignorance of the fact that the only group of gun owners they do impact is the one least likely to commit a crime: Collectors. Gun collectors are, on the whole, no more likely to go commit a violent crime than collectors of anything else, be it coins, stamps, or Beanie Babies. When they get a chance to buy two [Fill In The Blank: World War One Military Rifles, Spanish Pistols, Pre-1973 Ruger Revolvers] at a time from another collector or an estate sale, the last thing on their mind is a massacree at the local garden club meeting. Similarly, if some trenchcoat-wearing loser is going to act out his Marilyn Manson song fantasies, he's not going to be put off for a moment by a "One Gun A Month" law.

Admit it, these laws are what you politicians do instead of something.

Just so y'all know...

...our lawn is mowed. We don't want any SWAT team trouble 'round here.


(...and just for the record, they didn't deploy the tactical team due to his lack of horticultural maintenance; they deployed it because he threw down on the lawn-mowing guy with a gauge. A handy exemplar of how stuff can spiral out of control pretty darn quickly.)

Quote of the Day:

A mandatory public health care system is a universal adapter for unlimited Nanny State legislation, because there’s very little personal behavior that wouldn’t impact public health care costs in some way. -Marko, The Munchkin Wrangler

Go read the whole thing.

...but you get VIP access!

Club Eloi offers to brand you like cattle; hairless patrons agree to scheme.

The ultimate irony is that nightclubs have an average life expectancy measured in months; that'd be like getting a tattoo to commemorate a television series.

Unusual side effects.

So I heard the announcer on the TeeWee this morning saying that the newest Great Big Danger of the slowdown recession downturn contraction right-sizing whatever thing it is that the economy is doing is that unattended toddlers are going to be sleeping with the inflatable fishes in the abandoned swimming pools of foreclosed McMansions all across America. I didn't see the promised interview with the tearful mom, but I'm sure that the solution to the problem is legislative, and we'll soon have another "<$Dead Kid's Name>'s Law" that'll make everything okayer and expensiver and more paperwork-y.

Meanwhile, on a less tearjerking note, some folks are beginning to wonder what's going to happen to all the big boxes that have been emptied of their contents. Most towns can only support so many flea markets, gospel congregations, and indoor paintball courses, after all. I'm wondering what the eventual fallout in the commercial real estate market is going to be like. The mortgage on one of those huge suburban strip centers and the land on which it squats has got to be brutal; how are you going to make that huge monthly nut when your Sportsman's Warehouse, the Bed, Bath, & Beyond and the Circuit City have all closed and your only remaining tenants are a Great Clips, a Chinese takeout place, and a video game franchise that's been late two months out of the last three?

Day thirteen of nonstop coverage...

If Elton John releases another version of "Candle In The Wind", I am not going to be responsible for my actions. I'm just sayin'.

Huh.

Having been running my iPod via the slow USB 1.1 connector on my old iMac, I have to say that plugging it into the eMac was a bit of an eye-opener. Trying to fill even that little 4GB device at 12Mbit/s was like trying to drink Lake Michigan through a straw, except without all the dead fish and industrial pollutants. The procedure was slow enough that I rarely changed the playlists on the gizmo because, like cooking in a crock pot, you'd plug it up and then check on it every so often to see if it was done.

Now I plug it in and zip! Done. It's amazing how a little detail like that can increase the usability of a device by an order of magnitude.

Packaging fail.

Bonnie and Unc note instances of packaging fail.

Personally, I would like to congratulate someone on great packaging success: The person who came up with the packaging for Doo Dads enabled me to while away plenty of bored time in the grocery store when I was younger, simply by turning the boxes on the shelf upside down:


What Uzbekistani kid doesn't love that traditional snack food, Spep Oop?

(Yes, I am rather easily amused.)

Grilling adventures.

Roseholme Cottage finally acquired a grill recently, an inexpensive charcoal number from Lowes picked up almost on impulse. Since then I have been practicing my admittedly feeble grilling skills on the occasional steak, but last night I went for something different: Jamaican Jerk Pork Chops. Here's my pork chop AAR:

• I'm thinking that marinating should consist of more than a couple hours floating in a bowl of jerk sauce in the fridge. Next time we're dunking 'em the night before.
• There's got to be a way to get them nice and blackened around the edges without turning them into shoe leather on the inside. I'm guessing higher heat for less time?

Anyhow, despite being a first attempt, they turned out okay. Roomie said she wasn't hungry, but if we had a dog, and she threw that bone to it, it would have been one disappointed pooch, because she'd pretty much scraped all the flavor right off it.

Time for Governor Frankenstein?

At least the good Doktor knew how to stimulate a corpse, which might be a useful skill in moribund California:

California is so broke that they can't even borrow money to pay their bills. They've spent it so fast they can't even issue the tax refunds that are owed. They are sending out IOU's to indicate recognition of debt but nothing more. Try to stimulate your landlord, utility company or grocer with an IOU.

The past is future.

Nobody's more of a natural "prepper" than a bunch of people dedicated to steam-powered tools and hay-burning tractors.

I live with this every day, since my roommate commutes to work from 1937.

Me? I appreciate the thought behind this, but my idea of "old school" is SCSI and vacuum-operated secondaries...

Break in the action for a new 'puter.

I've been using a G3/400 iMac as my desktop media server for about a year now. It's worked out well, but the Achilles' heel turned out to be its lack of USB 2.0 ports. Since FireWire got Betamaxed by high-speed USB, it was time to find a newer machine in order to be able to synch my iPod in anything less than geological time scales, as well as use newer portable hard drives for backup or music storage.

Fortunately, even late model eMacs are available for a song on FleaBay these days, so I picked up a 1.25GHz DVD eMac for under a c-note.

Doing the software update dance now...

The most patriotic gun?

Our only company at the range was a guy and his two sons shooting a Mini-14 and a bolt action .22 rimfire. I made a comment to the father about there not being a better way to celebrate the 4th and he heartily agreed. I didn’t do much shooting yesterday. I loaded magazines for Mischa and Eddie and fiddled with my Buckmark’s adjustable sights, but mostly I watched the father and his boys.

I asked them if I could take their picture for this blog. ”Sure no problem.”

“Do you want me to obscure your faces you know, it’s the internet and all?”

“No that’s OK we’ve got nothing to hide”

If I talked like Ward Churchill, I would say “on that day….. my heart….it soared like an eagle”. What’s the most patriotic gun you can shoot on the 4th? This one right here.

Read the whole thing. Look at the pictures, too...

Heaters and Hotels.

Last week, my roommate and I watched No Country for Old Men over dinner, since she hadn't seen it. As those who have seen it are aware, various bad things happening in motel rooms make up a large part of the story. Bad things that involve guns.

When a friend and I drove down to Terlingua, we spent a night in a motel room in Alpine, Texas where the door jamb showed signs of rather vigorous forced entry in the not-too-distantly-repainted past. Over dinner, we speculated on various things: Had it been the cops? The DEA? Business associates of an unlicensed independent pharmaceutical distributor that had been staying there? A drunk student from the college across the road with a mean stomp-kick? Where do we put the FAL and HK-91, since leaving them in the truck was a definite no-go?

Having recently returned from a roadtrip to the Left Coast, Frank W. James speculates on some practicalities of guns on the road, and defending your castle-away-from-castle. It's given me pause to think. Usually when on the road, I've slid the revolver from my purse under the other pillow in the bed, but how much good would it have done on those occasions I forgot and left the doorknob alarm at home? I mean, I sleep fairly lightly, but...

The beat goes on...

As Detroit collapses into rubble around them, kids somehow still find time to commit traffic violations & drug misdemeanors, scare old folks, and make bad mating decisions:

In the late afternoon one recent Friday, the parking lot adjacent to the Belle Isle bathhouse was half full with people around charcoal grills loaded with chicken and steaks.

"We've been coming here for 40 years, but we make sure to leave before it gets too late," said David Zane, 52, a retired city worker. "When it's starting to get dark ... it's time to go."

That's about the same time Sakina Ali, 18, and her girlfriends arrived. "It's really all about the boys," said Ali, who lives on the east side of Detroit. "There really is nowhere else to go in this town."

Ali's car was nearly sandwiched between two beefed-up vehicles vibrating from the pulse of the sub-woofers and the traffic.

"Hmm, he looks good," said her friend Carla Davis, 19. "Maybe I can find someone decent."

One half expects the Jets and the Sharks to dance across the scene, snapping their fingers in unison. (Although, given the pre-post-apocalyptic setting of Detroit, there would be some horrible twists, like Riff has a colander strapped to his face and the rest of the Jets are wearing spiked and studded leather like extras from Mad Max, Bernardo is a loyal attendee at a Wahhabist mosque, and Sgt. Krupke is in the National Guard instead of the DPD.)


(H/T to The Shekel.)

Oleg claims it's a picture of me, but...

...I seem to look a little stoned.

Vote early, vote often!

In a process less democratic than an Iranian election, but slightly more democratic than a Chicago ballot box stuffing festival and headstone & park bench counting contest, the weighty issue of July's Indy Blogmeet is being discussed here.

As my roomie pointed out so eloquently to me...

...the trouble with democracy is that we get the government they deserve.

Quote of the Day:

Insty on fireworks (and life in general):

“Leave it to the trained professionals” is one of the cancerous mantras of our age, and there’s a big difference between setting off your own fireworks and sitting passively while others do it for you — the difference, if I may say so, between having sex and watching porn.

I'm gonna call this a symptom...

Six words that put our current governmental problems in a nutshell:

Marion "Cracklin'" Barry keeps getting elected.

That's right, there are enough voters in Washington, DC who are either sympathetic, apathetic, or just plain pathetic enough to ensure that a man who is a virtual caricature of a corrupt inner city politician, a man who in a more moral society would be horsewhipped from the public square by angry constituents, not carried into office by a plurality of eligible voters, remains the recipient of a government paycheck, despite a rap sheet longer than his resume.

Fear my magic weather control powers.

I have set foot inside a minor league ballpark three times this year, and succeeded in raining the game out twice. But I got a Rowdie doll.

Whoah, deja vu...

Incidentally, Victory Field is indeed a great ballpark. Whoever called it the Camden Yards of the minor leagues wasn't far wrong.

Heh.

Someone just hit this blog googling for "palin emmanuel goldstein".

Great American Guns:

What would be the most patriotic thing to shoot today?

Wait, let me rephrase that, before someone says "a politician" or "the king of England"...

What firearm would it be most in the spirit of the holiday to take to the range today? An M1 Garand? A Colt Peacemaker? A Charleville Musket? A GE Minigun?

I'm curious as to what y'all vote for, and why.

Happy Fourth of July!

(I'd say "Happy Independence Day", but I haven't checked to see if that is still the official approved name for the holiday.)

Today is the day when real Americans light off fireworks (or, in many states, watch the government light off fireworks for them) to celebrate conscription and income taxes, zoning laws and the FDA! Two-flush toilets and government-mandated florescent light bulbs! Seat belt laws and helmet mandates!

Hurrah for Old Glory! Hurrah for the Real ID Act and our great national Ponzi scheme! Tomorrow we'll round up all the doctors and assign each and every citizen his or her very own physician, because health care is a right! Who do you think paid for the bandage around the head of that guy playing the fife in that "Spirit of '76" painting? The government, that's who!

Today's the day we remember the name of the brave patriot who rushed the keys for the trigger locks on the muskets to Lexington Green, just before the bad guys got there! The day we celebrate the airbags and five mile-per-hour bumpers on the Connestoga wagons that made the westward journey so safe! The smoking regulations at Belleau Wood and the non-toxic, lead-free ammunition at Bastogne! The SPF-30 warpaint worn by the native Americans as they scalped Custer!

Today we remember how Charles Lindbergh had his shoes inspected for bombs before climbing into The Spirit of St. Louis, how Lewis & Clark took nothing but pictures and left nothing but footprints, how Casey Jones passed his Federal Railroad Administration licensing exams, and how the battle stations on the Monitor and Virginia were certified OSHA compliant.

I'm going to do something patriotic today, like stay inside, out of the UV radiation, fill out a tax form, and drink some organic soy milk.

Happy Fourth!

It's important to have your priorities straight...

North Korea salvoed seven IRBM's (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles) of a type apparently related to the SS-1 "Scud" into the Sea of Japan yesterday as...

...hey, did you hear? Michael Jackson's coffin was made right here in Indiana!

In other news, experts determine that water is, in fact, wet.

This may come as a shock to you, but doctors are warning that engaging in eating contests where you bolt a couple pounds of butter, wolf down 50 hot dogs in ten minutes, or stuff your face with over a hundred jalapeños, might cause obesity and other health complications.

Who knew?

She's such a subversive...

Breda engages in some "Editorial Shelving".

Sorry I'm late...

...I overslept.

I just thought you should know that, according to the Today show, Michael Jackson is still dead.

This is just completely out of control. When Tim Russert choked on his last cookie, I expressed a bit of surprise at the amount of airtime spent eulogizing someone who was, let's face it, not exactly a household name. But this... This is completely off the chain.

This is like some mutant offspring of the death of Princess Di and the kind of state funeralizing that we give to famous ex-Presidents and Gerald Ford. Kim Jong Il could vaporize Honolulu, Department of Public Records building and all, and it would be forced below the fold by the toxicology reports of a washed-up pop star who had sold a lot more tabloids than albums over the last decade.