Memorial Day 2012

Remember.

.

Eureka!

I figured out the ending for my Neptune Spear movie!

When last we left the lovable misfits of SEAL Team 6, freshly whipped into shape by their new leader, call sign "POTUS" (played by Denzel Washington), they had just assaulted Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan. The Plucky Female SEAL (played by Demi Moore) proves her courage in the firefight, and then... and then...

I was stuck.

But wait! Hollywood has taught me well! You've got to have the plot twist, right?

The real villains will turn out to be some old corrupt white guys at [the Pentagon/Langley] who [pine for the good old days of the Cold War/are under the thumb of some generic evil US petrocorp] who just used Al Qaeda as cats-paws.

When POTUS and his team discover the evidence in UBL's hideout (discovered by the Troubled Rebel SEAL, played by Charlie Sheen, whose cynicism and acting-out is thus vindicated) they fly back to DC for the final [confrontation with the corrupt senator/assault on the star chamber meeting of the cabal of crooked generals in their secluded mansion on the Potomac]!

I have reached the end of the internet.

Once upon a time, humans developed speech.

From speech came writing.This allowed us to develop our ever-more-fantastic communication technologies, the pinnacle of which is the internet.

I do not think that it would be out of line to suggest, therefore, that the whole mighty sweep of human history was directed for the sole purpose of allowing me to read this headline this morning.

I have envied few people on the planet as much as I do the anonymous msn journalist who got to craft that headline.

Randomness.

Hot. Really, really hot.

It's frickin' hot out there today. Potentially record-breaking hot. Plus there are all those people in town for that little automobile race out on the west side of town, so I'll be staying inside where it's shady and cool and tourist-free, doing busywork, like migrating all the pictures from various digicams and memory cards and the cell phone all onto one thumb drive.

Here's a picture from the zoo gift shop last year. If you have ever heard the expression "gayer than a purse full of kittens" and wondered just exactly how gay that was, well, now you know.

Fun Show Saturday!

There was a Fun Show in Lebanon, Indiana yesterday, and so we went. It was easy enough to find, there at the county fairgrounds, practically next door to the Boone County Sheriff's Department range where I have attended a couple of Louis Awerbuck classes.

Bobbi has a detailed report over at her place of our excellent adventures yesterday, complete with many a photo, and I will suggest you go there and look at them.

Myself, I picked up a few loose rounds of .41 Swiss rimfire, because after plunking down money on the full box at the last show... I find myself reluctant to break up a full box of antique cartridges, yet I still want to shoot the Vetterli. I wonder if I can persuade the guys at Eagle Creek to let me shoot it there? I mean, I know Eagle Creek is pistols and shotguns only, but 10.4x38R has a lot less steam than any shotgun slug. Heck, with a 330gr bullet at ~1400fps, it's out-powered by a fair number of big handgun rounds these days.

I almost got away without purchasing any firearms, but at the last minute succumbed to an extremely reasonably priced S&W .32 Safety Hammerless 2nd Model, circa 1902 or '03, a blued 3 1/2" gun in nicer shape than the somewhat ratty nickel 3" 1st Model I already owned.

In the parking lot? Vespa!

By comparison, the Zed Drei's interior is positively palatial.

You might be a redneck if...

So Roomie has me quasi-hooked on antique malls. I find them fascinating because I had no idea that if I'd saved all the Fisher-Price toys from my childhood, I'd be one of those millionaires that Chris Hayes hates on MSNBC of a weekend morn.

Anyhow, I saw this statuette in the one in Westfield, IN today. The hanging tag read "Tribute To NYFD Firefighters On 9/11". While the guy's ball cap does indeed say "TRIBUTE" right on the front...

...I had no idea that Dale Earnhardt was a firefighter in NYC on that fateful day.

Yes, that's The Intimidator with angel wings...

Tab Clearing...

• Brilliant: Dot targets, and dot target games.


• Via Kevin: No wonder I don't grok kids these days. I've sent maybe two dozen text messages in my life...


• That's like forcing you to buy body lice.

Maybe this one will have SEAL sergeants in it, too!

So, allegedly the administration leaked classified info to filmmakers so they could do a movie about Operation Neptune Spear, one which will (purely coincidentally, of course) hit theaters the month before Election Day.

In the wake of the most accurate SEAL movie ever, this Hollywood effort is sure to be a hoot:

The misfits of SEAL Team 6, with the Troubled Rebel played by Charlie Sheen and the Brave Female SEAL played by Demi Moore, are energized by the arrival of a new commander, call sign "POTUS", played by Denzel Washington, who whips them into shape in preparation for leading them all on the mission of their lives.

Terrorists will tremble when they face the wrath of POTUS and SEAL Team 6!

Wish fulfillment...

I have been jonesing for a deep-fried bacon-wrapped hot dog for lunch for near a week now. And today...

The view from the porch at Plump's Last Shot in Broad Ripple.

The Butler Dog: A beef frank wrapped in bacon, deep-fried, and slathered with tomatoes, onions, and jalapenos.

Oh, baby... Mission accomplished!

QotD: Anachronism Edition

I write this as someone who lives in a house where more than half of all the non-hallway/bathroom walls are covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, there are piles of books on every remotely horizontal surface, boxes more in the garage and basement, and the attic floor's structural integrity is at risk from the tonnage of books it supports. In other words, I love me some books in what most people would consider a strangely excessive and not-quite-appropriate way, and my roommate is, if anything, even more sorely afflicted by the same syndrome than I.

All that is a preface to this sad-but-true line from the Adaptive Curmudgeon:

Then my attention drifted because I’d forgotten book stores still exist. How many are left? Are they located between soda fountains and livery stables? Are they sharing rental space with Blockbusters and the telegraph office?

I miss small private bookstores; they were magic. But they were hunted to extinction sometime during the great cultural revolution during which iDevices with games involving hurled birds supplanted rotary dial phones.

Yeah, I like my Kindle. But I don't have to enjoy liking my Kindle!

That was really tasty.

I forgot that Plump's Last Shot doesn't open 'til 3:00PM on most weekdays. Frustrated yet again in my attempt to get a bacon-wrapped deep-fried hot dog for lunch, I strolled past the Monon Food Company's jam-packed lunch hour deck and across 65th Street to see what was on the specials menu at the BRBP.

And what a good thing I did, too:

Red Miso Flank Steak: Flank steak marinated for days in a Japanese red miso, sake, mirin, and pepper marinade, grilled to order and served with garlic-soy grean beans, organic brown rice and spicy cucumbers.

 So tasty that I even ate my vegetables. Recommend! (Specials change on Wednesdays, so you've got a few days to try it if it sounds like something that would tickle your taste buds, which it will unless you're some kind of mutant or something.)

On the Kindle is Nothing in Reserve: true stories, not war stories, by Jack Lewis. Also recommend.

After lunch I meandered over to Rusted Moon Outfitters and pawed at cool gear I can't afford, bought a water bottle for the Broad Ripple SUV, and then took the long way home with the top down. Also also recommend.

Boldly went.

Huh. The allegedly "unmanned" SpaceX rocket was actually transporting a powdered engineer, in case it had any problems with its dilithium crystals, or whatever.

Weren't we supposed to have permanent orbital colonies at the Lagrangian points by now?

Listen up, you primitive screwheads!

So apparently some of the locals in Dubai are all out of sorts because foreigners in the country have the gall to go places like the mall dressed all immodestly, showing off such lascivious body parts as knees and shoulders. Some expats in the country have even gone quisling on the issue:

Khadija Sali, a journalist from the Philippines, said: "We have to respect the culture and respect ourselves as well. Don't wear anything too short or too tight, it's common sense."

No, Khadija, I do not have to respect the culture. I no more have to respect the culture of those backwards goat-molesting savages than I do the culture at a backwoods Klan cross-burnin'; the only difference is that the Kluxxers aren't sitting atop the world's petroleum reserves, so I don't even have to pretend to respect them.

Any culture that is afraid of women flashing knees in public lest it drive their menfolk into helpless throes of rapeyness is messed up on a fundamental level. If that's the problem, why not make the menfolk wear blindfolds? That'd fix the women not having driver's licenses problem in Saudi, too, neatly killing a pair of birds with a single stone.

It is times like this that I wish there were some way to extract all the oil over there at once and pay them off in one lump sum and then we could ignore the 'eathen wogs and leave them to their teetotalin' burkha-wearin' desert savagery in peace.

There's no "Well, maybe..." in Libertopia, dammit!

In the whole "Cart You Off To The Rubber Ramada" discussion, Roomie offers the following argument in opposition to my viewpoint:

You don't own other people; you don't get to control what they do. When you threaten to harm someone -- even yourself -- you're initiating force, attempting to extort something from the persons to whom you are expressing your threat.

You know, I don't think I agree with that. And yet it's an angle I had not pondered before. I'm willing to go sit someplace quiet and chew it over for a bit and see if I still disagree. I think I will, but the very fact that I'm willing to do this is apparently proof that I need to scrape off my Ron Paul bumper stickers and burn my Murray Rothbard books. I just got my wookie suit dry-cleaned, too, dammit!

It's funny 'cause it's true...

In comments over at Jay's place, Balloon Goes Up wrote:

Jay, I ran my Glock 19 for a 5 day course and 2600 rounds with out cleaning, lubing, or wiping down at the US Training Center.


The only hiccups were due to me riding the slide stop.

To which my response was

That's because it's a Glock. If you ride the slide stop on a 1911, it's because it's an antiquated POS and you should have bought a Glock. ;)

The CCA 1911 I shot at AFHF came right out of the box and ran through two days of AFHF with no maintenance other than squirting a couple drops of oil into the thing without taking it apart the night before TD1, about five minutes after I'd taken it out of the box.

(...and, yes, I've been carrying a Glock 19 for the last month. Long story. I'll tell you about it sometime.)

Tab Clearing...

• ToddG's 2012-2013 pistol-training.com test gun is going to be a Springfield Armory Custom Shop 1911 in 9mm. This should be interesting, to say the least.


• His Indian Native American Casino-Owning American name is "Speaks With Headlights". Good on the court for seeing through to do the right thing. If the purpose of speed limits is to slow people down, then the guy flashing his headlights was doing a better job of it than the revenooer skulking in the bushes with the radar gun.


• I want one of these "Fill Your Hands..." ones real badly. I have no need for one, and I can't even articulate why I want it, but I wants it, my precious, yes I do.

QotD: Shrinking Market Edition

In response to HuffPo's news about CNN's incredible shrinking ratings, KurtP writes:

Can you imagine what their ratings would be if CNN wasn't the default setting on every airport TeeWee and motel lobby in the country?

As FOX and msnbc ratings relative to CNN show, people prefer to do their shots of infotainment straight up, not cut with insipid fake "neutrality" that does nothing to cover the aftertaste of bias.

(As a side note, I've noticed a lot of bar and airport TeeWees tuned to CNBC lately.)

Overheard in the Office:

The TeeWee down the hall had the talking head on the morning news saying "Fire on a nuclear submarine!" in a tone of voice that made it clear that simply uttering the words gave him a little ghoulish journalistic chubby.

Reporter: "The Navy was quick to inform us that the fire was at the opposite end of the submarine from the nuclear reactor."

Me: "Oh, you mean at the end with the torpedoes? The part where there's actually something flammable?"

(...and yes, I know there are stern tubes, and that the forward tubes are actually more sorta midships, and that there's no real good place on a nuclear-powered undersea vessel to have a raging inferno, but the guy's combination of morbid fascination and utter cluelessness just rubbed me the wrong way.)

Why fruity targets? Because racegun!

So in a recent post, ToddG brought up the ghey targets that IPSC shooters use instead of the normal ones used by USPSA (which is the US branch of IPSC.)

They're kind of blobby and I guess they comply with the laws of some of the more enlightened nations where the ruling class get nervous when people practice shooting at anything even slightly bureaucrat-shaped.

So in an effort to be PC, courses of fire are set up where you are running around through doorways and dodging around barriers shooting at... what, some kind of hovering torso-bots from Disney's The Black Hole? Everybody knows what the targets in a course like that are supposed to represent: Movie extras. The ones that play bad guys that the hero mows down in implausible hordes armed with naught but a pistol that only needs reloading for reasons of cinematic tension. Duh.

Using abstract targets to pretend you're shooting anything other than imaginary bad guys makes you look like dorky hypocrites with corporate sponsorship jerseys.

Fried Spam Nuggets.

Since turning off word verification, my Spam trap has become some of the best reading on the internet. Between the stuff written by Chinese political prisoners trying to plug the products of the PLA's vast fake designer label knockoff operations, and the stuff churned out by programs that toss a mean word salad in an attempt to slip through the Turing Filters, I am endlessly entertained.

A high level accurate bag lover, then it is certain you know nicely regarding the Gucci carriers.

I can hardly wait to call somebody a "high level accurate bag lover" to their face, just to watch them try to process exactly what I mean by it. Is it a complement? An insult? Who knows? It's like a verbal Rorschach!

I pauperism to introduce you a flagrant movie. Let debate it.

This one irritates me like a piece of popcorn hull between two molars. It almost parses. It almost makes sense. It should make sense. It's like picking up something from Zeta Reticuli on your backyard SETI receiver that is just random electronic noise, only with kinda a pattern to it... What's it saying? "Help! I'm being held prisoner in a Shanghai spam factory?" or
"You humans are a disease. You are a cancer on this planet, and we are the cure?"

Sad news from the the internets.

Karl at Ushanka.us sent me an email with some lousy news: Hoosier blogger CrazyUnk passed away this past Saturday.

I'd occasionally see his blog show up in my Sitemeter and go nose around for a bit, just ships passing in the digital night...

Good job, Blogger.

So there's been a bit of a flutter about Blogger deciding to "upgrade" their user interface again. I'm sure there's a reason for it, and I'm sure it has made life easier for somebody, but like any change, it has had plenty of downsides, too.

For instance, while it runs tickety-boo on my shiny new Win 7 laptop, here on creaky old VFTP Command Central ("Single core processors are for low-end cell phones now," as Marko pointed out,) it wheezes.

And if I were doing my blogging on my little Eee PC, I'd have had to just quit; the new interface is just not compatible with the combination of Eeebuntu and Firefox on that machine, as I discovered to my chagrin in the airport last month.

While I don't mind the new interface in general, it's given lots of people fits. My roomie hates it. Joel loathes it. Frank James gave up in disgust.

I see Frank's point, too. Blogging is not something I am willing to pay to do. I enjoy it and it is fun but I have no desire to spend money to register Tamara'sEgoSite.com, so spare me the evangelism in the comments section. And when it stops being fun and turns into work, then I'm not going to pay to keep doing it, either.

Oh, hi!

Don't mind me, I was just in the back room there, working my muse over with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. Wow, is she stubborn; won't divulge a thing so far.

This one's always good for a laugh...

Apparently the police in Colton, California have struck another blow in the never-ending war to rid the streets of the scourge of fiberglass tubes.

I really hate to go into reruns, but it's

[j]ust an inert tube used to carry a missile around. Kind of like the container in which you get posters mailed to you, only olive green with some numbers stenciled on it and it once upon a time held something even cooler than a Kill Bill poster. The only way it could possibly be dangerous is if you beat somebody with it, but it would take a fair amount of beating to get anything done since it has the density and drag coefficient of one of those big kiddie whiffle bats, only more awkward to hold. Actually, if you wanted to kill someone with it probably the easiest way to do so would be to take some heavy-duty scissors, snip off a piece, and stuff it down their throat in hopes that they choke.

I don't know what it is about green plastic tubes that sends reporters and Barney Fife into a total Code Brown, but they sure do.


(H/T to Sebastian.)

LOLWUT?

Two Little Ponies For Sister Sara

I had no idea that My Little Pony had grizzled mercenaries and Juarista revolutionaries. That might get me to watch. That and the Gatling guns.

Incidentally, the fast and loose attitude of old-time Hollywood prop departments toward realism in firearms is something that can render old movies nearly completely unwatchable for gun nerds. For instance, well into the '70s, M1873 Springfields, bought in bulk early in the century, served as generic long guns in pirate movies, Revolutionary War movies, Civil War movies... well, pretty much anything where they needed "old-timey looking guns with hammers on the side".

Are we talking about the same GOP?

In comments over at Unc's, reader armed_partisan writes:

Picking Romney is easily the stupidest thing the GOP has done in my lifetime...

I don't know, is it really any stupider than Dole or McCain? It seems like it's almost a reflex action for the GOP to oppose a young-ish charismatic candidate with a tepid benchwarmer with all the vibrant charisma of a tub of library paste. Heck, it's almost like it's a party tradition.

Owie. Hurtie.

My tummy hurts.

I will be with y'all in a moment.