Summertime in SoBro, 2013 Edition...

It's been a cool and wet spring, and Broad Ripple's famous gargoyle is looking a little like a garghillie:

Blending in with the environment.

I'd never noticed the little details on the roof...

Bobbi says the ornamental roof crest will keep witches from sitting on your roof. I do not know if this is true, but it sure sounds good. Alas, honest little Roseholme Cottage would look a little silly with such gingerbread, and so we must be ever on the alert for witches perching up there among the antennae.

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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "Some day we'll have Obama Voter Memorial Day, remembering those who put on the unicorn and lost."

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Sometimes they're creepy-smart.

Watch as the cat knocks on the door and then turns around expectantly to see if it opens. I'm fairly certain he doesn't have the whole chain of events ironed out (like a three-year-old or a drunk ex-boyfriend, he would probably knock 'til his foot fell off without ever thinking "Maybe nobody's home...") but there's an obvious rudimentary cause-and-effect relationship in his pointy little head between beating on the door and a monkey opening it.

About fifteen minutes before feeding time, Huck starts knocking stuff off Bobbi's dresser or hitting his sister, because it spurs a reaction from a mommy* that may involve putting food in front of The Stomach That Walks Like A Cat.


*I'm not being cutesy-wootsie here: Whereas dogs have fairly sophisticated social arrangements, cats have only one way of relating to their huge food-providing human companions.

Obviously a Sherlock Holmes fan...

Despite an apparent shortage of Glaringly Obvious that seems to have led to rationing, the UK still remains a leading exporter of Comic Understatement:

A dramatic clip filmed by an onlooker just minutes after the killing showed a man with hands covered in blood, brandishing a bloodied meat cleaver and a knife.

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day," the black man in his 20s or 30s, wearing a wool jacket and jeans and speaking with a local accent, shouted in the footage obtained by Britain's ITV news channel.

"This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

[snip]

Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a visit to France to return to London and chair an emergency national security meeting.

"The police are urgently seeking the full facts about this case but there are strong indications that it is a terrorist incident," Cameron said...

Good Lord, Holmes! Do you think so?
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Next Year in Indianapolis!

Those of you coming to Indy for next year's NRA Annual Meeting need to make sure you see all the sights: The World War Memorial, the museum out at the track, our beautiful zoo and the nearby state museum, the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, and the armies of FBI agents milling around the halls of the City-County building carting off boxloads of documents.

Seriously, it's getting as busy as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in there. Pretty soon we're going to need to put colored jerseys on the federal agents so you can tell them apart: Green for the Brizzi investigation, purple for the real estate kickback scandal, beer-bottle brown for anybody still down there investigating l'affair Bisard...

Stockholm is burning.

Hundreds of youths have set fire to cars and attacked police and rescue services in poor immigrant suburbs in three nights of rioting in Stockholm, Sweden's worst disorder in years.

I dunno... The EUtopians may seem all soft, docile, and toothless right now, but the recent immigrant welfare sponge class is playing with fire here. Euros have a proven zero-to-jackboots time lower than just about anybody on the planet. Get Gunter or Pierre all backed into a corner and feeling existentially threatened and you'll be wishing you hadn't, faster than you can say "Arbeit Macht Frei".

(And if and when nationalist parties do take over and dust off the banners and jackboots and whatever happens, happens... well... the liberal leftists who discouraged assimilation and encouraged welfare subsidies, the very factors that created these ghetto islands of alien discontent, will have nobody to blame but themselves.)

I just saw a thing...

...where they let you zip line over some alligators in Florida, and I swear to H.L. Mencken that my very first thought was "Is the harness fastened so that it needs some special tool to unlatch? Or is it a quick-release buckle, wide open for someone to commit a very exotic and YouTube-worthy suicide?"

(Bobbi: "The alligators have rubber teeth.")

In a nutshell...

Og boils blog comments down to their essence.

Remember: The only reason to share little bits of your life with the internet is so that random strangers can tell you that you're doing it wrong.
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De-smogged.

When I was younger, it was not uncommon to peer under the hood of some piece of mid-'70s Detroit iron and see severed-'n'-plugged vacuum lines everywhere, the result of a teenager's attempt at "de-smogging" the car to try and awaken all the latent horsepower that must have been lurking in there somewhere.

I feel the same way about buying a Windows desktop machine from one of the major manufacturers today. The first thing I have to do is get all the bloatware out from under the hood. There's nothing more annoying than being in the middle of slaying dragons or shooting tangos and having the screen drop to the desktop with an urgent window letting you know that your Free Trial Subscription to Super Coupon Value Saver is about to expire. The downside of the All New!® Windows 8 interface is that I'm having the devil's own time finding where all this stuff connects, and feeling like I'm just clipping vacuum lines and threading sheet metal screws into the severed ends.

I want to be a clone.

Cloneliness is next to Godliness.

Another Acadia Green Metallic '99 Forester L with a tan interior running around Broad Ripple... with a "Mitt" sticker. Is hippieflage officially a thing now? *checks Google* Apparently it is.

Sunday morning...

Ruger 22/45 and M&P 9. Again.

Gun pic from Sunday morning... which is kinda pointless, because it looks like the gun pic from the range trip before that, and the range trip before that, and the range trip before... well,  you get the point.

Maturity test...

Everybody else in our little group walked past this sight just fine, but I went into a fit of Beavis-and-Butthead-esque snickering.

Then again, I can't walk down the imported foods aisle at the grocery store without collapsing into helpless giggles at the sight of a can of spotted dick.

Lord, grant me maturity, but not yet.

I'd say it's psychosomatic, but that's all in my head.

I don't know how medical personnel do it. After taking care of a sick roomie for a day or two, every physical sensation I get is filtered through the light of her reported symptoms.

Is that twinge the onset of a sore throat? I feel a little hot, but is it because it's hot in here, or is it just me? There's a tiny bit of a headache, but is it just that I'm dehydrated first thing in the morning and haven't had caffeine yet, or am I coming down with RobertaXitis?

The smart thing to do, of course, would be to proceed with my normal weekday routine and peek in on her every so often, rather than lounging about in my pyjamas and psyching myself into being sick, too.

I has a sad...

Those cool 10-8 mag floorplates for the M&P? As it turns out, even with rounded corners that are snag-free to the touch, the matte anodized aluminum will abrade its way through a cotton chambray shirt in a surprisingly short amount of time.

EDIT: Because apparently this needed clarification, that shirt went through two summers with the same gun under it. I changed mag floorplates and... BAM! ...holed in a month. As mikee pointed out in comments, since aluminum oxide is, you know, used as the abrasive on sandpaper, this probably should not have come as a surprise. Hey, Hilton Yam: Outstanding product, but maybe you should consider some clearcoat? Someone should bring this to his attention.

The abraded area is a couple inches square.

 Back to the factory plastic parts for CCW. :(
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Unsicher bei jeder Geschwindigkeit

...is the topic of Road & Track's June issue. I'm a Car & Driver reader myself (I defected from R&T back in the '80s) but I picked this issue up since it was a 50th anniversary paean to the Porsche 911, which has always been somewhat of a dream car of mine. I've driven a couple of 911s, but still haven't owned one; the closest I've come is a pair of 924 volksPorsches: a '78 and an '87 "S" model. The latter's 50/50 weight distribution, high polar moment, and benign departure characteristics make it practically the antiparticle* of a '73 Carrera RS in the handling department.

The link in Marko's post went well with a lot of the reminiscing in the R&T retrospective. It's easy to forget that the early 911 was a success in spite of its handling, not because of it. That, and the fact that there was no word in German for "Ralph Nader" back in the Sixties.

*Firefox's spellchecker knows "antiparticle", which tickles me no end, for some reason.

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom...

The TeeWee is tuned to the TODAY show. The entire TODAY crew had been en route from Hawaii to Yellowstone for their little 'Tour of America' week of filming on location in vacation spots when the monster tornado ripped through Oklahoma yesterday.

Like a gigantic aluminum buzzard circling down to a fresh carcass, the plane bearing Matt Lauer and company veered away from JAC and into the landing pattern for OKC.

Matt Lauer: "...At least the storms will be moving in a more positive direction."

Me: "What, towards New York?"

Later:

Reporter: "They're pulling tiny victims from the rubble..."

RX: "There's nothing network news likes better than tiny victims. They're like child abusers by proxy."

Incidentally, I am given to understand that TODAY pulls in half a billion in revenue for NBC and that Matt Lauer, in turn, is paid 25 million of that, which is insane. That Willie Geist guy seems like a nice and personable young man and surely pulls in more viewers than that odious choad of a prima donna Lauer repels, and probably at a fraction of the cost. Ditch Matt and maybe I'll actually watch your show sometimes, rather than just occasionally listening to it from the next room.

Automotif XI...

Summertime in SoBro again...

After returning from the range yesterday, I pedaled over to Twenty Tap for a steak salad and a pint of Upland's Lightwave. Parked up near 54th and College was this tastefully restomodded '62 or '63 Mercury Meteor:

Blues out in front of The Jazz Kitchen: I could see myself behind the wheel of this san-o Sixties Merc.

Hello!

Sunday nights are WoW nights, and most of the folks I run around with are on Mountain or Pacific time, so I'm usually up past pumpkin o'clock, hence the slow starts on Monday morning. I should have the nozzle on the free ice cream machine cleaned out shortly.

I'm going to finish this coffee and go put a couple miles under the bike's tires. Bobbi has pics from yesterday's range trip for your viewing pleasure in the meantime.

Expose yourself to art...

Yesterday was Art Fair time. I always enjoy the Broad Ripple Art Fair. Even though I can't tastefully decorate a jillion square foot mansion with original pieces, I can still wander around and "Ooh!" and "Aah!" at all the pretty stuff, and I usually manage to take home a trinket or three as a sort of souvenir...

Expose yourself to art! (Click to embiggenate.)

A square coffee mug from Dutch Lake Pottery.

The knife blade is hammered from an auger bit. The handle is sambar stag with a blood jasper pommel. From 2Jakes Custom Knives.

Postcards from ArtFroH! Including the awesome Lincoln vs. Washington: 4 Score and 7 of Butt-Whuppin'!

Dear Product Designer:

Why did you make the thread pitch so fine (or whatever the technical term is) on the cap on your tube of facial moisturizer? It takes 379 complete revolutions to get the cap back on the tube, which is a tricky thing to do nine-fingered while balancing a big glob of moisturizer on the tip of your index finger.

I hate you every morning.

Three and a half miles...

It's not much, but biking into Broad Ripple Proper and back in the mornings burns more calories than sitting at my keyboard.

Becoming a non-smoking user of Apple products has made me fat and stupid, and I'm trying to rectify that situation.

I think beer consumption at home is going to have to come to a screeching halt. If I want a pint, I can bike or walk to Twenty Tap or Fat Dan's.

There's also the synergistic effect that quitting smoking and doing most of my reading via the Kindle app on my iPad has had. I need to figure out a new reading ritual to replace sitting on the porch and smoking, because I've read maybe three complete books since I quit back in March, which is down some from my accustomed book-every-day-or-two clip.

And the reason I say three "complete" books is that the difference between reading on the iPad and reading a regular book is that on the Apple product, the distraction machine is built right in. Reading a history book and encounter something that tickles your hindbrain? Wikipedia is a button press and screen touch away! And while you're in there, better check your Facebook and Twitter, and see if anybody's posted in that forum thread you replied to, and your email account just chimed, and... where were we? Oh, yeah... page three. Still.

My Kindle currently has probably half-a-dozen or more books in various stages of completion, which is uncool.