Automotif DLXVII..

Any E-body sighting in the wild these days is kind of a big deal to me, and spotting a 1970 Challenger RT in Lime Light with a 440 Six Pack is a very big deal indeed.

Tasty.

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Politics as Team Sportsball

So Bumpstock Donnie is coming back because in the Fox News Cinematic Universe anybody to the left of Pinochet is a "communist"*.

Inflation's down, unemployment's as low as it's been in decades, and they keep having to add new lines to the top of stock market charts in newspaper business sections because the market's never been this high... and apparently neither have American voters because everyone seems sure that we're in the middle of The Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo.

Ask the Man (or Woman) on the Street (or Facebook) what the state of the nation is, and you get some unfocused argelbargle along the lines of "Eggs are eating our pets and immigrants are expensive and it costs four dollars a gallon to trans our kids or something. Plus Ukraine** is taking all the FEMA away from decent American retirees."

Truly we are a fundamentally unserious people.

*Y'ever notice how you can't call someone "Hitler" until they've actually killed six million people and invaded Poland, but if someone proposes jacking the upper marginal tax rate a few percent, they're definitely Stalin?

**You know they broke out the good vodka in the Kremlin this morning.

Morning After Memes...

Vote or GTFO

I paused my morning activities of cleaning some pistols for photography to go take a picture.

Go and thou do likewise.

Swole Savage

New from Savage is this upgrade of the Stance, called the Stance XR.

It's higher capacity than the original, shipping with a 10-round flush-fit mag and a 13-round 'stendo, and it has the most innovative quick-detach MRDS mount I've yet seen. It allows a lower-third co-witness (at least with this Riton dot), comes with night sights, adds a tabbed trigger for enhanced drop safety, and the dot mount seems to have true return-to-zero functionality.

A feature-length review is coming in Shooting Illustrated as soon as I've wrung it out some more. (I already put a bit more than half a case of ammo through it in a 2-day class with Chris Cerino at Range Ready earlier this year.)

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Memes for Electile Dysfunction...

A reminder for fellow Indianapolis residents...

IndyGo doesn't charge bus fares on Election Day. I'll have a free ride on the Red Line to and from my polling place.

(Not a big deal for me because it's only about a five or six block walk, but hey, a free ride is a free ride. And it might be raining.)

Monday Memery

Another BRIC in the wall

Xi and Putin have been eagerly trying to steer the BRICs nations into becoming a more-or-less explicitly anti-Western coalition. Some member states like India and Brazil aren't too hip with that.

Countries like Brazil and India may subscribe to the overarching philosophy of the BRICS as an institution that can help shape the new “multipolar” world in an age of waning U.S. and Western influence, but they are not interested in subscribing to an anti-Western alliance. Both were originally skeptical of China and Russia’s push to expand the bloc, seeing it as an implicit attempt to dilute their own clout. Some analysts in both countries argue they may be better off quitting the enterprise all together.

“For us, the United States is by far the most important partner in terms of our future growth and technologies and access to technologies, and therefore, we don’t want a situation where BRICS become the focal point of conflict with the West on the economic political fronts,” Kanwal Sibal, former foreign secretary in India and former ambassador to Russia, told my colleagues in an interview.

“So while we are in there, we would like to have more cooperation within BRICS and work on a positive agenda for the form of the international system in a cooperative mode, rather than in a confrontational mode,” Sibal said. “Otherwise the BRICS will move in a direction which would become pronouncedly anti-Western.”

I can see how the fact that they have to hold meetings only in countries where Putin is allowed to travel could cause inconvenience.

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Sunday Snickers...

Automotif DLXVI...

Continuing the second generation F-body theme from yesterday is this late Seventies Z28. The hood is an '80 or '81, the fender vents say '77-'79, the grille is '78-'80. The air dam and fender flares didn't come alont until '79, so if I were to hazard a guess, it's a '79 with a functional '80-'81 cowl induction hood rather than the original hood that came with a dummy non-functional NACA duct.

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Ce n'est pas un signe

Wordy Memes...

 

Automotif DLXV...

A 1979 Pontiac Trans Am in Sundance Yellow, the last year for the 400... although the "6.6 LITRE" decal on the shaker scoop says this one's actually an Oldsmobile 403.  

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Elsewhere...

• Shooting a Triumph TR-3A in action with a Nikon D800 in color and B&W...


• A '66 Impala Sport Coupe with a rat rod vibe.

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Honorary Monday Memes...

Tumbled Gyros

I know it's Thursday but between the weather completely changing, plus yesterday's holiday, and the calendar rolling over to November, today feels like Second Monday.

Monday through Wednesday were unseasonably warm and sunny, yesterday was overcast and rainy, with temps returning to seasonal norms. Today will be sunny but cool.

It doesn't feel like tomorrow brings the weekend, but here it is.

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Ты с ума сошел, бро?

Russia is big mad that some Russkie channels have been removed from YouTube, so a Moscow arbitration court has fined the tech giant a jillion squillion hojillion dollars, which is roughly a bazillion times more than all the money in the world.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion, about 10 billion trillion times smaller than the fine.

LOL.

ROFLMAO, even.

This certainly makes me take Russia seriously and not think of them like a cross between a comic opera kleptocracy and the fictional bad guy country from an Austin Powers movie.

(The post title is, of course, Google Translate's attempt at "You mad, bro?" in Russian. Is it accurate? I don't know, and I also don't care, much like Google doesn't care about bogus fines issued by some phony-baloney court.)

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Star Wars Memes

Squirrel!

As foliage thins on the trees, squirrel photography season really gets into gear for me. I'm a lot more likely to use longer zooms as my walking-around lens. These were with the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II on the Nikon D300S. That's the equivalent of a 300mm focal length on a full-frame camera.

You don't get these shots with a cell phone.