Automotif CCCII...

1970 Coupe de Ville, shot with a Nikon D800 & 24-120mm f/4

So, taking pictures of cars and filing them away in my little Facebook photo albums is my borderline-on-the-spectrum happy place. Some people go trainspotting, others stand around at airports and record aircraft tail numbers, I have my car photo albums, which I usually update every morning with the previous day's take.

What amuses me is when I post a picture of a car like this and someone gets all assmad because this dude didn't dress his Barbie doll the way the commenter would have dressed it if it were his.

Bro, nobody appointed me or you to be the fun police. Does it look like homie loves his ride and is having a good time? Yes. Yes it does. So why don't you make like the cartoon girl in that Disney movie, and "Let it go! Let it Go!"?

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Who watches the watchers?

This is pretty squicky.

Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist's plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News.

Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.

Then again, given the sordid history at some agencies, it isn't entirely shocking.

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The Long and Winding Road

One of the most underlined passages in Night Watch, according to Kindle:

In my circle of friends, we even have a single word for it: Derpeste.

It's all a road of improvement and learning, but first you have to realize that you have things you need to learn and improve, and that the You of Right Now is wrong about things that Future You will think are obvious.

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So it turns out...

 ...that the kook in TX was wearing a plate carrier but hadn't put any plates in it.

Statistically this seems to be the most common discovery after the breathless media claims of "tactical vest" and "body armor"; the Buffalo kook was an anomaly in actually wearing plates. 

Plate carriers and chest rigs are cheap and readily available, especially for people not caring if they get airsoft-tier gear for their one-way trip, while plates themselves are harder to source and a lot more expensive. The middle of an active shooter incident is not the time to be trying to puzzle out whether homie is wearing armor or not.

Besides, even loaded spare mags in a chest rig make pretty good defense against pistol bullets, especially slow fat ones like .45ACP and .44Spl.

...especially if dude is using an AK with much more robust mags.

If you are unfortunate enough to have an active shooter event with a long-gun armed bad guy wearing a plate carrier erupt right in your lap, your point of aim is no longer some vague area on the upper torso.

All the Little Angels Rise Up

Never forget the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May, and the people's struggle for justice, freedom, reasonably-priced love, and a hard-boiled egg.

(It's easily my favorite Discworld novel... one of my favorite novels, period, actually. Sir Pterry at the peak of his powers. I think I'll read it again.)

This Week's Episode...

Unplanned walkabout...

I've been shuttling an immunocompromised friend to medical appointments a couple times a week, so I figured it would probably be a good idea to stay current on shots, just to be on the safe side. Accordingly, I went and got a second Moderna booster yesterday.

My appointment was at the public lieberry at 42nd & College at 1130. The weather was lovely, so I walked to the 54th Street Red Line stop, arriving at five minutes after eleven, only to watch the southbound bus pull away just before I arrived.

"No problem," I think, "The buses run every 10-15minutes."

*glance at station monitor, which informs me the next southbound bus is 37 minutes out*

"Well, shit. I can walk to 42nd Street in 37 minutes."

So I did.

The bus, of course, whooshed past just as I was walking up to the library door.

There was a friendly rent-a-cop in a folding chair just inside the entrance, who greeted me and gestured me into the room where they were set up to augment my 5G reception.

On the way out, I noticed he was carrying a stainless Third Generation S&W auto with adjustable rears on it and a spurred hammer. I had to ask "That a 5906? Or a 4006?"

When he realized what I was asking, he replied "Oh, it's a Four Zero Zero Six," pronouncing every digit like it was a phone number. "That's a pretty good guess!"

"Just lucky I reckon."

I guess it was an issued gun from the security company.

It only took a five minute wait at the 42nd Street station to catch a ride back north.

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Fault Lines

Because if you wanted to quickly turn 'Murica into something between Belfast in the Eighties and Sarajevo in the Nineties, that'd be the hot ticket.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 25, 2022

Project Deuce-Deuce

A few years ago I put some serious round count on a Bodyguard .380, to the point of actually buying a Bladetech holster for it and using it in Chuck Haggard's pistol class at Paul-E-Palooza. In the process of shooting it that much, I learned a few things, such as the fact that allegedly the LAPD has a replacement interval for both recoil spring assembly and the mainspring* of 250 rounds on the ones they issued as BUGs.

Lately I've been enamored with the little Ruger LCP II in .22LR. It's so very shootable compared to the .380 version and the availability of ammo like Federal's Punch makes me wonder about it as a CCW piece.

I'm looking at buying a DeSantis Slim-Tuk and MFT Minimalist, putting in some range time, and scoping the calendars of traveling trainers passing nearby in summer or fall. A backup gun / pocket pistol oriented class would be ideal, but I'm enough of a weirdo to take it to a regular class, too.

*Remember that in these little hammer-fired locked-breech pocket pistols that the hammer spring is a big part of what absorbs the recoil. Once my BG380 passed about 800 rounds, ignition on non-Federal/CCI primers got iffy.

Drinking the Haterade

What I’ve come to understand over the years is that manifestoes like that of the white nationalist gunman in Buffalo are not really worth reading. They are written to be shared, but they are not confessional, and they shouldn’t be read literally. They are manipulative.

They are the story terrorists want to tell about themselves, not the truth. The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto doesn’t mention his history of animal abuse, for example. As with any writer of his own story, he was making choices about how he wanted to be seen.

She's spot on here. You should RTWT.

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Automotif CCCI...

Having the Mecum auction going on last week barely more than a dozen blocks from my photo perch was practically hunting over bait, as this sighting will attest.

It's an ultrarare 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner with the factory supercharged 312cid V-8, one of only twenty F-code cars still known to exist.

I wished I had more lens than the 24-85mm f/2.8-4D on the D3, since 12MP doesn't allow for a ton of cropping. Oh well, we shoot with what we've got...

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Pop Culture Blender

Nodding off while MeTV is running on a Saturday evening makes for great dreams.

I mean, if Adam West's Batman showing up on the bridge of Shatner's Enterprise is your thing, at least.

Holy photon torpedoes, Batman!

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 22, 2022

Biff! Pow! Two to beam up!

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