Pocket Sharps

Oh, man, just this morning I learned that Spyderco is making a version of their Dragonfly 2 with the Emerson waved opener.

I long ago switched from the waved Endura to the smaller waved Delica, but that waved Dragonfly would be super easy on the pocket.

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"Concealment"

I'm generally pretty slack about concealment. I wear the gun burkha as much for its voluminous "document pockets" as I do to avoid having to talk to strange randos about their favorite kind of pistol or brand of holler points. I'd think that anyone with half a brain realizes that the voluminous unbuttoned shirt is there for a reason.

Still, I do wear them and the season has definitely arrived for replacing the lightweight Royal Robbins summertime ones with something a little less airy and breathable. These days I've been favoring the Propper shirts in the cooler months. I like that the document pockets have zippers on them. They keep things like earbuds and notebooks from falling out better than the single or double velcro tabs on the lightweight summer shirts I use.

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Freeze Peach

https://t.co/CMmvmheF1E pic.twitter.com/YSWpZ0T9lQ

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 28, 2022

Here in the 'States you get people complaining about their freedom of speech being violated because Twitter won't let them use the n-word so they have to go to Parler or wherever to type their racial slurs.

Meanwhile in Fiji, a place where there are no First Amendment protections...

It was an error that could have happened to anyone, especially two years into a pandemic: In a court document, a judge in Fiji twice wrote “injection” when he meant “injunction.”

And so, in a gently mocking Facebook post back in February, Richard Naidu, one of the most senior lawyers in the Pacific nation, pointed out the mistake, concluding with a “thinking face” emoji. He now faces up to six months in prison.

The government throwing you in prison for calling out a judge's spelling errors in a Facebook post is pretty draconian. 

That's not a response to incitement or libel or a threat of violence, it's just a heavy-handed overreaction to the non-crime of lèse-majesté.

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Background on the Chinese protests...

From The Dispatch this morning...

This latest and most far-reaching round of protests began Friday in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang region, one day after a fire in an apartment building killed at least 10 people. Some in the city have been under lockdown for four months, and videos shared on social media suggested COVID-19 lockdown measures may have slowed firefighters’ rescue efforts. A candlelight vigil for those who died in the fire quickly popped up in Shanghai, where people went hungry during two months of sudden lockdowns earlier this year. Until now, criticism of China’s COVID-19 policies had remained largely online—Weibo was abuzz in September when a bus transporting people to quarantine crashed and killed 27. But this weekend’s demonstrators reassembled multiple times after security officials dispersed crowds.

The police response seems to have grown increasingly aggressive over the weekend—officers reportedly detained, pepper sprayed, and beat some protestors—though there haven’t yet been reports of mass detentions. The BBC also said that security officials had detained and beat journalist Ed Lawrence while he covered a protest in Shanghai, telling the broadcaster he’d been arrested “for his own good in case he caught COVID from the crowd.”

The demonstrations present a dilemma for Chinese leaders. The relative easing of COVID measures in recent weeks has accompanied a record surge in infections, and with lagging vaccine uptake, China's inadequate healthcare system could genuinely be overwhelmed if zero-COVID policies are abandoned altogether. But lockdowns have already taken a heavy economic toll—shutting down small businesses and major manufacturers alike—and the Chinese people’s patience is evidently wearing thin.

Click through to RTWT. (May require a free subscription or the ability to use an archive site to bypass a paywall. I'm not your mom. You can figure out this intertubes stuff if I can, it's not hard.)

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The 50 Cent Army is running amok...

...on Twitter because there's, uh, nobody trying to stop them at the moment.

Throughout the day yesterday, people searching for news on protests in China were bombarded with pages linking to porn and escort sites: “All the China influence ops & analysts at Twitter have all resigned.”https://t.co/0ItPOe1Gio

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) November 28, 2022

In case you're not familiar with the wumao, there are enough links here to get you more or less up to speed.

Meanwhile the usual crew of Pepe avatar types were yelling "wHy iS tHe mSm iGnOrInG tHe pRoTeStS iN cHiNa?" when in fact it was a front page story at the NYT, WaPo, CNN, et al.

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Still Quite Good

Watched the seventh episode of The Peripheral last night, and both Bobbi and I are still very impressed. The pacing is good, and they pack an awful lot of plot into each hour long ep.

While there are some differences in the specifics between the series and the book, they're definitely telling the same tale with largely the same cast of characters. The casting is a delight. Especially Lev Zubov and Inspector Lowbeer, who are almost exactly as my headcanon envisioned them from the novel.

Best of all, the show is going out of its way to get a lot of the cool little details from the book onto the screen, with great effect. 

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Authentic Frontier Gibberish

Look, there's carrying a revolver because you realize that a revolver is going to suffice for the vast majority of private citizen defensive gun usage, and then there's this hot mess...

"The Pistoleer is a faithful reproduction of a design more than a couple hundred years old. Long after the plastic guns of the world are melted into what looks like primordial ooze and technology fails, people like you and me will be slinging this kind of gun on those Swamp Thing creatures emerging from the fallout. When we pull the trigger, this gun will go bang and large lead pills will protect us. This makes the Pistoleer the smartest gun a person can own."

That kind of gunwriting makes me want to break out the special coffee mug. It's like the writer was trying to work in as many classic cliches as possible.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #225...

Not gonna lie, I really dig the whole "Fine, I'll make my own MP-7, with blackjack and hookers!" vibe from the Ruger LC carbine. I don't know if I'd be able to resist SBR'ing it if I had one.

Oops.

So at CanCon, I was there as a freelancer with the RECOIL crew helping to cover the event. On the first morning we got our event staff name badges and everyone sets to filling theirs out with Sharpie.

It wasn't until I looked around and realized that everyone had been carefully printing "Fred Smith, RECOIL Magazine" or "Suzy Jones, Off-Grid Magazine" did I realize I might have been doing it wrong...

A little embarrassing, there.

I might as well have printed something dumb like "I'M GUMBY, DAMMIT!"

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Abandoned but not Worthless

Via a link from Gorillafritz comes this listicle of abandoned (or semi-dormant, at least) gun blogs worth checking out...

There are a lot of resources available online. Unfortunately, not all of the are great, or even good. As such, it's always a shame when resources stop getting updated, leaving us a little diminished as time marches on. Luckily, many of these resources stay online, holding their data for generations to come, a pillar of knowledge from days gone by. As someone always looking for more information, here are some of my favorite defunct blogs.

Whirled Cup

It's time for the quadrennial festival of soccer, the World Cup.

The small percentage of Americans who are enthusiasts of the sport are, like curling fans every Winter Olympiad, going to try to convince the rest of us how awesome the sport is, with less success than soccer athletes have trying to get the ball in the goal.

Hey, how is soccer like an incel track meet? There's an awful lot of running around and almost zero scoring!

Ba-dum!

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Happy Turkey Day!

As usual, I am thankful for Bobbi and her tasty, tasty cooking: Turducken, veggies, mashed potatoes, and bacon-onion gravy.

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Sports, Illustrated

The annual Drumstick Dash here in Indy was slated to come right through our neighborhood this morning, so I was out there at 9:00AM with the EOS-1D Mark IV and the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L, ready and waiting.

I got my pro sports photog LARP on pretty good, I think...

Focus isn't quite there on the last one, but I love the pic so much...

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Better than Expected

So it was April of 2016 that I picked up that Apple Watch on a trip to New Hamster. It was the least expensive model, an original First Generation that was, at the time, only about five months away from being discontinued and replaced with the new "Series 1" second generation watches.

It's soldiered on ever since, despite being completely unsupported since September of 2018. I was getting a full day's use still on the battery, and just throwing it on the charger for about an hour every morning.

As it got longer in the tooth, it would occasionally get that weird fault where the battery would drain unexpectedly quickly, but doing a forced reset would fix things. It wasn't much of a problem since it only happened once in a blue moon, maybe a couple-three times a year.

Here lately it started doing that and no matter how many times I gave it a forced reset, nothing seemed to fix the drain.

Oh, well. Six and a half years is a really good run. It outlasted the iPhone 6S that I got at the same time and then the 7 Plus that replaced it. It was on its third phone when it finally went wonky.

I hope I get as good a run out of this Apple Watch SE 2nd Generation that I got to replace it. It was on sale, so...

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Squirrel!

Neighborhood squirrel, photographed with the Olympus E-5 & Panasonic Leica Vario-Elmar 14-150mm f/3.5-5.6 Asph Mega OIS.

This is just a bangin' superzoom, and I really like this camera/lens combo for general purpose walking-around-the-neighborhood stuff.

As Thom Hogan has pointed out, 12MP is plenty of resolution for the internet (it's plenty for magazine photos, too) and the Olympus pro-grade Four Thirds DSLR bodies, the E-3 and E-5, are crazy rugged and weather resistant.

If I'd bought them new, this would have been $1700 worth of camera with another $1300 of lens on the front, but thanks to the magic of depreciation and electronics buyers needing the latest and greatest, I shopped around and waited and gave about three hundo each for the body and the glass at Roberts and KEH, respectively.

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Are wheelguns real guns?

Greg Ellifritz has a guest post up from Darryl Bolke on the qualities and realities of a revolver as a carry or duty handgun. DB's career in law enforcement started out in the waning days of the revolver. He absolutely knows what time it is.

"A proven quality service level revolver that is clean, lubricated and loaded with quality ammunition is in my experience far less likely to malfunction than a semi-automatic pistol in the conditions we find in street shootings. That means, non-locked wrists, poor grip, asymmetric firing positions, interference from clothing or barriers, body contact, disturbance to the gun during firing, impacts, improper administrative handling, etc. They are consistent in their performance in those conditions, which is what reliable is.

Where they are not reliable is when subjected to tests of ruggedness. They do not work well when dirty and full of debris. They do not work well when abused, neglected or exposed to foreign matter. They do not work well when poorly maintained. They do not work well with modifications made by unqualified individuals, or used outside of the limits of the modifications. If these are factors, their consistency will suffer. They also tend to require a trained individual and tools when they break or stop working."

You should definitely go and read the whole thing. Apparently there'll be a Part Two tomorrow.

Darryl Bolke teaching students the intricacies of another misunderstood weapon from a bygone era.

From elsewhere...

Discussing the animated Netflix series Inside Job on the Book of Face...

I loves it so much. I am absolutely their target audience.

I mean, I've been assiduously collecting weirdo conspiracy theories for decades now.

I really should start planning for someone to get my whackadoodle mimeographed handouts from gun shows in the early-mid Nineties when I croak.

I was quite the connoisseur of black helicopter lore.

It's about time to reread Them, come to think of it.

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