The old bikini picture inside joke...

When I referenced "the bikini picture" in a previous post, I didn't stop to realize that not everyone who reads this blog also reads the gun boards (ie. The Firing Line, The High Road, Glock Talk,) and even then, not everyone was around on those boards long enough to remember it. So here's the story:

A long time ago, I was younger. As younger people often are, I was also thinner, largely wrinkle-free, and moderately toned. I dabbled a little bit at modelling, and at one point we were going to do a photo shoot to make a poster for the shop I worked at at the time. It was going to feature me holding an AR-15 carbine and wearing an American flag, a smile, and not much else. ("Y'know" mused the photographer, "I've done plenty of 'cheesecake & guns' shoots before, but this is the first time the model brought her own rifle.") Anyhow, a day was spent on the lake on my boss's cabin cruiser burning up film.

Fast forward a couple years: I'm recuperating from a motorcycle wreck, wheelchair-bound, and fairly well opiated. A thread comes up at Glock Talk entitled "Post a picture of yourself!" or somesuch. Since the only picture I had of me that was on my hard drive at the time was a scan of a 4x6 outtake from that shoot, I posted it. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me in my pill-sotted condition.

Don't do drugs and post, kids.

As the pain pill wore off, I came to my senses and deleted the photo from the board, but the damage was done. For several months folks would post inquiries about the picture. I would deny having it available. A third party would pipe up with "That's okay, I saved a copy!" In time, this became a running gag. And that's the rest of the story.

Now, having come clean, I figure that if I'm going to crassly exploit anybody for the sake of a couple hits, it may as well be me. Preferably a younger and faintly scrawny-looking me who can't fight back and who I could probably beat up if she did. Behold: