Barack Obama supports a federal ban on CCW.

Barry on CCW.

If you own guns and vote for this guy, you are, to put it simply, a f$cking moron.

(H/T to Bucks Right.)

Purina Peasant Chow.

Mmmmm. Irish bangers from Fresh Market, to be accompanied by some manner of cabbage. (I'm on kind of a kick here...)


On a totally unrelated note, how come I had never heard Coldplay 'til today?

Quote of the Day: "Emotional incontinence..."

From reader Alath in comments here:

Following your links back to the New York Post article (Here. ed.), it is eye-popping to see how extremely emotionally unstable this crowd is. Back spasms? Daily phone melt-downs? They're just aswim in the tempestuous seas of their own emotions; anchorless.

It's easy to see why they think being armed means going on a shooting rampage whenever you have a bad hair day. For people with complete emotional incontinence and to whom the concept of self-mastery is utterly unknown, that's probably what it would be like.

Smoke 'em if you got'em.

Another kind of transition team appears to be at work, one that is helping terrorists transition from "Wiretapped and Alive" to "Smoking Hole and Dead" even if they're maybe not so much actually inside Iraq or Afghanistan.

It's almost as though they feel they're playing against a shot clock now, and someone has said "Okay, enough wiretapping; we've got the data we're going to get. Let's get these guys off the board before the hippies take over."

Yes, but...

"A vote for McCain is a vote for the status quo!"

Uh, yeah. Exactly. And it should tell you something that I'd even prefer another Patriot Act, another foreign war of questionable necessity, and another stock market crash to the big bolus of HopeyChangey I'm being threatened with by the other side. I mean, worst case scenario, we wiretap some more hippies, bomb some more foreigners, and some more stockbrokers jump out of windows. Really, how does this hurt me?

The other side wants to do things like sell me bad health insurance at gunpoint. Yeah, 'cause you guys have done such a splendid job with my retirement funds, now I want to let you run my doctor's office, too. If your health care plan is so great, how come I'm no doubt going to be thrown in jail if I don't opt in?

One side is offering me politicians acting like politicians, which is to say power-hungry, callous, and scheming; the other side is trying to offer me politicians acting like missionaries, and that scares the crap out of me. Given a choice between the devil I know and the devil I don't, I'm going to stick with the one I know. Especially if the one I don't is offering me milk and cookies.

I'm neither shaken, nor stirred. Just amused to death.

Erica Jong is issuing threats of blood-in-the-streets revolution. It's enough to make me feel all warm and bitter and clingy inside.

Meanwhile, I woke this morning to an Obama commercial on the TeeWee. Either nobody on the campaign has a sense of irony, or we have a mole in his ad agency. There were multiple (at least two) images of The Man Himself with arm raised rigidly at an approximately 45-degree angle, and it closed with him saying "...and that's how we will emerge from this crisis. As one nation! One people!"

"One leader!" I couldn't help but add.

Jeez. Either that was deliberate, or there are some clueless mofos on Madison Avenue these days. (Then again, Madison Avenue thought that "Virago" was a manly name for a motorcycle, so you never know...)

God Bless America!

In what other country can you get a time share on a cow? (And get to evade The Man while you're at it?)

Although I have no particular interest in milk fresh from the bovine, the idea appeals to the rebel in me.

My kind of recipe...

1 fresh bratwurst from the Fresh Market.
Some beer.
Some Worcestershire sauce.
Some pepper.
Some salt.
Rest of the sauerkraut from that jar in the 'fridge.

Slice brat. Put in frying pan with beer, Worcestershire sauce. Shake salt & pepper over pan some. When good & sizzling, add kraut. Stir some until kraut starts to brown a bit and smell drives you wild with hunger. Transfer whole mess into bowl. Eat. Yum.

Quandary:

In the (temporary) absence of an AR-15 in the Armory de la Tam, with what do I fend off the zombie hordes?

1) M1 Garand?
2) FN-49 in 8mm Mauser?
3) SVT-40 Tokarev?
4) Remington Model 11 riot gun?

I've got enough ammo in .30-'06, 8x57JS, and 7.62x54R to reenact The Gauntlet, but I'm a little light on 12 gauge; maybe 100 rounds or so. Suggestions are being entertained in comments...

Today In History: Like it was a clue or something...

On this date in 1864, Denmark ended the Second Schleswig War by signing Schleswig, Holstein, and a player to be named at a later date over to the Prussians, whose Dreyse "needle gun"-armed hordes had overrun southern Denmark anyway and, well, possession was nine tenths of the law.

The Austrians had allied with their fellow Deutsche-speakers in the fracas, and to celebrate their joint victory, the Prussians stomped the holy heck out of them a year and a half later, then took a couple year breather before beating France to a paste.

Europe in the latter half of the 19th Century was a generally peaceful place, but every time there was a dustup, it seems that it was called the "Something-Prussian War". Cops call that "the usual suspects"; authors call it "foreshadowing".

That's pretty uncool.

Julie from Western Australia reports on the new plan for mandatory intarw3bz censorship in her country. For the children, of course.

To say she is less than amused would give me a pretty good leg up in the Understatement of the Year contest.

It ain't haute cuisine.

So, last night I threw a buttered slice of seeded rye in the frying pan, with a big thick slice of Swiss atop it. Sort of an open-face grilled cheese sandwich. Then I surrounded it in the frying pan with sauerkraut.

My roomie looked at me like I had lost my mind. Apparently she had never seen fried 'kraut before.

Well, I thought it was yummy...

How 'bout a nice hot cup...

...of steaming Zumbo?


(h/t to Joe Huffman.)

Bitterer.

I have never in my life been so ready for an election season to be over and done with. I can hardly wait for the Messiah to be sworn in so unicorns will start farting rainbows on the front lawn of my gold house and I can run them over with my rocket car on the way to my governmentally-guaranteed middle class job.

(Oh, and the TeeWee will blessedly shut up with the ads for at least a whole three months until we start building up for the 2012 campaign season. The steady drone of bullshit has me boxing my own ears out of frustration.)

The great debate?

So, some guy on an internet board starts out a thread with "I think the most debated topic in the “Firearms Industry” is the use of the front sight or not using the front sight."

Huh?

In internet chatrooms and the letters column of Guns'n'Gear mags, maybe.

Generally, though, most everybody with serious credentials says one thing, and a handful of guys (most who coincidentally have techniques named after themselves and epaulettes on their shirts) say a few other, different things.

Incidentally, I'm planning to name a technique after myself, start teaching an "intense, high round count course", and let folks dump a case or two of ammunition into the berm unsighted from the hip for two days. That way I make money, and they get to take home a certificate and tell their friends that they're "trained". And since the odds of them being in a shootout in suburbia are slim to frickin' none, we're all happy. It'll be awesome. I just need to think up a name for my technique and order some shirts with epaulettes.



(Folks, you own every bullet that comes out of your gun and everything it touches. If you can't control exactly where it lands, you have no business toting a pistol in public. The easiest method for doing this (outside of arm's reach, anyway) is to use the sights that are conveniently built into every pistol.)

Everything old is new again...

If you're a real 1911 geek you should appreciate the following factoids:

1) The Colt 1902 has a bushingless coned barrel.
2) The Colt 1902 has a ramped barrel.
2) The Colt 1900 has double, nested recoil spring a la the Detonics or Delta Elite.

Everything old is new again. :)

A roundhouse kick to the antis' junk.

Chuck Norris kicks gun grabbers in the face:

Your tax dollars at work.

Roberta X has a post up breaking down just where your money gets spread around by the government. With charts.

It's up.

New content at The Arms Room: Classic Colts #1.

Wait one.

Doing something for the other blog. Content here soon.

What color is the sky in his world?

As proof that wearing one's Reynolds Wrap yarmulke too tight can cut off circulation to the parts of the brain responsible for functions higher than, say, shoe-tying, I offer the following comment left by "Terry" at Xavier's blog, from the post about Kirsten Brydum's death:

The Republican controlled CIA comitted this murder. It is easy to see if you will just open your mind.
1) the murder was a head shot several times over (very unlikely for a mugging/gang violence)
2) Kirsten was uniting the anarchist movement across the country which is a very big threat to the government being this is the key to the movement as a whole (unification in struggle). If people don't know that they are being very ignorant of class consciousness and historical struggles against any oppressor (look at slave rebellions for an example)
3) it is extremely difficult to picture Kirsten provoking any sort of violence or mugging. Anarchists are peace loving, and she had a long history of helping people.
4) this all happened within the same week of the stock market crash and $700 billion bailout plans. Capitalism was heading for a collapse and so those that are in power are very afraid right now (just watch Bush's speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms_O5avYAOs)
4) this happened in the wake of another activist murder in the same week (or at least very close) who was actually saying she was being spied on before she died.
5) this is also in the same time period of a nation-wide raiding of Food Not Bombs and anarchist collectives all over the country (since before and after the RNC).
6) if you look at McCain's name you will see it's a anagram for CIA.
7) McCain is desperate to win the White house and he learned all kinds of Viet cong tricks while a prisoner.
Our government has tortured and assasinated people before. Why do you think it would be any different with this peace loving person?

It's really quite an incredible flight of fancy, and a glimpse into a truly "other" world, one where an omniscient CIA knows and cares about the existence of every campus radical, and has the time and inclination to violate its charter by rubbing them out on U.S. territory because They Matter. It's a world where muggings and murders have to be "provoked"; where predators can divine your inner thoughts and helpful intentions and are driven off by the fluffy bunny waves emanating from within you, rather than just busting a cap in your fool head and taking your bike and your stash. A world where small bands of coffee-house Anarchists have The Capitalists so scared that they send out hit teams...

The world of the conspiranoiac is a fascinating one, and it proved that the space-time continuum curves back on itself. Head way on out there to the right, on out past Fred, out even past Alex Jones, and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of Rage Against The Machine fans, looking at Cynthia McKinney from the other side.

I didn't know it was possible to like her more...

...but every new thing they try to hang on her just makes me feel better about Sarah Palin. Anybody that drives the legacy media and the bilious "progressives" this far into conniptions can't be all bad. Hell, the way they feel about her makes them seem positively ambivalent about the Shrub by comparison.

Palin's going rogue? You'd better bring a big elephant gun, baby.

Arab-to-American translation:

"Aggression by US helicopters against civilian building in Boukamal leads to the martyrdom of 8 citizens."

Translation:

A tango playing "ollie-ollie-oxenfree" across the Syrian border is now "It". Permanently. And no taps back.

What kind of heathen Yankee treachery is this?

The first thing I heard this morning was the little weather gnome on the TeeWee saying that "...the snow flurries have moved out of the area..."

Snow flurries? What the heck? It's not even Halloween yet! You people lured me up here so you could by-gawd freeze me to death, didn't you?

I blame bicycle helmets...

Obviously we have taken Darwin out of the equation in modern Western society; people who would have normally drowned themselves in five gallon buckets of Drano left open on the living room floor are instead surviving to adulthood and voting for Barack Obama.

Until Gaia evolves us a twenty-foot-long flying predator to bring the dimwit population back into check, it's nice to see that the gene pool occasionally finds ways to self-chlorinate.

Who is John Galt?

Is Atlas going to shrug?

Consider that Barry's "economic reform" proposal of increased income taxes on those with enough money to invest, increased capital gains taxes, and a bump on dividends taxes couldn't put the already-staggering economy down for the count faster if he'd actually aimed between the running lights, one wonders how much longer before those who are pulling the wagon get tired of the weight...

The comments at that post of Dr. Helen's make for fascinating reading.

Happy birthday, bro.

The Munchkin Wrangler celebrated his 37th yesterday.

Oh, my gawd...

On the Chris Matthews Show this morning (The topic was "President Obama: Was it Destiny or merely his vast Talents?") the panel was practically autoorgasmic, never mind that we haven't actually had a, you know, election yet. They know in their hearts who their president is; they were definitely not this fired up about Kerry, or even Gore.

During the commercial break, while '60s music was being used to sell hair dye to vain older guys who think that it will help them surf and pick up chicks while playing the guitar in a rock band, I had time to ponder as to the reason Boomers, in particular, are so starry eyed over a guy who was still in short pants during the Summer of Love. I have to say, I can't figure what it is.

"How was the gun show, Tam?"

Two words: "Colt" and "1902".

Fear me.

More later.

Bein' hassled by The Man!

In an interview with Essence.com, ACORN claims that the whole "voter fraud" thing is all whitey's fault. And by "whitey", we mean the GOP. Srsly. Here's an example:

ESSENCE.COM: ACORN's voter registration campaign turned in applications signed by phony names or multiple applications for the same person. How did this happen?
BERTHA LEWIS: I think it's important for people to know exactly what is happening. We do massive voter registration to low- and moderate-income folks. The Right Wing and Republicans, specifically, have been coming for us since the 2000 and 2004 elections. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent U.S. attorneys after us to investigate and try to find a prosecutable action. In 2006, the reason he stepped down is that he fired eight attorneys because they kept coming back to him saying, "There's no evidence; ACORN is clean." They constantly tried to come after us and attack us, and not once anywhere has it been proven that we systematically engage in this activity.

...and then Karl Rove planted listening devices under her tinfoil beanie!

I mean, sweet tapdancing Jesus, there wasn't even an attempt to answer the question, just a "The man is keepin' us down!" so reflexive that it likely came from the same part of the autonomic nervous system that controls liver secretions and never even passed close to the centers of speech, much less higher thought. Ah, well, can't say she doesn't know her target audience...

Sucker's bet...

Heh.

I've added my two cents in his comments section. ;)

Need proof that hippies are culturally illiterate...

...as well as being somewhat thick?

Well, given an assumption of a tiny bit of cultural literacy and an ear for the euphonious, this poster should have said "Girls say yes to boys who say O."

Although the type of girl who would say "yes" for such an inane reason could probably manage the difficult feat of boring a nineteen year old boy to tears in bed by describing, in all its glory, Obama's tax plan while junior is tryin' to get jiggy wit' it. Bear in mind that these are the people who are immensely in favor of sex ed in public schools and, from what I remember, only the government could come up with a movie about sex that would act as a soporific to a room full of high schoolers.

Prescience.

I've been reading Jeff Cooper's Gargantuan Gunsite Gossip. Like reading Miss Florence King's collected old "Misanthrope's Corner" columns from National Review (Stet, Damnit!), it's a fascinating archaeological view of the not-too-distant past.

Courtesy of the good Colonel, I note that 'way back in '87, James Kilpatrick referred to one Sen. Biden as "The Lickspittle Lapdog of the Lunatic Left".

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

About his boss, now...

Is Richard Daley going to let Obama move into the White House, or is he going to keep him in Chicago the way he does Blagojevich?

(Just curious. Besides, to use the geeky metaphor, every Anakin needs a Palpatine, right?)

Shack up for Gaia!

If you find yourself writing the following paragraph

Perversely, we live in a world where the sustainability consultant in San Francisco is willing to fly in an exotic boyfriend every month from Washington, D.C. All day, she helps companies "green their supply chains" and "internalize core social costs," yet that eco-savvy seems to vanish at night, when she e-mails: Come visit!!! You might say she's willing to be a locavore but not a locasexual.

understand that English is no longer your primary language; you are now speaking snivelese. Also, your sense of priorities is so unhinged that it's in danger of falling off completely. Also also, people like me occasionally lie awake dreaming of bludgeoning you half to death with an uncooked 20-oz. porterhouse.

After reading this, I have determined that henceforth all my long-distance communications with gentlemen will be undertaken with smoke signals from a pyre made of dead baby seals during the day, and by blinking morse code with the flame atop a refinery cracking tower at night.

Bizarro search of the day.

May you find what you are seeking, Manuel.
(Damn. "Irony Pantyhose" would be an
awesome name for a blog. Or a band.)

The Obamessiah is in town today...

...and the DHL truck with my shipment of anti-politician monkeys that I was going to turn loose on the streets in a chittering horde is nowhere in sight, blast it all!

In other news, my roomie forgot to duck in the laundry bunker this morning because she had an armful of squirming, adventurous house cat (who is positively fascinated by the Forbidden Basement), and brained herself pretty good on a low-hanging duct. Hopefully she can get close enough to Barry to touch the hem of his garment, which should clear up that bump on her noggin tout de suite.

Taxonomy of Modern Dangers question:

Nanobot Spiders: More or less dangerous than Face-Eating Monkeys?

Whose team are they on? I'd guess that they are obviously affiliated with the Killer Space Robots. Also, since they're sneaky, they'd obviously be tied in with the Ninja/Vampire faction, and therefore opposed to the Pirate/Werewolf/Hippie side.

Police gear up for rioting...

...although who they expect to riot is uncertain.

Like I said elsewhere: "I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I was clinging to my gun and it went off…"

Today In History: "We will no longer remain slaves."

On this date in 1956, student protesters in Budapest began cutting the hammer and sickle from Hungarian flags and toppled a statue of Stalin. Ministry of security troops panicked and opened fire on demonstrators outside the Radio Budapest building, and the uprising was on. Troops sent to relieve beleaguered secret police joined the protesters instead, and the government, by now fearing for their lives, called the Soviets.

The West stood by and watched when the Russian tanks rolled in and crushed the uprising after days of bloody street fighting. It was not Freedom's finest hour.

Tried. Tested. Proven. And 50ft Tall.

McCain has warned that if The chOsen One is elected, he will be tested by America's enemies, and the callow youth will probably get an F. Or at least a D minus.

Enemies would not similarly challenge McCain, he said, because he's already been tried.

"They know I've been tested," he said. "They know I've been tested. I've been tested many times."

They also, McCain went on to point out, know that McCain has a 50-foot tall robotic battle armor exoskeleton, which Obama most certainly does not, and that he's not afraid to use it.

I know it takes all kinds of critters...

...to make Farmer Vincent's fritters, and all...


...but certain search queries just scream "Help Me!" loudly and clearly.

It all comes down to motives.

We hope that, unlike ground-up bits of tigers, rhinos, gorillas, and Sylvester Stallone, that an increase in... er,... "potency" is not attributed to Yeti toes.

However, in a sane world V1agra would have knocked the black rhino and the Siberian tiger right back off the endangered species list, so I'm not getting my hopes up about the expedition being backed by pure mythozooic curiosity.

Ah, bacon!

Is there anything it can't do?

More sharp pointy stuff...

Another on the list of Knives I Will Never Sell is my Greco Whisper. Granted, it's not a tenth the utility knife the Puffin Magnum is, and the odds of me ever being in a knife fight are somewhere between zero and naught, and even if I were I probably wouldn't have the Whisper with me and I'd be totally pwnd anyway because I know doodly-squat about knife fighting... But it's such a sweet knife to hold. It balances nice and fits the hand. The proportions are graceful, especially considering its prybar thickness, and mine even has pretty rosewood scales. Plus I bought it at the first Blade Show I ever attended, back in '02.

The space race goes on...

...whether we bother to suit up or not.

While the Chinese have been orbiting manned missions, their archrivals in India have just lofted a probe to orbit and map the lunar surface.

"But Tam," you say "We've already mapped the moon! We're playing with R/C model cars on Mars!"

Yes, but after we mapped the moon and hit a few golf balls around up there, we just turned our back on the whole thing. Scrapped our huge boosters. Used an outdated, overengineered flying garbage truck as a make-work program for NASA and a pork conveyor for incumbent congressweasels. Got in the way of private progress with government interference that would have strapped airbags on the Wright Flyer and prevented them from flying at Kitty Hawk lest they wound some rare sand flea.

The Chinese and Indians are serious about this. This is good. I've mentioned before that when I get to the moon I'd like a choice of food other than Happy Family Pork Seafood Rice #5. I was kinda hoping for a Big Mac rather than some soy & curry concoction, though. If we want to get back in the game, I say we tell Americans that anything that happens over a hundred miles up is tax-free, and then stand the hell back.

On the Texican, whoa-oh, radio!

Last night's Gun Nuts: TNG was awesome. The chat room had, like, eleventy-seven people in it; even Lawdog showed up. And, speaking of Texas, call-ins included HollyB and JPG. See what you missed? Oh, wait: You can download it and pretend like you were there when your friends ask you about it around the water cooler at work today!

Today In History: G-men get their man...

On this date in 1934, FBI agent Melvin Purvis and his crew caught up with notorious bank robber "Pretty Boy" Floyd and killed him in a gun battle. Probably.

Better shooting through chemistry.

“Grip the gun twenty percent tighter!”

I can still hear Todd Jarrett’s voice saying it clearly, not muffled like I heard it on the square range in North Carolina, because I’d neglected to bring my Peltor Tac 6 active hearing protection on the Blackwater trip. (Who knew those AA batteries would still be good three years later?)

I didn’t cover myself in glory at Blackwater. Oh, I was solidly a mid-pack shooter, and nobody had to worry about me suddenly displaying inept gun-handling skills; safety is well and truly ingrained in my reptilian hindbrain. But my shooting wasn’t up to what I knew I could do.

My trigger finger was doing the right thing, and I had a crisp, clear picture of the front sight, and I was sure I wasn’t flinching, but…

“Grip the gun twenty percent tighter!”

Jeez, Todd, I’m already gripping the thing harder than I ever would in any target discipline like bullseye or silhouette, and I’m still dropping shots at speed here. What do you want me to do? Crush it?

Fast forward to about a week ago. I was re-reading The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery, 5th Edition, by Massad Ayoob, because I remembered it being pretty inclusive and non-doctrinaire and a good shooting primer; I thought I remembered it as having a lot of basic practical shooting advice to help my roommate for the upcoming bowling pin match.

In Chapter Four, Ayoob discussed the “crush grip” for combat shooting, and mentioned that gripping the heck out of the gun with the non-trigger fingers of the strong hand prevented them squeezing sympathetically with the trigger finger when shooting at speed. (If they were already squeezing as hard as they could, it was hard for them to tighten any more.) It was like a little light went on over my head; like some weird chemistry; spoken hydrogen and written oxygen combining to make shooting water...

“Grip the gun twenty percent tighter!”

Last Saturday at the range I put it into practice. Shooting the Pro for the first time in months, I squeezed heck out of the grip with everything but the trigger finger, concentrated on the front sight, and…. BANG! The .45 bullet blew the “-0” right out of the center of the target. w00t! BANG! BANG!BANG! BANGBANGBANG! A big, ragged hole appeared around the first perforation. I was on fire!

I tried my Colt 1903, with the same result. Four different S&W wheelguns, in .22 and .38: No change. Back to the 1911, this time on a bowling pin silhouette and… Huzzah! I was dialed in!

Something I’d heard mixed with something I’d read and became something I knew. And it worked!

I can’t wait to try it on those nefarious bowling pins Saturday morning…

Waitaminnit...

...Will Smith was supposed to be Neo?

Public Service Announcement:

Don't forget that every time you don't listen to Gun Nuts: The Next Generation, God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens, and tune in tonight at 9PM EDT.

It all makes sense, now.

A Little Rock TeeWee news anchor was found beaten in her home Monday morning. The assailant remains unknown, but she had once interviewed Dick Cheney on the ammunition aisle of a "hunting goods store", so you never know.

They're not saying it was retaliation for her appearance in that "W" movie, either, but you know how the New World Order works...

I'll tell you what, this Bush Derangement Syndrome thing is almost as much fun as playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and a whole lot less mentally challenging.

w00t!

According to my email box, I'll be able to pick up the Gun Blog 9 tomorrow! :)

Mad props to the guys at Beech Grove Firearms for not call-blocking my number at any point in this saga.

If only there were tighter gun laws!

Oh, wait... Never mind.

I do like the opening sentence:

A financially strapped South Korean man went on an arson and stabbing rampage in Seoul on Monday, leaving six people dead and seven others wounded, police said.

"Financially strapped"? It must be the GOP's fault. Evil capitalists! Look at how they cause stabbings.

Thankfully stuff like this will stop on January 21st.

Someone needs to be fired...

...and then horsewhipped out into the employee parking lot and left to freeze.

I speak, of course, of the knob who decided to use a godawful looping edit of the chorus of "Saved By Zero", by The Fixx, for that stupid Toyota ad.

Wow! A quick Google search shows that I am not suffering alone. There may even be a support group.

Today In History: Lights! Camera!

On October 20th, 1944, filming began on The Heroic General; a short film written, directed, produced, and inspired by Douglas MacArthur.

Heroically wading ashore and bravely exposing his trousers to saltwater stains, Gen. MacArthur managed to seize the already secured beach in less than twenty dramatic takes.

Swords: They're ____in' dangerous!

A series of public service announcements that will make you pee yourself laughing. (Frequent dropping of the F-bomb, so don't crank up the audio if you're working the receptionist's desk at the convent today.)

Powell's announcement offers...

...proof that RINOs are not herd animals.


BONUS! In comments here Cossack in a Kilt shows he's onto Obama's secret.

DOUBLE SECRET BONUS! Video proof.

Quote of the Day, from 24 years ago:

This one's for Joe the Plumber:

"One difference between a liberal and a pickpocket is that if you demand your money back from a pickpocket he will not question your motives."
-William Rusher, writing in National Review in nineteen hundred and eighty-four.

The correct answer was...

Poor Rep. Bachmann, all flustered so easily. Here's what she should have said:

MR. MATTHEWS: Sarah Palin was around today talking about pro- American parts of America, and assuming there's other non-parts of the country. What parts of America would you say are anti-American? What parts of this country?

TAMARA: Well, the chair your fat ass is parked in, for starters, Chris.

Overheard in the kitchen:

Scene: Roseholme Cottage kitchen interior. Early AM. Bacon is frying.

RX: "Will you keep an eye on the bacon for a second while I take care of something really urgent?"

Me: "Sure."

*A brief time elapses. I'm be-bopping spastically in the kitchen, eyes closed, to some internal soundtrack, probably "White and Nerdy" by Weird Al. Unseen by me, my roomie has returned.*

RX: "Oh my gawd, are you doing the Forbidden Bacon Dance?!?"

Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day.

Don Gwinn's boy, Kane, got to participate in a mock election in elementary school. Just like the way the AFL-CIO wants their future elections to be, there was apparently none of that namby-pamby "secret ballot" nonsense. The outcome was predictable, if depressing...

Kane's class had a mock election yesterday. Kane voted for McCain.

The rest of the day, the other kids taunted him and called him a racist. It was a pretty good preparation for adult political discourse, come to think of it.

Rakin' the lawn, rakin' the lawn!

So, awesome morning. Deluxious greasy spoon-style breakfast and then to the range where I shot the Pro for the first time in a month or two. Shot like a house afire; best range session I've had since before Blackwater. Those bowling pins next Saturday morning had better look out.

Then fun times w/friends, a bit of strolling about Broad Ripple, and then back to tend to the leaves in the yard. Right now I'm taking a quick break from the yard work. I'd write more about each stage of the day, but I gotta get back to it. More in a couple of hours...

Well, they were closer this time.

Usually when some talking head or columnist from the MSM blathers about "an arsenal of weapons being found by police in the home of Joe Smith, whose neighbors describe him as a moody loner", the camera then goes on to pan shakily across a bedsheet covered with grandpa's old .30-30, a couple .22 plinkers, an SKS, and a $79.99 single-barrel twelve gauge from Wally World. It always turns out that the "over a thousand rounds of ammunition" is only because Mr. Moody Loner (apparently being introverted and prickly about the neighbor's dog peeing in your rosebushes is a sure sign of a future spree killer,) picked up a couple bricks of .22 during a 2-for-1 sale at K-Mart when they were closing out their gun department ten years ago.

Rarely do I sit up and say "Okay, that is a lot of guns."

It's good to have goals. Mine is that, when they finally come after me for felony jaywalking or confuse my address with the crack house two blocks down, and in the aftermath spread all my stuff on bedsheets in the front yard, I want the kids on the intarw3bz gun boards to look at that junk-on-the-bunk display and say "Wow, that is an arsenal."

They must be doing something right...

I mean, I don't remember Bob Dole having swooning fans screaming in the mosh pit...

Ahab liveblogged the Sarah Palin rally last night.

Was it Genius or Insanity...

...that was supposed to let you hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time and believe them both to be true?

Anyway, when the Washington Post came out with their endorsement in the Presidential Derby yesterday, they claimed to have a big problem with their old pal, McCain:

And we find no way to square his professed passion for America's national security with his choice of a running mate who, no matter what her other strengths, is not prepared to be commander in chief.

So they instead threw their endorsement to The chOsen One, Mr. "Present", the two-year freshman Senator from Chicago. Big shock, there.

That makes sense to someone, I guess. Everybody knows that being the C-in-C of the Obama campaign, with its legions of phone volunteers, is more practical experience than being C-in-C of the AKNG, which only has soldiers and airmen.

Dinner tonight...

...was at a restaurant with honest-to-Wotan bears. Animatronic bears (observe about ~35-40 seconds into this video). This led to pondering between my dinner companion and I, both veterans of intarw3bz gun boards, as to what would be the best gun for killer space robot bears, which are obviously more dangerous than zombie bears or ninja bears, if not quite in the same class as zombie ninja bears.

Also, there were dead critter heads all over the walls, and the Stevens Crackshots and 11mm pinfire revolver in the showcase by the gift shop were for sale. Tell me that doesn't just knock Cracker Barrel into a cocked hat in the dining experience department.

Try the elk medallions in horseradish sauce for an appetizer. They are teh awesome.

BONUS! Guess whose autographed pic was on the wall:

SciFi comics made of win and awesomesauce.

Big Head Press is advertising in my sidebar! Cool!

Overheard: "...no matter what we're doing."

So, at the end of the commercial for that weird little Bose clock/radio/CD thingummy is this enraptured couple extolling the virtues of the little audio device that has brought so much happiness into their otherwise drab existence:

She: "Whenever it comes on, we just start dancing..."

He: "...no matter what we're doing."

"No matter what we're doing"?!? This has led to a new long-running gag at Roseholme Cottage, based on speculation as to just what they might have to stop to get down with the Bose:

"...we just leap out of the cottage cheese bath and tango in the living room."

"...we drop the sheep and start to rhumba."

"...we throw down the chainsaws, she lets go of my leash, and we do the hustle."

"...we pay the clown, send him home, and waltz through the topiaries, without even wiping off the whipped cream first."

Train up a child...

Xavier's Little Darling administers a low-key verbal beatdown to a Range Blowhard.

It'll warm the cockles of your heart. :)

Ha!

Insty wins the internets!

QotD:

[The legacy media has] done more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years . . . .

It is apparently just a rumor...

...that Kathy Lee sleeps in a vat of formaldehyde every night.

...now this is a knife.

Oleg has a pic up of some new knives from McCann Industries.

My go-to knife for the past six years has been a McCann Puffin Magnum, which is big enough to handle most chores without being too huge to keep on a belt with ease. Incidentally, mine is the very one Kim Breed tried to destroy in his review for Blade magazine, though you could never tell just by looking at it. O1 tool steel and tough as armor-plated nails...

(That deep belly on the blade will cut holy hell out of your finger, too, if you are grasping the kydex sheath like an idjit while drawing the knife. Ask me how I know. Also, super glue is good for closing cuts when you're many, many dirt-road miles away from civilization. Also, have an ER nurse in deer camp.)

Free Legal Advice:

It can make your claim of justifiable homicide in self-defense look a little sketchy if you then decapitate your attacker and wander the aisles of the local Wally World holding his severed noggin.

Although, you know, if anyone's looking for a last-minute Halloween costume, all you'd need would be a sari, a cleaver, and a would-be rapist.

Stingray on the economy:

Don't edit yourself, man; tell us how you really feel. (Hint: it involves fairly liberal use of the F-word out of sheer exasperation.)

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Legacy Media giant and famous McNewspaper, USA Today, notes an uptick in righteous self-defense shootings of goblins and, for some unknown reason, gets all hand-wring-y about it.

SayUncle has the story on the story.

That was easy. Next question?

Greg at West, By God wants to upgrade his totin' iron. He wants something that will share a caliber with Beth's sidearm and that she will find easy to operate.

Well, if she's carrying a Glock, then nothing would be easier for her to use than an identical Glock. Plus they could share magazines.

No agonizing decision required: Get a 9mm Glock just like hers.

There, wasn't that easy? :)


On a tangentially-related note, I've never understood situations where the "His'n'Hers" home defense shotguns are a 12ga Mossenberger 500 and a 20ga 870 Youth Model. Either she should train to the 12 gauge, or, if that's physically impossible, he should realize that it won't hurt his manhood to use a 20ga Remington. Same thing with folks who are all prepared for the Zombocalypse with a manly .308 M1A for him and a dainty little AR for her. Either one or the other would be fine, but it's awfully impractical to use both.

Life's Great Mysteries, #437,196:

How come the most in-your-face activist proponents of open carry always have the crappiest holsters? Nothin' but Fobus and those godawful clip-on nylon sausage sacks with the spare magazine pouch sewn on the front of the holster. (If I had a dollar for every customer over the years who asked me "D'you got one o' them clip-on holsters with the spare clip pouch?", I'd retire rich. They always looked so crestfallen when I said that we didn't carry those and explained why.)

For heaven's sake, if you're going to show it off, at least spring for something made from a name-brand steak wrapper, if you're not willing to go all the way to stingray or sharkskin. (And that 1/2" wide thing from The Gap is not a pistol belt. That's why it's rolling over like that and causing your iron to flop about.)

I know it's irrational...

I used to be a stone traditionalist when it came to the stocks on a Government Model. Only natural materials like wood or ivory needed apply. My stance has mellowed somewhat, though. I've come to terms with 1911 stocks made out of G10. Out of Micarta. Out of carbon fiber.

But I just can't do Alumagrips, sorry. You gotta draw the line someplace.

Feelin' ooky.

Hopefully I will get more chipper as the day goes on. It's not like I'm suffering for lack of things I need to do...

Pomegranates are...

...like steamed artichokes and drawn butter. It's a long run for a short slide, but it's a helluva slide.

Speaking of long runs for short slides, would anybody spend time cracking open crab legs or lobster claws if there wasn't crab or lobster inside? I know I wouldn't spend time working over the grasper of an undersea arachnid if the payoff was oatmeal...

Everybody's worried about their portfolios...

... but since I'm pretty heavily invested in steel, walnut, brass, and lead, mine's actually looking pretty good, thanks.

Hey, S&W stock may have taken a pounding, but old Smiths themselves have been absolutely blue chip over the last five years. They've all performed well, and I could probably better than double my money on a few. Plus, have you ever tried to knock bowling pins off a table with a stock certificate?

...and now, the news.

This morning's Top Ten stories on CNN.com:

1. Fears of violence as economy tanks
"OMG! We're all gonna die! There's no hope! We need change!"

2. 'Bradley effect' could affect vote
"Don't be a racist. Vote for Obama. You don't want to feel like a racist, do you?"

3. GOP blasts stimulus measures
"Evil Republicans don't want to buy your vote!"

4. Army denies puppy return to U.S.
"Get the Army out of Iraq. With its puppies. Evil GOP!"

5. Polar bear slips into zoo moat
"Happy fluff."

6. Palin aides warned, report says
"Evil GOP!"

7. Leader breaks podium, gets laughs
"Silly foreigners."

8. McCain speaks out about Lewis
"Evil GOP!"

9. Mob mansion may hold more secrets
"Happy fluff."

10. Deadly wildfires rage across L.A.
"zomg we're all gonna die!"


*Sigh* Sometimes you wonder why you bother getting out of bed and re-entering a world full of idiots that are, for the most part, illegal to shoot.

Random notes...

1) A splendiferous day. My friend came by and we rode the Monon, went to Taste for brunch, came back to Roseholme Cottage and watched the Jeff Cooper vidjo, and then he cooked a delicious dinner. The only thing that would have made it cooler is if a midget on a tricycle had ridden around the block a few times. On fire.

2) How come we get the low-grade Coca Cola here in America? Didn't we invent the stuff?

3) Got the other Mac playing tunes... "No More Tears" and Van Hagar's "Pound Cake"... That takes a girl back.

Tactical mustaches and sideburns...

I'm sitting here watching a cool DVD re-issue of Jeff Cooper's Defensive Pistolcraft video set. It was recorded at Orange Gunsite back in the day, which in this case means 1987.

Lots of mustachioed instructors, Jeff Cooper in the classroom and tooling around on the tactical trike, 2-tone 1911s with Bo-Mar low mounts.

It's interesting to see how much has changed (pure Weaver v. Modern Isosceles, tritium sights are a gadget, the old-school drawstroke presentation,) and how the basic principles remain the same, from "Front Sight, Press" to the Four Rules being presented in their natural habitat.

He hasn't said "rabbit people" yet, but we're only halfway through disc one, so I'm holding out hope.

Here's a sample: Vidjo.

People shouldn't be so wishy-washy...

Courtesy of an old post at Dustbury is a link to an awesome rant on why one guy doesn't like modern cars:

Next problem of course, is the innability to just get a good honest car, they're all loaded to the gills with stupid doodads like Electronic Ashtray Position Sensors which will fail nanoseconds after the warranty expires, most likely at 2:30 AM, February 12, in Deliverance, Kentucky- immediately frying the "ECU", a completely useless device that forces the engine to reswallow it's own vomit time and time again so that factories that produce children's toys out of lead-coated asbestos can purchase "clean air credits", and do-gooder dumbass politicos can jump in their private jets and deliver a sermon to me about how I'm personally responsible for the extinction of the Brazilian Banded Aardvark because my '92 F150 burns a quart of oil every 1,000 miles.

Don't hold back! Tell us what you really think, man...

I love to ride my bicycle!

I think I'll celebrate European Oppressor Day by going for a bicycle ride, and then cleaning guns. Perhaps I can find peaceful autochthones along the Monon to whom I can swap beads and trinkets for land deeds.

Oh, the huge manatee!

Dennis the roadtripping manatee shuffled off his mortal coil on the road outside of Orlando, Florida. I hope he had a good last roadtrip, at least. Maybe they got him some pecan logs at a Stuckey's and stopped to let him See Rock City.

Chores for today:

1) Mow the lawn so that ninjas, pirates, or killer space robots approaching the house will at least have to go prone, rather than being able to walk upright in the tallgrass prairie.

2) Organize reloading supplies.

3) Find all my ammunition and sort it. There are still a couple of big boxes chock full of ammo left unexcavated from the move, including all my ferschlugginer .32ACP, without which I can't fire my Colt 1903.

4) Contemplate removing the layer of road cack from the Zed Three.

Big bore thunder...

TD gets ready to break out the big guns with some Eurometric chamberings. Makes me want a double in 9.3x74R really, really badly. Until then, my T/C Encore in .405 Winchester will have to do...

In what has rapidly become a weekend tradition...

...I'm sporting a blister on my trigger finger from several hundred rounds of double-action revolver work. Soon the callous there will return.

I shot a little over 100 rounds of .22LR through my Model 34, and put probably 200 rounds or more of .38 Spl downrange. Some of it was shot through my Model 64 snubbie, but the vast majority was fired through what is probably going to be my new pin gun: my pre-war 5" .38/44 Heavy Duty. I replaced the target stocks in the picture with linen micarta smooth combat stocks and a Tyler T-grip. Most of the ammo run through the gun was from the case of Federal 147gr +P+ Hydrashoks I have left sitting around, to see how it would handle and shoot with the kind of loads required for clearing a bowling pin off the table with anything like alacrity. I was pleased.

We met Brigid at the range, and she joined my friend and I for lunch at Rick's, and put pictures of the foray up at her blog. From there, my friend and I went off on a gun store crawl before returning to Broad Ripple for dinner at Sam's Gyros, and then to the theatre to see the new Ridley Scott flick, Body Of Lies, which is teh awesome. (When did Leonardo DiCaprio stop looking like Doogie Howser? He was all growed up and stuff in this movie, and very believable. BTW, am I the only one who thinks that if Caleb rocked a goatee there would be more than a slight resemblance?)

Inventorying for the coming zombocalypse...

Let's see, we have dies in .44 Spl/Mag, .38 Spl/.357 Mag, 11mm Mauser, .405 Win, .303 Brit, .30-40 Krag, 6.5 Swede, 6.5 Jap, 6.5 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, and .22 Remington Jet. We have at least a few hundred bullets in .429", 411", .357", .312", .308", 264", .224", and .222". Several pounds of various powders, a few thousand assorted primers...

I need to lay in dies for 9mm and .45ACP, as well as .223. I should probably lay in a complete swatch of loading supplies for .32 S&W Long; cheap to load and cheap to shoot. If I'm actually going to start reloading rifle cases, rather than just talking about it, I need a good case trimmer. I need a good tumbler. I need to teach my roommate.

EDIT: Just rummaging around to go to the range this morning and realized another must-have: .44-40 dies. Gotta keep my Model 544 fed.

Wow.

This just in from the Ministry of Irony:

In a Mark Morford column containing the following breathless claim about Barry O...

Because the truth is, the notion of an Obama presidency yields many gifts. Foremost: a refreshed intellectual climate, a far higher quality of basic discourse. Squinting and bumbling and "is our children learning" are out, articulation and oratory nuance are in. Out: aw-shucks "go with my gut" Joe Six-pack pseudo-cowboy Jesus-says. In: thoughtfulness, polysyllabic words, sentences with complicated construction and meaning.

...we find the following set of phrases broken on the wheel of tortured sentence structure:

No longer will it be tolerable when chatting up a sweet young thing or an older tasty thing at a bar or fetish dungeon or Whole Foods cheese aisle and casually toss in a reference to Obama's solar initiative or the multifaceted cultural upheaval happening in China or India, to watch his eyes glaze over as he shrugs and stares at his shoes and mumbles something about getting baked while lubing his skateboard and watching Xtreme Motocross on ESPN2.

Sweet zombie Jesus! Physician, heal thyself.

(Yeah, I know my monthly trip to go see what asshattery Morford's up to now will eventually cause me to stroke out, but I'm addicted to the "irritainment", as MattG so cleverly termed it.)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #49: Happiness...

...is a filthy gun.

Clowns: Pugsley, si! Ronald, no!

The jowly, super-sized Che-wannabe, who looks like he's sampled a few Big Macs in his time, goes after The Evil Golden Arches of Hegemonic Yanqui Capitalism.

Definitions for the terminally unhip:

Let me field a couple of questions recently asked by those of you who are not total online nerds and actually have things to do in real life:

1. "What does 'zomg' mean?" Well, when you see "OMG!" on teh intarw3bz, it means "Oh My God!" Internet lore says that "zomg" comes from someone trying to type "OMG", but missing the Shift key with their left pinky and hitting "z" instead. Hence, "zomg". If you are nerdy enough for netspeak to creep into your spoken vocabulary, it is pronounced "zōmĭgŏd".
2. "What's with the '!!!!1!!!1!one!!!'?" Another net joke stemming from a missed shift key. If someone was really carried away when trying to put a string of exclamation points after something, say in an internet argument, their finger might bounce off of the shift key for a keystroke or two, causing a numeral "1" to be inserted in the string of punctuation. The spelling out of "one" in the middle of the string is intended to indicate extreme hyperbole.

The Breda goes to see Sarahcuda and that old guy...

...and shakes Cindy's hand.

Random musing on identity politics...

I will be so happy when everyone on earth is a sort of medium-beige, Tiger Woods-y hue so that we can stop worrying about race and unite to persecute those sinister left-handers.

Wait...

Movie Day at Roseholme...

Went with Roomie yesterday afternoon to see the matinee showing of An American Carol down at Circle Centre.

Not too bombastic, surprisingly funny, and worth the price of admission for the unexpected zombie scene alone.

(The reviews gathered here are priceless:

Parents need to know that this independent comedy from one of the directors of Airplane! is designed to articulate politically conservative ideas...

Yeah. Bundle the little tykes off to see something wholesome, like Saw XLVII, instead. This is me, rolling my eyes.)

Magical thinking...

Xavier has a post up about the murder of young, free-spirited Kirsten Brydum. Kirsten was on a sort of wanderjahr; couch-surfing, free-storing, and dumpster-diving her way across America. Her trail took her through New Orleans which, while no longer the Mad Max world it was in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, is still far worse than it used to be last time I drove through, and it was bad enough then.

I'd say that there are neighborhoods in every city where one does not go, but that wouldn't be entirely correct. I have lived in some of those neighborhoods in Atlanta; people obviously go there. It would be more accurate to state that there are neighborhoods where one does not want to be lost, an outsider, out of place, uncertain. To do those things in those neighborhoods, especially at oh-dark-thirty in the A.M. marks one, as certainly as if there were a neon sign over one's head, as a resource, a victim, a prey animal for the predators that glide through the city's nighttime reefs.

Kirstin did that, and the result was depressingly predictable.

What is fascinating is the comment thread at Xavier's, where some have stopped in to express their belief that Kirsten was somehow targetted by the CIA or some nefarious member of Blackwater hit squads that populate the imaginations of folks who have forgotten to double-layer their Reynold's Wrap yarmulkes.

Let me get this straight; an unarmed, lost, young out-of-town woman gets killed in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of a dangerous city, and some folks want to say it was Blackwater or the CIA?

Folks, when you hear hoofbeats rounding the last turn at Preakness, do you look for zebras?

Not Louisiana, Paris, France, New York, or Rome, but--

-Gary, Indiana
Gary, Indiana
Gary, Indiana
Where the fix is in!

If I didn't know better...

...I'd think that the legacy media was trying to stir up a depression, just to have something juicy to report.

EDIT: Another primer on zomg we're all gonna die!!!

Oo-ooh, that smell! Can't you smell that smell?

The smell of corruption, that is.

Here in sunny Marion County, where the county clerk is about to be investigated for voter fraud, we have 105% of our eligible voters all registered to vote!

Awesome!

From the legacy media on down to your block captain, the fix is in on this one, kids. With McCain apparently trying about as hard to win as the 1919 White Sox, I'm starting to get a'feared that I know who my next President is going to be.

Today In History: "Your car was hit by what?"

On this date in 1992, an insurance adjuster no doubt had his work cut out for him when the Knapps called to report that their 1980 Chevy Malibu had been hit while parked in their driveway.

By a rock.

From outer space.

A Klansman under every bed.

One group, the Center for Social Inclusion -- a nonpartisan organization funded in part by the Ford Foundation -- claims the phrase was racially charged.

"The racial undertones were subtle but unmistakable," CSI Director Maya Wiley said in a statement released Wednesday.

"By making a dismissive, condescending remark like this, McCain was tapping into a current of superiority among white voters. It was an attempt to 'otherize' Obama and tap into the implicit bias that so many of us hold," Wiley said.

A True Believer can contextualize any utterance, no matter how innocuous, in terms of their particular worldview. What sounds to you and I like normal conversation is, for them, a complex structure of code words and shibboleths. Some people live in such exciting worlds.

(H/T to tgirsch at Unc's.)

Sometimes guns blow up...

A bone-stock Remington 770 in .270Win, shooting factory Remington ammunition, managed to demolish the last foot or so of barrel. Apparently the young man firing it had purchased rifle and ammo together, taken it to the range without so much as cleaning it first, and on its second shot ever, the gun grenaded.

Bore obstruction? Nope, else it would have detonated on the first shot. Squib? Apparently not; by all accounts the first shot sounded and felt normal. Probably just a fluke bad gun. It happens. Remington should buy him a new one and send him a nice letter and some ammo, and they'll probably have a happy customer.

An interesting internet phenomenon is to be found in the comments at the YouTube video. Just like on the gun boards, note all the people who come out and froth "I has a Remminton770 in .300 ought 6 and I shot 30000 shots through it and aint nevr nothign happend your a lire!"

Relax, Sparky, the guy wasn't saying anything about your gun. I'm sure yours is the bestest gun in the world.

Meanwhile, in the People's Collective of Chicago...

...homeland of Lord Obama, the good Sheriff has told the mean bourgeoisie bankers that he will not be doing foreclosures on rental properties.

Power to the people!

It ain't from the Food Pixies...

Would you like to know how the food magically gets to your table? Farmer Frank has been documenting the joys of the harvest season.

(Incidentally, driving past billiard-table-flat, harvested fields to get to Wildcat Valley last weekend triggered this Appalachian gal's agoraphobia something fierce...

"OMG! Where's the horizon?"

"Over there somewhere."

"That's not a horizon! The earth just drops away! A horizon is something like a tree line or a hill or a building!")

Isn't it supposed to be ironic...

...don't you think? A little bit ironic? Yeah, I really do think.

And yet I find Weird Al's "Trigger Happy" to be just a fun, toe-tapping ditty.

You'd better watch out, punk!

HA!

Awesomest t-shirt evar! Order one now as a Christmas present for your IPSC and IDPA friends.

Bonus!: The Finnish version, which reads "Cardboard is Evil".

New gunblog.

From an IPSC chick in the land Down Under.

Go read!

Shooty goodness...

So, who hasn't gone and watched all six episodes at Downrange TV yet?

In case you haven't got your USRDA of doom'n'gloom today:

Syd waxes a little hyperbolic. I wish it was a lot hyperbolic, but it's not; it's way closer to unvarnished than I'd like. (H/T to Kevin for pointing me there this Ay-Em)

Meanwhile, Lead and Gold has a link up to a fascinating .pdf transcript from Ira Glass's This American Life, which is often the only thing worth listening to on NPR other than Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers. It is a very clearly detailed flowchart of how dumb home loans in Cali wound up wrecking banks in Europe.

Why they loved the B-17...

This one took a direct flak hit over Köln, Germany that blew the nose off the plane and killed the bombardier. The pilot brought it safely back some 400 miles to its base in England, fighting what must have been a heck of a built-in headwind the whole way.

You might need to eat less...

...if someone else has to bring you the food because you can no longer heave your bulk out of bed.

Look, I think the culture is a little over-obsessed with thin. After I reached a certain age, and my metabolism would no longer allow me to down a whole pizza with impunity while the needle on the scale stayed motionless, I decided that I'd much rather give up Size 6 than give up steak and beer. But there comes a point where it's unhealthy, you know? And that point is somewhere long before you're immobile in bed and paramedics have to take a wall out of the house to load you into a pickup truck.

The worst part about the story is that he'd been bedridden for four months. That meant that for four months he had someone bringing him the Twinkies and Coca Cola; an unindicted co-conspirator, if you will.

Happy 1st Blogiversary to...

...my Roomie. Go congratulamate her!

(I'm feeling guilty because I totally spaced linking Breda's celebratory post last Wed. I can't forget to listen to the Gun Nuts: TNG show tonight, either. Only an hour away... )

Out for a bit...

I have an errand to run at Beech Grove Firearms, across the street from the Vast FEMA Extermination Camp (*snicker*). If I don't make it back, send the internet commandos.

"zomg teh barb wire points inwards!!!!1!1!!one!"


(PS: If you really believe that the Amtrak facility in Beech Grove is a "FEMA Extermination Camp", you are obviously barely multicelled and dumber than jello. Grownups are chatting here, so please don't drool in the comments section.)

EDIT: Bonus!

EDIT II: And can anyone guess why barbed wire points inward almost everywhere these days, including the Amtrak facility? Class? That's right. Lawyers. Because when Seth & Jared go to climb the fence so they can spray paint "Jared luvs Tifani 4evar" on the dining car, and the barbed wire is pointing out, if they try to climb over, they fall, break something, and then Mommy and Daddy sue the crap out of Amtrak, the fence maker, and whoever poured the concrete for the sidewalk. Whereas if it points inwards, they usually just give it up for a bad idea and climb back down, or get their Abercrombie & Fitch baggy drawers all snarled up in the barbed wire until the mall ninjas come out in the golf cart to help them down and call the police.

As anyone who's ever driven past a real jail or prison or maximum security site knows, nobody uses three strands of barbed wire if they're serious about keeping people out anyway. They use razor wire a la concertina.

Ignorance to take your breath away...

The comment thread here at Boing Boing is simply stunning in its ignorance. Watch as a bunch of people who took "Social Studies" instead of "AmGov 101"and who wouldn't know a platoon from a platypus discuss the Coming Martial Law Of The Evil George Bush! And how to fight it!

The uprising of the unarmed hippie ignorami! It's awesome. Really!

How do people this dumb stay alive? You'd think they'd be dropping dead left and right from driving off cliffs while text-messaging or forgetting to breathe while setting their entertainment centers to TiVo Dancing With The Stars.


(And to the guys way off to my right who are going on about the 1st BCT's current rotation, you are aware that it is a BRIGADE Combat Team, right? How many divisions did the Army use in Baghdad? And they're going to do Operation Garden Plot with one BCT? Pass the bong, dude, 'cause I want some of that.)


(H/T to Unc.)

The Plan Is Working:

After bombarding her with "We're All Gonna Die!" financial news round the clock for months, the media stuck a mic in the face of an underemployed Georgia woman and she burst into tears.

Unfortunately, she did not punch the reporter or anything.

Panicked people, however, tend to vote for Hopeychangey.

I blame George Bush.

Karthik Rajaram, an unemployed MBA in Cali, went off his nut and shot his whole family and himself yesterday after George Bush stole his self esteem. Deputy Chief of Police Michel Moore (I'm not making that part up. ed.) said:

"This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed, apparently because of a man who just got stuck in a rabbit hole, if you will, of absolute despair, somehow working his way into believing this to be an acceptable exit."

The nation's Chief Executive was seen on the security cameras of the gated community fleeing the man's dwelling with a sack over his shoulder that was believed to contain Rajaram's self-esteem. Accompanying him was his evil sidekick Dick Cheney, with an unidentified bundle that could have been Karthik's employment opportunities.

This is why you should vote for Lord Obama this November, so that nothing bad like this will ever happen again.

Thus saith CNN.

Today In History: Piracy, plain and simple.

On this day in 1985, noble peace-loving freedom fighters of the PLO hijacked the cruise liner Achille Lauro. They then demonstrated how tough and resolute they were by shooting a wheelchair-bound senior citizen.

For some reason, not one of the hijackers ended up decorating a yardarm.

Wall Street sneezes...

...Yuropeens catch a cold.

In other, tangentially-related, news, given the volume I've been shooting recently, it's time and past time to get the reloading press set up at home. Copper, tin, and lead are getting too expensive to purchase in their pre-assembled form.

I don't get it. Will someone please explain it to me?

So, all the liberals out there in voterland absolutely hated the Bailout Bill because it was rewarding greedy Wall Street capitalists for all their corporating and speculating and oppressing, and doing it on the backs of the taxpayer.

And all the conservatives out there in voterland absolutely hated the bailout bill because it was socialist and meddled in the marketplace and propped up businesses that should have become fodder for the scavengers.

So, if Pinko Liberal America didn't like it, and NASCAR-'n'-Jesus America didn't like it, who did like it? (I mean, other than a bunch of scoundrels and scalawags in Washington who are apparently not even pretending to represent the will of their constituents anymore...)

Recall Them All.

Ballistic art...

Back in the day, when I worked at the gun shoppe in Georgia, we came up with an idea to explain various hollowpoint rounds to customers. At my boss's house, we filled a big ol' plastic chemical drum with water and fired down into it from his deck using various calibers and brands of ammunition. At the end of a session, you would dump out the water and recover your now-expanded bullets from the bottom of the barrel.

No handgun bullet we were using (not even IMI/Samson .50AE JHP from the notorious Deagle) would damage the bottom of the barrel after traversing more than three feet of H2O. A 240gr HydraShok fired from a 16" Marlin .44 Magnum carbine, on the other hand, displaced a good deal of water some fifteen feet vertically, tipped the barrel over from the resultant sloshing, and did, in fact, nick the bottom after shedding its jacket and the "petals" of lead from the hollowpoint cavity.

The "blossomed" hollowpoints were very popular conversation pieces on the counter at the store, and tended to grow legs and wander off, especially the highly photogenic (and very pointy) Winchester "Black Talons". To my knowledge, however, none wound up being used in such a clever and artistic fashion.

(Via Greg via Unc.)

Rare bird.

What to buy the Mosin-Nagant geek who has everything: A Finnish 28/76.

EDIT: Looks like Empire Arms ran out or took down the page or something. Here's a thread at Gunboards.com on the 28/76.

There's big and then there's big.

When I moved to Indy, I heard someone mention something about it being the "13th largest city in the US". So I checked, and lo and behold, it was so.

But wait... Is that list accurate? Because Atlanta's at, like, number thirty-three, and I've lived both places; you could lose Indy in Metro Atlanta... Ah, that's right: Metro Atlanta. Atlanta is a donut city; the city itself is actually fairly small, geographically, and consists mostly of business districts interspersed with single-family dwellings, and is surrounded by vast, uncounted miles of paved suburban hell, teeming with office buildings, industrial parks, malls, and commuters. The Atlanta-Marietta-Sandy Springs Metro Area recently passed Boston, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Indy, comparatively speaking, you're not that far outside I-465 before the cornfields start. Which is kinda nice, actually. I live in a fairly urban and cosmopolitan neighborhood, and if I head west on 56th street, I'm to an outdoor pistol range in a city park in less than 30 minutes, and a mile or so past that, I see my first grain elevators.

Interesting statistic, but...

"Homeless Families" are a lot more sympathetic characters than regular bums; it's one thing to lose control of your circumstances so badly that you wind up drinking Aqua Velva while living out of a shopping cart behind the Greyhound station, and another thing altogether when you have your spouse and kids in the cart with you.

This article goes into the plight of homeless families in the Greater Boston S.S.R., but remains sketchy on the definition of "family", leaving one to envision whole Brady Bunches of little bindlestiffs clogging the freeway underpasses and Motel Sixes of the Bay State.

MMmmmmm...!!!

After shooting today (more on which later) I went with my friend to Scotty's Brewhouse in West Lafayette and had the most awesomest appetizer evar: Deep-fried dill pickle slices with horseradish sauce for dippin'. Crack cocaine pales in the addictiveness department by comparison...

Nuke-yoo-lar frisson.

LabRat tees off on the folks who can't stand it when someone pronounces it "nuke-yoo-lar", unless that someone is a Democrat.

Today In History: Great Ball of Fire.

On this date in 1930, the British commercial airship R101 augered into a ridge line in France and burst into the kind of fireball that can only be created by a few jillion cubic feet of hydrogen and thousands of liters of diesel fuel.

Intensive investigation into the causes of the accident revealed that the main culprit was that a balloon full of hydrogen and diesel fuel had been launched into the air, and what followed was pretty much the inevitable result.

"Safari on the Cheap", a re-run.

A re-run from May of '06:

I'm getting a barrel for my Encore chambered in .405 Winchester so I can have lion-hunting fantasies. Not, of course, that I will ever have the money or leisure time to go on safari for the King of the Beasts, but one can daydream. Or maybe organize a cheap substitute here in town...

"Dear Diary: Day three of the safari. After a quick breakfast of Tabasco Slim Jims and Diet Mountain Dew, my trusty native guide, Fred, has maneuvered me into an excellent position for the culmination of my trip, the confrontation with Simba. Careful not to spook the skittish herds of preschoolers, which would alert the lion to my presence, I ease around the concession stand. The cloying stench of cotton candy fills my nostrils..."

Like I said, one can daydream... :)

Curses, foiled again!

So, the po-po had to requalify this weekend, which resulted in the gates at Eagle Creek being locked for us mere civilians yesterday. Instead, we did the gun shop crawl on the west side of town. We wound up the afternoon on the patio at the Brew Pub, where I was schooled at learned how to play Chinese Chess.

A second attempt at powder-burning will be made today at a different location. My trigger finger is itchy, and I want to shoot some steel.

Lovin' an elevator...

"80,000th floor: Hardware, Astronautwear, solar power satellites. Oh, good morning, Mr. Sheffield! Going... down?"

Scientists are kicking around the beanstalk concept again, this time with NanoTubes™!

The natives are reluctant...

The next time you're at a soiree and someone starts up about their last vacation to France or Italy and how they shunned the "tourist-y stuff" and "saw it like a native", invite them to dinner at Waffle House and a minor league baseball or high school football game.

How come people who are so pleased to think that they might have seen another country "like a native" are so willing, or even proud, to spend their whole lives as a tourist in their own?

I'm not as cool as Caleb...

Hi-Speed Lo-Drag Caleb is going to be smoking A-Zones in IDPA ESP class at Atlanta Conservation Club tomorrow.

Mundane shooters such as myself (and, hopefully, RobertaX) will be punching paper at Eagle Creek in the AM, in preparation for next month's bowling pin match.

I'll be shooting my 2" Model 64 and my old Kit Gun to work on my DA revolver skillz, and I'll put fifty or so rounds through my Radom because... well, because I can.

Oh, hooray!!!

It's the most awesomest thing on teh intarw3bz ever!

AmGov 101, or The Ignorant American.

So there's a discussion brewing at The Munchkin Wrangler about the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, and it has once again reminded me of how woefully uneducated the average American is as to just how the country they live in works.

Here's a question: Where in the Constitution does it specify how you get to vote for the President?

If you answered "It doesn't." then, Hooray! Brownie points for you!

That's right, nowhere in the Constitution is there any mention of a popular vote for the office of the President. It does specify that the several States send electors, but there is no mention of primaries or parties or popular elections or any of the folderol we have come to take for granted as part of the electoral process. This election cycle, New York could decide to sell lottery tickets to determine who their electors will be, and Mississippi could draw names from a hat and Idaho could send the cousins of the Mayor of B.F.E., and it would be perfectly Constitutional.

We live in a Republic made up of the several States. You are a citizen of the State in which you reside. The States vote for the President of the Union. That they ask your opinion as to who it should be is a bonus, not a bylaw.

Bail out who?

If you live in a trendy or desirable neighborhood, you know the story: "I can't believe the Simpson place sold for $250,000! Of course, it was those transferees from California that bought it. Boy, did they get snookered!"

California has been suffering from a flight of productive citizens for years now as they tried to escape high prices, confiscatory taxes, and regulations that make the adjective "Byzantine" look completely inadequate. Unfortunately, rather than making them change currencies at the state border, we allowed them to spend their California Monopoly money and candy bar wrappers in the rest of the country as though it were real cash.

And make no mistake, Monopoly money is what it is. California has experienced Wiemar-like inflation, where grocery store cashiers make $12.50/hr, rookie police officers pull down $70k/yr, and the most depressing little 2br/1ba crackerbox costs a cool quarter mil. No wonder that they have a bizarre effect on local housing prices when they're allowed to show up in Des Moines and spend it as though it were real dollars.

Now that the goose that laid the golden eggs has flown the state to escape being eaten, the Cali .gov still has to pass out all the gold houses and rocket cars that it promised voters, and there just aren't the taxes to do it. What to do?

It's obvious! Beg Uncle Sucker for the money! If it works for the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, it should work for the Governator, too. Just ask for Federal tax dollars from working mothers in Dubuque and Peoria, and that should prop up the decaying edifice of crazy social programs and no-connection-to-reality public servant salaries that are the rule on the Left Coast these days.

Hey, I know her!

You'll be able to watch me make an arse of myself as I show off my total lack of skill on Downrange TV.