My FPS homunculus was named "Nick Schießen".

Well, actually mine was named "Auntie Tank", and my Ex's was yclept "Nick Schießen", but anyway...

Here in Hoosieropolis, there was a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the parking lot of Don's Guns, leading purveyor of fine firearms at MSRP+ to the segments of society that even the most rabid proponent of the RKBA can agree probably shouldn't have guns. Or knives. Or sticks. Or kids. Or oxygen.

Roomie points out that the "No Loaded Guns" sign on the door may have been a contributing factor, by mandating the finger-banging of loaded firearms in the parking lot in the name of safety.

I can't say I necessarily disagree; any time Ice Dog or Cletus is forced to mess around with loaded heaters, loud noises may result.

Nose News

I got a call from the office of the Mohs surgeon this afternoon.

My consultation is scheduled for January 9th. Plenty of time to work up trepidation over the holidays, were I the trepidation-working-up type. Which I'm not. Really.

Overheard in the Hallway...

Me: "Once upon a time..."

RX: "...when the world was shiny and new, and even the sky gleamed the color of brass..."

Me: "...and was polished every day by angels, that article about Doggerland in National Geographic would have just been about Doggerland, rather than..."

RX: "...Climate Change?"

Me: "Yeah, 'Here's what we can learn from our peaceful ancestors about dealing with climate change.'"

RX: "They dealt with it by moving to where the climate was better!"

Me: "If it hadn't been for those bastard Cro-Magnons driving around in their Cadillac Escalades, there wouldn't have been any climate change!"

RX: "Don't be silly; the Escalade is a very recent model."

Me: "Okay, Chevy Suburbans, then."

"Hold my beer, y'all..."

So, an off-duty IMPD officer working security at a bar... stop snickering! ...noticed a couple of dudes in a black SUV doing donuts and burnouts in the parking lot and otherwise operating their vehicle in a manner that might lead one to believe they were intoxicated.

Operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated without a badge is a crime in Indianapolis, and so the police officer went and got in his squad car to go inform them of this fact.

Madcap hijinks ensued, culminating in a high-speed chase around the parking lot that wound up with the SUV on its side, bent like a banana, and the rescue crews having to open its roof like a sardine can to extricate the driver and passenger and rush them to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

I know this isn't usual VFTP material, but something about a high-speed chase ending in a possibly fatal wreck despite never leaving the parking lot just kinda caught my eye.

Zero to jackboots in less than ten seconds.

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

Seems that there are economic problems in a bunch of European countries, and the leader of a powerful minority party in one of them is asking for a list of prominent Jewish citizens who might be security risks...

It's been a while since they killed each other in boxcar lots on the other side of the pond, but only a fool believes that it can never happen again.

The Grapes of Pique.

The airwaves are ablaze in Indiana this morning. In the kind of story that gives local TeeWee reporters a veritable journalistic chubby, a family of migratory Pennsylvanians was pulled over on their way to California.

Acting on a phone tip from an unnamed family member, Hoosier state police opened the back of the rental moving truck and found five of the couple's seven kids, four of them minors, huddled in their coats and sleeping bags among the stacks of boxes. Oh, and eighteen cats, too.

Two kids were riding up front with Ma & Pa Joad; talk about being mommy and daddy's favorites...

Of course the parents are now facing four counts of neglect of a dependent, a Class D Felony, which strikes me as a little harsh. I'd say that perhaps we could somehow make sure they didn't reproduce, but the damage is well and truly done on that front. However, is this really something for which we need to strip people of all their rights?  I mean, if you can't pack your own kids across country like cargo in the back of a truck in the middle of a Depression winter, whose kids can you do it to?

I shouldn't have been surprised, really...

Out running errands yesterday.

I picked up all the non-food stuff at Target, but I'll confess to having become a total foodie snob hipster douchebag when it comes to bacon, and so I went across the way to Whole Foods where I could get my swine wrapped in paper rather than vacuum-sealed in plastic.

Into the cart went bacon, a dozen eggs laid by chickens that had been allowed to run around and eat bugs, little wedges of Gouda and Manchego by way of treats, and a copy of National Geographic because apparently being in Whole Foods does that sort of thing to one. Before I got the urge to save any rain forests or mail a check to Al Gore, I pushed my five (Count 'em!) items to the 10-Items-Or-Less lane and prepared to leave.

My departure was delayed, however, because the full-sleeve-tatooed checkout hipster had to bag the entire shopping cart of the woman ahead of me in line, who either could not read or could not count, or perhaps both.

As she pushed her cart towards the exit, I drew a laugh from the cashier by muttering under my breath "It's okay, honey, that sign didn't mean you," while staring daggers at her back.

I completed my transaction ("Oh, wow, this issue is so cool," said the cashier, referring to the Nat Geo, "The article on redwoods..."
"No spoilers!" I yelped, warding him off with upraised hands) and wandered out to the car with my bag of yummy in my hand and a song in my heart.

Putting the Zed Drei in reverse, I started to back gingerly out of the parking space, in the manner typical of a little roadster with iffy rear visibility surrounded by SUVs and minivans, only to see the Mercedes ML in the spot directly behind me suddenly start up, shift into reverse, and head for my rear fender.

I tapped my horn to make them aware of my presence, and the Upscale Explorer shuddered to a startled halt. Since I was halfway out of my spot, I resumed backing, only to see the lights on the Benz come on again and it resume its implacable course, now towards my driver's side door. I tapped the horn again, yelling "I know those things come with rear-view mirrors!" Apparently Captain Solipsism didn't need mirrors, though; all you do is throw your vehicle into reverse, hit the gas, and trust the world will get out of your way...

At the exit to the parking lot, the ML320 pulled up next to me, and guess who was in the driver's seat, giving me a good finger-wagging with one hand while clutching her iPhone with the other? That's right, Little Miss Entitled Innumeracy from the 10-Items-Or-Less lane.

It must be nice to be the star of the movie; I can tell you it's no fun being one of the extras sent over from central casting to play "Other Shopper", though.

Do I tell you what to put in your tea, Mr. BBC man?

Sub-headline from a column at the Beeb.com:

Barack Obama should rethink America’s goals in space and shoot for something a little more inspirational than a lump of rock, argues our space columnist. 

Let me translate that for you:

Barack Obama should rethink America’s goals in space and shoot for something a little more inspirational than a lump of rock, argues some guy without a spanner's worth of skin in the game.

Hell, you can tell NASA to go do whatever, can't you? I mean, it's not like they're jacking up your bank account to pay for it, after all. You're pretty good at spending my money there, old chap.

Of all the things going in space exploration, asteroids are one of the few that have immediate and obvious payoffs more useful than leaving abandoned cars and golf balls:  It'd be nice to learn how to nudge the things away from potential cosmic fender-benders, and also they might be made of cool materials we need more of down here on Earth. If people are willing to risk electrocution for a few yards of copper wire, imagine what they'd do for a giant flying rock of the stuff.

Speaking of neat commercials...

I hope this one won an array of awards:

Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi is surfing her favorite eccentric old car dealer's website*, upon whose digital glass she is often found leaving binary noseprints...

 RX: "Ooh! That's pretty!"

Me: "Huh? Oh, a Triumph Spitfire. Cute! It looks clean..."

RX: "$7,000..."

Me: "You oughtta see what kinda core charge they'll give you for your MGB."

(On the right side of the Roseholme Cottage garage, dwarfed by the towering bulk of the Nazi rollerskate parked next to it and the pennyfarthing bike leaning against its rear bumper, is a blanket-swathed MGB, once upon a time Bobbi's daily driver and now one of those "someday" projects that fill garages across America...)

*Well, the cars are eccentric and old. The dealer might just be some normal middle-aged dude, for all I know...

Long dark night of dextromethorphan dreams...

They all took place in this quaint little downtown, about the size and character of the one in Athens, GA or Lafayette, IN.

There was a murder mystery. I had a cool apartment in a neat old building with a used bookstore off the marble lobby. I had a nice balcony with lush potted plants, which should have been one clue that it was a dream.

The imaginary town must have been somewhere in northern Indiana, because it was flat, and the people on the city bus in the dream looked appalled as Gunsmith Bob loudly explained that the only reason Notre Dame was undefeated was that they played half their games against the Little Sisters of the Poor and assorted other Pop Warner squads, instead of in the SEC, where the real football teams are.

Spam poetry corner...

I call this one "The Agony Of Crass Commerce". Note how the occasional spasms of Tourette's shilling intrude on the tortured musings of the HAL 9000:

In it something is.
Now all is clear,
thanks for an explanation.
cheap generic viagra online

Do you passion to wager
or neutral receive
with tongue in cheek
with some prime in casinos

then I conclude you are a "pro".
But in reparition some of us
who do not entertain any
gambling episode, it remarkably

is an unwieldy step.
The hesitation of risking
our pelf can absorb as
so wretched we do not wager a cent!

But do not perturbation,
you can agree to all the
intelligence set to rights
in the console of your living room.

Just log unto an online casino
and offer away the party start!

Fun Show!

It's fun show time!

Not that I should really be buying anything, but in my tribe, a Fun Show makes for a better place to do your Christmas shopping than Macy's.

Let's sing the Fun Show Song!

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

Maybe I can stumble across a deal on some inexpensive grotty old Smith top-break in a variant I don't have. That'd be cool.

*taptap* Is this thing on?

I'm sorry for the radio silence this morning. I've got writing I simply have to get done. I'm kinda hoping that if I get on a roll, some of it might spill over to my other blog, though.

As an aside, thank you, Search Engine Optimization %^#@*ers, you $#%^ing #@*+ers, for breaking the internet. I try and do a little bit of research, searching for "the history of handgun accessory rails", and I get page after page of sites trying to sell me cheap-ass Chinese crap to attach to airsoft guns and not a thing about, you know, the history of handgun accessory rails.

#%$* you very much, SEO wizards. I hope you all die in crotch fires.
.

Because I can...

One of my favorite commercials of all time...



It's extremely fractal. The more you watch it, the deeper you see the pattern goes.

I remember that there were some TeeWee shows broadcast on either side of it. I guess they were interesting, too.

Randomosity...

• I'm finally on the downslope of this flu. Checking back over the blog, I see it was a little over a year since my last bout. I tried to stay home as much as possible, because at its height, I'm pretty sure my viral load could have been measured with a bathroom scale. It would have been nice if Bobbi's Typhoid Mary co-worker would have been as thoughtful, but this is probably karmic payback for all those times I tried to be a trooper and went to work sick as a dog.


• The Genie Won't Go Back In The Bottle, Either: The future is going to be a wonderfully convenient place that will make anybody who grew up back in the days of "privacy" break out in hives. This is the absolutely inevitable sorcerer's apprentice result of the silicon revolution: Once you have computers powerful enough to recognize faces and correlate databases, people are going to use them to recognize faces and correlate databases. You might as well complain about the splitting of the atom or the Industrial Revolution or the invention of gunpowder. Barring complete civilizational collapse, what is done will not be undone.


• It makes me happy to know that there is a thing in the world called a "yeti crab".


• It feels weirdly like Monday, doesn't it?

What is best?

To crush your enemies, see them...

Wait, that wasn't the question.

The question actually asked at this one forum was "What is the best self-defense gizmo for my Significant Other to carry if they won't carry a gun?*" The general consensus was some sort of good-quality OC spray. While not perfect or foolproof, a quality spray hits the sweet spot between ease-of-use, stand-off distance, and least amount of commitment required to carry.

See, someone who, for psychological, dress-code, or workplace policy reasons won't strap on a Glock is just as unlikely to get a Spyderco P'Kal, the associated dull training blade, and get trained in its use, or to shell out for a Taser, and keep it holstered where it may actually be useful and, besides, for the purposes of just breaking contact and getting away from the bad guy without getting hurt yourself, OC is probably superior to either of those choices.

Inevitably in any of these threads, the Society for Creative Anachronism shows up, claiming that they, their spouse, their sprogs, and the dog all pack a foot or so of cold steel everywhere they go. Our correspondent went on to state:

I will say that the mere presence of that big ass knife on the hip is a deterrent in and of itself and anyone that sees it understands what it can do. Predators dont pick hard targets, especially if they know it could cost them everything.**

Leaving aside the argument of who criminals pick to jack up, I have to say that in a lot of environments, and certainly where I live, a "big ass knife on the hip" is simply a no-go.

Were I to open-carry my heater, as long as I was well-groomed and wearing neutral clothing, most folks wouldn't bat an eye. A gun on the hip in that situation registers to most people as "cop". (And even then, the occasional remark or question is enough to get me to usually wear a gun burkha, because I ain't got time for that.) A big knife on the hip, on the other hand, is going to either read to passersby as "Jason from Camp Crystal Lake" or "Weirdo Who's Escaped From The Renaissance Faire And Could Go Aurora Batman Premiere At Any Moment".

Further, I question the willingness of someone who is not willing to pack a J-frame to strap on their Crocodile Dundee every morning, even if you get them a sheath that matches their Dooney & Bourkes and is dress-code compliant at the bank.

*"Oh, Tamara," you say, "I love how you made that sentence all PC and gender-neutral." Hey, I've had boyfriends who I couldn't convince to CCW. Oh, sure, they'd throw a pistol under the truck seat if they had to use the ATM at night, but carry a gun? Everywhere?

** I'll at least give him points for not writing that "...a blade doesn't jam or run out of ammunition!" Every time I read that on the internet, I want to hit the writer with a sock full of nickels until it jams or runs out of ammunition.

Thankful...

I'm thankful for all of y'all.

I'm thankful for a roof over my head.

I'm thankful for my health, even if it seems to have gone on vacation for the week, the slacker.

Hopefully I will be coherent enough to string more than two sentences together again shortly. Tomorrow would be splendid.

Bad, bad idea...

To the news that internet-famous Canton, OH police officer Daniel Harless might possibly, in the face of all common sense, get his job back:

 The city attorney is probably drinking heavily right now.

That bullet-headed cretin is a seven-figure settlement looking for a place to happen.

Of course, I'm no legal beagle, but this looks like a fork against the city by Harless and his attorney to get his disability retirement pension approved. In the long run, it could be cheaper for the city to deny the medical clearance and pension him off than deal whatever fallout this loose cannon caused next.

Like tears in rain...

The past eventually all runs together into a blur.

Bobbi, in the other room with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade running on the boob tube, hollered "This dance number has the men in zoot suits and the women in flapper outfits! That's just wrong!"

And it is, you know. It's as wrong as having the men in pointy-collared polyester double-knit with snaggletooth necklaces and the women in tie-dye tees, bell bottomed denim, and beaded headbands.

On a somewhat related note, having been stuck in bed watching the incredibly farby Daniel Boone on MeTV, I was reminded that painstaking historical accuracy in the costume-'n'-prop department is a fairly recent development in Hollywood that has largely been made possible by the evolution of the historical reenacting hobby.

Overheard in the Office...

RX: "It had Gary Coleman, back when he was cute. Before he became a dead guy."

Me: "A crazy dead guy."

RX: "How can you be crazy when you're dead?"

Me: "Well, he was crazy first, so a 'dead crazy guy', then."

Practice good syntax, kids! It can keep the crazy zombies away!

The Scarlet "Like" Button

Here's an unexpected twist to the socially-networked Nu-Perfect America: Facebook has made modern and digital the quaint Puritan practice of shunning and turned the whole country into colonial Boston.

VFTP readers, meet our latest 21st Century Hester Prynne. Her "A" stands for "Asshat", apparently.

"Oh, but she has a right to post photos that she knows others will find shameful and boorish* on her Facebook page!" Indeed she does. And people have a right to react however they feel like reacting, so long as they keep their hands to themselves.

I'm torn ten ways from Sunday about the whole thing, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't find it absolutely fascinating.


*Oddly, it seems that from inside her bubble, she had no clue that others would take offense at the picture. How insulated and provincial the East Coast cosmopolite so often is!

EDITED TO ADD: She was just trying to show what a rebel she was by mocking a sign that said "Silence and Respect"... without stopping to consider the larger context of where that sign was. It's the difference between lighting up next to a "NO SMOKING" sign, and lighting up next to a "NO SMOKING" sign in a pediatric lung cancer ward. One's rebellious, the other's reprehensible.
. 

Day Three...

Still not dead, but beginning to consider the upsides of that condition.

Weird and disjointed dreams. I had dysentery in my dream. Now that's one that'll have you waking up in a cold sweat, suddenly relieved to find that oh, Auntie Em! It was only a dream!

I'm supposed to go see the almost-a-dentist today. When their robot called on Monday to confirm the appointment, I pressed "1" in what turned out to be a fit of excessive optimism. I ache all over, like an army of midgets have been working me over with tee-ball bats. Every muscle and joint is sore, and there's a constant bone-deep chill every time I venture out from under the electric blanket.

I'm sure this time tomorrow I'll be feeling better, but for right now, I'm miserable.

Whine, whine, whine, poor pitiful me...

Back to the blog.

Overheard in the Office...

I am dying at my keyboard. Bobbi is down the hall in her room, watching the news...

RX: "Superintendent Wiener?"

Me: "What?"

RX: "San Francisco is passing an anti-public-nudity ban..."

Me: "San Francisco has a 'Superintendent Wiener'?"

RX: "He's the guy who wrote the bill."

Me: "Wait, of course they do..."

Monday morning stream of consciousness...

Oh, lordy, I ache all over. And I'm starting to get a sore throat. And I have a chill. I'm tempted to write this day off as a bad idea and crawl back under the covers.

Lois McMaster Bujold has a new Miles Vorkosigan novel out, and in preparation I'm reading back through the series as a very enjoyable refresher. Just finished Young Miles last night, and now I'm off on Miles, Mystery & Mayhem, perhaps under an electric blanket.

When it was mentioned that the NTSB was at the explosion site in south Indy, airplane crash rumors briefly circulated. Nope, turns out the NTSB's investigative bailiwick includes pipeline accidents, which I guess makes a certain sort of sense if you look at it all squinty-eyed, since pipelines are transporting things. I learned that little factoid from reading about the San Bruno pipeline explosion in the book Crazifornia, thanks to a reader.

The news is on in the other room. The newsreader is telling me about violence in the Middle East. I don't know why he is doing this, because violence in the Middle East is practically the opposite of news.

"Oh! Palestinians are rocketing Israeli territory!" I was unaware they'd ever stopped. Any insurance company that underwrites anything within rocket range of the Gaza Strip deserves whatever they get, they're a worse insurance risk than Atlantic beachfront homes. "But, look! The Israelis are massing tanks on the border!" Wow, it's been almost three whole years since they last did that...

There's no such thing as a surefire career choice...

...not anymore, not in this economy.

via Twitter.

Tab Clearing...

• How to work a Mosin stripper clip. With pictures!


• Handy guide to food trucks around the nation: Roaming Hunger.


• Did you know that the Broad Ripple Brewpub posts its weekly specials online? I already know what I'm going to eat at this afternoon's blogmeet...

Seriously? Seriously?

Re: The Sonny Puzikas incident in Texas... (That's the one where the tactical instructor and alleged Spetznaz vet rolled into a dark shoothouse, guns hot and no flashlight, and treated one of his assistant instructors like he was made out of brown cardboard. The guy is expected to live but has several extra holes for the nonce.)

In comments at Caleb's blog some people, whom I have to assume are some variety of Puzikas nuthuggers and therefore can't believe anything bad of the guy, are trying to hang the blame on someone other than the dude who pulled the trigger; in this case, on some fictional "RSO". Says one commenter who signs himself 'Sid':

Some of the comments upstream get my blood boiling. The shooter cannot know what he does not know. He was a shooter, not the RSO. He obviously did not know that 2 individuals had entered a hot range. The individuals walked into a hot range without clearing with RSO.
...
Prayers go out to the injured person. Yes. But stop with the 4 Rules sermon.

"Four Rules Sermon"?

Brethren and Sistern, there is an obvious lack of sufficient sermonizing here, so let me turn to the Book of Armaments, Chapter Four, Verse One: "Be Sure Of Your Target And What Is Beyond It." There is no codicil that says "Unless you're in a shoot house," or "Unless you're going really fast."

It’s not okay to shoot your fellow range patrons EVEN… and I’d like to make this perfectly clear… EVEN IF THE RSO SAYS IT’S COOL.
.

Overheard in the Kitchen...

Setting & Dramatis Personae: Bobbi is in front of the microwave preparing tea. I stumble into the kitchen, groaning and looking somewhat the worse for wear for trying to fight off some bug or another, searching for the morning's first cuppa joe.

Me: "Ohhh... I'm dying..."

RX: "Yes?"

Me: "I'm dying the death..."

RX: "'Murdered to death?'"

Me: "The death of a thousand dances!"

RX: "You know, in French you can actually say that."

Mini Gear Review #2

Almost twenty years ago, my "nightstand gun" was a Smith & Wesson 4006. It had a Laserlyte red laser almost the size of a modern pocket flashlight clamped to the trigger guard and operated by a pressure pad velcro'ed to the pistol's sporty Hogue grips. Next to the gun was a four D-cell Maglight so I could see what I was shooting at.

Fast forward to nowadays, and all that stuff fits easily into an inside-the-waistband holster:

M&P 9 w/Crimson Trace Lasergrip and Lightguard and Dark Star Gear holster.

 Some people have raised objections about the Lightguard, citing its lower power relative to full-size weapon lights that run on two CR123 cells, or the shorter run time afforded by its single CR2 battery. This, I think, misses the point of thing, which is to make a light that is bright enough to use and yet still small enough to carry on a CCW gun, and Crimson Trace succeeded at that goal just fine, as you can see.

The light was bright enough that I had no difficulty using it to engage targets out to 30 yards or so at the Midnight Three Gun match earlier this year, and that's plenty bright. No, it's probably not bright enough to get inside the enemy's OODA loop and dominate his battlespace with a wall of light as a weapon  and cause him to have a dynamic critical incident in his pants, or whatever the latest tacticool buzzspeak is. That's okay, I'm not on a SWAT team, and this serves my needs just fine.

IWB and OWB holsters from Dark Star Gear.

The holsters from Dark Star Gear were custom made as the result of me winning a contest on Pistol-Forum.com, and I couldn't be more pleased. The IWB rig is now my everyday carry holster and has proven to be all-day comfortable, even holding what used to be a whole nightstand's worth of stuff.

Uh, bonjour.

They can't put anything on the internet if it isn't true, right? Not even gun safety tips?

Like this one at Cheaper Than Dirt's blog, the "Babineaux Method" for reholstering Glocks:

To ensure safe holstering, today’s professionals are beginning to utilize a method that has become known as the Babineaux Method.

As they say on Wikipedia: ^{[citation needed]}

While the idea seems sound at first, keeping the trigger from moving rearward, the method is seriously flawed because it involves sticking your finger inside the trigger guard while holstering. Bad Idea.

If you are at all hurried, or shaky, or not paying attention, your finger is now only a half inch away from becoming exactly the trigger-jostling foreign object you're trying to guard against.

The column gets double extra bonus fail points for showcasing a photo of a guy stuffing a Glock into a floppy $10 Uncle Mike's neoprene clip-on holster pointed right at his junk in the suddenly trendy appendix-carry position. You could possibly come up with a better setup for disaster, but it'd take some work.

Neuromancer...

The ghost in the spam machine wrote me some poetry.

I removed the links and broke it into lines and verses, but the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization is from the original spam:

Your highness, soundless and stirless appear,
also so a first game,
scared all conditioned reflex regards,
bitter became far a.

The tabloids a short body,
behind the strong rely on
an empty, repair and knew
mini ghd was bad.

Upper body sank,
far also hung on the bench,
with one's face towards the sky
in the upper body,

into a standard XXOO gestures,
just behind the attack
of his highness in face
to face relatively!

Nothing.

Nothing.

Saying nothing, but
hit the wall with your back,
find a chair to sit on a wall with!

if far this part
one also thought
that he was out of breath,

just know that it is
the stomach trouble,
mood rare raised up,
close to if far in front of,

"my father was very hungry?"
abandoned is the most beautiful horse
people think, the present is the most beautiful!
But he did

Wait, wait, wait...

A computer used by Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with CIA Director David Petraeus led to his resignation, contained substantial classified information that should have been stored under more secure conditions, law enforcement and national security officials said on Wednesday.

This guy was our Chief Spy?

Oh, my gawd how the mighty have fallen.

I can just see him ordering a pizza for him and his girlfriend and, having no folding money for a tip, telling the delivery driver "Uh, hey, I don't have any extra cash on me, so here's your tip: Go short on KBR. And cancel your vacation to Cairo." This guy isn't fit to carry Allen Dulles' secret decoder ring. Yuri Andropov is laughing his ass off from a slowly-turning spit in hell.

Slow morning...

Off to a late start. Nobody I follow on Twitter is awake yet, either. I'm talking to myself...

Caffeine-free Tam is not a happy Tam. To make Tam a happy Tam, please insert caffeine.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 15, 2012

Forget the Tesla, I want a car that runs on hippie tears. When the low fuel light comes on, you have to pull over and punch one.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 15, 2012

Hippie tears as a fuel should make all the enviro types happy, too, because talk about your infinitely renewable resources...

C-Wooly on "Assault Weapons"...

I had no idea...

Armageddon Man.

So, with the re-election of the president, internet gun forums exploded into... well, pretty much a repeat of late November, 2008.

There's going to be an executive order for confiscating all firearms tomorrow and Barry, Harry, and Dianne are all jocked-up and stacked outside your door even as we type this and then things get into all kinds of weird speculation and the black helicopters are flying and pretty soon people are just posting scripture references, like the guy whose post consisted of nothing but

Revelation 13:5

...to which I replied

John 11:35

I'm still pretty proud of that one...
.

The world turned upside-down...

...and these men were there to see it:

In 1864 Rev. Elias Hillard, a Congregational Minister and erstwhile historian, embarked on a “do-or-die” mission.  It was the last chance history would have to record by word or photos the last surviving soldiers of the American Revolutionary War. 

Incredible though it may seem, six veterans who served in the Revolution were alive eighty-three years after British General Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown ending the War of Independence.  Even more incredible is that, because of Rev. Hillard's efforts, photos of the six veterans are available in the historical record, the only photos of any of the War's soldiers.

I remember these photos, but I can't put my thumb on where I saw them. I think it was from the July 1976 issue of National Geographic, back when Nat Geo was still cool. The July 2076 issue will probably show the same six men under the heading "BEHOLD THE GENOCIDAL RAPERS OF GAIA!"

That makes sense...

Motor Trend's "Car of the Year" award just went to the Tesla Motors Model S.

This puts it in the elite company of previous winners, such as the '71 Chevy Vega, the '74 Ford Pinto GT Mustang II, the rolling Sominex substitute '76 Dodge Aspen, the 1980 Chevy Slowtation, the '83 AMC/Renault Alliance (there's business sense for you: when your American car company is circling the drain, an injection of French automotive technology is as useful as a lead life preserver), the dull-as-dishwater '95 Chrysler Cirrus, and that star of rental fleets at airport parking lots around the nation, the monumentally forgettable 1997 Chevy Malibu.

Aunt Stabby's Relationship Tips:

If I make you a cup of coffee and it tastes like crap, do not fling the Jamaican Blue Mountain into the herbaceous border while making a face like a little kid eating broccoli and whine "This coffee is criminal!" because coffee, no matter how poorly it tastes, is not criminal, but me beating you to your knees with the coffee pot like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas most certainly is, and we don't neither of us want that.

(Incidentally, watching old commercials throws doubts on the premise behind Idiocracy and makes me want to give someone at Arnold Worldwide or Crispin Porter + Bogusky a great big hug.)

This has NEVER happened before...

Dude plays video game, gets ripped.

Although I guess that the kind of obsessive dedication it takes to hunch over a glowing screen at all hours of the day and night is, at its root, the same kind of obsessive dedication it takes to make like a hamster on a treadmill for a good sized chunk of your time, while dining on heaping portions of Nature's Organic Soy-Fortified Self-Flagellation Crunch washed down with Hair-Shirt Smoothies.

(Although I'll point out that if the price of that level of fitness is being nutty enough to refer to yourself in the third person, I think I'll pass.)

If at first you don't secede, try, try again.

So the news has noticed all the petitions on WhiteHouse.gov, wherein people are threatening to hold their breath until they turn blue (or red, as it were.)

Texas's petition to secede was up over 60,000 signatures last I checked, and Indiana's had passed 11,000; hardly a resounding plebiscite but enough to get HuffPo's EZ-Twist knickers in another one.

Secession of course, is treason. Unless you win, in which case it's not. As John Harington famously phrased it, "Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, thou gets thy face on the one dollar bill."
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ka-BLAM!

No, Roseholme Cottage is not anywhere near the Richmond Hills subdivision. As a matter of fact, it is about fifteen miles away as the crow flies, assuming a reasonably sober crow.

Which makes the fact that I was standing on the porch late Saturday night and heard what sounded like a single rumble of thunder from the cloudless southern sky all the more impressive.

The Reynolds Wrap yarmulke crowd is already yelling "drone strike!" which I find surprising because I was unaware that they had MQ-1s carrying JDAMs now*. Don't get me wrong, a Hellfire will ruin your day, but it doesn't knock houses off their foundation three doors down, either.

While no official announcement has been made, I'm guessing a fuel-air, or "thermobaric", munition, and probably a big one; maybe 17,000-20,000 cubic feet of spark-detonated explosive gas/air mixture...

In other words, a gas leak in the unoccupied house. Given a modern, energy-efficient, darn-near-airtight house and a good leak at the water heater, it could get downright stoichiometric in there, given enough time to for the leak to hiss away before she blows.

(I'm surprised that gas explosions and fires haven't become even more common in post-foreclosure America, where metals-scavenging from unoccupied houses is a growth industry pursued by the none-too-bright with a shaky grasp of abstract concepts like workplace safety.)

*As it turns out, MQ-9s can indeed lug a couple 500-pounders into the air. Well paint me blue and call me Smurfette... Although I'm still missing a plausible reason for one to be dropped on an empty house in suburban Indianapolis. No doubt the internets will be glad to fill that little gap in for me.

Get them brand-loyal when they're still young...

...and you'll have customers for life.

For instance, check out these "My First SERPA" kits, as seen in the local World of Wally:

A cynic will note that the only difference between the police SWAT dress-up kit and the military Special Forces dress-up kit is that the former is black and the latter is... well, I think they were going for "flat dark earth".

Thank you, veterans...

I normally reserved this day at VFTP to commemorate the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when the guns fell silent, but veterans of the Great War are sadly thin on the ground these days.

Every day is Veterans' Day, or it should be, but today is the day set aside to say "Thank You" to those who gave of their time and their selves to defend this nation. If it takes a special day on the calendar to get someone to thank a vet, today is the day.

But it shouldn't.
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At a loss for words.

I'm not sure which one of you started this, I think it was Matt, but when I mentioned I had a boo-boo on the side of my nose, half the internet decided to play "SAVE FERRIS" and somewhere along the line I wind up standing there in Gander Mountain after lunch yesterday, all teary-eyed, talking to OldNFO on Brigid's cellie. (Brigid said it was okay to tear up; if anyone noticed, she'd tell them she'd just sprayed me with one of the pink pepper spray canisters we'd just been looking at.)

I was going to post links to everybody who'd decided to go play freelance fundraiser, but Sitemeter's down again, and it would just wind up looking like my sidebar and then some. I think JayG and Peter have pretty comprehensive link farms; they're both such little social butterflies.

My reputation as a faithful email corresp...

I'm sorry, I can't even type that with a straight face.

Anyway, most of y'all know how horribly bad I am with email, and I'm afraid to peek into my inbox right now, since my phone has been emitting a fairly steady "*blingle!* ... *blingle!* ... *blingle!*" in the next room for most of the past 36 hours or so, so I suppose I'd better look in there to make sure nothing's burning down.

At the risk of sounding corny, I love y'all so much, and I would jump in the Zed Drei right now to drive around giving each and every one of you a big hug if I could. (And if being around people didn't actually make me feel all itchy and start acting like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.)

Parliament of fools...

Which is easier to spook into a stampede?

1. Cattle
2. Bison
3. Antelope
4. State Legislators

If you picked Number Four, you're absolutely right!

That Tannerite scare has got to be the most contrived, nervous-nellie, hand-wringing, manufactured-from-whole-cloth non-issue since greasers and hoodlums were taking over the blackboard jungle with their switchblades and song & dance numbers, as chronicled in that shocking documentary, Westside Story, necessitating the ban of automatic knives.

Not real chatty. Or not as chatty as usual, at least.

For those of you not on Facebook, you lucky souls, you, the doc called yesterday morning before lunch and told me that the thingy on my nose is indeed basal cell carcinoma which, if you have to get cancer, is probably the way to get it. Hell, it's barely even cancer; it's more like cancer's farm team.

(Although I could have done without it being on the nose. I am not going to wind up disfigured from this. The Henry Waxman look just isn't for me, and neither is Tycho Brahe's.)

So that's why there wasn't exactly much posting or commenting here from me yesterday afternoon. I took Bobbi to work and then me to the freshly-reopened Aristocrat pub for a bowl of French-onion-soup-flavored comfort food. and then practiced my moping for most of the afternoon.

French onion soup from the Artistocrat pub. Good for what ails ya. (Unless what ails ya is atherosclerosis, in which case it's probably not.)

Anyhow, a bunch of people have been very kind and generous and caused me to experience all kinds of emotions I don't process real well. I'm really good at things like "pique" or "schadenfreude" from diligent skills drills and years of practice, but I don't have a lot of experience with "gratitude" or "whatever this weird feeling is that makes my vision get all blurry and my nose runny", so bear with me.
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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "Google has a weird logo today."

Me: "Yeah, Bram Stoker.... It's his hundred'n'sixty-fifth birthday."

RX: "I didn't know that... I didn't get him anything."

Do you know, I don't think I have ever actually read Dracula? It's one of those books, like Frankenstein or Moby Dick, that so pervades the culture with references and allusions, film and cartoon adaptations, children's condensed versions, et cetera that you can know the whole story and then realize you've never actually sat down and read the source material cover-to-cover.

I should probably read it in the original and then watch Gary Oldman in that bit of Francis Ford Coppola eye-candy, Bram Stoker's Dracula, again.

Collector Grade Paper from the S&W Custom Shop

So while I was driving down to pick Bobbi up from work last night, I was monitoring enemy radio frequencies for actionable intel listening to NPR, and the lead-in for their business program was pretty funny. The host, almost petulantly, said (and I'm paraphrasing, here) "All along, Wall Street and investors have said they were leery of uncertainty and that's why they were holding back, and so now that the election's over and there's some certainty, how did they react?"

I snarled at the radio "That's because there is some certainty now, you drooling moron! The certainty that the economy's Borked* for at least another two years!"

There was a bright spot in the otherwise dismal market, though: Every hundred bucks you had in gun manufacturer stocks on Tuesday is a hundred and ten bucks today.

Gosh. Who saw that coming?


*And that's a considered use of the verb "to Bork", for its multiple layers of meaning here.

Uh, yes, Mr. Luthor, I'm applying for the position of "supervillain"?

Koch Industries billionaire David H. Koch is the wealthiest man in New York City, with a net worth of $31 billion. His fortune is built on polluting the climate system...

 Well, he probably started small, though. Maybe by tapping ashes into a fish tank, or throwing Coke cans out of car windows. Now, nobody short of Barack and the Super Friends can stop his villainous plans!

What I always wondered about these bad guys, ever since the days of watching Super Friends  sprawled on the living room floor of a Saturday morning, was "Why is the supervillain trying to blow up the planet? What do the bad guys stand to gain from that? Who pays the Legion of Doom, anyway?"

1. Split Moon in half with giant sonic earthquake laser, causing both halves to slam into the Earth.


2.  ???


3. Profit!

(I was pretty hazy on the concept of "extortion" at age six, which clearly marked me as unsuitable for a future career in politics.)

Let the panic-buying begin!

I was reading somewhere on the internet yesterday evening that the Bilderbergers or The Gnomes of Zurich or the Trilateral Commission or somebody was all upset with Obama since he had not worked their will in America, and so they had picked him to take a fall and selected Romney as his replacement.

I wish I could remember where I read that, because I'd like to go back and see how they explain last night's results. Maybe the Electo-Selecto-Ray at the Bilberberger's secret volcano lair was on the fritz? Maybe the Bilderbergers are powerless in the face of ACORN? Anyway...

Quick! Panic buy ammo!

And then sell it to me cheap next April!
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Seven- Six- Five-Year Itch...

L to R: Colt's, Savage, H&R, S&W, and Remington.

I think it started back in early '07, when I got a really nice early Colt's Pocket Hammerless .32 that I was reluctant to shoot. So I got another, slightly earlier, slightly more worn one which I could take to the range and pound out its little guts, guilt-free.

This kinda got me interested in early American self-loading pistols, which were an anomaly in the Land of the Revolver.

After a bunch of fits and starts, I managed to assemble a complete set of nice examples from the major domestic manufacturers, which you can see pictured above. These will be the inspiration for a bunch of new content at my currently-moribund Arms Room blog. Stay tuned!

Minor annoyances...

While the state of Indiana doesn't particularly care if you have a bazooka slung over your back while you vote, my polling place is in a school, which is one of the few hard-and-fast No-Totin' zones in the Hoosier state.

It's complications like this I don't need, and that have kept me from trading the Glock 19 for a second M&P 9. On a day like this, the easy-off/easy-on RCS Vanguard 2 has the Glock off the bench and pinch-hitting for the Smith.

How apropos...

A spambot blundered by and deposited this nugget into the filter...

It's awesome to pay a visit this web page and reading the views of all mates about this post, while I am also eager of getting familiarity.

In light of the mangled syntax, it is perhaps appropriate that the title of the post under which it was found was "LOLWUT?"

Sigh.

When Skynet wakes up, the machines are going to come at us Gangnam Style.

Thank Shiva it's almost over...

• Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Steven H. David has got to go! All God's chilluns need to vote 'No'!


• On the other hand, I will be voting to retain a judge for the first time. Whatever heinous decisions Robert Rucker had a hand in, and I'm sure they were legion, he wrote the dissent in Barnes, recognizing that laying hands on somebody who has no business being in your house is no crime, no matter how many badges they have. As far as rights go, getting people off your lawn is down there near the bedrock.


• The whole Donnelly/Mourdock donnybrook has had me taking a closer look at what is meant by "Blue Dog Democrat". Joe Donnelly is reliably pro-RKBA; he came by his positive report card from the NRA fair and square. He's reliably socially conservative, being totally down with conservative Republicans on social issues like the gays and the 'bortion. And yet he's a total union-supporting, anti-business redistributionist on economic issues. In other words, this guy is a populist with whom I agree on practically nothing except guns and apple pie, and I want both of those to be tax-free, so we maybe don't agree on them, either.


• As much as it's like chewing on a cat turd to say this, that wide-bottomed, empty-headed poster child for nepotism and machine politics, André Carson, is running the only campaign I've seen whose ads do not drive me into wanting to Elvis the television. He mouths a bunch of happy platitutes and talks about all the manna he wants to give his constituents, and never a whisper, negative or otherwise, is even made of his opponent. I guess when the election is expected to be as close as an Evander Holyfield-Billy Barty bare knuckles bout, there's no need to go negative. 

Playing Russian Roulette With a Colt Cloverleaf...

From facebook.com/FilmingCops

I would like to stress, as someone who rode a motorcycle a hundred miles a day commuting year 'round in Atlanta traffic through rain, fog, and sleet, that texting while riding a motorcycle is the absolute dumbest thing I have ever seen. Texting in a car isn't the brightest thing in the world, sure, but very few pavement imperfection are likely to send your Camry cartwheeling down the road in a parts-shedding cloud of disintegrating pain.

Look, sport-o, if it's so important, then pull your squidly ass over to the side of the road and send your text, otherwise, hang up and ride.

(And, seriously, texting? The ABSOLUTE BEST PART of riding a motorcycle is that idiots can't bother you when you're all by your lonesome and sealed up in a helmet. If you're the kind of gregarious monkey who has to constantly engage in mutual flea-picking with the rest of the troop, a bike may not be for you, because it is solitude on two wheels, dude.)

That said, I do not support making texting-while-riding illegal. Go to hell in your own way, but if you hurt somebody else on the way there, I fully support rushing your victim to the hospital and finishing you off in the bar ditch like a mad dog.

Snark that should only be handled by remote control:

So everybody is aware of NYC Mayor and Douchecanoe-in-Chief Michael Bloomberg's reasoning for turning down the idea of calling on the National Guard for assistance in the post-apocalyptic Big Apple, right?

" The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns."

Well there you go, Gothamites; the God-Emperor has spoken. If you run into a guy in your stairwell tonight and he sticks a cheap chromed pistol in your face, don't worry, it's just the cops!

Of course, in NYC, that may not necessarily be as far from the truth as we'd like. As Marko wrote on his Facebook page:

"Mayor Bloomberg has refused to let any out-of-state plumbers enter NYC to help with the Sandy aftermath. He says that NYPD officers should be the only one on the streets with toilet plungers*."

Bazinga!


*For VFTP readers under age thirty: Abner Louima. You know what kills me about the Louima case? Okay, the Eighth Amendment prevented Us the People from using a toilet plunger on NYPD Officer Justin Volpe, and so a lengthy prison sentence had to do, but the officers convicted of the coverup? They should have stripped them of their brass buttons in Times Square and then made a meat windchime out of them. That's the only way you're going to break the culture of coverup.

To repeat my jokes from Facebook...

...and Barry gets the coveted Iranian endorsement.

Sigh.

Remember the days when you could count on the Ayatollahs to back the GOP?

and

Apparently, Hurricane Sandy caused a shortage of domestic air, so we're having to import ours from Canada for the nonce. It's really cold and smells faintly of poutine and Labatt's.

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom...

Bobbi was running a tub, then cut off the water, shut the bathroom door, and went to her bedroom and burrowed under the quilts.

Me: "Uh, why are you... I mean, the tub..."

RX: "I'm letting the hot water heater recharge."

Me: "Why do we need a hot water heater?"

RX: "Because the hot water they deliver isn't hot enough."

Me: "You know what we need? One of those inline, on-demand heaters."

RX: "Oh, those are expensive!"

Me: "How expensive is 'expensive'?"

RX: "Um, probably close to a thousand?"

Me: "Because I'd totally be willing to go in on that."

RX: "Or, you know, we could just get a bigger heater, because that one is awfully tiny."

Me: "But if we got a tankless one, think of the floorspace it would free up in the basement! Think of all the old radios and computers we could put there!"

Alexander Graham Bell Pulaski: First Telephone Pole

One of the posters at a forum I frequent was the recipient of a phone call from a pollster who inquired as to whether he would be voting for Obama or Romney in the forthcoming election. When he replied that he would be voting for neither, she said "So you won't be voting?"

He told her he'd be voting indeed, but for Gary Johnson, and she said "Oh no sir, I am asking about the *Presidential* election on November 6."

Now that is market penetration, baby!

Here at Roseholme Cottage, I've only gotten robocalls and one dispirited, monotonous, reading-from-a-script pollster on whom I hung up since I was headed out the door.

I'm desperately hoping for a live phone bank caller so I can ask "Well, how many drinks is your guy going to buy me before we stop at each polling place? The other guy is offering three per vote..." in a slurred voice. Depending on who was calling, I'd bet my response would be on FreeRepublic or Democratic Underground by sunset.

The Klein bubble...

Rarely have I wobbitta-wobbitta-WHAT?!?-ed as hard as I did this morning, reading a piece where Tom Scocca described the voting patterns of his fellow Slate writers, and tried to preempt accusations of Pauline Kael-ism  with the following assertion:

People will look at this list—Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama—and they will say, Look at the Slate writers, inside their bubble. And they will be wrong. 

There is a real, airtight bubble in this election, but it's not Obama's. As a middle-aged white man, in fact, I'm breaching it. White people—white men in particular—are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense, in defiance of normal Americans.

When did white dudes get defined out of the part of the Venn diagram describing "normal Americans", you Manhattan-dwelling freak?

Hey, Tod Lubitch, I don't know how to break this to you, but statistically speaking, "white men" are closer to the definition of "normal American" than any other group except for "white women"; demographically, this is still largely a cracker country.

I normally avoid the politics of race because they are dull and stupid and not based in anything like reality, whether you're talking about Jeremiah Wright or one of his photographic negatives in Couer d'Alene, but damn, dude, I haven't seen such comical white guilt pinned to a shirtsleeve since Avatar.

I'll take irony for $500, Alex...

While we're on the topic of accuracy in political attack ads, there's one from some Democrat PAC or another running here in Indiana that takes Mourdock's rape comment and then tries to tie him to Mike Pence, currently set to blow out the Democrat contender in the Hoosier gubernatorial contest by a near double-digit margin.

It does this by pointing out that Pence was a co-sponsor of the Republican's "No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act", which the voice-over describes in hushed, indignant tones as "a bill that would have re-defined rape as 'forcible rape'," without mentioning that another co-sponsor of that bill was...

...fellow Congressman Joe Donnelly (D-IN), currently running against Mourdock for RINO Dick's old senate seat. As Slate puts it:

And that vote is probably worth explaining. Like Rep. Bart Stupak, Donnelly initially refused to support the health care bill for fear that it would fund abortions. Stupak and Donnelly switched their votes when the president promised a mostly toothless executive order that reaffirmed the no-money-for-abortion language. Most of the Stupak caucus lost their elections in November. Donnelly survived, then co-sponsored the Republicans’ “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” which (in initial drafts) changed a legal reference from “rape” to “forcible rape.”

So it should be Donnelly, not Mourdock, who’s squirming to explain his abortion stance. For a while he was, giving mushy answers about his stance on the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. Then Mourdock effectively bailed him out, and Donnelly has benefited from third-party attacks on his opponent.

Oddly, the attack ad in question neglects to mention that Rust Belt Catholic Blue Dog Donnelly skipped down the aisle hand-in-hand with demonic conservative zealot Pence on this issue. Huh. Funny, that...

In other news, water found to be wet.

Everybody's familiar with one Mourdock quote, but there's another, older one that's been hammered into everybody's subconscious by means of incessant repetition in commercials. If you're a Hoosier who's been unfortunate to be within audio range of a televisor or radio device in the last couple months, not doubt you've heard the following repeated ad nauseum:

"To me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else...."

This damning soudbite has been excised from the entire quote (for time purposes, I'm sure) which went like this:

"To me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else from the microphone or in front of a camera, to win them over to my point of view. If I am fortunate enough to become a United States senator, we're going to be involved with the national argument…"

Which reads entirely differently, no?

(Ugh, it pains me more every day that Mourdock went full Akins, rendering the above quote irrelevant now that we're all rape, all the time. Look, guys, if you're ever running for office and the word "rape" comes up in an on-the-record setting, just say you are foursquare against it and then shut your cakehole. There is nothing you can say beyond that that isn't going to piss somebody off, no matter how earnest you think you sound. Just don't even step into the minefield.)

"Doing jobs unAmericans are unwilling to do..."

Allegedly, alert utility workers in New Jersey caught undocumented scabs who didn't have union certification trying to do work for less than scale and ran them off, protecting the livelihoods of thousands of Garden Staters shivering in their cold, dark houses...

Or, to put it another way, utility crews from the Heart of Dixie were informed that they weren't allowed to help turn the lights back on in New Jersey unless they were union members. There's no right to work in Jersey, not even to work at being a good Samaritan. Sorry, fellow Americans trapped behind enemy lines, we tried.

If this is true, it's positively infuriating and is the whole Red State/Blue State thing in a nutshell...

Overheard in the Office...

Logging off a session of World of Warcraft...

Me: "Well, that was fun! I got to meet new people..."

RX: "I don't like meeting new people; I like meeting persons who have been people for a long time."

Ow. And more waiting.

Spraying a jet of liquid nitrogen on the back of your hand stings a bit. That's good, though, because then it doesn't come as a surprise when they spray it on your cheekbone, right below your right eye.

"Seven seconds, it takes seven seconds. Let me know if you need a break..."

"I'm... good..." I gritted through clenched teeth, between mewling noises.

Then came the spot on my upper lip, just under my right nostril. You have a lot of nerves in your upper lip. That hurt like a sonofabitch. I've fallen asleep while a dentist was drilling on my teeth and that squirt of liquid nitrogen on my lip was the longest seven seconds I've experienced where I wasn't actively engaged in falling off a motorcycle.

It rendered the next blast, just under my left eye, positively anticlimactic by comparison.

I wandered out to the waiting room in a freezer-burned semi-daze. Brigid, who earned my undying gratitude by taking a day off work to hold my hand, asked how I was doing. I couldn't rightly say, because I wasn't done; next came the biopsy.

If you're looking for something fun to do this weekend, I can give a hearty disrecommendation to anything involving getting lidocaine needles stuck in your snout. They proceeded to scrape at the side of my nose to get material (read: my skin, which I use to keep the blood in) for the biopsy. My nose then did like noses do and bled like a fountain, requiring some extensive time spent with the electrocautery needle in an area that guaranteed a good view of the sparks and hearty whiffs of burning skin.

And...?

And...?

And now I get to wait "as much as a week or two" for the results from pathology. (The words I kept hearing were "basal cell"...)

Meanwhile, I have a bandaid on the side of my schnozz which I am under orders to not peek under 'til this afternoon. Given my general reluctance to look at my own blood, I asked if we could maybe give it another month or two, but no, the boo-boo must be washed. Joy.