Warning!

WARNING!: Riverdancing Over Water Can Cause Excessive Excitement!

Broad Ripple Camouflage...

A Subaru Forester wagon in its natural habitat.

Did you know that when you buy a ratty old used Subaru, the radio comes pre-tuned to NPR? True fact.

After lunch at Yat's with Turk, who had graciously driven me on my errand this morning, we stopped at the local indie hipster record shop to get a sticker for the rear window, which appears to be de rigueur for a SoBro Subie, and I'm sure I have an Apple logo sticker around here to match it someplace. Perhaps even the older rainbow Apple logo.

It'll be like having a cross between a cloaking device and a Somebody Else's Problem field. Where do hippies buy those other stickers? The one about the Air Force and bake sales? I need one of those, too...

Random car shopping thoughts...

• Shopping for Subarus in the snowy heart of December is like trying to get a good deal on a convertible on the first of June.


• Ditto 4WD SUVs.


• Did you know that you can get an AWD Ford Mondeo for pretty reasonable cash if you don't mind a bunch of Jaguar frippery hung off it?


• I'll bet that short-bed RWD Dakota with a V-8 and sport tires would have tuck & roll upholstery after I drove rode in it down an icy road, clutching desperately at the wheel while the rear tires made like an uncoordinated puppy on a slick tile floor.


• Whereas Ford did their British acquisitions a world of good in the reliability department, it would appear that GM broke Saab, at least to judge by owner's reports. That's a shame; pre-GM Saabs were decent cars and made awesome winter drivers, what with being from Sweden and all.

Stranded.

So, noticing that the 8" of snow on the lawn had subsided a bit from melting and sublimation, Ma Nature dropped another three inches of global warming on us to freshen our drink, so to speak, with another three-to-five called for on Monday/Tuesday. Which also happen to be New Year's Eve/New Year's Day.

Could there be a worse time to need to get a roadster on summer sport tires (and which won't idle well) to a small independent garage?

It's looking like a tow truck on Wednesday is how this is going to work.

Bleh.

I'm seriously thinking about just buying something cheap, practical, and FWD and letting the Roadster Era draw to a close, and I don't like thinking like that, because that's when you start getting old.

An oasis of calm & an assault weapon off the street.

With roomie at work yesterday, I volunteered my services as native guide, traveling to a couple of local gun stores with Turk.

The first, 500 Guns, was something of an oasis in the current frenzied hurricane. It's not really an AR15 kind of place, although they usually have some Glock/HK/XD/SIG-type pistols in stock, but if you're looking for a cased double rifle in a caliber that begins in "5", this is the only place in town where you'll be able to comparison shop them.

There was nothing in the shop I couldn't live without, but the Enfield No.2 Mk.IV .22 trainer was mighty tempting. I have often thought it would be fun to go to a smallbore-only indoor range and watch the RSO's expression as I blithely un-cased a SMLE.

From there we proceeded to Premier Arms, which was packed like they were giving dollar bills away. They hadn't jacked prices on anything, but had signs up stating that they had a 1 box per caliber per customer policy in place.

All the ARs and AKs were gone, as well as the AUGs and FS2000 and several other EBRs that were usually in stock. The self-loading shelf was denuded save for a stainless Ruger Mini-something-or-other and what looked like a collector-vintage Colt SP1. Didn't see any AR or AK mags, either, but I didn't look real hard; I got mine.

I did see a deadly high-capacity assault weapon that tickled my fancy, however. And we can't just let these things run loose, right? We're supposed to get them off the street, no?

Thirteen rounds of .32 caliber fury. If you can find a less practical pistol, buy it.

For some reason, the proprietor didn't realize that high-capacity assault-y type weapons were selling like sno-cones in Hades, and made me an offer I couldn't refuse on this pristine-in-the-box Beretta 81, so old that the instruction manual was only printed in Italian and it still had the old "Berben Corporation, N.Y., N.Y." importer's marks.

It is safely off the streets now. (And for only two-and-a-half used GI 30rd magazines at current Cheaper Than Dirt pricing!)

To the camps with the opposition!

Interesting discussion going on in comments here on the topic of reasoned discourse. (And by "reasoned discourse", I mean actual reasoned discourse and not Reasoned Discourse™.)

Which reminded me of a post that Erik made over at P-F.com in response to somebody describing people in favor of gun control as "fear-driven", "low-information", and "childlike":

That seems entirely too reductionist and dismissive to me. I know a number of people who understand that the world is an inherently unsafe place and support the individual right to keep and bear arms conceptually who still look at recent events and think that banning "assault weapons" might just be a reasonable step. Those people don't understand why anybody who isn't in a position of authority would need a weapon "that can shoot so many bullets so fast" and can't help but think that reducing the number of those weapons that are available would make a difference. Those people are not part of a control-driven elite and they're not child-like in nature. They are responsible, adult, well-intentioned people whose hearts are broken by events such as Newtown and they want to make a difference. They think that banning "assault weapons" is taking responsibility and that clinging to them is irrational. Those are the people you need to reach, and you can't do it if you don't start from a place of mutual respect. 

We mock the scornful tone put forth in editorials from the other side as "Why won't you stupid cousin-humping rednecks vote for us?" and then expect the flip side of the same coin to work: "Why won't you childish emotional communist hippies listen to my logical arguments?"

I manage to discuss politics with the Democrat Next Door just fine. I think she's wronger than a monkey riding a poodle, but I'll grant that she's smart and well-meaning and came by her wrongness honestly, and I'm not going to change her mind on a single issue by shouting or belittling her.

Of the "four boxes", I'd greatly prefer to win using the soapbox. 

Oh, IMPD! You're just the gift that keeps on giving!

Another IMPD officer arrested, and it's not for drunk driving this time!

Detectives from the IMPD Special Investigations Unit arrested 40-year-old John Haggard of Indianapolis. He was arrested for burglary, criminal recklessness, criminal confinement, pointing a firearm, domestic battery and battery.

*facepalm*

In the wake of the Bisard scandal, any new chief that came in was going to be facing a mucking-out chore of Augean Stable proportions. It would take a leader of Herculean abilities to carry it off, and unfortunately the new guy is just not giving off that kind of vibe.
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Stuff...

Walked to the grocery store again yesterday. Butter and eggs.

Had lunch at Twenty Tap (a spicy Cuban sandwich again because we fear change) with a pint of beer that I ordered because its name made me think about the Farm Fam: Farmageddon! That was darn yummy; too bad it's seasonal.

Lots of folks still hadn't shoveled their walks, the bastiges. I did much of my walking in the street, which was at least well-packed down. It was my maiden voyage on Yaktrax, without which things would have been a lot more harrowing, I can tell you. Recommend!

Met the ambassador from Turonistan in the afternoon, and spent the evening in Azeroth with my posse.

So, yesterday was a good day; I didn't have to use my AK. (Which is a good thing, I suppose, considering I don't even have one.)

The small rectangular arena.

Last weekend the publisher of S.W.A.T. Magazine*,  Rich Lucibella, appeared on the MSNBC morning show Up with Chris Hayes, in a panel discussion which wound up featuring no brandishing of illegal props and 72% less flung spittle than other gun control debates on weekend political shows.


I've known Rich for many years now, as have a few of my fellow bloggers, all dating back to when we were on staff at TheFiringLine.com, and I can say that he's on the short list of people I'm not at all worried about parking in front of a hostile camera to represent my team.


*FTC DISCLAIMER: For which I do assorted web scutwork in exchange for money.

No Blog For You.

Maybe later.

Euclidean Meteorology.

Winter Storm Euclid has come and gone.

Roseholme Cottage's primary piece of snow-clearing equipment is a smallish plastic shovel. (There's also a small snowthrower, but due to the fact that it is powered by a remotely-located coal-fired generator and there is a paucity of external outlets at Roseholme, it is mostly used for major emergency operations, like clearing the alley with a drop cord running into the garage.)

The snow was wet and heavy, and as I cleared the walks around Roseholme and the neighbor's house, each shovelful had to be turned upside down and given a vigorous jerk to get the snow to turn loose.

I basked in the smug feeling one gets from being only the second or third house on the block to have their walks cleared, and then set off on a celebratory stroll to the Fresh Market for bacon.

Worst single-day snowfall we've had since... January '09? I think? Probably eight or ten inches.

The Heart of SoBro. Taken from the Fresh Market parking lot, left to right are Moe & Johnny's, Sam's Gyros, and Twenty Tap. Compare to this photo.

Businesses were closing early all over the city, including all "non-essential" city government offices (Mr. Mayor, I just had a budget-slashing idea!) Apparently if your boss tells you it's too dangerous to drive to work, you need to go get some antifreeze at Moe & Johnny's before attempting the run home.

Ugly out there...

The blizzard has pretty much ground the city to a halt. Heavy, wet snow and 40mph wind gusts have created whiteout conditions and filled roadside ditches all over central Indiana.

The timing couldn't have been worse, reaching its crescendo right about the same time as morning rush hour, so plenty of people set out for work with a heart full of optimism and wound up sitting backwards in the median, as even the snowplows were pulling off the road in places to wait until they could see.

Good thing Roseholme Cottage's larders are full.
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Whitman or Spambot?

It's time for today's round of  "Whitman or Spambot?"

Was the following written by the noted free verse poet or by a subroutine in a server in Shanghai?

Sit on overlooking
The noble grace of bearing
With different people
With different excuses to see
One can not help but ask

I sing the body electric, indeed...

Oh, it's just what I always wanted!

According to Breitbart.com, the D.C. Metro Police are giving me a great, big stuffed Schadenfreude for Christmas!

Washington D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has confirmed that the department is looking into allegations that NBC's David Gregory violated D.C.'s gun banning laws during a recent taping of Meet the Press.

 Apparently, there's no "Sanctimonious Dickhead" loophole in the statute.
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Ugh.

Before too long I'm going to need to go clear Winter Storm Euclid off the sidewalks and my roommate's car.

They're calling for 6"-10" of snow between now and nightfall that, judging from the 40-mph winds, is mostly going to be stuck to the sides of trees and houses and slow-moving squirrels.

This is going to be a two-pot-of-coffee morning, I can tell you that.

Also, I don't think the Zed Drei is going to make it into the shop today, dammit.

Bears and Bulls and Bullets...

People are reporting sick things happening on the internet auction sites. I heard rumors of an AR bolt-carrier group selling for $265, a completed Rock River lower bid up over eight bills. Writes one guy at Pistol-Forum.com:

I put a hacked on Glock 19 on there for starting bid of $.01 with no reserve and it was already to $405 before I could edit the description with some HTML to pretty it up, like 90 seconds later.

Back around '04-'06, I made a very conscious decision to change my focus from gun accumulating to gun collecting, and began to divest myself of "flat-black people-poppers".

I kept the customized 1911s, since I carried them, but all the various Glocks and SIGs and HKs and Berettas got turned into more old S&W revolvers. Similarly, I kept a brace or so of AR carbines for practical reasons, but unloaded everything from the old Norinco AK underfolder and the custom .223 FAL to the full-pimp HK-91 and the Beretta AR70 in favor of old Mausers, Springfields, Mannlicher-Schoenauers, and the like.

Now I'm seeing the craziest price bubble I've seen since the Dutch went long on tulip bulbs.

I'm feeling a little sick.

I wonder what that AR70 would fetch on Gunbroker right now?

Jolly old elf in the wire! Blow your claymores!

A very very Merry Christmas to all of you out there in readerland!

Here's hoping that Santa was good to you and that you have a plate full of tasty vittles waiting for you today!
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A question...

I am honestly curious about this.

Neither mental illness nor magazine-fed firearms are new things in this nation (although gun control largely is.)

What kept disturbed kids in the '50s from wandering into the cafeteria with a mail-order M1 carbine and laying waste?

Discuss.

Made in Malaise-ia...

Talk about more than just the usual job worries to cloud the mood: Confidence among U.S. consumers dipped to its lowest point in December since July amid rising economic worries, according to a monthly index released Friday.

The Big Recovery remains as elusive as always. This year's holiday spending orgy turned out to be more of a "holiday spending chaperoned date"...

Keeping those cards and letters coming...

SayUncle noted a couple days ago that "[i]f everyone who bought an AR-15 magazine since 2004 wrote their congresscritter and told them to not support any restrictions on gun rights, no bill would see the light of day."

Perhaps coincidentally, this thread popped up the next day at P-F.com:

 I spent six years working on Capitol Hill. One as a staff aide for a particular Senate committee, two as a legislative correspondent for a Senator, and three as a legislative aide for the same Senator.

For those of you who don't know, a legislative corespondent (LC) is basically a fancy title for a young twenty-something just out of college who receives the letters and emails that you write, and is usually the person who writes you back. Generally, Congressmen have one or two LC's who do all of their letters for every issue, while Senators have a whole team of LC's that handle letters for certain issues that they're assigned (IE: a military LC, a healthcare LC, an education LC, etc.). Here's a few things that I picked up as an LC that might help you should you choose to write your Congressional delegation:

If you're going to write, you should go read the thread.

Well, gosh, how could that be?

The newscaster just said, and I quote:

"The gun control issue, which remains front and center ten days after the Newtown shooting..."

I... I... Look, it's not that I'm at a loss for words, it's rather the opposite: The tidal wave of potential retorts to that positively fatuous, completely self-unaware, pompous, faux-concerned piece of self-referential circular logic have simply logjammed in my Broca's area.

QotD: Scope of the Problem Edition

Billy Beck, in a post on the ultimate cost of the lack of knowledge of values, dropped this line:

If cars were the social menace here, you people would be arguing about what colors to prohibit.

There is no way that resort to non-essential trivialities is going to address this matter.

Ain't no cure for the wintertime blues...

Actually, I lied... Allow me to explain:

Thursday was possibly the absolute worst time for the Zed Drei to start acting wonky. A big winter storm was fixing to ice us over by Friday morning, then comes the weekend, followed by Christmas Eve and Christmas Proper, and the soonest my car's going to see the inside of a shop is Wednesday.

Sad face.

But wait! This is the upside of living in the city! Roseholme Cottage is within easy walking distance of stores and restaurants, and I figured I'd take an afternoon's walk, grab a late lunch at Twenty Tap, and then hit the Fresh Market for groceries.

Spicy Cuban sandwich, fries with Sriracha aioli for dipping, and a pint of Mad Anthony Winter Warmer

Getting home with the groceries was a bit of a bear. Thursday night's snow had started as rain and then slush before the temps dropped enough to deposit a layer of snow atop the ice. As a consequence, when the sun came out yesterday and the temps got up enough to start a bit of melting, the people who had not cleared their sidewalks had sheets of water-lubricated glaze ice in front of their houses.

Don't give me the hairy eyeball through the venetian blinds for walking through your yard when you couldn't be bothered to shovel your skating rink sidewalk.

Fortunately I arrived home safely with the contents of my grocery bags undamaged. (The shopping list had read: "bacon, bread, beer, beef".)

Yes, that's why it's called "winter".

The weatherchick on the local news perkily announced that "It hasn't been this cold since last February!"

Let's unpack that: It's winter! It's cold! It's so cold that it hasn't been this cold since last winter! It's way colder than it was in spring, summer, or fall!

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Overheard in the Hallway...

Bobbi is poetasting...

RX: "'Twas the weekend before Christmas and all through the 'net
Not an AR could be found, not on a bet..."

QotD: Everybody Else Is Doing It Edition...

This has been the Quote of the Day everyplace on the 'net, including being Tweeted by Adam frickin' Baldwin, but Larry Correia's post on gun control deserves being linked again:

So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.

Word.

Fuzzy Logic...

Just when you think that these swoopy, newfangled browsers and their plugins are supposed to learn your surfing habits:

Uh, no. (click to embiggenate)

You think you're so smart, Mr. Firefox and ABP, but you're not.
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Oh. My. Gawd.

That presser was an unmitigated disaster.

(In case any of you little spree killers were watching that, "Natural Born Killers" was a movie by an old guy named 'Oliver Stone'. Your parents watched it when they were dating and called each other "Mickey" and "Mallory" for the next couple days, until their friends started rolling their eyes.)

Big! Christmas! Sale!

Every time Barry opens his mouth, another hundred people buy an AR-15 get in line to buy an AR-15.

I have manned the counter in a gun store during the passage of the original "Assault Weapon Ban" in '94 and its sunset in '04. I was slinging guns across the glass in the panicky run-up to Y2K, when all the computers died and we were reduced to a life of heavily-armed savagery in the ruins of our once-proud technological civilization, and I was selling guns on 9/11, when America flocked to buy guns just in case Osama bin Laden jumped out of the bushes in front of their house, and I have never seen anything like this.

December of '99 was close; when we closed the shop on New Year's Eve, there wasn't a round of service caliber ammunition or a single 12ga shotshell left in the store and the long-gun racks had a distinctly picked-over look, with not a square inch of black polymer in sight. But here I'm hearing tales of frenzied buying like you wouldn't believe.

And this is good.

There are a lot more first-timers out there than the other side would like to believe. I know a lot of people who got into the whole RKBA thing because of the '94 AWB; who ran out and bought a scary-looking gun simply because they didn't like being told they wouldn't be able to later.

Ask around your friends at the gun shop or the shooting range; ask them how many got into this because of '94. All this aggressive ban talk by the other team is just sowing dragon's teeth...

EDIT: Good thing I ordered from BCM when I did; they are absolutely sold out of AR uppers. Period. Still need a BCG...

Thursday randomosity...

The Zed Drei started running weird when I cranked it yesterday morning. Didn't want to idle when cold, and when warm was still idling rough and a little slow. Don't think it's hitting on all six. The spark plugs have *mumble-cough* thousand miles on them, which could be a contributing factor.

It hasn't needed to go in the shop for anything since I moved to Indy, so I don't actually have "My Mechanic" locally. Pete's, over at 49th and Penn, advertises as specializing in imports, so I decided to go pay them a call.

They happen to be right across the street from Cafe Pretenchou, whose specialty omelet this morning was delicious...

That's a three egg omelette stuffed with Goose the Market jowl bacon, feta cheese, and sun-dried tomatoes, and drizzled with Sriracha sauce...

My interview at Pete's was a little unpromising. Kinda pushy and condescending, and it was unsurprising to find them so poorly spoken of on Yelp!

Decided not to leave the car, what with Winter Storm Draco!!! on the way. (It's going to snow in the Midwest in December. Somehow this is such an awe-inspiring event that it needs a terrifying name. Perhaps even theme music on The Weather Channel. I'm waiting for Spring Drizzle Vlad the Impaler!!!)

At least I had a filling breakfast out of the excursion.

Overheard in the Hallway...

Me: "Dammit, I was really proud of that post, and I don't even get a laugh?"

RX: "'Tamara K.: Sensitive Blogger.' That's because you were crabby when you wrote it."

Me: "I'm always crabby when I write posts; it's why I do it first thing in the morning."

The Bubble Wrap Generation.

One of the leading stories on the local news this morning?

Bulletproof backpacks are already on the market with your child's safety and your peace of mind as the pitch. But since last week's school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, online body armor companies like BulletBlocker.com are seeing quadruple the number of sales of the protective backpacks.

So Junior, sitting on the sofa eating pudding made of high-fructose corn syrup and crushed Cheetos, every muscle in his body flaccid save those required to grip the X-Box controller and twitch his eyeballs, is going to be packed off to school with a Level IA bookbag for his health. (Assuming his school doesn't require clear or mesh book bags, you know, to keep the guns out.)

Mom's finely-honed risk assessment skills explain why sales of both lottery tickets and diabetic test strips are up.

Good thing his mom doesn't realize that bag won't even slow down a 5.56 round, because I'm not sure that he could heft a SAPI plate, although it would probably do him some good to get the exercise. At least this way, when Junior snaps and goes on a homicidal rampage wrapped in bookbags, the responding officers' patrol carbines will have some effect.

I wonder how many of these people buying Kevlar® backpacks were gasping in horror whenever it was mentioned that "the killer appeared to be wearing body armor" and called for that stuff to be banned?

If someone was a real helicopter parent, you'd think they'd go down to William Golding Memorial Elementary and do a dust-off...
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Duck hunting...

...it's not about that.

Worth reading...

My friend Matt wrote a very thoughtful post*. You should go read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

If guns are the problem, why is my life not steeped in violence? Even though I literally am dispatched to every call involving violence in my jurisdiction for half of every other day, I have seen very little in the way of gun violence in the last 12 years of service. I've never been shot at. I've never shot at anyone. I've never arrested anyone for intentionally shooting at another person (true story!). I've only a handful of times arrested people for pointing guns at others. This is in Texas, where private ownership of firearms is almost unrestricted: No limit to number of guns, no registration of guns, no waiting period, no state restriction on private sales, no state restriction on ammunition or magazines. If you get it federally registered, you can even own an automatic weapon.

*And I mean exactly that: It is not only thought-provoking, but it is obvious that much thought went into the writing. It is full of thoughts.

"I am Joe's phone..."

Right now I am not very happy with Richard Mourdock.

Joe Donnelly has always been a reliable pro-gun vote, but Joe is not only reliably pro-gun, he is also a reliable Democratic Party animal.

With a month left as a representative until his swearing-in as Indiana's junior senator, his phone has got to be just blowing up right about now:

"Mr. Donnelly! NRA on line one!"

"Mr. Donnelly! DNC on line two!"

"Mr. Donnelly! Senator Feinstein on line three!"

"Mr. Donnelly! Wayne LaPierre on line four!"

.

Meanwhile, in Lafayette...

Just because you're a small city that is so tranquil you sometimes go a year forgetting to have a murder doesn't mean you can't have plenty of other weirdness. For instance, to give this story a suitably holiday-themed headline:

"You'll shoot your kid's eye out."

I had never before heard of the Daisy Red Ryder school of parenting...

Things You Will Never Hear, #32,547

In light of the entertainment industry's spastic purge from the sports channels of responsible citizens engaged in responsible firearms usage, Robb Allen types up a fanciful press release that is clearly from an alternate universe.

If only...
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The professional mourners have arrived...

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward." -Matthew 6:5

Dick's Sporting Goods has ostentatiously ceased selling Evil Black Rifles entirely.

NBC Sports Network is showing their concern for the victims of gun violence in America by cancelling all their shooting shows, including 3Gun Nation, effective immediately. I have been to a 3Gun match; there was a distinct lack of nutters and no injuries to any participant that couldn't be fixed with a band-aid. Meanwhile, Discovery has axed American Guns, despite nobody on the cast being accused of shooting anybody.

Cerberus Capital Management has announced that it is selling the Freedom Group, among whose holdings is Bushhamster, manufacturer of the deodand used by the nutter on Friday. Given the money spent to acquire Remington, Marlin, AAC, and DPMS recently, they may take a short-term bath to demonstrate their revulsion with the manufacturers of the Devil's Tools, but businessmen do not take decisions like this lightly and they obviously expect it to improve their bottom line down the road.

CalifARnia, here we come!

Guess who owns 6% of Bushhamster, via their half-billion dollar investment in Cerberus?

The California State Teachers' Retirement System.

That's some delicious irony right there. The tortured hand-wringing from the column's author is almost uncomfortable to watch.

# This Poll.

WSJ online poll on whether or not large capacity ammunition magazines should be banned.

(For those on the other team, they're referring to "assault clips".)
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Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Jim points out that if the other side is going to get emotional about "weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters" that "don’t belong on our streets" there's no reason not to do so right back.

"Weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don't belong on our streets." -President Obama

"I learned it from watching you!"

Your morning LOL.

Safe storage laws are bound to come up in the near future. If someone mentions them to you, point out that the "child" in question was, in fact, a 20-yr old adult and thus falls outside the purview of most safe-storage laws as they are presently written.

BONUS! New word for your dictionary: "Goreography" (Language warning for the F-bomb sensitive.)
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Dear dog owners...

You always go on about how much your four-legged companion is just like a member of the family, but I know that's not exactly true, because you'd never leave a bag of your child's crap in the bottom of my garbage bin after the trash truck has run.

The market reacts...

Sunday morning, when Bobbi's TeeWee cut on at 0MyGod30 by way of an alarm clock, I went into her room and flopped down on the bed amongst still-groggy roomie and a pile of electric-blanket-seeking cats, awaiting Chris Matthews and the weekly pressure-testing of my cerebral arteries.

As feared, 48 hours into the 24 hour news cycle, the media were still in full cry, driven into a feeding frenzy by all the blood in the water. It was all gun control, all the time.

Thinking of the completed AR lower I've had lying around for a year or so, I muttered aloud that I should probably go ahead and get an upper for it, just in case.

"You probably should," agreed Bobbi, and so I Googled up Bravo Company and started browsing. It was already a "beggars can't be choosers" situation with their in-stock uppers, but I got an order in on one that was more-or-less what I was looking for and claimed to be in stock, added a charging handle and... no bolt carrier groups. Nor were there any available at Daniel Defense. Nor Brownells. Nor Palmetto State Armory. Brother, can you spare a BCG?

Later in the day, after the noon range trip, Bobbi and I headed to lunch and then I peeled off to go check the ammo situation at the local Wally World. I bought the last 1000rd brick of the Winchester M-22 deuce-deuce in the place. There was no other bulk-pack .22 on the shelf other than a couple lonely-looking 225rd boxes of Remington Golden Bullets: No 333rd boxes of Winchester, no 525rd bricks of Federal...

They were all out of the 100rd boxes of 9mm WWB and had a perilous few 50rd boxes left, of which I grabbed a couple, just because. The cheap 5.56 and 7.62x39 looked a little picked-over, too.

Still some 100rd boxes of .380, .38 Spl, and .40, as well as a pretty good situation in Prvi and TulAmmo. This is a fairly urban Wally World which doesn't carry firearms and only recently started carrying any ammunition other than shotgun shells, and so is something of a 'Secret Fishing Hole' whenever there's an ammo run.

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom:

Bloomberg's on Meet The Press.

Me: (yelling, with that vein doing that thing in my forehead) "Of course he thinks we can just ban guns! This guy lives on some fantasyland little Wizard of Oz urban island where all he has to do is snap his fingers to control what size soda cups people can buy! Nobody tells him 'No'! He's as crazy as Elvis!"

Overheard in the Office...

TeeWee still playing the news down the hall...

TV: "...and Saturday Night Live opened with the New York City Children's Choir singing 'Silent Night'..."

RX: "Apparently that's the only classy thing the networks are going to do here..."

Me: "Not really. When they were finished, they had them break into a chant of 'No more guns! No more guns!'"

RX: "REALLY?"

Me: "Nah, but that was scarily plausible, wasn't it? I mean, you believed me for a second?"

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom...

The news announcer on the TeeWee was explaining that, after her fainting spell and concussion, Hillary would have to cancel some appointments:

TV: "Due to her health, Clinton will no longer testify at a House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday on the attack on a U.S. mission in Libya."

Me: "What, did she trip over Dick Nixon's tape recorder and hit her head on Vince Foster's tombstone?"

I'm sorry, that was just a hanging curve, belt-high and right over the plate.

Media consumption...

• Bobbi and I have been watching Elementary on the Roku box and caught up to current with a 3-episode marathon last night. It's the first reliable cure for House withdrawal I've found. Whiners complain that it's not a faithful re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes mythos. Fine, pretend the lead character's name is Reginald Smythe or something and watch it that way; it's good stories and good chemistry and pretty darn smart-ish as TeeWee shows go.


• Also watched:  A Series of Unfortunate Events. How had I missed this? It was right in my wheelhouse. I guess I wrote it off because it was a Nickelodeon kids' movie featuring Jim Carrey, whom I have loathed in everything but The Truman Show? Wonderful, witty movie with bizarre characters and opium-dream sets. Imagine if Tim Burton directed a Terry Pratchett screenplay of Mary Poppins off a Charles Addams storyboard. Makes me want to read the books.


• Off the e-shelf: Into the Kill Zone. Off the meat shelf, thanks to a reader: A Revolution in Arms: A History of the First Repeating Rifles, a good book that manages to remain readable while covering a fairly esoteric topic. You can possibly skip the first little bit, which takes us from thrown rocks to firearms, and just start with the early efforts at breechloading and then metallic cartridges, which made repeaters possible.

Need a laugh this morning?

Yeah, me too. Here you go.
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What media bias?

 In 2009, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was among 58 senators to back an amendment allowing a person holding a concealed weapon permit in one state to hide his firearm when visiting another state.

...and I looked around, and this wasn't the editorial page.

Careful, Mr. Montopoli! You might want to roll up your cuffs; you're splashing blood all over your slacks.

49 degrees and sunny in Indianapolis.

Link.
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Beat me harder!

A drooling moron in Marko's comments section referred to the killing of Kathryn Johnston as a "botched police raid", which is like saying the guy at the Clackamas Town Center mall had a "botched range trip".

Meanwhile, the expectation of privacy apparently doesn't exist on public transportation. (But think of all the dopers we'll catch!) Also, now my state wants to make it harder to buy cold medicine than it is to score actual methamphetamine.

The buggering people are willing to take in the name of fighting the War on (Some) Drugs never fails to astound me. Just because you have dreams of being tied up, yelled at, and slapped around a bit by someone in a black leather trenchcoat and shiny boots doesn't mean you need to drag the rest of us into your little fantasies.

BONUS!: You're probably not paranoid enough.
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Dammit...

One of my favorite cranky desert hermits just got a diagnosis that puts my little problems in perspective.

2012 is turning out to be just a grand ol' year all 'round. And the amount of sarcasm dripping off that previous sentence could potentially damage an LCD monitor.

EDITED TO ADD: Jesus wept, this year just keeps getting better! [/sarc] (Apologies to any owners of LCD monitors damaged by the sarcasm in this post.)

2012 is obviously defective. I would like to return it to the manufacturer in exchange for a year that is not borked.
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How to put this delicately?

Remember that "caveat emptor" thing I said about the sauerkraut yesterday?

Well, I woke up and did my usual morning routine, washing my vitamins down with a can of Spicy Hot V8 and then swilling a 16oz. can of NOS energy drink...

And my stomach, which had in the previous 24 hours been fed bacon, eggs, toast, Tabasco sauce, aged Gouda, Parrano cheese, saltines, Ruffles potato chips, French onion sour cream dip, organic sauerkraut, dry roasted peanuts, black coffee, hard apple cider, more bacon, French toast, honey, and Mello Yello Zero, informed me in no uncertain terms that we were going to go have a lie-down under an electric blanket for a while.

Sorry for the lack of content this morning. I'm off in search of something more substantial in the way of lunch, now that I'm feeling a little better.

Wait, wait, wait...

You mean Dr. Evil actually orbited something? There's a North Korean... well, they say it's a "weather satellite" zipping around up there?

Are we sure on the translation here? I'm sure it's the conditioning of a lifetime of James Bond movies causing it, but when Kim Jong-Whichever-One's-Running-Things-Over-There-Now says "weather satellite", I hear "weather control satellite".

And what does North Korea need a weather satellite for, anyway? What's it going to tell them? "Tomorrow will be partly famine, with a chance of starvation"?

Sit! Roll over! Burn rubber! Good dog!

Clever ad campaign:



(via email)

Yummy, but...

I am enjoying a new sauerkraut I discovered from a company called "Wildbrine", who extol the virtues of naturally-fermented foodstuffs with the same fervor a Scientologist pimps L. Ron Hubbard books.

The ingredients on the label read: "Organic cabbage, Sea salt, Dill, Garlic" and that's it. It smells like old sweat socks and tastes delicious, although it will possibly have the same side effects on you as that other fermented cabbage dish, kimchi. As they said in ancient Rome, "Caveat emptor, baby."

Absolutely fantastic on a Hebrew National dog with some Heinz chili sauce and a good Dijon.
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The air currents in the DSL cable had set up a weird harmonic, like the moaning of a ghost in the machine...

HAL 9000 has been writing spam poetry again:

Bluestacks is worth so we will not waste to
the deepest part in the ocean.
Time on their hands have been trying that believes

it's okay to playfootball game
this reduces the cost of selling
music that our accounts department can deal

While there will not be any blood-dancing at VFTP...

...I'll note that the bar for "Mass Shooting" has been significantly lowered.

In most urban areas, that's called a "Double Homicide" and sometimes doesn't make page three of the local news, unless it's really spectacular, like the birthday cookout in Indy a couple years back that got sprayed in a drive-by, killing two and wounding six, which you didn't hear about because it happened to non-photogenic people in the 'hood.

Let it happen to whitey in a suburban mall, however, and the national satellite uplink trucks converge and the talking heads all rub their chins and furrow their brows for fifteen minutes on the network morning news program.

(You know the morning news program of which I speak: It's the one on the network that employs Bob Costas, the network being sued for lying about Mr. Zimmerman. No anti-gun Bias in their Coverage, no sirree.)

Save the cows, eat a steak!

Now here's a conservation program I can get behind:

Ask Joe Henderson any question and odds are he’ll give you a very thorough answer. But ask him how to save one of the most endangered breeds in the world, the Randall Lineback, he’ll give you a very short retort: You have to eat it.

Donate to the World Worcestershire sauce Fund!
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Automotif VII...

Koo koo ka choo, Mrs. Robinson...

Alfa Romeo Spyder spotted in the parking lot of the Mountain of Geese of an early November day while out gallivanting about with friends.

I did not inquire if the driver's name was "Sally".

I had to take a picture of this car in front of Kahn's. It was so clean and straight that it looked like it had rolled off a dealership lot in... is that a '66? ...right through a wormhole and wound up in 2012.

I'm the only one qualified to what is this I don't even...

Found here.

Sure as God made little green apples, that man's carbine is as devoid of sights as the moon is of air.

It's from the Nat Geo show Border Wars. I would somehow feel marginally less surprised, if not necessarily any better, if the back of his vest read "Policia", but there you go.

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "Wait, the federal government has a site called 'blog.usa.gov'?"

RX: "Yes, the federal government has a blog, complete with cute little pictures of the family dog looking at the Christmas tree. If you don't believe me, you can go look."

Me: *buries face in hands* "My soul hurts."

Later, overhearing a commercial on the TeeWee down the hall:

Me: "WHAT?!? You can't do 'scrapbooking' on a Nook! There aren't any scraps in a tablet!"

Your modern world frightens and annoys me.
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Tab clearing...

• Obviously a labor of love. Nerdy, nerdy love, but love all the same: Every single minute difference between the book and movie versions of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King tabulated in handy list form.


• Why yes, John Moses Browning also invented the rotating barrel recoil-operated pistol, he just didn't use it.


• "Cartographer: made analog maps for cruise missiles." One of the more esoteric job descriptions I've read.

Sometimes the jokes write themselves...

"Indiana University Students Go On Strike; Bloomington Pizza Delivery And Retail Marijuana Industries Collapse"

You would think that someone smart enough to go to college would realize that when you stop purchasing a good or service, it is called a "boycott", rather than a "strike", but there you go.

Oh, to have been a fly on that wall...

Aide: "Mister President, the South Korean rapper 'PSY', the one who did that 'Gangnam Style' video you and Michelle thought was so funny, is scheduled to perform at the upcoming Christmas In Washington concert you're going to be attending, and it turns out that back in '04 he was in a video singing lyrics like 'Kill those f--ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives and those who ordered them to torture,' and going on to say, 'Kill them all slowly and painfully,' as well as 'daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers.'..."

Barry: "Okay, and...?"

Aide: "You don't see how this could be spun as bad PR, sir?"

Barry: *blank look*

The bitter clingers seem upset. Team Blue State seems puzzled at their reaction. Same planet, different worlds...

Trying again...

Shootin' Buddy and I are going to make another try for Cafe Pretenchou before the range. We'll show up an hour earlier and see if the line is shorter. The prize is an omelet called the "Julia", with jowl bacon from Goose the Market and Swiss cheese. Yum.

Then the range, which will probably not be too crowded on a rainy day with the mercury in the mid-forties.

I've had a T&E Leupold DeltaPoint sitting around and finally slapped it on the backup M&P9, just using the rear sight dovetail. If it works out, I'll either get the slide cut or look into getting one of the optics-ready ones that Smith's just released. If it doesn't, I'll just put another set of I-dots on this one, too.

Data may be skewed...

So I was monitoring enemy radio transmissions in the car the other day, and they had a financial program on the radio. Listening to collectivists discuss business is usually amusing, so I turned it up so as not to miss the good parts.

They were chattering about how the government had given all this free money to bail out the big banks and then the big banks weren't loaning it out to small businesses. To prove this, they had opened a discussion on their Facebook page, asking small business owners (or prospective small business owners, I suppose) if they were having difficulty getting loans.

You gotta wonder what kind of small business owners will be commenting on an NPR program's Facebook page...

"Uh, yeah, my name's Joe Wilson, and I have a store called 'Tees For The People' that specializes in organically-grown Fair Trade hemp T-shirts with ironic slogans for riders of fixie bikes, and I couldn't get approved for a loan..."

or

"This is Tiffani from Racine, and even though I had a business plan and everything for my combination used book store and feral cat spay & neuter clinic..."

There's nothing like a couple hours of NPR to remind one of that classic Thomas Sowell quote: "Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from."

Sorry 'bout that...

Totally overslept. Lemme get the ice cream machine plugged in here...
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Hoist by my own petard.

I will occasionally (and spontaneously) read aloud some particularly amusing bit of spam here in the office.

This backfired on me today when Bobbi discovered something in her spam box that tickled her funny bone and began reading it to me. I was skimming an article on my own computer, and so it took my brain a second to realize that:

1. Someone in the room is speaking.
2. Bobbi is speaking.
3. Bobbi is speaking English.
4. Bobbi is speaking recognizable English words but ohmygod I can't parse what she's saying! I've had a stroke!
5. Wait, I can still make sense of what's on the screen. 
6. Ah, she's reading spam comments aloud. Whew!

Speaking of the Miami shootout...

Very few incidents have been so painstakingly studied and yet have generated so much myth and outright bovine feces in the gun community, for instance:

"It was all the fault of the 9mm!" or "The FBI screwed up and tried to scapegoat the 9mm!" (Which one you claim depends on whether or not you're trying to sell a .40, of course.)

Anyhow, rather than getting the skinny from TV dramatizations or the guy at the local gun store, one can instead read the FBI's own post-mortem of the incident, thanks to the FOIA.

EDIT: Stupid FBI won't let you hotlink directly to the document. Your tax dollars at work. When you get to the "vault.fbi.gov" error page, type 'miami dade shootout' sans quotes in the search box in the upper right corner.

Found in the spam trap:

I think the HAL 9000 is branching out into screenwriting and is trying to pitch me a concept for a legal drama, sort of a less-coherent L.A. Law:

Extreme York effective taste is aggressive lawyers quarrel their behave oneself practicing status. Nearby is, assorted reason, vigour around States.

Be expeditious for brace or another, lawyers, judges, efficient scholars gain those who smash them are suggestion garbage. Meanwhile they newcomer disabuse of entities abrade injured.

They think twice entities' legal interests investiture them cherish their hop expectations. They supplementary precedents determination shortcomings be useful to quo.

genre these professions based above skewed perception. Regarding is digress lawyers are overpaid debonair lifestyles work. Duration "overpaid" is play there with, lobbing close by an pertinence is exceedingly unfair.

Really?

What kind of defect... no, scratch that... she obviously intended for herself to be caught, right?

Seriously, there is obviously a badly malfunctioning sense of consequences involved here.

(My favorite part? Where they say she had lost custody of her kid for being an unfit parent. No fricken' duh. If you look up "unfit parent" in the dictionary, her picture is right there next to the definition...)

I really want to say something snarky about her, but she's like a walking example of Poe's Law: Is she really that dumb? Or did she just decide that she was in such dire straits that perhaps a jail term and a potential reality TV gig was her best chance out of the mess that was her life?

Because misery loves company...

...I have to share this charming bit of news from Kokomo:

Police say a homeless man found decomposing in a basement freezer in central Indiana had been drinking, doing drugs and having sex with the man now suspected in his death.

So, apparently the suspect (because that's what we have to call them before the verdict, no matter how many dead guys you find on the premises) brought home a vagrant, got all drunk and stoned, had teh buttseks, and then got in some kind of row that resulted in our protagonist gagging the victim with duct tape before nodding off himself, only to awaken to a dead body and what must have been the mother of all hangovers.

Now, you gotta wonder what's going through the guy's mind as he's stuffing the dead hobo into his freezer:

• "The high school guidance counselor warned me that I'd wind up like this."
• "Mom would be so proud."
• "I had no idea that you couldn't breathe through duct tape."
• "What's my probation officer going to say when he hears about this?"

I'll also note that apparently it was the neighbors who called the po-po due to the funk of forty thousand years that was emanating from the dude's basement. Just... wow.

Oh, IMPD, you are just a fount of blog inspiration...

So the local TeeWee News announcer informed me this morning that the IMPD had formally hired their interim police chief as the new head cop of my fair city.

Described as a Gary native who came to Indianapolis two years ago from Baltimore, I thought "Wow, now there's the resume you want for your top cop." That's like having the new city comptroller described as "a native of Weimar Germany who comes to the Circle City from the Argentinian Ministry of Finance..."

(I also like the way the linked article deftly rephrased "rumors of evidence-tampering" regarding the departure of the incumbent...)

Ten out of ten for boldness...

...and minus several thousand for thinking things through...

Sitting around the neighborhood gun store, it's easy for people to BS their credentials. Walk into one at any given time and you'll find a couple-three former SEAL Delta Ranger Snipers.

It's a little harder to make outlandish claims on some of the bigger internet forums, since there's a much greater statistical chance that a person who actually was what you claim to have been may wander by.

Check out this incident on the Smith & Wesson forum I stumbled across while Googling info on the Federal .38 Spl 147gr +P+ Hydra Shok load, where a guy claims to have been an FBI agent who was present at the infamous '86 Miami shootout, and then a couple of real FBI types post in the thread.

I wonder how many times this guy spun his yarns about his Special Agent heroics in Miami at his Local Gun Shop without anyone calling him on it?

...and get off of my lawn!

So, I'm seeing the above commercial for, like, the third or fourth time when it occurs to me that the chick who looks kinda like Nicki Minaj actually is Nicki Minaj, and that would mean that the other people in the commercial are not some random collection of young hipster punks that need to get off of my lawn, but in fact are some sort of young musical celebrity hipster punks that need to get off of my lawn, however I could not put a name to any of them.

My first Official Old Fogey Moment. I'm so proud of myself; it's a big day in a young girl's life.

Total Eclipse of the Last Thirty Years

So I'm standing in the long checkout line and notice that half everybody in line front of me is back in skinny dark blue jeans with prominent gold stitching and calf boots. All we were missing was cowl-neck sweaters and poodle perms and we could have been on the set of Remington Steele.

I did not go check the dude's department to see if parachute pants and muscle shirts with random kanji characters were staging a similar comeback.

One Flew Over The Po-Po's Nest...

No particular reason for the post, except that I can't believe nobody's used such a gimme of a title in the Adrian Schoolcraft case.

Keep the Schoolcraft case in mind when people are encouraging more proactive government intervention in mental health. I don't mean to go all Godwinski, but you know who had a really good system of state mental health facilities? The Soviet Union, that's who. They were really good at diagnosing disagreewiththegovernmentosis.

Overheard in the Kitchen...

Me: "So I told him 'Every American should own an M1 Garand because M1 Garand. Not owning one should cause you to get a corner clipped off your 'Murrican card...'"

RX: "I guess I get a corner clipped off my card."

Me: "I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. Then I said 'That being said, I can think of a half-dozen better choices for a combined hunting/zombocalypse rifle.'"

RX: "How does a zombocalypse differ from a zoombocalypse?"

Me: "One has shamblers, the other has fast zombies. And we can tape the corner back on your 'Murrican card because there's a Garand in the house, so you sort of have one by proxy."

The Federal Bureau of Entrapment.

The FBI identified Wright as the leader of the months-long plot that aimed to strike a blow to corporate America.

But that effort would never come to pass. Wright was unwittingly chatting up an FBI informant for months leading up to the day he tried to set off what he thought were explosives.

Instead, it was fake C4 provided by the FBI, part of a sting operation that led to his arrest.

 Once again, the FBI has shoved us into traffic and then yanked us back onto the sidewalk, yelling "I just saved your life!" Not that that comes across as majorly dysfunctional or anything...

(h/t to Noah D in comments.)

You can't nerf the world.

At a forum I frequent, one commenter suggested

They should focus on making sure that football players are getting the right assistance and lower triggers for intervention to help them get the counseling, treatment, and mental/emotional help they actually needed. In fact, we need that for the rest of society, while I am thinking about it.

Indeed. If your friends and neighbors see you acting sketchy, or suspect that you might be depressed, there should be a number they could call to see that you get the help you need; get you a counselor and some meds, and get your guns taken away until your mental health team believes the crisis has passed. We could call the new agency the "Societal Tranquility Agency for Special Intervention".

At the risk of sounding callous, freedom and dignity are going to cost some dead bodies every year. As long as people have guns, some folks are going to get shot with them; that's just the way it is. As long as people have cars, folks are going to get liquored up and wrap them around trees. As long as there are train tracks, hobos are going to pass out on them. We aren't going to put Nerf padding on the corners of the world, and I wouldn't want to live in the Minority Report-meets-Demolition Man world where they had.

Who is Bob Costas?

Let me get this straight: A young guy whose entire, for lack of a better word, 'career' up to this point has rewarded him for aggressively bringing the pain, lost his $#!+ during an argument with the mother of his child and solved the problem with a gun. When his ears stopped ringing and she didn't pop up again at the re-spawn point like in Halo and he realized that he'd thoroughly and comprehensively effed up his own life, too, he offed himself as well.

This affects me how, Bob?

This may come as a shock to you, Mr. Costas, but I have worn a loaded gun pretty much every day of my adult life. I spent pretty much every working day of that adult life in workplaces where everybody else was wearing loaded guns, too. There was nothing magic about these places or the people in them. They were typical workplaces with all the typical workplace politics and the drama that entails and yet... Magically! ...we all somehow constantly managed to refrain from shooting each other, despite literally bathing in the mind-control rays you think emanate from loaded handguns.

Wonder why that is?

Highlight For Spoilers: Because normal, well-adjusted people don't solve their problems with handguns, Bob, regardless of their availability.

I do find the allegation that, in the absence of handguns, Kasandra would still be alive to be absolutely ludicrous, because everybody knows that without a handgun, there would be no way for an enraged 6'2", 228-lb. NFL linebacker to harm a 22-year-old woman. 

Tired.

Went to the range today with Shootin' Buddy and burned some powder.

Iggle Crick's December hours caused some grief. Normally they open at 0900, and so Shootin' Buddy would show up at Roseholme Cottage at 0800 and we'd go and have our choice of Broad Ripple weekend bruncheries before the hipsters had dragged themselves out of bed, and then head to the range.

With the new hours, we met at 10:30 and headed to Cafe Pretenchou. Throwing in the towel at the line-out-the-door-thirty-minute-wait there, we headed to Zest instead, where we faced only a twenty minute line for chow. (Creme brulee French toast for me. Yum!)

Then on to the range where I ran a bunch of deuce-deuce through my 22/45 and enough 9mm through the M&P9 to keep my hand in. It's probably time to clean the Ruger, given that the bolt is getting so sluggish that I can feel it cycle...

The shooting was as enjoyable as shooting always is. Although there was one young guy a couple lanes down who ran probably 200 rounds of buck and slugs through his shotgun, leaning backwards with the butt perched right on the ball of his shoulder, head straight up and thumb wrapped over the wrist of the stock. It hurt just to watch him shooting, as each BOOM! rocked him back on his heels, flinching, and I had to fight down the urge to go give him some pointers on his technique.

How come people are willing to spend scads of money on guns but won't spend a penny on learning how to work them?

Global Warming.

Well, I can't say that National Geographic didn't warn me that we were going to have Chamber of Commerce weather this weekend. It's supposed to be in the low sixties tomorrow; splendid weather for a trip to the range.

I could probably hie myself to MCF&G this week, too, and get the FACOG atop the M&P15-22 dialed in like I've been meaning to do for a bleedin' year now.

Caleb had a post up recently about the deuce-deuce M&P carbine as a defensive choice, which was interesting in that I had recently been musing that in a situation like that faced by the Korean shopkeepers in the '92 Los Angeles riots*, I'd hand my neighbor the .22 AR as a spare long gun without a qualm.

It looks scary and makes noise, which is important because the most important use of long guns in those scenarios was as a deterrent and, push-come-to-shove, it's a lot easier for a novice to operate and make hits with than any of the other spare long guns I have lying around. The thought of a marginally-trained person not much over five feet tall wrestling with a Garand or Mosin M44 on short notice is daunting; by comparison, a dot-sighted rimfire AR is practically an iGun.


*Laugh if you want, since there hasn't been an honest-to-gawd burning overturned cop cars in the streets riot within ten blocks of where I'm sitting in about fifteen years.

...and stereotypes always travel in pairs...

I picked up the terminology from Shootin' Buddy originally, but it's just so handy:

• Seth and Jared...
• Cletus and Jasper...
• Ice Dog and Ray-Ray...
• Tiffani and Amber...

Broad Ripple is like Seth and Jared and Tiffani and Amber Ground Zero.

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.