Detroit Rock City

President Barack Obama proposed giving Colombia about $323 million in aid next year, mostly to combat drug trafficking and violence. Detroit, with an 81 percent higher homicide rate, will get $108.2 million.

As Michigan’s largest city entered a record $18 billion municipal bankruptcy on July 18, the message from Congress and the White House was that no new money would be forthcoming.

In linking to the above article, a forum poster asked "What does Colombia and Detroit have to do with each other??"

Well, other than the fact that a significant percentage of federal aid money that goes to Detroit probably eventually ends up in Colombia anyway, there are some other similarities:

• They're both corrupt autocracies that are sinkholes for U.S. tax dollars?


• Their declines were both accelerated by governmental meddling in a free market?


• They're both hosts to simmering low-level guerrilla conflicts?

This is just to get back at LTC Dubois, isn't if?

Why are most all of the biggest, prettiest, most compelling SF movies of the past decade polemics written by dipping the other end of Ayn Rand's moral compass needle in the inkwell?

First, Pocahontas Does Polyphemus; now, #OCCUPY_L5:


Still going to see it, though. Can't not. It's filmed on a ginormous Stanford torus*, for heaven's sake!


*Not really, but the CGI looks bumpin'.

Yikes.

Finally read the Heidi Yewman piece.

Since having the gun I’ve had two repairmen, a carpet cleaner, and a salesmen in my home. If the gun’s for self-protection, it’s not going to do any good in the safe, but it’s not really practical to have the gun pointing at them as they work. How else would I eliminate the element of surprise if I were attacked?

Yow. This woman doesn't just have issues, she has whole subscriptions.

"The sad fact is that some people shouldn't have guns. Or cars. Or children. Or oxygen." – Pat Rogers

...and yet, at the end of the day, this complete soup sandwich, this projection-riddled bundle of neuroses I wouldn't trust with a burnt-out match, wandered the streets of America for an entire month without adult supervision and with a loaded Glock, and what bad things happened?

None.

Whose point was she trying to prove, again? Mine or hers?

Sorry 'bout that!

Bobbi's on vacation, which kinda puts Roseholme Cottage on Vacation Time.

So, a slow start this morning, compounded by the fact that I have only just now heard about the most fascinating case of Munchausen By Internet evar.

(WARNING: That wordpress blog at the link is a time sink par excellence. I am only just now starting to struggle back up out of that rabbit hole.)

Musical Interlude...

I think I was at Waffle House that night!

Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi is watching YouTube videos of Cletii doing tabletop reviews of crappy guns, for some reason.

Me: "'Cobb-ray'? Did he just say 'Cobb-ray'? Jesus, shut that ignorant cracker up, will you?"

YouTube: The place to go if you love lingering closeups of Cletus pointing sucky guns at his own hand.

(I do have to say that the original Cobray single-shot .410/.45 derringers were oddly charming in their unpretentiousness. It was the absolute minimum amount of stuff needed to set off a .410 shell in your hand without blowing your own fingers off, and didn't really pretend to be anything else.)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n...

...is all over at Bobbi's place today: Winchester 1903! OlyArms Wolverine reboot! Top-break .22s!

Go look!

A picture is worth 1,000 words.

(click to embiggen)

Well, to be fair, it does say "High Risk" right on the box. (Although there's always the possibility that's not what they meant by that.)

Blah.

I was thinking about trying some anhedonia today, but I just can't work up any enthusiasm for it.

There are four pieces of Fresh Market bacon on the plate in front of me, cooked just the way I like them, and I don't really feel like eating it. They smell great and the crumbles I've sampled taste good, but eating four pieces of bacon seems an awful lot of work. I'm actually contemplating throwing away bacon.

Seriously questioning my decision to get out of bed this morning. May not have been the right one.

Today was a good day...

Eggs Benedict on the veranda at Good Morning Mama's this morning with Shootin' Buddy and then off to the range!

Still on short rations: Fifty rounds of nine and 240 of deuce-deuce. Hopefully the rimfire situation loosens up before Halloween. Shooting could have been better. Working on speed, but it's hard.

After the range we drove into Broad Ripple proper and got a bite (I had a skirt steak taco) at La Chinita Poblana before heading to see the new Wolverine flick. Thank goodness they made this one; now we can pretend that previous craptastic Wolverineship Troopers movie never happened. This one unsucked.

Ran by the Brewpub for a half-growler of IPA, and I think I'll put my feet up and finish reading Master and God.

Brrrr!

Woke up this morning to a chill, since we set a new record low for the date, breaking the previous low mark of 54°F, set in 2004.

It's been a mild summer, but this morning was just freaky cool. Just north of us in Lafayette, the mercury dipped into the forties. In July.

To anybody in town for the Brickyard 400 for the first time, no, it's not normally a howling arctic wasteland in July up here.

Relics.

The one on the left was under some stuff on the corner of the desk. Ironically, the one on the right was atop the same stack of detritus.

...and yet they're the same size! Freaky!

The one on the left is at least ten years old. I'm pretty sure it was in the Nikon Coolpix 990 when I got it from Oleg. Lotta good times have been crammed into those sixteen tiny megabytes over the years...
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Savage tales!

The cryptic Savage photo is somewhat explained at the other blog.

QotD: Smuggling Donkeys Edition...

Bobbi has figured out the real deal with the Weiner-man:

At this point, I suspect his real kink is getting caught out and having to grovel.

Summertime in SoBro 2013 Edition, Vol. IV

In Broad Ripple it is apparently important to have specialized vehicles for hauling things:

Sano Ford Econoline pickup truck.

...for hauling old muscle car parts.

Surly Long Haul Trucker. 3 water bottle cages seem a mite excessive.

...for hauling thirsty hippies.

556hp, 190mph Cadillac CTS-V wagon: "We need to get Billy and his friends to their Little League game, stat!"

...and for hauling ass.

Arms Room Preview...

Stop! Hammer time!

(Actually they're not hammers; just external cocking indicators for the striker mechanism. That's right: American-made striker-fired pistols with double-stack magazines... in 1907. But that's for tomorrow...)

Overheard in the Kitchen...

My cat likes olive oil.

See, sometimes while Bobbi was cooking breakfast, she used to give the cat a bit of bacon grease. Pretty soon, Rannie decided that any stove-centric activity must produce yummy grease, not grasping the cruel fact that there was no such thing as oatmeal grease or soup grease.

So one morning when Bobbi was cooking oatmeal, she put a little olive oil in a saucer for the cat. Apparently ever since that fateful morning my cat couldn't care less about bacon grease; she wants her olive oil in the morning and will paw at Bobbi's leg or even nip her on the calf while she's cooking breakfast until she gets her olive oil.

Now I discover that it can't be just any ol' kind of olive oil, either...

INT. ROSEHOLME COTTAGE KITCHEN - EVENING

RX: "This isn't extra virgin olive oil."

Me: "Wait, what? It's Bertoli!"

RX: "But it's not extra virgin."

Me: "I thought my cat liked..."

RX: "She likes the extra virgin."

Me: "I'll... We can..."

RX: "I prefer the extra virgin, too."

Me: "So you're saying that the regular Bertoli isn't good enough to give to the cat?"

RX: "Oh, I guess she'll eat it. Reluctantly. But she'll dig in to the extra virgin. What can I say? Your cat's an olive oil snob."

Please to be giving me olive oil? And not the cheap stuff you feed the peasants, either, monkey.

QotD: Truth In Advertising Edition...

Brian J. Noggle lays down the hard truth:

You know what I call “The Ultimate Matrix Collection”?

A DVD of just The Matrix.

Word.

Con Air II: Flakes On A Plane!

According to FAA records, 2012 was a low ebb for unruly passengers getting tossed off planes, with a mere 129 rude jackasses being forced to disembark. (I've been on single flights with that many people who had no business on a plane, but that's neither here nor there...)

Okay, I realize that the hickory shampoo went out of fashion with Rodney King, but couldn't they at least have tased the bejeezus out of that woman? Here's the one chance in your career to get a standing flippin' ovation for a bit of police brutality, officers, and you passed on it. There's not a person in that airliner cabin who would have felt anything but gratitude if you'd drive-stunned that woman until she soiled her bloomers.

Anyhow, congrats to the airlines on the low numbers for 2012, and I would encourage them to consider my proposal for lowering numbers even further: On January 1st of every year, sentence everyone who's been kicked off a plane in the previous year to have to fly on a redeye to London and back with their fellow miscreants. Since regulations require a cabin crew, they should be selected based on votes by airline passengers.

The whole program could be funded by selling the video rights to recordings from armored cameras in the cabin of the annual Bedlam Air flight.

Whaddaya think?

Summertime in SoBro 2013 Edition, Vol. III

It's a cute little starter home...

I just now noticed that one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood is up for sale! Im'a start rolling pennies; I wonder what kind of maintenance nightmares go with a slate roof and all those leaded windows?

Forest Hills is a neighborhood of what we'd now call "McMansions" just to the south of Kessler and east of College. Biggish homes made to look even bigger by tiny lots, it was a streetcar suburb of Indy back in the first third of the last century.

While not as grandiose as the ginormous cribs crowding Meridian on the far side of College, there's enough variety in the architecture and landscaping to make a pleasant backdrop for a bicycle ride...

It's nice of Iowahawk to let me play on his internets

@iowahawkblog That city wouldn't voom if you put four million Volts through it. It's passed on. It is an ex-city.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 24, 2013

I'll not be snatching any pebbles from Iowahawk's hand anytime soon...
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Automotif XII...

Redhead. Click to embiggen.

Not many cars will have me pulling over on the streets of SoBro and fishing for the cell cam like a tourist, but a Ferrari Testarossa is one of them. The atomic doorstop with the giant door-mounted cheese slicers was pretty much the ne plus ultra supercar of my teenage years.

Short Attention Span Theater.

I see that it is now time for an important and frank national dialog about Weiner's wiener.

This is like watching TV with a compulsive channel clicker. I freely admit that I'm lost now. I thought we were talking about what William and Kate were going to name Trayvon's Detroit bankruptcy?

Because it needed to be done...

(Rolling Stone) Wanna see my picture on the cover
(BOOM!)Wanna blow up children and their mothers
(BOOM!)Wanna see my smilin' face
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

I'm going to have a hard time not singing it that way now. I seem to have earwormed myself.

EDITED TO ADD:

...and then sepulvedasrevenge did the heavy lifting:

I'm a big jihadi
getting letters from the hotties
and my chef does some great halal
The bros and the homies
they all want to know me
they keep dropping by my cell
I got agents I got lawyers
I'm a bona fide employer
but I never get to be alone
I 'll tell you one thing more
this was all before
I made the cover of the Rolling Stone

So. Full. Of. Win.

EDIT AGAIN:

I'm slower than Reno, but I got there eventually...

So if you want fame
And you've got no shame
Or any musical talent at all
But you're a kinda good looker
And you own a pressure cooker
Then you'd better get on the ball
Just dump out the chowder
And fill it with black powder
Build a detonator from your phone
Though it's a small sample
Here's a pretty good example
You'll make the cover of the Rolling Stone

Um, media? Can I ask a question?

I don't mean to interrupt all the royal cervix watchin', but how's the president doing on The Most Important Issue Facing The Country?

I mean, I realize there has been sideshow after sideshow but, well, your guy's been in the driver's seat for a while now and I was kinda hoping you could spare a journalist to do some reporting on why the economy's still in the crapper? Those green shoots supposedly sprouted some time ago. When are we going to have our very important national dialog on where did all the jobs go?

Justice For... Hey! Let's Go Ride Our Bikes!

Boy, the difference in the subject matter between yesterday's morning network news programs, both local and national, and today's is unbelievable. It's like they're reporting on different planets or something.

Yesterday was wall-to-wall "No justice, no peace!" and today it's all about the fact that English royalty is about to whelp. Other than a commercial for Dr. Phil, there hasn't been a peep about the topic that was on every talking head's lips practically non-stop all last week.

So, the whitest baby in the world is about to get born and the dead black kid is all of a sudden last week's news amongst the media glitterati in Midtown Manhattan? Our very important national dialog on race is sidelined for a very important discussion on the House of Windsor's baby names?

You're sending me some really mixed signals, NBC. Maybe Reverend Al isn't 100% wrong about everything after all. I think there's some serious projectin' going on in the chattering classes.

The Bill Whittle Skittles vid...

I think ToddG had the right of it here.

It's too bad Mr. Whittle couldn't have made a video expressing simply the facts without all the sermonizing about the MSM and Reverends Sharpton and Jackson.

If he'd done that, then I could have linked people on the other side of the opinion fence to it and said "Look, here's an unbiased recitation of some cold facts you may not have heard." As it is, it would look like I was saying "Hey, don't believe that Left Wing propaganda you're being fed! Try this Right Wing propaganda instead!"

Unfortunately, the fish who are nominally on my side of the tank often don't seem to notice the water they're swimming in, either.


*As a side note, the whole Skittles and tea thing is a red herring, anyway. You don't need any of that crap to chug a bottle of Robo; a couple squirts of Chloroseptic will deaden your gag reflex enough for that. Uh, or so I was told during my misspent youth, anyway. 

Conservatives always sound like squares when they talk about catching a buzz; about as convincing as that Reefer Madness flick. Except Limbaugh. He has doper cred.

Anyway, like I said, that's all a side show: the jury didn't need any of this to reach a verdict on the case, Zimmerman couldn't have known it anyway, and the facts don't require it.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #62:

Seen at Sand Burr Gun Ranch: One of Dennis Reichard's trademark .44 Magnums...

Can be embigennated to ginormous size for a good look at the engraving...

 He can flat shoot those things, too, in addition to being a hella revolver 'smith. I gotta get back up there now that the Subie's fixed, if only to hang out for a bit.

No finer place for sure...

It's actually 111 E. 16th Street and not 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Don't be fooled by the sign.

Downtown...

Down at 16th and Pennsylvania...

QotD: Dueling Edition...

From Reno Sepulveda:

Then again, communications and transportation were much slower back in those days so there was a natural time/space buffer on hostilities… Oh God!  Can you imagine the carnage  if Andrew Jackson had the internet, metallic cartridges and Air Force One?

I LOL'ed and LOL'ed. That's a beautiful mental picture right there, man. It's enough to make me want to try my hand at some alternate history fiction writing.

We get wound up about recent presidents, but modern politics ensures that the contents of the Oval Office are going to be as buttoned-down and bland as possible, focus-grouped to a fare-thee-well. It's easy to forget that we've had actual crazy people in there before.

Unarmed.

So a 17-year-old kid knocks you on your back on the concrete and, straddling you, starts raining blows on you...

What's the worst that could happen? This.

The dynamics in that case just weren't the right kind to attract the attention of the Attorney General, I guess.
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Slow start...

... so, while I'm clearing cobwebs, why not go read Mike's touching farewell to his faithful four-legged friend, Bert? Bring some Kleenex, just in case.

QotD: Post-Apocalyptic America Edition...

Commander Zero on Detroit, America's first post-apocalyptic city:

Minimal public services, high crime, a Third World / Soviet style population base of unemployed fatalistic masses, crumbling infrastructure and burned out buildings….it’s like Fallout 3-D. Seriously, they should drop Bear Grylls down there with nothing but a knife, an EBT, and a pack of Marlboros and give him 30 days until evac. It would be like a cross between Escape From NY and Bat 21.

RTWT.

Don't Be That Guy.

There are still real, actual problems with race in this country because some people are just morons. I don't understand them, I can't understand them, and I'm afraid that, like the Good Book says about the poor, the dumb will always be with us.

Conversely, once upon a time, I had a black dude turn around and accuse me of being a store detective following him in a store in which I was a fellow shopper. Nothing I could say would convince the dude that I wasn't some kind of undercover store security. I just could not talk to him and finally had to walk away.

Mr. President, you're starting to sound like that guy.
.

Bazinga!

BREAKING NEWS - the DOJ has released George Zimmerman's gun. Unfortunately, it was in a shipment to Mexico.
— Robb Allen (@PantsFree) July 19, 2013

That's the internets for today, folks. Thanks for playing!

Drug use at ad agencies?

Who signed off on the ad campaign for Nicoderm in which it appears that if you slap on one of their patches, not only do you not have a craving for cigarettes, but you also hallucinate little men singing old Rare Earth tunes at you?

The uninformed viewer is going to be thinking "Dude, if the cravings are that bad, just spark up rather than slapping on the psychotropic patches."

Overheard in the Hallway...

Me: "It's hot as balls out there! When Dick Cheney was running this country, the .gov controlled the weather. Now the Democrats are running the show and the EPA shuts down HAARP because their generators can't pass emissions! Bring back the GOP, I say!"

RX: "We'll just have to watch 'em like a hawk to make sure they don't destroy New Orleans again."

Me: "^&%$ New Orleans!"

QotD: Wish I'd Said That Edition...

Joel in comments here:

"But I think we can all agree that if you don't hate Zimmerman you're a hater."

Heh.

I've thought about a vehicle-mounted camera...

...and I'd do it in a minute if I lived in one of the big traffic hells like DC, ATL, L.A., or DFW. Besides, without a camera on board, how will you get lucky video of a meteor exploding overhead?

Having had someone try to by-god kill me while I was just riding along and minding my own business before, I can see the value in a dash cam. Check out the footage Rational Gun got within two weeks of installing one; if he'd actually hit that dude, the camera would have paid for itself many times over in an instant.

(Fortunately, in my case, the dude was a mensch and pleaded guilty in court. Things could have dragged out longer than they did if he hadn't owned up to his screwup. That's not the kind of thing you can count on, sadly.)

See? See? It's all in the name!

White County, IN doesn't get much in the way of homicides, but they apparently try to make up in quality what they lack in quantity.

In this particular sordid tale, we have a guy shot dead for selling bad meth, three people supposedly members of a Chicago-based gang, a girlfriend who is a co-defendant for reasons not made terribly clear in the article (but just hanging around these people probably should be at least a B misdemeanor,) and a perp actually named "Ray Ray" who was arrested for these charges as he was walking out of the neighboring county's jail for a different case.

For bonus points, the decedent appears to have succumbed to a lone .22 projo in the tummy.

Overheard in Roomie's Bedroom...

The Today show is parading Martin's parents to cheerlead this morning's Two Minutes' Hate:

Mr. Martin: "What if it had been your unarmed child...?"

Me: "My child wouldn't have been beating his head against the sidewalk!"

RX: "Your child is a cat."

Details, details.

Arrr! Cap'n Sumdood is a salty seadog!

Cuba claims this is some other dude's ship and they don't know who left the weapons in the hold. They didn't even know those weapons were in there. Also, they were just holding it for somebody else. And they were told they didn't work anyway.

I don't recall you consulting me on your English curriculum...

...so how 'bout you keep your nose out of self-defense matters?

The American Federation of Teachers, like everybody else on the planet, has apparently issued a statement of their position on what they think just happened in Florida.

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "'Ride the pine', sit on the bench. It's a baseball term. I was kinda surprised to have a sports term used in an otherwise nerdly setting..."

RX: "What do you think World of Warcraft is? Sports for nerds."

Me: "You're thinking of roller derby."

RX: "That's sports for fit nerds."

It's the Official Narrative...

Listening to Diane Rehm on Monday, I heard a caller ask why Zimmerman got out of his truck after being ordered not to by the police. Not a single one of the guests on the show, including Erich Pratt, pointed out that wherever this particular sequence of events took place, it wasn't in this dimension*. And who can blame them? Listen to Juan Williams...



His recounting of what he thinks happened shows how the version of the narrative ("Martin, who was told by the police to not get out of his car, got out of his car and followed Trayvon, caught him, started a fight and shot Trayvon when he lost...") promulgated by the media and flatly contradicted by the actual, physical facts, has taken root in the mind of America.

*I did. I yelled "That is a lie! That never happened!" at the dashboard a few times before starting to gnaw on the steering wheel in frustration. It was like the voices in my radio were gaslighting me. Luckily, I was stationary in the drive-thru line at the bank, so the car didn't veer off the road or anything.

"Carrying a laser down the road that I must travel..."

I have no idea why this one lodged itself in my ear tonight. I guess I must have heard a snippet of it somewhere in my daily travels? Anyhow, your daily Eighties:

I totally had this on 45 (ask your parents, kids.) It was on translucent purple vinyl. Swear to Edison.

(EDITED TO ADD: Derp. It was the word "kyriarchy" that did it. Duh.)

The sneering contempt for the petit bourgeoisie is nothing new.

Having just read this steaming little pile of a hit piece, I felt it important to warn my Twitter followers...

Breaking: #JurorB37 has never written a single thesis on Identity Politics and the Intersectionality in the Kyriarchy! Obviously unqualified
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 16, 2013

Ugh...

After a freaky cool and dry spell for the first week or so of July, more typical Midwestern summer weather has arrived, with daily highs in the high eighties (and sometimes into the low nineties) and humidity like a sauna. I console myself with the fact that it only really lasts a couple weeks here instead of a couple months like back home.

I'm torn right now because we are already past the coolest part of the day, and it's plenty muggy out there already, but it's still not yet nine o'clock and therefore a little early for my bike ride. See, between nine AM, when everybody's gotten to work or school or whatever, and eleven AM, when the fat part of the lunch hour wave starts to crest, the side streets of Broad Ripple are fairly empty and you can even manage to cross Kessler Boulevard without much of a wait.

It's going to be like breathing through a wet towel whenever I go today, but the wet towel is getting hotter by the hour...

Given the fact...

...that the entire Zimmerman/Martin incident and subsequent legal drama was practically a real-life advertisement for taking a class from Massad Ayoob or Southnarc, I was interested to note that Mas didn't mention the case at all except in the most oblique fashion at the MAG-40 class last month.

I had my suspicions as to why, but decided to respect his reticence by not poking my nose in. I see that my assumptions were correct. I'm just a regular Angela frickin' Lansbury.

(I really need to get into an ECQC class.)

A chance at free stuff...

Apparently Brownells is running some sort of 12 Days of Christmas in July sweepstakes thing. You can enter daily between now and the 30th either through the Facebookenings or at their web page. Today's prize looks to be some VZ Operator II grips for your 1911 in tactical grayish color that is perfect for operators who operate covertly in covert operations.

Hell, yes, there was "profiling"...

So, when Mr. Neighborhood Watch dude, ever vigilant for punks and hoodlums that threaten the neighborhood peace, sees the figure ambling about the neighborhood in the rain at 0dark30 and goes to investigate and...

...raise your hand if you think Zimmerman would have said "Oh! You're white! Never mind!" and hung up on the police.

Yeah, it didn't work that way when I was a teenager, either.

A lot of hay has been made by the folks playing five-card stud with a full deck of race cards that there would have been none of this hue and cry if Zimmerman had been black. I similarly maintain that if Trayvon Martin had been a white kid, the media wouldn't have given a tenth as much of a damn, even if the story had been otherwise identical. In fact, the media might have decided that a Zimmerman jumped by a white skate punk was a sympathetic character...

Meanwhile: That didn't take long.
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Att'n, Indy Indie Film Buffs...

Frank James's son's indie film, Open Mic Night After The Apocalypse, is going to have two screenings at the Indianapolis International Film Festival this month, on the 20th and the 23rd. (Tix are available at the latter link.)

Incidentally, I has a sad that the film festival organizers didn't go with the painfully obvious pun for the name, despite the sense of whimsy evident on all their web pages.

Overheard in the Office...

Me:"'...[T]he Wasatch Front has an estimated population of 2,051,330 residents, or 80% of Utah's estimated 2007 population of 2,645,330.' Look, that's over two million people in this little area, leaving all this..." *gestures at screen* "...to only about 500,000."

RX: "Oh, yeah."

Me: "Man. I'll bet you there are places out there where you could just go do weird $#!+, right out in the open."

We knew the day was coming...

It looks like we'll need to put one of those kiddie safety latches on the cabinet where the Huck chow is stored.

I thought about a Tupperware-type bin for the food itself, but he outmasses the standard size bags of food and would probably just tip the bin out and work at it until he got it open or someone caught him.

And the media has delivered the lesson...

Stay in the car, America.

Forget your neighbors' barbecue grills getting overturned and bicycles getting stolen. Don't worry about the graffiti getting sprayed on the neighborhood walls. Ignore the cries of that woman getting stabbed on the apartment steps.

Pull the blinds. You think you're a cop or something?

Don't get involved. The potential social and legal costs are too high.

Stay in the car, America.

Me? You'd better cool believe I'm staying my ass in the car. The media has taught me well that I am not my brother's keeper. We hire people to do that these days.

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "'They had been given the chance to convict Zimmerman of manslaughter but did not do so, despite asking for a clarification of the charge earlier in the evening.' They failed! How could they have failed? He's going to get off on a technicality! The technicality of being not guilty!"

What media bias?

It's still not legal to beat someone's head in in Florida...

...just because they looked at you funny.

Not Guilty.
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Ephemera...

Went to the Indy Hamfest with Bobbi today.

The sellers there are interesting to me as a non radio nerd. Half of them are guys doing this as a business and the other half are guys who have cleaned out their man-caves with shovels and hung price tags on the debris.

Lots of fairly recent electronic flotam and jetsam. One guy had a bunch of iPAQs for $3 each. (When Marko got one back in late '00 or early '01, we called it the "GeekMaster 2000"...)

As someone who once gave real money for a Canon AE-1 Program, it was interesting to see the bin that had a bunch of 35mm camera bodies in it included a T50 and a T70 for $4 each.

I passed on the Mac Performa 6400 and the Mirror Drive Door G4 tower, although the LNIB C64C was tempting.

Bobbi picked up some stuff that I would no doubt find cool if I knew what it was.

Also, there was a purchase which will get a post on The Arms Room!

QotD: This Is My Shocked Face Edition

An employee of the Florida State Attorney's Office who testified that prosecutors withheld evidence from George Zimmerman's defense team has been fired.

No kidding?

I realize that "Chris Matthews Said He's Guilty" is a thin reed on which to hang a case, but that doesn't mean you need to take it out on your subordinates, there, sport...

Dissent Is Patriotic Unpatriotic!

The legal experts at The Liberal Gun Club have decided that TJIC's infamous "1 down, 534 to go" comment constituted "a threat to standing congresspersons", and therefore doom on him*.

Lacking a law degree, I am not entirely certain on what constitutes a threat or not, so I'm not going to talk out my ass with confident certainty, but maybe I'll stop telling that joke about "What do you call a bus full of Progressives that goes over a cliff with one seat empty?" lest these fine legal minds construe it as an actual threat to go out and buy a bus and start filling it with hippies.

Q: How many Progressives does it take to get indignant?
A: That's not funny!

On a tangentially related note, given that so many genuinely funny comedians are as pink as a Myrtle Beach sunrise, how come the average gathering of run-of-the-mill lefties is so serious it makes a Methodist church service look like a Three Stooges film festival? Saving the world is srs business?


*...and how many of them attended or approved of political protest events where a sitting president was burned in effigy? Irony is apparently a decadent bourgeois thing.


EDITED TO ADD: I'm also amused that it is apparently very Liberal to waive any Fourth Amendment warrant requirements in the case of alleged "threats". How P.A.T.R.I.O.T.ic!

Apparently the Bill of Rights is very situational. I guess one can expect that from people who wanted Gitmo shut down (and Right Now, dammit!) before 1/09 and then suddenly got all "Well, these things take time..." when it was their team carrying the water to the board.

FURTHER EDITED: Congratulations to this guy; he gets it. The rest just went into the usual "Yay, my team! Boo, their team! Us smart! Them dumb!" kneejerk response straight from the medulla oblongata that characterizes American political discourse today. ("Can you believe those people like [Joe Biden/Sarah Palin]? Whatta bunch of maroons!") That's me: A big ol' Limbaugh-lovin' wingnut...

Speaking of dull video games...

...remember when the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership* released a First-Person Non-Shooter?

It was a better argument for gun ownership than anything our side has ever done, because people probably went out and bought guns just to avoid being associated with something so painfully unhip and sanctimoniously douchey.


*Thanks, Unc!

Overheard in the Hallway...

RX: "On Soviet SyFy, shark jumps you!"

Given current events...

...I think it's time to trot out this Robb Allen classic again:

I Want You (to turn your head and cough.)

In my lifetime our national personification has gone from Uncle Sam to Uncle Badtouch.
.

Well, that's interesting...

Sitemeter occasionally coughs up some interesting hairballs. Check this guy out:

Click to embiggenate...

I wonder what the back story is behind this? Is he looking for a particular snitch? Is somebody actually maintaining a list of known snitches in Seymour? The world wonders...

That was yummy...

For a quickie dinner, some ribs from the Fresh Market and a bowl of chimichurri in which to dip made for shockingly good eats.

It was Warcrack night, and I was just glad the headset auto-mutes the mic when you fold the boom up. I'm sure the sounds as I was greedily getting every last shred of meat off the bones would have been pretty gruesome, but it was just a compulsion at that point.

Oddly, Derek Smart was not involved.

Was Outpost just too fast-paced and plot driven of a video game for you? Emperor of the Fading Suns not rambling and pointless enough?

Try Penn and Teller's tour de force of digital ennui, Desert Bus!

(Of course, they did have the advantage of actually setting out to make the most pointlessly dull video game ever, an excuse not shared by Sierra On-Line...)


(h/t to Claire Wolfe.)

A massive savings of time!

Because he's here to help, Robb Allen has condensed every post ever made on every firearms forum and gun blog ever into a handy one-page list. Because it's about guns, he used bullet points instead of numbers.

Go read it and print it out and keep it in your pocket. Then you can just consult it any time you have a firearms-related question when you're out at a gun store or gun show and save a bunch of bandwidth on your cellular plan.

Three Yards And A Cloud Of Dust...

When I first moved to Tennessee from Georgia, the Volunteer State had a relatively-new "Shall Issue" CCW law that they had largely cribbed from the then-recent one in Texas, albeit with some modifications like doing away with the requirement to conceal and the bizarre pistol/revolver qualification requirements.

It had some eccentricities of its own, however. For instance, you couldn't CCW into an establishment that served alcohol, which meant leaving the gat in the car if you went to lunch at Applebee's. Further, you couldn't even CCW into an establishment that sold alcohol for off-premises consumption, which meant un-strapping to go in and pay for your gas at the Quickie Mart at 0300.

Shortly after I moved there, the ridiculous ban on carrying into the grocery store lest you be overcome by the mind control waves emanating from the beer cooler was lifted. A few years ago they got rid of the prohibition on carrying into restaurants that served alcohol.

Following the passage of an imperfect CCW law, the restrictions are gradually being chipped away. The way things are going, it would not shock me to see Tennessee eventually go to permitless "Vermont/Alaska/Arizona/Wyoming/Arkansas-style" carry a few years down the road.

Similarly, a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth is being done over some of the idiocies and imperfections in Illinois' new shall issue law...

Let me repeat that: ...Illinois' new shall issue law... Man, talk about internet posts I wish I could send back in time to firearms forums thirteen or fourteen years ago...

Anyhow, the point is that the foot is in the door; the camel's nose is in the tent. As Claire Wolfe put it in a column in S.W.A.T. Magazine last July:

Instead, smaller groups working at state level practiced the art of the possible. When they couldn’t get everything they came for, they grimly settled for half a loaf and made plans to come back for the other half. This often put them at odds with the “all or nothing” purists (um, like us) within their own ranks. They resolutely ignored the naysayers and plugged away. They ultimately changed laws—and minds.

The single-issue activists started with nothing: scant organization, little funding, no widespread support, and active hostility among entrenched lawmakers. But they didn’t give way to despair.

Do you think the people in Illinois who have been busting their ass to make this happen are done now? I don't. Not by a long shot. People who've worked as hard as they have don't have any quit in 'em.

I'm not saying I'm hidebound, but...

"Hey, Tam! Did you hear about the new Gruntchunder A2 9mm that Nocturne Avia Imports is importing from Lower Slobbovia? Chuck Rockhard in Great Big Gun Monthly said its trigger reset is even shorter than his best 1911s and it has a bore axis lower than any other pistol on the market and they're sure to be a huge success! What do you think about 'em?"

I don't think about 'em. I mean, if you want to run out and buy one, fine, but if you fall off that rock and break your leg, don 't come running to me in five years complaining that you can't find holsters or spare mags.

I don't understand the urge to rush out and be an early adopter for every oddball new bottom-feeder that turns up on the market. For every Glock or HS-2000 that eventually becomes a sales success, there are dozens of flops destined to be curiosa and answers to the firearm owners version of Trivial Pursuit, like the Vektor CP1 or the Bernardelli P-01.

Of course, as the continued existence of Steyr M owners' clubs proves, sometimes the obscurity is the attraction...

QotD: Llama Edition...

From PDB on the current gunternet shenanigans:

Do be prepared to spend more than a couple hours peeling down the onion of butthurt. It seems that every drama was preceded by other drama. 

Indeed. From all I can tell, it's a butthurt wrapped in an agenda shrouded in a vendetta drizzled with pettiness and rolled in a crunchy nougat of simple greed.

That was freaky.

I had a pretty normal dream about going to gun school, except I still had that ratty black '84 Trans Am, which then segued into the closest thing to a nightmare I can remember having in a long, long time...

I was in the office, which was just like the office at Roseholme cottage except it had a walk-in closet. Bobbi spilled a bottle of iced tea and we were in the closet getting paper towels to clean it up. My little brindled calico cat was in there, too.

Brindled calico paperweight, for illustration.

At which point I clearly heard the basement door open and close and footsteps in the kitchen.

Bobbi, normally the jumpier of the two of us, didn't appear to hear anything as the footsteps grew closer.

I went out into the hall to confront whoever it was, and it was Bobbi. With my cat following her. Except the cat that was following her was half her regular color and half like a black & white photo.

I woke up with a start at that point, thoroughly creeped out. It was very Twilight Zone.

Schadenfreude.

The utter bafflement so plainly evident between the lines of this BBC piece warms the cockles of the place my heart would be if I had one:

Illinois has become the last state in the US to allow residents to carry concealed handguns, after lawmakers overrode the governor's veto.

I especially like this bit of strange fantasy speculation: "[O]pponents of the concealed carry law feared it would allow virtually unregulated possession of handguns in the city of Chicago, which is grappling with a severe gun violence epidemic."

I don't know where they're getting that idea, but I can tell you this: Chicago's current gun restrictions don't seem to be keeping people from dying like Tommies at the Somme, so why not try something different instead of more of the same, Marshal Haig?

Sorry for the delay...

...but internet drama ate my life for the last day or so.

Since sometime yesterday morning I have been completely absorbed, nay... hypnotized by watching people in a segment of the gunternet whacking each other over the head with their multicam man-purses.

I'm almost out of popcorn, here, though, so posting should resume shortly.

We're all middle class!

I overheard some maundering about the Sacred Middle Class today that inspired me to do some recycling:

This is maybe the only nation on the planet where the guy in the $500,000 house with a new Benz in the driveway and the single mom making $8/hr at the Food Lion and living in a single wide will both sigh and turn up the volume to listen in when the TV announcer says "A new threat to the Middle Class!", thinking he's talking to them.

Speaking of recoil control...

Saturday at the range we met up with someone Shootin' Buddy knows from work. She'd mentioned wanting to get some basic handgun familiarity since she was thinking about buying a pistol when they moved into their new home, and Shootin' Buddy isn't one to pass up a chance to do the Lord's Work, so she and her husband met us at Iggle Crick on Saturday morning.

After the initial safety briefing, I worked with her and Shootin' Buddy did likewise with her husband, running through basic safe manipulation and operation on an assortment of revolvers and self-loaders.

Unfortunately for when it came to explaining a good stance, the Best Visual Aid I've Ever Seen had left the range before the couple showed up...

A few lanes to my left when I arrived were three people I took to be a family group: Mom, dad, and adult son. Dad and son were both taller than me and dad was a big, buff dude where son had more of a swimmer's build.

They were taking turns shooting a full-size small frame Glock, either a 9 or .40. Junior would lean slightly into the gun, not in an exaggerated Magpul video crouch but with his weight definitely centered forward of his hips, and was shooting better than the run of the mill public range shooter.

Meanwhile, Senior was in the "Beginner's Lean": standing bolt upright and leaning back a bit at the waist. What would have made him such a valuable teaching aid was that, despite the fact that he was physically much bigger than the younger man, from the side you could plainly see the recoil rock his torso back slightly with each shot.

Basically, from the waist up he was slightly unstable due to his rearward lean; every time the gun went off, the few foot-pounds of recoil the Glock added to the system was enough to throw it out of balance. I wish I had the nerve to ask if I could video, because it was so textbook.

Update...

Yesterday, Claire Wolfe noted, in regards to l'affaire TJIC, that "(i)t’s ominous to hear nothing in these ‘Netly days. Anybody have later information?"

Oops. Sorry 'bout that.

For those of you following events, I talked to Jenn on the phone on Friday and received an email from Travis on Saturday. Everything was as good as could be under the circumstances: Nobody ended up in handcuffs or an ambulance.

I'll post up anything I get that's cleared for publication.
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "I'd love to have the resources to do a short video of a bunch of people, well dressed people in suits and skirts and dress shoes, wearing burlap hoods with eyeholes cut in 'em and standing outside a jail waving torches and making nooses out of microphone cords yelling 'Give us the killer! Send out Zimmerman!'"

RX: "Why, Tamara! You're not saying..."

Me: "Yeah, it's a $#@* media lynch mob."

As the prosecution's half-fast case sputters to a halt, the media's not even pretending to be dispassionate and unbiased reporters of events anymore. One of the morning cheerleaders at NBC all but asked their 'legal expert' if there was any argument the prosecution could use in closing to get this bad, bad man. ABC's analysis doesn't leave much doubt as to where they stand, either.

A year in a night...

I slept late because my dream went into overtime. Sorry 'bout that.

Let me stream-of-consciousness this before I forget all of it. Pardon any typos, this is a first draft straight outta the forebrain...

We were moving and Bobbi had gotten a huge old apartment in a big Victorian walkup in some apparently fictional dream city down in Appalachia someplace. East Tennessee? Western North Cackalacky? Hilly, winding streets, very old architecture in the town center.

Anyway, the building was half on a college campus, and I rolled up with the moving truck late at night, worried about the legality of all my old Mausers and Mosins. Bobbi, who was on her way to work the graveyard shift, assured me it was perfectly legal to have guns on campus, and so I backed the truck up as close to the building's entrance as I could and started carrying old rifles in by the armload and stacking them in the lobby. (For the price of a single nice AR-15, you can own more Mosins and rusty Gew.88 "Commission Rifles" than you can carry in three trips!)

As I was getting ready to carry a load up the staircase, a commotion happened around the corner and, like an idiot, I went to see what all the flashing blue lights were about. I left the rifles where they were in the lobby, figuring that a bunch of low theft value rusty five-foot-long Soviet tomato stakes would be safe unattended for a moment. I had been using the single-point sling on a carbine to carry it in the same load and, rather than leave it, I just trusted the fact that it was dark out to keep people from seeing the carbine I had half-covered with my shirt.

There had been some kind of stickup at a convenience store half a block away and a crowd had gathered and I rubbernecked from the dark out at the edge of the crowd. Totally spaced that I'd left a pile of surplus rifles stacked like cordwood in the apartment lobby until I noticed the sky getting light.

I hurried back, hoping nobody would see the carbine and freak out. When I got there, I found Bobbi, already home from work and in her pyjamas, hauling the last load of rifles up to the apartment and giving me a chiding look.

I sat down for a second before going out to move the truck, as it was getting on towards full light and the street out front was getting busy. When I got up to finish the chore, I was outside before realizing that the carbine had somehow come unhooked from the single-point sling and must still be in the lobby, next to the chair in which I'd been sitting.

Just as I was headed back in through the doors, this dude came bustling out past me with the gun, and I was all "Hey!" and he took off running.

"Hey! Stop that dude! He's got a stolen gun!" People are turning and looking and I'm running as best I can, but he's got a good 25-yard lead and opening it wider when he stops and turns and starts aiming the loaded carbine at me. Right there in front of God and everybody.

He's well down this broad flight of steps, standing behind a concrete planter that comes about waist-high on him. He fumbles with the folded stock for a second before leaving it alone and looking through the optic. I'm going for my holstered pistol and fortunately Dream Me's stolen carbine was an HK G36 and the guy can't find the charging handle and I squeeze off a single shot at probably 30 yards and he goes down like a sack of potatoes*...

...and I'm standing over him trying to keep a gun on him with one hand and pressing my cell phone on a bystander with the other "Call the cops! Call 911! This guy stole that rifle and tried to shoot me with it! Call 911!" and trying to remember everything from Massad Ayoob's MAG-40 class.

And everything was all jake and it was self-defense and I had witnesses a-go-go, which helped, no doubt.

The other disjointed part of the dream that sticks out is that I was taking a shortcut along a walking trail which skirted one edge of the campus, and it bordered this area that was all fumaroles and small volcanic cones and geysers and bubbling mud pits, which is odd topography for southern Appalachia. The local hovercraft enthusiast's club was out, and there were these two- and four-fan hoverbikes and personal hovercraft parked up all over the place. While the causes of all the other elements are fairly obvious, I have no idea how this part got into the dream.


*This part was interesting. I've been trying to get plenty of range time, and I do a lot of shooting strong hand only and weak hand only, and try to practice fundamental marksmanship, and improve my shooting skills, and in the dream, I was aware that this was a long and difficult shot and concentrated hard and was surprised at the effect of the first shot, fully having expected to need to fire more.  After the whole thing, when I reloaded after the incident (yes, the dream police even let me keep my heater. I want to move to Dreamville.) I noticed that the remaining rounds were all bound up in the magazine like the TulAmmo at Blogorado last year. I'd have had a second shot and then a *click*.

A philosopher has philosophized...

...that the way to solve the alleged gun violence problem the media keeps telling us we have in this country is to make us monobrowed gun owners civilly liable for the harm done with our gats if they are stolen. You see...

"One good consequences [sic] of strict liability is that people will take greater care of their arms, seeing, for example, that they do not fall into the hands of children or thieves. This is in keeping with my belief in personal responsibility."

That's a pretty odd notion of "personal responsibility" you have there. What about the thief's personal responsibility? Where does that come into the equation?

Oddly, I hear the same rationale used for burkhas.
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Gone shootin'...

Off to the range. My glacially slow splits ain't going to reduce themselves, you know.

And dammit for that being one thing that is just impossible to improve via dry fire and the ammo drought still being in full effect.

I need to work on recoil management and being able to track my sights; the former isn't going to get a lot better unless I start getting serious about working on my grip strength, either.

Place your bets...

Bobbi noted in her post yesterday that she's:

...half-convinced we have already passed the point where future historians will draw a line, saying, "Here the Republic ended; here the Empire began."

So where will they draw the line? Place your bets, not that we'll be able to pick a winner unless someone can hop in their DeLorean and do a couple of 88 mph laps around the block and bring us back an Intro To History textbook from 2213.

My guess? Future historians will note the time when a populist dictator claimed wartime exigencies to break with long-standing tradition and stand for a third term as consul.

...meanwhile, in American-occupied America...

I pedaled back from Fresh Market with a paper-wrapped bundle of ribeyes that was as big as my head. Bobbi was grilling those while I was on the phone with Jenn during the whole sordid invasion of TJICistan.

After dinner, we went outside and set off fireworks. Unfortunately, since I had picked up our fireworks supply from Kroger, it was all fountains, most of which were pretty, but lacked that whole fly-up-in-the-sky-and-go-'splodey thing that rockets have*. Fortunately the neighbors were carrying our slack in the rocket department, especially whoever was launching them from just across the Monon trail; those gorgeous starbursts going off with massive thunderclaps just above treetop height were probably in contravention of several international arms agreements.

It was still sticky and warm out, so I didn't bother throwing on a gun burkha. None of the thronging neighbors seemed especially fretted by the pistol on my hip or indeed took any notice of it at all, although now that I live in the city I don't wind up the display with a blank double-charge from a muzzle-loader or a few marine flares from a 12ga†. The squares don't seem too easily spooked, but we don't go out of our way to try, either; it's just neighborly not to.


*I imagine that rockets will be available at deep discount today at the seasonal fireworks joints that have sprung up in every empty storefront and defunct gas station around here. I should go get some. There's no law that says you have to set them off only on July 4th or January 1st...

†...and I definitely don't do that staple from holiday displays back when I lived on the lake, involving a blank-firing adapter and a full magazine of M200. While I'm not certain how that would square with city ordinances regarding the discharge of firearms, I see no need to find out. There are sacrifices that are made to live among the hippies and their brewpubs.

Cradle and Grave of Liberty, Part Deux...

Remember the TJIC incident?

Well, TJIC got his Massachusetts FID* reissued, and has reapplied for an MA LTC**.

Now the local po-po*** is surrounding his crib, wanting to inspect the premises. Without a warrant. In the suburbs of Boston. On Independence Day.

Is irony dead in this country?

I'd type more, but I'm on the phone with casa de TJIC and I need to light the beacon fire...


* FID: Firearm Identification. What you need to own a gun in MA.
** LTC: License To Carry: What you need to take firearms outside of your house in MA oustide of very restrictive circumstances. Comes in many flavors.
***Like, ten cops.

EDIT: See comments below for updates.
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Confidence...

When Huck* leaps at something, be it Rannie, who is much smaller than him, or a human who is much larger, there's no arching of the back or bottling of the tail or any of the vocalizations that cats use to psych themselves up and psych their opponent out, he just goes.

I'm not sure if it's the confidence of a kitten play-fighting or the confidence of a cat taking a squirrel. I do know that Bobbi wrestled with him from the time he was just a big kitten to the time he was fully grown, and he loved it, so maybe he thinks the whole world is still game for a little rough-and-tumble. Rannie is not amused.


*We don't know when he was born, but it was some time in the summer of 2010, so we arbitrarily assigned him July the 4th as his birthday. It seemed apropos.

Vobis Non Me Dux

When I was a child, after the sun went down on the fourth day of the month of July, the night sky around me was filled with the rattle of firecrackers and the whoooooshCRACK! of bottle rockets, and the horizon around me sparkled and blossomed with the sights and sounds of people turning money into colorful noise to celebrate the day, much like it will tonight.

What made it all so much more Independence Day back then was that all of those people had had to drive to neighboring states to buy those fireworks, and each skyrocket was a glorious, glimmering, 'splodey middle finger to the nannies and busybodies who live to tell other people what to do.

For at least one night a year, Mr. & Mrs. Buttoned-Down suburbanite were willing to get their wookie on and stand out in front of their house and break the law right in front of God and everybody; to write "Come And Get Me, Copper!" in flaming letters across the sky. It was the most glorious thing I've ever seen.

Happy You're Not The Boss Of Me Day, everybody!
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Hand on the Glock...

Ran fifty rounds of that steel-cased TulAmmo stuff through the Glock 19 on Sunday and so I swung by my Wally-World ammo fishin' hole to see what the situation was like...

No rimfire, no revolver calibers, a few boxes of .40 and .45 Federal FMJ, and about a half-dozen boxes each of Federal and TulAmmo 9x19. I bought my three-box-per-customer limit of the Federal at what would have been a decent price for .45 a year or two ago.

It's definitely getting to be about time to set up the press again.

I was pleased to note that rifle and shotgun ammo was largely back to normal levels.

There's a song in my heart!

I have promised myself to not be cynical on patriotic holidays, but pedaling back from Kroger with a bicycle basket brim-lippin' full of BATFE-compliant Class C Consumer Grade fireworks, my otherwise-unoccupied frontal lobes got to lyricizing...

Oh, beautiful for drone-filled skies
A tax code so arcane!
A voting class on their fat ass
From Houston to Fort Wayne!
America! America!
You voted stuff for free
You made your bed, ye overfed
Go watch some more TV!

There. I got that out of my system, and now I can be all festive and happy tomorrow.

Warcat.

Huck is pretty fearless and quite willing to tackle foes many times his size. The other day, for instance, when he was pacing the office floor restlessly and mewing incessantly because it was 37.5 minutes 'til dinner time, I made an aggressive palm-outward shooing/get-back motion towards his face with my hand.

Most cats will scurry away from that; instead, Huck leaped at my hand, which I barely got out of the way of flailing paws and gaping maw. "Yay! A fight!"

The last thing he needs is a suit of armor.

(via email)

There are two kinds of people in the world...

On one hand, you have people whose first response to anything bad happening is "Could passing another law have prevented this?" and on the other, people who want to choke the living $#!+ out of them.

Tumbleweeds and empty shelves...

We stopped by the local Mountain of Geese while I was hanging out with Brigid yesterday afternoon. It was depressing. The selection in centerfire handgun ball ammo was thus:

• Winchester Super X .30 Mauser, ~$80/50rds
• American Eagle 10mm Auto, ~$50/50rds
• Remington .32 S&W Long, ~$35/50rds

There was about a case of each, spread out in a single 1-deep/1-high row so that the thirty boxes covered the whole frontage of a single shelf.

I've never seen the like.

Tip-up reasoning?

In comments regarding the tiny pocket tip-up Berettas, reader Scott J notes:

"I think the original tip barrel designs were intended for use by dainty ladies with dainty hands lacking the strength to work a slide.

But that's just more picked up over 20+ years of gun ownership. I can't cite a definitive source so apply appropriate sized grains of salt."

Which got me to pondering...

I think the reason may have been that the tip-up barrel allowed them to dispense with an extractor on the pistol (on most small blowback pistols, the extractor is only needed for manually clearing the chamber; backpressure on the case handles the job just fine without mechanical assistance during the firing cycle.) Combine the lack of an extractor with an open-top slide, and you've enhanced both feeding and ejection reliability on a bitty little pocket gun.

I'm just spitballing here, though, if you'll forgive the metaphor...

Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi was reading the Wikipedia article on the Declaration of Independence:

RX: "'Some colonies held back from endorsing independence. Resistance was centered in the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.'"

Me: "It still is."

A certain distrust of liberty apparently has a long tradition in some of those areas.

Patterns in the clouds, ghosts in the machine...

The Giant Flying Storm Cow of Indiana.

"It felt best in my hand..."

One of the downsides to selecting a firearm based on how it feels in your hand in the gun store is that the only thing that tells you is that the gun feels good in your hand in the gun store.

It may feel great sitting static in your hand and be uncomfortable when you're actually firing it. It could torque annoyingly under recoil. It could pinch your finger painfully between the trigger and the guard.

One interesting problem I've run into is with the little tip-up double-action Beretta pocket pistols and their Taurus clones: If the shooter has long fingers and sticks their trigger finger in the guard up to the distal joint like they were pulling a double-action revolver trigger, the tip of their finger will bottom out against the left-hand grip panel or the frame before the trigger has moved far enough rearward to trip the sear. Not the kind of thing you notice just holding the gun in your hand.

A shooter in the class this weekend had a 9mm HK of some variety that was actually hurting her hand when she was firing, which wasn't conducive to accuracy. (It's hard to focus on the front sight and a smooth roll on the trigger when you're thinking "Oh, man, this is about to hurt!") She finished TD3 and shot her qualification on TD4 with my M&P and not only qualified, but was unanimously voted Most Improved by the staff*.

If you can get a chance to try before you buy, it can reveal things that just holding the unloaded gun in the store won't.


*The tradition in MAG classes is that the most improved student gets the target Mas shot on qual day signed by all the staff for a souvenir.

When you're a Jet you're a Jet for the rest of your life

I was rooting around in some boxes in the attic yesterday that were still packed from the move, looking for some .357SIG Gold Dots I could swear I still have someplace, when I happened to stumble across this Whitewolf/Walter Brend #2 auto knife:

It just magically appeared...

What a fortunate coincidence, since HB1563 became law yesterday, a portion of which bill repealed Indiana's archaic ban on switchblade knives, a ban ostensibly instituted to keep gangs of swarthy Puerto Rican youth from breaking into finger-snapping choreographed song-and-dance numbers in the Blackboard Jungle back in the day.

Personally, like everything illegal in Indiana, I blame John Dillinger, who must have done all his robbing with short-barreled shotguns and switchblades, when he wasn't buying cold beer in grocery stores* and shopping for cars and booze on Sunday.


*Indiana's weirdest booze law. You can get Jack Daniels at CVS 24/6 (buying booze on Sunday makes the Baby Jesus cry, unless you do it at a bar) and you can get chilled white wine at the grocery store, but only bars and liquor stores can sell refrigerated beer. That's right: The beer at the grocery store is sitting out warm on the shelf right next to the cooler for the white wine. This made sense to a majority of the state legislature for reasons that have yet to be successfully explained to me. It must have something to do with "π=3".
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Zombie Tam comes shuffling into the kitchen, repeating the morning TV weatherdude's predictions for the day:

Me: "Shotty spowers and chunderstorms!"

Speaking of zombies, I was quite pleasantly surprised with World War Z yesterday. It was a more substantial movie than I had been expecting.

I mean, it's still a great big summer action movie, not Terms of Endearment, but there's some actual acting going on. Brad Pitt seems to have tendered an application for Harrison Ford's old roles as the Everyman Hero who saves his family and finishes the movie with a bloody lip.

I am actually not at all a fan of zombie movies, but I might go back and catch this one as a matinee, just because a lot of the big scenes are so busy that I kinda want to see all the stuff that was going on in the background.