Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #69...

The other thing I did at the range on Sunday...

Moar 9mm shooting.

Last Day!

Final Push For Kilted To Kick Cancer!

VFTP loves underdogs and heartily supports Teams Atomic Nerds, Guns & Coffee, and McThag, but just go donate to somebody or other in support of this worthy cause.

It's not bigotry when we do it.

Bill Maher reminds everybody what he thinks about NRA members.

What I find interesting is how it's implicit in his attitude that all decent, right-thinking people, or at least all of them smart enough to operate a remote control, are in absolute agreement with him. "Gun owners! Am I right?"

Mr. Maher, there's a 'Pauline Kael' asking for you on line two?

Irked.

So, I post up something about some lousy ammo I got yesterday, and the comments start.

"Check the bases with a magnet and they will probably be steel," says one helpful numbnuts who didn't sign his comment.

Really? "Steel", you say?

Jesus wept, what kind of drooling simpleton do you think I am? We'll leave aside all the years where I, you know, ran a ____ing gun store and just focus on the fact that the shells are base-up in the sidesaddle. You think I might have noticed that they weren't yellow? That I use a magnet on a string to pick them up off the range floor and dump them in the trash, separate from the recyclable stuff?

I fix a shotgun in a hotel room two thousand miles from home with a %^&$ nail file and a month later I've got somebody trying to patiently explain 'chamber polishing' to me like I just fell of the turnip truck and bumped my head on my first firearm yesterday.

So, I'm going to throttle back on the firearms content. Instead, here...

I'm sure someone will be along shortly to explain "Now, Tamara, that's what we call a 'cat'. I don't know if you noticed, but he seems to be upside down."

Double shotgun!

I've about settled on plucking the rounds out of the sidesaddle with my thumb and forefinger and going over the top of the gun to throw them in the ejection port. It's faster for me and seems to involve less chance of me butterfingering the shell vis-a-vis thumbing it up into a waiting palm and then rolling it under the receiver.

Shootin' Buddy wanted to do a mini "Rolling Thunder" drill and, after finishing up a box of Federal target loads, I broke out a fresh box of Winchester shells and loaded up the gun. "You start," said Shootin' Buddy. Okay...

"FOOD RIOTS!†" *BOOM!"

*BOOM!* "Out!"

*BOOM! B...* Oh, sweet jebus what now?‡ The shotgun slide was locked firmly closed on the spent shell. Check bolt release, apply safety and, muzzle pointed downrange, place the butt against my hipbone and haul back mightily on the slide with both hands... c-lack! The empty shell is spit on the ground.

It looks normal.

Try again, and after one slightly sticky round, the gun locks up tighter than Dick's hatband. Same extraction drill. Shootin' Buddy glorps oil onto the action bars and onto the extractor, but everything's smooth in dry fire.

"Here, you try it," I suggest. He picks up the gun, fires one round, and the gun locks up. Now I don't think it's the gun.

I hand him a couple shells. "Try these in your gun." Same results.

The probable culprit: Winchester Super Speed 2 3/4" 12 ga. #8 Lot No. 55Y2GH24 from Wally World. There wasn't any noticeably increased recoil or obvious pressure signs on the spent rounds, and I'm no shotgun expert, but there you go.

One of the guys who works at the range spotted me a box of Estate birdshot, which was awfully nice of him, and the gun ran fine from there on out, except for one round that didn't eject cleanly. I rolled the gun to let gravity help and of course the spent shell was followed out the ejection port by the live one on the lifter. What're ya gonna do?

Anyhow, I'm definitely going to remember this the next time I get to hear Cletus telling me how he "likes pump shotguns, 'cuz they don't jam."


†You had to be there.
‡The range probably would have frowned on me clearing kydex with my pistol and finishing the drill.

Automotif XXII...

Good day for car-spotting in the Good Morning Mama's parking lot...

Convertiballin'! What have we here?

Looks like a 1967 Pontiac GTO...

...and Triumph TR6. Love the Union Jack licence plate surround!

I enjoyed a "stuffed burrito Sonoma" on the veranda. It was a splendid morning for it.

Automotif XXI...

Some daily drivers around Broad Ripple...

I'd say that this late-'60s Corvair hardtop sedan was one of the more unusual daily drivers in Broad Ripple but...

...yes, the "Floyd Van" is covered in carpet on the exterior and, yes, it says "10¢ A FEEL" across the hood.

I wish the Corvair sported my favorite vanity plate I've ever seen on one: "F NADER".

Overheard in the Office...

RX: "I like old British cars. They remained 'human scaled' a lot longer than ours."

Me: "The worst part though was after the war, when the socialists took all their automotive stylists out and made them kneel in a row beside a ditch and shot them. After that, their cars looked like their handguns. The 1950s produced some spectacularly ugly little cars in England..."

RX: "Yes, but they'd been bombed a lot and drank heavily, so some of those cars were the equivalent of waking up in the night screaming."

This somehow came from a discussion of "trafficators".

"Bill, just admit it..."

When your super realistic tactical alternative to USPSA allows shooting through "no penalty vision barriers" shaped suspiciously like innocent bystanders in order to hit the "bad guy" targets, its value as a super realistic tactical alternative to USPSA is called into question.

This is amplified when someone who uses a laser or mini red dot or carries AIWB can't use their street gun in your "street gun competition" and has to use special game gear to play. On the equipment front, IDPA is becoming a version of SASS that looks fondly back on the previous century instead of the one before that: Instead of Cowboy Action Shooting, it's '90s Action Shooting. Maybe instead of fishing vests, you could have participants dress like Ethan Hunt or Nash Bridges?

Tab Clearing...

• And who wouldn't want to live in Willa Minga Honga? Or Tongue of Gangsta?


• How to think like a liberal thinks conservatives think about gun control.


• The word "gun" is uttered somewhere in the Five Boroughs. Sales of adult incontinence products soar.

The biggest head in the little talking box.

Should have seen the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs. Zimmerman on the Today show this morning.

It was hard to decide who was more repugnant: Her or Princess Lauer.

What I did find amusing was the idiocy of the odious Matt Lauer* as he first destroys her credibility by recalling her perjury charges and pointing out that people in the middle of divorces sometimes have very... subjective opinions of the people they're breaking up with, and then he goes on to ask what she thinks really happened on the night Trayvon got hisself shot.

Matt, you dolt, if you want us to believe what she says, you can't first tell us to not believe anything she says.

The dumb, smug "Gotcha!" look on his face as he leaned back after coaxing the "...and I really don’t know what he’s capable of," line out of her made me want to wipe it off with a fireplace shovel. He looked as proud as a kid who'd just pulled the wings off a fly (which, come to think of it, was probably a hobby in his younger days.)

*I have a serious loathing for Matt, in case you can't tell. He's practically a caricature of the egotistical monster of a TV celeb, and it's only made more obvious by the inclusion of people like Al Roker or Willie Geist on the set. I doubt I share a more than a handful of viewpoints in common with either of the latter, but I can easily imagine having a beer with them. Lauer? Compared to him, Robert Patrick's character in T2 was a paragon of empathic humanity.

ProTip: Hydrate or die!

So, last night was a Warcrack night, and I stayed up a little past my bedtime and there are... hmm... fewer beers in the refrigerator this morning than there should be.

If y'all will pardon me for a moment, I'm going to go take the First Lady's advice and drink a whole bunch of water. With aspirin. Back in a mo'.

(Incidentally, if you are into wheat beers, I highly recommend the fine products of Boulevard Brewing. I'm on something of a wheat jag, and they have a variety to choose from, all of which are exceptionally yummy.)

Discussion in comments elsewhere...

From a (thus far) polite discussion with an antigun-type elsewhere...

“You want to carry a gun because as a tool, it has force.”

Maybe I want to carry a gun because it matches my shoes.

“It can maim or kill me.”

No it cannot. It is entirely inert.

“Provided we have no intend to harm each-other, you caring a gun is unnecessary within our theoretical meeting.”

Provided I have no intent to email anyone, my carrying an iPad is unnecessary within our theoretical meeting. (But if my heart held the hidden malice you keep implying it does, you would not want me holding a one-and-a-third pound slab of metal and tempered glass, would you?)

“In this meeting, you with a gun, me without, some chance of mishap exists.”

How? Do I get possessed by a Zortian brain slug? Do you go crazy and try and grab my gun? I’m trying to find this “element of risk” and not spotting it and all I get is hand-waving in response.

“You carry your gun to potentially, or purportedly, thwart crime. ”

You have no idea why I carry a gun, nor is it really any more business of yours than why I picked the color undergarments I am wearing, as you are extremely unlikely to catch a glimpse of either barring a dramatic wardrobe malfunction.

“ My risk/reward calculation tells me I don’t want you around with a gun.”

Fortunately my Supreme Court says that what you want has very little bearing on the matter. People in hell want ice water. You want me to not carry a gun. It’s good to want things.

Here’s some thoughts on which to chew:
#1) I think it is highly unlikely that I will ever need a firearm to save my live.
#2) I have already been wrong about #1 on more than one occasion.

(I usually avoid this internets debate stuff like the plague because both parties wind up talking past each other, but he seemed polite and willing to engage, so what the hell... )

My honest and happy LOL for the day.

Few things say "I feel pretty!" as well as a weskit and a SMLE with the bayonet affixed. The Sheffield steel makes him literally a sharp-dessed man.

I usually don't use emoticons in blog posts, but this seems to call for one. :D

Mediocre special effects; B+.

Indianapolis: Where obviously fake matte paintings of sci-fi skyscrapers loom in the background.

Low-risk bet.

So what are the odds that the news that at least some of the tangos who shot up the mall in Nairobi were Americans is going to somehow lead to Piers Morgan calling for AR-15s to be banned?

I'm thinking that bet is better odds than putting all your cash on black at the roulette table, if not quite as sure a thing as betting on the Colts against a random Pop Warner team.

QotD: Guaranteed To Make Your Beard Grow A Beard Edition

Linking to pdb's epic post on firearms advertising, WeaponsMan writes:

In a way, this kind of ad is a classic Appeal to Authority, psychologically no different from the TV spot where the guy or gal in a white lab coat urges you to buy some useless dietary supplement, or the more direct one where “four out of five dentists recommend….” It’s saying, basically, “A shortcut to your carbine decision is to rely on the decision that guys like the one in the photo have already made.” To put it even more briefly, “Choose Colt. The Army did.”

Awesome post and worth reading in its entirety.

(On a tangential note, a lot of points in there make a good bookend to the "Rule of Uncommonness".)

That was interesting...

I ran through an abbreviated round count at the range Sunday, thanks to the slowly-easing ammo drought. A hundred rounds of .22LR, and fifty each of 9x19 and 12ga.

It is going to take a lot more dry practice before I can smoothly thumb a shell out of the sidesaddle, brass up, and roll it under the gun and into the ejection port. I can do it a lot easier over the top, and I'm beginning to wonder if the odds of someone sneaking into my house and putting an optic on my gun make it worth continuing to work on the under-the-gun version.

Bobbi's friend brought along a couple of neat old pieces that I'd never fired before: A Whitney Wolverine and a Winchester 1903. The Wolverine pointed well and, with Remington Thunderbolts, shot into a tight little cloverleaf somewhere behind the front sight blade and just under the bull. If Flash Gordon needed to shoot beer cans on Planet Mongo, this is what he would have used.

WOLVERINE!

The 1903, Winchester's first autoloading rifle, shot like a champ. Unbelievably mild and wonderfully mechanical, the clatter of the action being transmitted through your hearing protection pretty much drowned out the almost airgun-like report of the round.

Sorry for the unaccountable lack of focus. Blame Samsung. Or me for not having snapped more than one pic.

Blog find...

For those of you who are planning on hitting Indy for the NRA Annual Meeting next year and were wondering about chow ideas, here's a blog find: This Ain't No Bistro.

Dude's a retired chef and restaurateur and he and a buddy do lunch together once a week in some non-chain joint around Indy, anything from soul food kitchens to burger bars to some of my local faves in SoBro and The Ripple Proper. Plus, he likes Flat 12 and Sun King microbreweries and the Smoking Goose Meatery and name-checks Beech Grove Firearms and Wannamaker Guns in a couple posts, so I don't know how I haven't read his blog before. I'll bet we've eaten lunch or gone shootin' in the same place at the same time at least once in the last couple years.

It probably helps that we walk the same turf, but I found it interesting enough that I read through his archives yesterday afternoon.

(A very grateful h/t to Bobbi.)

Under the bridge...

Your l'œil just got tromped.

Skiffy.

I recently purchased and read Peter Grant's novel, Take The Star Road.

It was very reminiscent of Heinlein's juveniles, a bildungsroman that follows an earnest orphan as he sets off to make his way in the universe. It is clearly written and well edited, well ahead of most self-published stuff and better than some mass-market published genre fiction.

Since Heinlein's early works were marketed at an audience of literal Boy Scouts, his viewpoint characters were squeaky clean and painfully earnest and Grant's Steve Maxwell is no different, despite not having to pass muster with the editors of Boy's Life. Incidentally, this leads to the one really jarring note in the book for me: a seduction-followed-by-off-camera-nookie scene early in the book that seemed totally out of character for the protagonist and could probably be written out of the book without distracting from the story.

Our hero also begins the book as something of an incredible kung fu badass for an otherwise wet-behind-the-ears teen, but this becomes sort of central to the plot and so is not necessarily any worse than finding out that somehow J. Random Hobbit has the magic ring that can rule the world.

As the intended first novel in a series, there's a lot of exposition and world-building going on front of you, some of which is obvious but most of which is easily blended into the experiences of Young Kid Seeing Big Universe For First Time. An awful lot of kung fu-ing goes on, and one's feelings about that will probably affect one's feelings for the book.

I'd give it three stars out of five and will probably buy the second book in Kindle format to see what happens with young Steve.

Incidentally, Peter has also recently released a non-fiction memoir of his time as a chaplain in the federal prison system: Walls, Wire, Bars and Souls. Having known the author for many years, I am looking forward to reading it.

How ya like me now?

Drones are harmless observers, an unquestioned good for the safety and security of the sta... wait? You mean ordinary people can buy those things? And they could theoretically be used to harm important people?

Well, we'll just have to take a look into some laws and regulations!

Unfair.

I bag on the IMPD a lot for their ongoing public relations crisis surrounding some high-profile OWI (officering while intoxicated) cases, so it's only fair that I report that the department has another side as well.

In the wee hours of last Friday morning, on the northwest side of town, a dirtbag who had recently been released from prison where he'd been serving time on felony dope charges got into an altercation with his girlfriend. Whatever the altercation was about, this guy figured that his domestic issues could be resolved by holding his girlfriend and her baby at gunpoint in their apartment.

At some point, she got out onto the balcony and screamed for help. A neighbor called the cops. There was the sound of gunfire from inside the apartment.

IMPD officer Rod Bradway was first on the scene and apparently engaged in some shouting through the locked door with the dirtbag and, when the man's girlfriend started screaming again, Bradway kicked in the door and went through.

The dirtbag had been hiding behind the door and opened fire, catching Bradway in the side, between the front and back panels of his vest. Bradway returned fire as he fell, and apparently his covering officer killed the dirtbag, but Officer Rod Bradway died of his wounds.

But he fell forward, with a gun in his hand, doing the right thing; risking his life to save another.

There are a lot worse things to have carved on one's tombstone.
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That turned out well...

One thing I like about digicams is that the cheap storage makes it like having the proverbial infinite monkey in your hands. If I just take enough pictures, I occasionally wind up with one like this:

That was a pleasant surprise to find on the CF card when I got home.
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Long fun day.

They need a paddleboat terminus at both ends so when you walk down, you can float back.

Range trip in the morning and walked the canal downtown in the afternoon. Wore slap out. Lots of pictures to edit. More later.

Automotif XX...

Seen yesterday in Rochester, IN:

1930 Chrysler. Sign in the window says "$12,000 firm" if anybody's interested.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #68...

Smith & Wesson Model 57 .41 Magnum. "Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."

A phenomenon I have noticed...

How come you'll have a guy obviously on a budget with, say, a Hi Point in an $8 sausage sack flopping off his JC Penneys canvas belt...

And it'll be stuffed with $5/round sintered Nytrillium* prefragmented ammo that came in a blister pack with pictures of rappelling ninjas on it.

These will be polished like the family silver and never fired. I assume each and every badly set-back one will be accounted for at his deathbed and handed down to Cletus Jr., or something.

"POA/POI? What's that?"


*You won't find "Nytrillium" on your periodic table because it's an alloy, composed of 20% Hype and 80% BS...

Sorry for the delay...

Been on the road, picking up some custom work. Had the triggers on my Model 57 and Model 296 worked over.

The 296 is really nice, but the trigger on the 57? That thing is now darn near the platonic ideal of a carry N-frame DA trigger pull. Like buttah, and yet with authority on the return. It's a set of C&S or Bowen sights and some Eagle Secret Service Grips away from being about perfect for me.

Pics to follow.
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Shoddy mass production...

Contractor that vetted Snowden says it also ran background check for Navy Yard shooter

What so many recent incidents reveal is a need for a revamp of the very concept of secrecy and security clearances in the .mil/.gov world from the ground up.

By declaring so many things to be secret, we have created a need for legions of people with clearances. In order to process those legions of clearances for less than the GDP of Bolivia and before the heat death of the universe, we wind up subcontracting out to mass producers what should be an in-house cottage industry done by dedicated craftsmen.

This modern world...

I needed a wheelbarrow, hygiene products, beer, deodorant, soda, a memory card, and shotgun shells. In America, this means one thing: A trip to WalMart.

I was dismayed to wander their vast garden department and discover that apparently wheelbarrows are no longer a thing? At least at this Wally World they weren't. Nor were there any nice wagons in the toy department I'd trust for garden cart duty.

Off to Sporting Goods for some ammo. There were a couple boxes of Federal 9x19 and about a case of TulAmmo, and stocks of .40 and .45 were back to normal levels. Deuce-deuce was still completely absent save five boxes of CCI Stingers.

Even though the "3 Box Limit" sign was gone, I decided to ration myself to a box of Federal 9mm, a 50-round value pack of Remington L223R3V to help replenish stocks after the CTC match, and a box of shotgun shells. I looked around for someone in Sporting Goods to help me, but found no one.

Nor did I find anyone in the adjacent departments: Toys, Automotive, Housewares, Lawn & Garden, Hardware... the entire northern fourth of the store was like the Empty Quarter, devoid of blue-shirted life.

I returned to Sporting Goods, where another customer had showed up at the ammo cases. He was calling his buddy about the inventory levels, asking if he wanted the Federal 9x19. I informed him that I was waiting on one of the boxes myself. He was cool with that.

I pulled out my own cell phone, used the portable magic elf box to get the phone number of the 73rd Street Wally World (2.2 out of 5 stars in Google!) and called the front desk, informing them that I was calling them from inside their own store, and could they get somebody in Sporting Goods?

*Customer needs assistance in Sporting Goods. Customer needs assistance in Sporting Goods.* came over the intercom.

By this time, a third person had showed up, looking for help. We chatted a bit. Still nobody.

I called the front desk again. She explained there was a manager's meeting going on, but she'd try to get somebody back there.

*Customer needs assistance in Sporting Goods. Customer needs assistance in Sporting Goods.* again.

Another couple showed up seeking assistance, this time with questions about fishing stuff. There was now a little knot of us, growing increasingly agitated. I checked my watch. I'd been waiting twenty-five minutes at this point.

I pulled out the magic elf box again, and looked something up on the internet. The number I was looking for was 1-800-WAL-MART.

"Hello, yes, I do wish to discuss my shopping experience. The one I'm having now. Yes, right now. I'm standing in the Sporting Goods department of your store at 7325 Keystone Avenue in Indianapolis, and have been standing here for twenty-five minutes despite two calls to the front desk..."

The person on the other end was polite and helpful sounding. Less than five minutes after I hung up...

*Will a salaried member of management pick up the phone? Corporate on line one. Will a salaried member of management pick up the phone? Corporate on line one.*

Two minutes after that somebody showed up with the keys to the case and got us our ammunition with a quickness, as well as a level of obsequious toadying that would please a Whole Foods customer. You'd have thought we were a trade delegation from Dubai and not a handful of J. Random Customers needing shotgun shells.

Five minutes later, as I was pushing my cart through the grocery department, my phone rang. It was Josh or Justin or Dustin or somebody from Bentonville, sincerely asking me if everything had been resolved to my satisfaction and was I having a pleasant shopping experience? Why, yes, Josh or Justin or Dustin, I am now, thanks to you guys at corporate. You need to crack the whip on this store more often.

I'll tell you what, they may have the occasional substandard store, but as a company? WalMart isn't playing around.

Rebels!

Some folks announce they will flout Mr. Schultz's wishes...

They see me sippin' They hatin' Patrollin' Tryin' ta catch me latte-in' dirty. #Starbucks
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 19, 2013

Tab Clearing...

Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie Trailer Time!

In A World

...where opacity stands in for sophistication, ennui for enlightenment...
...where politicians fiddle while their soldiers burn...
...where the disconnected coastal urban elite fears that the Wednesday-night bowling leagues of the shepherdless subliterate proles in flyover country are hotbeds of fascism...

I especially like the Sunstein piece. You get the feeling that there's a certain frisson accompanying his fears of a Wednesday Night Church Supper Putsch.

What narrative?

If a mass shooter had been a registered Romney-votin' Republican cracker driving a Ford Earthf***er with a website registered under the name "Patrick Henry" we would not be hearing the end of it.

Instead, I hear the NBC newscaster in the next room intoning "...and he had a website registered [garble] 'Mohammed Salaam' although he apparently never used it..." and I'm all "Wait! What? Is that 'Mohammed' with two 'M's? Was it the domain name, or on the Whois or what?" but a Google search gets me... crickets*. Hell, this guy still only has two names.

EDIT: Commenter -chaz- points out that great minds... or at least bloggers who live or have lived in the 865... seem to think alike. Sweartagawd I hadn't read that yet.

*Oh, except articles about the DC police chief complaining about the lack of gun control laws. Joe Biden, do you know where your shotgun is?

Wonderful wakeup

I don't know what woke me up, but the percussive sound tickled at the edge of half-awake hearing... 

*boom*

Huh. The neighbor just chucked a wine bottle into her recycling bin. But why is the bin still empty on Thu...

*Boom-Boom-Ba-Boom!*

Oh, jeez, that sounds like gunfire in a house nearby. That's a lotta shots, though. Maybe IMPD has some dude corne...

*K-KBOOM!*

Holy_! There was no time between the flash and the noise, and then the sound of fat raindrops smacking the window mixed with the clatter of the occasional hailstone clattering on the patio.

From the audio alone, it was obvious that if I'd been standing on open prairie instead of in a bed in a house in a wooded city, I'd have been able to watch this thunderboomer come striding at me on legs of lighting.

A bit of a break in the drought, finally.

When the TeeWee came on, the morning drive-time traffic chick was showing live footage of one of the traffic cams. In a bit of unusual frankness (or an example of internal monologue becoming external) she intoned "...And here's the intersection of Number and State and... the signal appears to be out. The drivers should be treating this as a four-way stop, which they're not. We're going to have a wreck here." Then she segued to the state of the local interstates.

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "Looks like the media has just discovered pump shotguns can be 'devastating'..."

RX: "I thought Joe Biden already told them that. Didn't they listen?"

"You still got tased."

I'm not normally what you'd call a huge fan of indie rockumentaries, so I initially went to see this movie more to show willing than anything else. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that I want it on DVD; it made my inner wookie-suiter happy and all toe-tappy. Also, I can hardly wait for the soundtrack, which I am told will be made available.

Farmer Frank informs us that it is available on Hulu now. Recommend.
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This one wins All The Internets.

Want to really sting a Seattle Progressive? Watch how it's done:

@Cameron_Gray Looks to me like @starbucksnews has adopted "Don't ask - Don't tell" about carrying in their stores.
— Tom Reynolds (@Beregond) September 18, 2013

Bazinga!

As Insty would say, "heh"...

AR-15 Was Used in Navy Yard Shooting...by Police to Stop Aaron Alexis - Katie Pavlich http://t.co/e6K5opSCSV
— E.A.Crosby (@Emilio_Crosby) September 18, 2013

QotD: Nearly Perfect Overlap Edition

"I'd like to see the boolean chart overlap of the people who sling an AR and go get coffee and the people who complain about Gay pride parades "shoving it in our faces"."

Reader Joseph in comments to the Starbucks post.

The more I think on it, the more I think the "AR in Starbucks" is an almost exact analogy to the "bearded guys in wedding dresses kissing on the float in the Pride Parade". There's a weird boundary area around over-the-top speech that is legal, Constitutionally-protected, and probably inappropriate for the venue.


PS: Personally, I think the guys on the float should be carrying ARs. If you're going over the top, you might as well go all the way over.

PPS: Bobbi points out that the hypothetical dudes on the float have better legal standing than the hypothetical guy in Starbucks: They are, after all, not treating someone's private property as though it were the village commons.

"No dogs or Irish..."

"...but even if you are Irish, we won't ask you to leave. We don't want to cause a stink or make a scene; we just don't like Irish people that much. But we'd still appreciate their money, if there was some way they could give it to us without being so... Irish-y about it."

Well, the seemingly inevitable end result of noisy campaigns by a tiny handful of Nanny Do-Gooders combined with an equally tiny handful of people who thought Starbuck's carefully vague stance on firearms was a ringing endorsement of shopping there while still dolled up from their "Battle of Fallujah" reenactors' club meeting has occurred.

So, Starbucks, in your corporate memo, laden with terms familiar to anybody familiar with modern progressive-speak (seriously, could you not have worked "trigger warning" or "safe space" in there someplace?) you have informed me what you think of me and my kind.

Back when you were carefully neutral on the topic, I expressed my appreciation the best way I could: I patronized your establishment, despite your synthetically-chic, faux-Seattle-hip chain coffee house being plopped down in the middle of my artsy in-town neighborhood full of authentically hip neighborhood coffee houses. I didn't wave my gun around or carry picket signs. Most of my fellow patrons, unless they were trained observers, never noticed I was armed. My support of your neutrality, which was all I asked for, showed up in the only place it really mattered to you: Your bottom line.

You will not have that support anymore; I will be patronizing my real Bohemian neighborhood coffee houses. Maybe their owners don't like guns either, but they haven't taken the time out of their busy day to tell me to keep my filthy gun (and, by extension, the nasty gun-owner to which it is attached) out of their establishment.

When I am politely asked to not give someone my money, it would be rude of me to ignore their request.

Good day sir.

QotD: I Know You Are But What Am I? Edition...

From Sebastian on the modern internet political debate tactic of getting to pick the other guy's team for him and then holding him accountable for everything they said:

Politics is increasingly becoming people shouting at each other in a cartoon world.

Word.

In the middle of the night, a makeshift hot air balloon drifts over the concertina-topped wall...

The Cradle and Grave of Liberty is losing another part of its tax base and Free America is getting another citizen.

Congratulations, Jay!
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The Media Agenda in only 1000 words:

NBC's life-like computer graphics exact reconstruction of yesterday's events:

Note how the evil Red state shooter is using the entirely imaginary didn't happen AR15 with underslung grenade launcher to mow down hapless Blue state peaceful Democrat victims.

What media bias?

(H/T to Andrew Stiles and Mad Saint Jack who caught the sly use of the approved media color palette.)

If I had an a-hole cousin from England, he'd look just like Piers Morgan...

@TamSlick That, or better immigration laws...
— Louis Brown (@LouisBrown16) September 17, 2013

The obvious response? "That's racist!"
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Getting ahead of the curve...

Well, the shooter lived in Texas, so I think it's safe to say that this is Bush's fault.
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 17, 2013

Common Sense Gun Legislation!

I think I can stand side-by-side with Senator Feinstein and call for legislation making it illegal to forcibly take people's assault weapons.

Finally, something our sides can agree on!

Test pattern...

While I try and generate something content-like here, feast your eyes on the ultimate accessory for the rootin' tootin'  S.A.S.S. dad in your life.

(via email)

Going for the easy layup...

Shooter took guns from downed guards? Time to close the Castle Wolfenstein loophole!
— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 16, 2013

Overheard in Email...

From an email thread taking imaginary bets on how early garbled reports will compare to reality once everything calms down in DC (and how the early, garbled reports will be used to gin up all kinds of conspiracy theories):

Me: "Washington Post reporting witnesses saying bald black dude in fatigues with AR."

Caleb: "Oh man, it's Dorner back from the dead! His death was staged by the illuminati!"

Zombie Chris Dorner: That's the best conspiracy theory yet.

Currently, my chips are on the square marked "'Workplace Violence' à la MAJ Hasan."

Overheard in the Office...

RX: "________ was driven mad."

Me: "Weren't they close enough that they could have gotten out and walked?"

Okay, I can kinda see their point on that one...

When someone brings up the team name of the Atlanta Braves, one can always counter with the Dallas Cowboys or Cleveland Cavaliers. (If the latter move to Rochester, will they keep the alliteration and change to the Roundheads? One wonders.) When the Cleveland Indians are brought up, one can retort with the Boston Celtics or Minnesota Vikings.

But the Washington Redskins? Uh, we are polite enough to call Notre Dame the "Fighting Irish" and not the "Drunken Micks", after all, and "Redskins" is something of a pejorative, albeit one that is largely a creation of Hollywood serials rather than actual 19th Century bigotry.

Bobbi's proposed solution of renaming them the "Ofays" for a few years lacks the proper sting; perhaps a more suitably local term? The Washington Tax Leeches, perhaps?

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #67...

WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU.

The stage gun from Stage 6, a teeny little PWS piston SBR with da switch. Basically you went running around a plywood shoothouse with this thing, while wearing a pair of PVS-14s. The gun had a laser on it and there were two 30-round mags in the gun; there were fifteen targets, so I left it on "semi" and saved myself a mag change on the clock.

Let me tell you, crawl up on the stock of an unsuppressed ~7" AR and the muzzle blast is... noticeable.

Truth in advertising...

I'd never fired a grenade launcher before.

I mean, I've fired a bunch of 37mm "grenade launchers", usually just popping a flare into the sky over the lake or what-have-you, but actually launching a grenade with the intent to hit something? That was completely outside of my skillset.

The FN40GL has a true DAO trigger so that Pvt. Snuffy can give a recalcitrant primer as many do-overs as he wants* without having to re-cock the weapon. When mounted on its stand-alone shoulder-stock doohickey, it is strange to fire because this long, light, vague trigger is most easily accessed by the traffic finger rather than the more usual digit.  Combine that with uncertainty over what recoil will be like and it makes one hesitate to snug up a good cheek weld on that metal rod of a stock to use the irons.

I was supposed to hit a car some distance downrange. Fifty yards? Seventy-five? With an orange practice marker grenade.

Fortunately there was a green Crimson Trace RailMaster laser clamped to one of the acres of Picatinny rail on the thing. "Just hold it where the trim strip on the door is... er, where it used to be... and be smooth on the trigger and you'll hit it, no problem," said the helpful RO.

The range officers on Stage 9 were so helpful because even on the second night of the match, they still got the giggles every time a marker grenade hit the car. It really is the simple things in life that are the most fun.

I held my head up like a prairie dog watching the green dot on the derelict Subie's door panel rather than snugged down watching the front sight like a good shooter, partly because of recoil paranoia and partly because, hey, I wanted to see the grenade hit, too.

FOOP!

pause...

POOF! Direct hit! Orange marker dust spattered everywhere. w00t!

You can see the orange on the berm from people who didn't listen to instructions.

Recoil was negligible, especially considering that I'd just lobbed a several ounce projectile out of something that felt about as substantial as a Nerf gun. And the laser? The laser made it stupid easy. If you could hold the dot still and pull a DA trigger properly, all you had to do was hold the dot where they told you and you literally couldn't miss.

In this case, the laser was practically cheating. If I'd realized the laser was that dialed in, I'd have shot it from the hip, just because.


*I don't know the exact logic behind this, but I think I'd treat the possibility of a 40mm hangfire differently than a 5.56mm one, too.

That's no way to start your day...

Meet The Press this morning. Yeah...

I have seen, live on my television, the yammering mugs of David Gregory, John McCain, Bob Woodward, Barney Frank, and Hank Paulson, all before breakfast.

Robin Wright was looking particularly like Bride Of The Crypt Keeper this morning. I kept worrying she was going to devour Tom Friedman's soul before I remembered he didn't have one. It says something that the least loathsome person on that particular panel was the chief foreign affairs correspondent for NB-fricking-C.

Then, totally gratuitously, as if just to make sure I was completely off my feed, there was about three minutes of Gregory and the odious Chuck Todd giving each other tongue baths while chanting a hymn to the Dear Leader before the credits rolled.

I do this to myself to get blogfodder, but it would be equally inspiring and less objectionable to just... I don't know, hold my cheekbone to a running bench grinder or something.

I'm not really shotgun people but...

I had so much fun at the first Crimson Trace Midnight 3 Gun match shooting Iain Harrison's FN SLP that when I ran across a New-Old-Stock Remington 870 smoothbore slug gun earlier this year for a reasonable price, I snatched it up.

Once I got the bugs ironed out (or filed off, as the case may be) I had a tremendous amount of fun running it at this year's match, too. I had forgotten just how... kinesthesiologically satisfying it is to run a pump gauge at speed. Boom! shalakalak Boom!

See the shells in the sidesaddle there? I'm doing it wrong.

 Love the Magpul stock, and I say that as someone who, when she first saw the Magpul shotgun furniture, thought "Okay, the guys at Magpul have jumped the shark now, because that looks flimsy and ghey." Despite my treatment of the 870 which, like most of my guns intended as range toys and sporting goods rather than collectibles, varies between neglect and mild abuse, nothing on the stock has broken or fallen off yet.

Surprisingly, I haven't injured myself with the (optional) rear sling loop. If a klutz like me didn't hurt herself, it's probably safe for normal people.

One of the advantages of a pistol grip on a shotgun is that it allows people without superhuman forearm strength to hold the gauge comfortable shouldered with one hand. Unfortunately, the downsides are that it pokes out awkwardly when the weapon is slung, makes operating the 870 safety a pain, and some don't like what it does to the handling of the gun. The Magpul stock gives the advantage of the pistol grip, in that even my wimpy wrist can keep the shotgun shouldered with just my strong hand, and hasn't any of the disadvantages. (Well, maybe it wouldn't handle as well as an English stock if I took this thing hunting for upland birds...)

The Mesa sidesaddle holds the shells with a death grip. Now that it's a little worn in, you no longer need to beat the rounds in with a rubber mallet*, but they're still awful snug. Even given how tight it holds them, though, you probably want to keep the shells brass-up; even the mild recoil of low-brass bird shot was causing reloads in the side-saddle to "walk" downward, so why tempt gravity?

In the lighting department, my experimenting has left me convinced that the SureFire forend is the industry standard for a reason. If you want a light on your gauge, this is probably the way to go unless you have a technique- or situation-specific reason to use something else.

I have a Magpul forward sling attachment doohickey en route, and that will probably finish the shotgun project from the hardware side of things for the foreseeable future.

Whether or not I install ghost rings and/or a red dot remains an open question. I haven't had any real difficulty with the factory rifle sights, but then I haven't had any really challenging shooting problems with it yet. We'll see.

When it comes to shotguns, I can't recommend this thread at p-f.com highly enough. There's more hands-on, real-world experience with running a gauge in those five pages than there is in some whole fora. It should be stickied, if not made into an e-book.


*Only moderate exaggeration.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #66...

Oleg's KelTec KSG from the LuckyGunner Blogger Shoot back in '11. Despite coonfingering several of them, I still haven't fired one.

QotD: Worst Job In The World Edition...

Adaptive Curmudgeon won all the internets with this one:

I’m referring here to the unnamed person who, in secret, was ordered to justify spying on all Americans. Imagine that job! I’ve shoveled shit. I’ve dug ditches. I’ve worked in brutal cold, blistering heat, dangerous environments, long hours, and I’ve even had to fly to Newark… but no job has ever asked me to shave off a piece of my soul and burn it on my bosses desk.

Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi is proofreading a post...

RX: "Darn stupid dyslexia. It's getting where I can't tell a 'p' from a 'q' from a 'b' from a 'd'. I turned a rabid dog into one that was merely quick."

Me: "That's going on the internet."

I don't know how I missed this...

Schultz said he even called for a “no” vote on war, telling his audience that while it’s okay for him to oppose war in Syria, it’s not okay for conservatives to oppose war in Syria, because he believes his motives are pure.

“But my motives are a heck of a lot different than the motives of these conservatives,” he claimed. 

Okay, leaving aside the fact that he's getting the neocon and Tea Party wings of the GOP all mixed up (the former opposes Obama because he doesn't want to bomb Syria enough and the latter doesn't believe in bombing anybody that isn't actively deploying landing craft against Myrtle Beach) his logic is just absolutely pretzeled.

He wants Obama to get his war because racism even though he opposes the war but he's not a racist just in favor of peace and Rethuglicans oppose the war because racism so they should vote for the war so The Most Remarkable President Of Our Lifetime gets his war to show they're not racist and George Bush fits in there somewhere, I'm sure.

Huh-wha? I am beginning to think I'm not mentally limber enough to do politics anymore, because that guy's powers of rationalization show that his mind is as flexible as a Romanian gymnast.

Stealing content from an away game...

From a discussion of the phrases "there is no timer in a gunfight" and "competition will get you killed" elsewhere:

The following is based on a real conversation that is taking place on at least one range somewhere in America even as I type this, guaranteed:

Shooter A: "Hey, dude, I noticed something about your reload. I learned this thing at this class that should shave a good half..."

Shooter B: "Piss off! Hardcore McFaceshooter* says there is no timer in a gunfight!"

Shooter A: "Oh, uh, hey, cool. You've taken a class from Hardcore McFaceshooter? I've been meaning to take one from him myself."

Shooter B: "Nah, I read where he said it on the internet."

I get the meaning behind it. I will probably never be really fast at "shoot house" type stages in run 'n' gun games because of it.

But: Other than perhaps "Slow Is Smooth And Smooth Is Fast", no other single aphorism has been used to justify more mediocrity and lack of meaningful improvement by the unwitting than "There is no timer in a gunfight."



*Only partially tongue-in-cheek: I used that to distinguish from some trainers I've heard use that line that made me have to bite my tongue to keep from replying "How the #@%$ would you know what there was in a gunfight?" On the other hand, there are people in that thread who tell me that there isn't a timer in a gunfight, and I believe them, because they went and checked. 

Excuses...

I was up past my bedtime last night.

Crickets in my head.

I got nothin' at the moment.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves for a bit while I figure out what's wrong with the ice cream machine.

Jaw-dropping...

Enjoy this video. Lord knows I did.


(H/T to Guns & Coffee)

Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi, writing up a post, double-checks some jargon...

RX: "Can I call terrorists 'OpFor?'"

Me: [Recalling Obama's Syria speech last night] "Not any more."

Sore losers.

Been watching network news this morning. You'd never guess that anything happened in Colorado yesterday.

Checked the front page at CNN.com. Nothi... wait. There it is in the fine print below the fold: "Gun-Control Dems Ousted In Recall."

Yesterday it was all over the big network sites as a NATIONAL REFERENDUM ON GUN CONTROL, and now it's like it didn't even happen. How ya like me now, Mr. National Referendum Man?

I'll bet Bloomie's a sad panda this morning, spendin' all that money for nothin'. Somebody buy that man a Big Gulp.

I'm confused.

The people in my television set keep calling it Patriot Day, which is confusing me because I thought Patriot's Day was on the 19th of April, when we celebrate the brave Americans who took the field in Massachusetts to defend their rights and throw off the shackles of monarchy.

Anyway, the president was on the televisor last night urging us to memorialize those who were murdered on this day twelve years ago by flying air strikes in support of the faction that murdered them. Whatever else may be said, that took an amazing level of chutzpah, to call on a nation to go to war in support of terrorists the night before going to lay a wreath at a ceremony commemorating their victims.

Frankenstein's car...

In William Gibson's cyberpunk Sprawl trilogy futureworld of drive-through cosmetic surgery joints, one character's facial features are described as a "blandly handsome blend of pop faces."

Looking at the snout of the new Infiniti Q50, one has to admire the skill of the surgeon who managed to blend the BMW headlights, Audi grill, and Mercedes chin spoiler into a subtle whole that says "I am a solid contender in the mid-upscale sport sedan market" without blatantly aping any of its targets.

For... seriously?

In what has got to be part of a paid advertising campaign for Fred Rich's novel, Christian Nation, former Bush press secretary and current Fox News talking head Dana Perino commented on a lawsuit challenging the "under God" insertion into the Pledge of Allegiance...

Fox News pundit Dana Perino said she's "tired" of atheists attempting to remove the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, adding, "if these people really don't like it, they don't have to live here."

Wow. Really? The thing I like is the way her comment passes without a murmur from anybody around the table there.

I don't know why conservatives have such a chubby over the Pledge in the first place. Completely aside from the "under God" language being added as a McCarthyite shibboleth in the fifties, since it was a well-known fact that KGB spies would be unable to say "God" without spontaneously combusting, the whole pledge itself is a creepy artifact of the good ol' days when fascism and eugenics were the coming fads.

Pledge inventor* and screaming pinko Francis Bellamy even had a little salute that schoolkids did to accompany their group submission ritual. It was dropped during WWII for what are, I hope, screamingly obvious reasons:

This should creep out any right-thinking small-government freedom-lover. And yet...

*The O.G. Pledge, without the "under God" words, despite Bellamy being an ordained minister and a nationalistic Christian Socialist.

Dream house.

If you're wondering what to get your favorite supervillain for Christmas because they were all out of secret volcano lairs at Supervillains 'Я Us, you could always go shopping for secret lairs in Vegas, like this bumpin' underground survival crib.

...and that's how the cracker crumbles.

Quick, scramble the media! The ant under the magnifying glass has started to smoulder!

Well, there's an ugly little piece of he-said, she-said theater. Who could have seen that coming?

If you build it, they won't necessarily come.

Electric drag racing is a thing. There are some guys who have exploited the fact that an electric motor makes peak torque at zero RPM to turn clapped-out old Datsuns into eyeball-flattening drag racers. The other fact they exploit is that a drag strip is only 1320 feet long.

Road courses tend to be longer, and this has the potential to turn the proposed Formula E into the least exciting thing since the invention of competitive paint-drying during refueling stops.

Plus, the whole force-fed nature of the thing feels artificial. It feels like the American Medical Association sponsoring a High Fiber Vegetable Eating Contest, which just wouldn't be as fun to watch as fat guys burying their mugs in blueberry pies.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using competition to force a technology: From the Orteig Prize to the Ansari X Prize, it's been part of aerospace envelope-pushing, but they don't build bleachers at Mojave Spaceport and try and sell it as a for-profit sport.

It's not _______ when we do it.

In an op-ed piece dripping with sneering condescension, Dean Obeidallah is unintentionally amusing at several points in his frothing outburst of Palin Derangement Syndrome*. Take, for instance, this entirely un-self-aware accusation:

Could Palin know even more Arabic? She did go on to say that both sides fighting in Syria are, "shouting 'Allah Akbar' at each other."

She could've easily translated "Allah Akbar" into English, noting that the combatants were screaming, "God is great." Or as Sen. John McCain remarked Tuesday on Fox News, "Allah Akbar" is no different than an American Christian saying, "Thank God." 

Stop for a moment.

Imagine if Obeidallah was commenting on some grainy FLIR gun camera footage where a U.S. pilot was ecstatically murmuring "God is great! God is great! God is great!" from the moment the Hellfire left the rail to the point where it impacted amongst the women and kids.

There would be absolute pandemonium on the networks. Dean, whose standup has been graded on a curve since 9/11 because his dad is Palestinian**, would be sh!++!ng himself with panicky accusations of our military being composed of xenophobic homicidal JeezoBot crusaders. But, you know, if you do it in a foreign language, it's just a colorful ethnic tradition.


* Don't worry, Zimmerman; Palin is still the Thinking Liberal's Goldstein.
** This makes Obeidallah, who was born in New Jersey, less of a "Palestinian" than I am a "Chicagoan".

Not that there's anything wrong with that...

I find it interesting that the author of Christian Nation, who is so careful to establish his tolerance bona fides in matters of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion (except you fundies; you're bad), is seemingly blind to one particular inclusionary buzzword. Despite the cast of Good Guys being a polyglot cast of every faith (except Evangelicals) and non-faith, they almost all stand to pee.

In fact, the novel only paints two female characters in any detail: One is portrayed as a social climber from the sticks; a shallow, power-obsessed, anti-intellectual harpy, and the other is Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile his protagonist appears to loathe the girlfriend described above, and never really describes what she looks like; she might have been blonde, I think? But, oh! How he goes on with the physical descriptions of the book's messiah figure!

This messiah happens to be the protagonist's former college roommate, a gay Indian guy who goes on to become the world's most self-effacing and virtuous dot-com squillionaire. He's also so good-looking that F3* uses it as proof he's the antichrist.

He's also a yogi who functions as a sort of Hindi anti-Galt, and our protagonist, an obvious author-insert, cannot talk about him without going on at length about the beauty of his perfectly symmetrical features and (I'm not making this up) the smell of his sweat when they do drunken yoga together.

The absolute best part of this is that he all but types "No homo!" after these interludes, too. There's this overwhelming sense that the author may not realize just how hard his subconscious is man-crushing on poor, doomed Sanjay. I've caught myself snickering hard enough at the seemingly ingenuous obliviousness of a couple of these digressions that I had to set the iPad down for fear of dropping it.

If I'm being trolled, he's doing it masterfully.


*F3=Fox, Faith, and Freedom: See, in the book, Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition and Fox News merge to become F3. Seriously. And all the poor hicks out in flyover country who can't get real news because CNN and MSNBC and NPR are apparently unavailable outside of Manhattan, San Fran and the Chicago Loop, are brainwashed by F3.

Fred Goes Viral...

Guns & Coffee gets the attention of the local TeeWee news for his Kilted To Kick Cancer campaign. Rock on!
.

Automotif XIV...

Seen while out pedaling in SoBro...

1960 Ford Thunderbird ragtop, last model year of the second generation T-birds. I believe this one is in frequent use, if not actually a daily driver. It lives on the street most of the time, at any rate.

Ah, the exotic chrome gingerbread of the most Wurlitzer-esque period in American automotive styling...

Provincialism, thy name is Manhattanite.

So, the protagonist of Christian Nation, when he gets out of the JeezoNazi reeducation camp by feigning conversion, and gets assigned to a work release program doing community service at the book-burning center (I am not making this up), guess what his supervisor's name is?

Hand to God, it's "Lurlene".

Jesus wept, Fred, have you ever set foot on the far side of the Hudson in your life?

It's only urgent in the Oval Office and John McCain's dreams...

According to CNN, the president faces an uphill struggle convincing America that Syria is our top priority:

Overheard in the Office...

Bobbi is watching a YouTube video of a sort of unicycle steeplechase in Germany...

Me: "Here comes the pack! I don't see how that doesn't dissolve into chaos."

RX: "Well, they are German."

Me: "Yeah, Germans don't really do chaos well... It's how we beat them!"

RX: "That's kinda true."

Me: "Yeah, we'd put stuff out in the middle of a field all out of order, and when they went out there to alphabetize it... BAM!"

.

I'm doing this for you, internet.

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; 
If you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; 
If you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

From Brian J. Noggle, I was led to an Ace of Spades post about Christian Nation: A Novel.

Ace didn't read it, but because I love you guys, I decided to take one for the team.

Wow.

Now, I've read a lot of apocalyptica from the Right and Libertarian side of the political axis, ranging from pretty good to far-fetched to barely readable drek. I figured if I could power through some of that, then this should be a breeze. Besides, as an urban-dwelling wookie-suited heathen, he should be able to scare me about the menace of the JeezoNazis lurking out in suburbia, right?

Wow.

It's like the love child of Tim LaHaye and Margaret Atwood wrote a piece of anti-Ayn Rand un-fan fiction, entitled Atlas Moved From Downward Dog To Crescent Moon.

In its overarching storyline, it's almost exactly a limousine liberal's vision of Ayn Rand's seminal doorstop, down to the hidden gulch where the protagonist is sheltered from the dystopian world outside. Oh, except D'Anconia's got a secret crush on Galt that the author takes pains to hide from himself by making his alter ego sleep with a shrewish and shallow Dagny, this despite loathing everything about her.

Also, the villains are less likeable, real and three-dimensional than the ones in Atlas Shrugged, and the dialog isn't as natural and flowing as ol' strident Ayn's. And the atheist messiah figure is slightly more polemical and single-minded than Galt.

It's all in well-edited English and the plot moves along with the whispering grace of a Gulfstream flying from New York to LA over the amorphous mass of undifferentiated howling savages between. The dialog is orderly, and painstakingly constructed, and represents interactions between people as seen by a disembodied mind from Zeta Reticuli that has never actually experienced anything you or I would recognize as human warmth, save a vague inarticulate longing that stands in for love.

I get a little annoyed at the Gays 'n' the 'Bortion wing of the GOP, but this dude is convinced they're under his bed, waiting to slither out as soon as he turns off his CFL night light, with their horrible Alabama accents and their Ku Klux NRA Intelligent Design yayhooism and turn his beloved Manhattan into some unreconstructed hive of toothless hilljacks, like Philadelphia.

I'm only in President Palin's second term; Nehemiah Scudder hasn't taken office and proclaimed the Theocracy yet, so stuff hasn't gotten completely silly, but I can't wait. I'm sure I'll be doing more pointing and laughing down the road. (My favorite review of it at Amazon, BTW, is this one. It's the one that convinced me to buy it, actually.)

Anyhow, if you can stomach it, it's a chance to see what an Ivy League corporate attorney in Manhattan thinks of you when he's pretty sure you're not going to read it. Because he thinks you can't.

Breaking news!

Stop the presses!

The spouse of The Man In The Media's Fishbowl is filing for divorce.

Also, he's cheating on his diet. Did we mention racist?

Kids these days...

So the talking heads in my TeeWee this morning were all a-flutter and in full hand-wringing mode over a report that more teens were using e-cigarettes.

Would you prefer they were using the real thing, Ms. "Journalist"?

You know, today's kids have something we didn't have: A mass communication system capable of taking things viral in no time flat. They need to take advantage of this fact and use it to prank the media.

High school kids should start posting videos of themselves snorting water.

Come up with a catchy slang term for it, like "getting damp". Tweet things like "anybody know where u can get good #damp in this town?"

Get it going viral, and wait to see how long it takes for an op ed column to call for banning the sale of water to minors.

Because you know they would. I think it's because these %$#@ers lie awake at night in a sweaty worry that they're not "hip" and "edgy" anymore, and so they want to ban anything people younger than them are doing to have a good time. If anybody deserved to have their career short-sheeted, it's these fun leeches.

Automotif XIII...

 Godzilla: Nissan GT-R on Monday in the Broad Ripple Station strip mall parking lot.

Thunderbird: 1956 Ford T-Bird outside of Target yesterday.