Lucky Thirteen Hundred

Took the G37 to Indy Arms Co. yesterday morning and ran another hundred rounds through it: Fifty S&B 230gr FMJ and fifty Remington UMC 230gr FMJ.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1310 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 690 rounds to go.
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The Future.

So, I brought a laptop back from New Hamster. It's actually got more wheaties than my 4-ish year-old desktop, and so I'm pressing it into service as a temporary desktop replacement.

This meant having to move the contents of my docs folders to the new machine, which was going to require a device with more capacity than I had on hand. So I go to Amazon and order a 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive. Huh. Same day delivery available. I mention it to Bobbi and she asks me to order one for her, too.

A couple hours later, there's a thump on the front porch, caused by the impact of a box containing probably more storage space than every computer I owned before 2010 combined, delivered to my doorstep in hours on a Saturday for less than the price of dinner & drinks for two at a middlin' fair restaurant.

(And for an idea of the impact of technology, it took nearly five hours to suck my pictures folder off the platters on the old computer and about fifteen minutes to spit it onto the SSD on the new one.)
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Upside, Downside...

Upside: You get a whole extra day this year!
Downside: It's a Monday.

This is like Santa bringing toothpaste and vitamins.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 29, 2016

In the mail yesterday...

...came this neat little gizmo from FLC Knives: A "Get Off Me" Tool #4. It's a carbon fiber tube with one end cut at a sharp angle and the other wearing a ferrule and eraser, and the whole thing covered in what appears to be a woodgrain decal.

It's innocuous-looking enough, and appears to be fairly stout:


It definitely tripped my "Neato Secret Agent Gizmo" levers, and looks like it would take a pretty generous core sample of dirtbag for later DNA testing by the po-po. My gun burkha does have dedicated pen/pencil pockets... Hmmm...

FCC Disclaimer: I shelled out my own shekels for this, so go piss up a rope, .gov.
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Overheard in Front of the TV...

...while waiting for Meet the Press to come on:

I'm sure President Hillary can have the same healing effect on gender relations that Barry had on racial ones.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 28, 2016

Friday was a good day...

Took the Glock to Indy Arms Company and ran another hundred rounds of ammunition through it. Fifty rounds of Sellier & Bellot 230gr FMJ and fifty of the Remington UMC 230gr FMJ. The magazines are still crazy hard to get that tenth round in. UpLULA for the win.

I threw a few, there, but I haven't busted but fifty caps in the last three weeks and I may have slacked off a bit on my dry-fire while I was up at Castle Frostbite, too. And, no, I wasn't aiming at the x-ring. The x-ring on the B-27 leads to bad habits. I don't aim there anymore unless it's required for some sort of scoring.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1210 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 790 rounds to go.

Leaving the range, Bobbi and I went to 317 Burger for lunch. She had the country-fried bacon and some manner of tasty-looking burger, and I had the reuben egg rolls and some wings. Next time, I'll skip the wings and just do a double order of those egg rolls.

Since I wasn't required to use my AK, I have to say it was a good day.
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I think they have a chance against SMOD.

Yes we can!

"The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world." -Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

From Facebook this morning:

"See, most people have to go through life eating a ton of shit, from their bosses and their spouses and the loan officer at the bank and everybody else. And so when they see some snarky Dr. House or Tony Stark or Deadpool character that just says "Fuck you" whenever they want to, they eat it up because they're living vicariously through that person. Now they can vote for him! Oh, sure, they'll rationalize it being about walls or ISIS or H1Bs, but that's it in a nutshell. He's gonna Fuck You his way into the nomination on the shoulders of an adoring throng of Walter Mittys."

Looks like it's the GOP that's running on Hopey Changey this cycle.

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No state is an island...

I love the strange insularity of state legislatures.

Now, no state in which I've resided had a specific minimum age for children to handle firearms under adult supervision. In Indiana, Tennessee, and Georgia, one needed to be 18 or older to own a handgun or long gun, but minors could use them under adult supervision for various enumerated activities. (Ref: O.C.G.A. § 16-11-132, TCA 39-17-1319, I.C. § 35-47-10-1)

Iowa, however, had a restriction that nobody under age 14 could use handguns, no way no how, not even with mommy and daddy standing right there. Long guns? Sure. Handguns, though? Nope.

Someone noticed this was a little odd, and took steps to correct it, and the predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth occurred:

Opponents questioned the lack of age limit under the bill.

"We do not have handguns that I am aware of that fit the hands of 1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds to operate handguns," state Rep. Kirsten Running-Marquardt, a Democrat, told legislators during debate.

"We do not need a militia of toddlers," Marquardt added.

Did anybody think to look at the states around them to see if there were plagues of pistol-waving preschoolers shooting up the landscape? Nope, we go right to the ol' "There'll Be Blood In The Streets" thing, as sure as the sun rises in the east. It's like they can only say one thing when their string gets pulled.
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Against the rules.

So, somehow a felon gets his hands on some guns and then violates the heck out of company policy by bringing them to work? Do I have that right?
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Aikido

It's my emotional support Glock. I even have a doctor's note. Your hoplophobia is triggering me. I need a safe space.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 25, 2016

Home again!

And look what was waiting for me when I got home from Upper Cryogenica!

My February Little Box of Violence from Violent Little Machine Shop!

 There's a Creasy Bear tee shirt and a ribbon for the Loser Child and pins and...

...morale patches and a bottle of firearms lube and coffee and a blank notebook handily embossed People To Kill on the cover. Supposedly there are a few subscription slots still open for March if you want little bundles of joy like this to show up on your front porch every month.
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Overheard in the Car...

Overheard in the Car: "What does 'genderfluid' even mean? Like 'What's going on with that person? I think their genderfluid's a quart low.'"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 24, 2016

Whom the gods would destroy, they must first make ironic.

So, Patrick Sweeney apparently did a little video piece for Guns & Ammo TV intended to rebut those who dis ¡BLACKHAWK‼'s Serpa holster as potentially dangerous. Among the claims were that people were just not internalizing the proper practice of keeping the trigger finger indexed straight along the frame.

Someone, however, thought to do a slow-mo excerpt from the video...



Ouch.

Now, before anybody pipes up that he muzzled his hand, I don't think he did; that's an artifact of the angle and the lens focal length. He did, however, provide a splendid illustration of why we keep our off-side paw centered high on our sternum on the draw, though.

Let me quote from Karl Rehn's excellent breakdown of this video:

From 0:07 to 0:22 you’ll see the entire holster lift as he pulls up on the gun, because he’s using 2″ belt loops with a 1.5″ wide belt.  You can see the whole holster move up, the belt ride up in the belt loops, and even see the pants rise a little.  The belt is too loose, and the belt attachment on the holster needs spacers to close up the slots, or a different belt attachment entirely.  “One size fits all” means “fits none properly”.   You don’t want your holster to move at all when you draw.  That’s bad.

Karl's a smart dude. Y'all should listen to him.

...and here's the thing. I've met Pat Sweeney. Had a couple beers with him and Farmer Frank and Bryce Towsley after the first CTC Midnight 3 Gun match, as a matter of fact. He's a pretty squared-away dude and I wouldn't mind sharing a range with him any time. Now, if this happens to somebody who literally handles guns for a living, how much worse is it for Jasper T. Cletus who doesn't dry-practice, only gets to the indoor range once a month, and even then isn't allowed to run the gun from the holster?

Of course, the baying of the hounds has started on Facebook...

"The military issues the Serpa!"

If you have to make do with crap gear because your employer made you, I guess you just have to make do. But why drop your own coin on it? And dropping coin is what it really comes down to, I think. 

The lengths people will go to in defending a dumb $29 holster purchase decision is a great indicator of how much ego people tie up in their gear. It's no wonder that they'll go that much further to defend the $450 they dropped on, say, an idiotic pistol purchase decision... 
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HOAP

If we had the sort of electorate that would read multi-paragraph essays, @JohnRShirley, Trump would be an unknown NYC real-estate mogul.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 23, 2016

Overheard in the Car...

New business venture: "The Fedora Shop: Trilbies and Vaping Supplies. Bitcoin Accepted."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 23, 2016

I need to embed a ticker on the site with the current exchange rate between $USD and Aspie Shekels.
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Fifty more...

Ran fifty more rounds of Remington UMC 230gr FMJ through Project Whimsy today. (Well, I fired three magazines and Maj. Caudill finished off the box.) There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1110 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 890 rounds to go.
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Eek! Guns!

Okay, I will open by acknowledging that this dude had an impressive stash by any measure of the term. This isn't one of those cases where they trot out a Mini-14 and a couple BB guns and call it an "arsenal". When your junk-on-the-bunk display includes StG-44s and Bren guns, you've pretty much arrived. Still...

“He seemed very set on the idea he was keeping people safe by looking after these weapons,” he added.

“He certainly didn’t see himself as a danger to others. But by the time we came across him, his life seemed to be deteriorating. Of course the fear was that they could fall into the wrong hands or, given that he had terminal cancer, something might change in his life and he would have access to hundreds of deadly weapons.”

If you watched the linked video, you can't shake the feeling that the people interviewed are talking about the weapons as though they were not only things that were inherently dangerous just sitting there, but that the had some sort of sinister agency, and might decide to hop up and do something bad, all of their own accord. This really is hoplophobia.
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The courts will follow where the culture leads...

Great observations from Joe Huffman on the increasing commonness of CCW in society. The normalization of armed self-defense is a good thing.
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Inevitibility of a Different Kind

Jeb will not be going to space today.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 21, 2016

Sorry, guys...

My motivation level today seems to have flatlined.

Spent the morning on the sofa finishing up my ARC of Chains of Command. Read it in two big licks; yesterday afternoon and this morning. Hella good yarn with plenty of shoot-em-up action. Definitely puts to rest any problems anyone might have had with Grayson just being a passenger on the plot trolley. Pre-order one if you haven't already!
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Today's Twitterings...

#PropertyRights and #Libertarianism until someone I like gets shown the door. I am the very model of a modern Wookie Suiter.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 20, 2016

Self-Contradiction

So, The Atlantic wants to see some kind of legal action against Bushhamster for making the weapon used in the Sandy Hook shooting:

The complaint alleges that while the weapon is suitable for the military and for law enforcement—where it’s used for combat and limited police purposes—in civilian hands, the high-caliber, rapid-fire rifles are essentially killing machines.

But wait!  Isn't this article in the same Atlantic that published the piece by Major General Scales (ret) decrying the M4 as an underpowered unreliable weapon that was getting our soldiers killed in the streets because Hamburger Hill and Black Hawk Down?

The military must change the caliber and cartridge of the guns it gives infantry soldiers. Stoner’s little 5.56-mm cartridge was ideal for softening the recoil of World War II infantry calibers in order to allow fully automatic fire. But today’s cartridge is simply too small for modern combat.

I guess the Stoner weapons system only reaches its full automated death-spraying-made-easy capability when wielded by untrained civilians. The Army should look into this.
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Who down wit' EDC? Yeah, you know me.

Before the word "preps" used as a noun became the gunternet jargon term that annoyed me the most, that title was held by "EDC". (This, of course, invokes the possibility of the horrible compounding of "EDC preps".)

Anyhow, for you people lucky enough to not know, "EDC" stands for "Every Day Carry", and people on various gun fora are forever starting threads where they take pictures of the pocket jewelry they're carrying that day: The current gun from their "carry rotation", the knife du jour, whichever flashlight they're currently carrying...

So, heck, I'll play, too.

Here's today's EDC:

 And this is what I carried yesterday:

 On this date last month:

 And, finally, what I plan to be carrying tomorrow:

I presume that you're carrying a firearm because you may need to use it to protect your life. Do you really want to stake your life on your ability to shoot, with unconscious competence, the gun that matched your shoes that morning?
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Carbine 2016...

It's been almost three years since I last put together an AR carbine, and I've been getting the itch to try a lot of stuff I've seen and learned over that time period. So, when a gun with most of the features I was looking for came up at a good buddy discount recently, I jumped on it and began setting it up to experiment with the new ideas...

 First off, 2016 is going to be the year I stick my toe in the water with a low-power variable optic, or "LPV".

LPVs are all over 3 Gun competition and seem to be more common on working guns too, these days. They help with target discrimination, and at close ranges an illuminated reticle model like the Burris MTAC 1-4 x 24 above can be used as a jackleg red dot.

I know, I know...If one has a decent optic in a good mount, iron sights these days are pretty much woobies; just there to make one feel good by their presence. Pat Rogers, on seeing my 2013 carbine wearing its Daniel Defense fixed BUIS when I showed up for class last spring, pointed out to me that they'd seen zero Aimpoint failures on their school guns over the years. John Mosby at Mountain Guerilla is well known for dishing out horrible abuse to his MTAC-equipped carbines to prove a point.

Still, I want my woobie.

This is what attracted me to the gun in the first place. The long, slim, keymod forearm is my first step back away from the full-on rail farms since 2006 or so.

I haven't settled on a stock yet, and the InForce WMLX light is only a temporary expedient on the gun. I bought it for a different carbine, and I'll be switching my Surefire Scout light over to this one. Also trying the newer style of more upright pistol grips, with the Magpul K2+.

Looking forward to getting it to a class, and maybe shooting some 3 Gun this year, just for kicks.

From Elsewhere on the Internets Today...

So, when I went to Disney World during SHOT '02, I went to the Haunted Mansion. The place gave me the creeping willies as a kid and I'm not a hundred percent sure I kept my eyes open the whole way through the last time I'd been there as a young teenager, so I was looking forward to seeing my childhood spooks and bugbears with grownup eyes.

There's the preliminary wander in that gets increasingly creepy until you wind up in the big room that's actually an elevator. And the narrator is doing his thing as the floor starts to lower and the ceiling gets higher and the lights dim...and then go out. There's a crack of thunder and, in a flash of simulated lightning in the dark, you see the dead body hanging above you on the other side of the painted cheesecloth scrim of the ceiling.

And this kid that was in the room with us just Lost. His. Shit. I don't mean he whimpered, cried, or yelled. I mean that this ululating, Lovecraftian "Had-His-Sanity-Blasted-From-His-Mind" noise came air-raid-sirening from the kid and he and his folks had to be discreetly herded out a side entrance rather than board the ride.

Definitely set the tone for the rest of the ride.
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Interesting Times Update

From the Daily Mail on Saturday:

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said tensions between Russia and the West have sent the world into a 'new Cold War', while speaking at the Munich Security Conference today.

'We have slid into a new period of Cold War,' he said. 'Almost every day we are accused of making new horrible threats either against NATO as a whole, against Europe or against the US or other countries.'

Amid an escalating war of words, the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said a lack of trust could return the continent to ‘40 years ago, when a wall was standing in Europe’.

...and from Defense News yesterday:

For years, the US administration has cast a longing gaze on a pivot to the Asia Pacific but wars in the Middle East have managed to divert attention.

And now Russia has re-emerged as the number one threat to the US. So if there’s a pivot happening anywhere it’s to Europe, and it’s clear the Army will lead.

The White Man's Burden is a Sack of AOL CDs...

So, does everybody remember the Nineties, when the North American continent was buried under strata of America Online diskettes* and CD ROMs?

Basically, AOL knew that getting more people on the internet meant more money for AOL, via monthly fees and ad revenues, and so it just spewed Free Monthly Trial discs across the landscape like ejecta from Vesuvius.

And this was just business as usual because they were passing out this product to 'Murricans.

But what happens when an American company offers free trial internet access to Indians?

IMPERIALISM!

“I see the project as both colonialist and deceptive,” Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, told me. “It tries to solve a problem it doesn’t understand, but it doesn’t need to understand the problem because it already knows the solution. The solution conveniently helps lock in Facebook as the dominant platform for the future at a moment when growth in developed markets is slowing.”

How dare you offer your beads and trinkets to Indians! You've probably smeared beef tallow on the zeros and ones and put the smallpox.exe virus in the installer!

That Mr. Zuckerman sees no irony in his blatantly paternalistic concern for the poor little 'eathens is one of the most hilarious things I've seen on the 'net in weeks.

*Diskettes: Okay, they were like big, flat, square USB drives, but inside the plastic shell was a little circular piece of plastic film, coated with particles of magnetized rust, that would spin and get read by the computer. Ask your parents.
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Well...

Scalia's dead, I'm on vacation, and...*looks out window*...it's too dang cold to go anyplace today.

Mr. Midshipman! Have the men install the special low yardarm! I want the sun over it as early as possible today.
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Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

C'mon, @Popehat, have some imagination! The @realDonaldTrump would appoint @TedNugent!

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 14, 2016

Oh, no...

Senior U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia found dead at West Texas ranch

 

Defective unit.

So, what are we going to do about this?

A 20-year-old man allegedly shot and decapitated his grandparents inside an Oklahoma City home that doubled as a day care.

Investigators who came to the house for a welfare check Tuesday afternoon found three children huddled inside an attached garage. The children were unharmed, police said.

But inside the house, authorities found a grisly scene. Sharon Reed, 59, and James Reed, 78, were dead.

"Both victims had been shot and decapitated," police said.

Are we going to rehabilitate him? Is some parole board going to have to listen to his future self say "Okay, yeah, grandma and grandpa got all shot and beheaded, but I was only twenty at the time, and we all do reckless and impulsive things when we're young, right? I'm ready to be a productive member of society now."

It's cases like this that make me want to keep the death penalty on the table. There's no repairing this guy, obviously. We can either warehouse him on your children's dime until we carry his corpse from the jailhouse to potter's field fifty some-odd years from now, or just take him behind the barn and Ol' Yeller him right now.
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Hooray!

Lawdog is back to posting on the regular again!

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I got nothin'...

I've got nothing to write about.

Well, that's not technically true; I've got a bunch of stuff I want to write about, but I have to actually sit down and write it out.

My experiment working at the local indoor range has come to an end, although I'll do a bit of consulting-type stuff and make myself available to cover the occasional shift if someone needs a vacation. I originally agreed to pick up a few part time shifts, and then wound up stepping into a full-time management position. However, it was fast apparent that either I was going to work in the retail shop or continue trying to grow my nascent writing career, but not both.

Last year's whirlwind schedule of gun school only served to whet my appetite for more, and I hope to make 2016 just as awesome, if not more so, than 2015 was in that department.
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Use #3246

Another use for the SureFire E2D Ultra discovered today: Thawing a frozen lock on the Subie.
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Problematic.

I've been seeing a lot of older people suddenly deciding it was time to buy a gun to start carrying. The stereotype of the demographic is "In their sixties or older, 5'4"-5'8", a hunnert 'n' somethin' pounds, two thirds of them women."

And the new crop of small single-stack nines is the Cabbage Patch Kid of guns for this demographic. Glock 43s, Smith & Wesson Shields, Sig Sauer 938s...they're selling like hotcakes.

Thing is, these guns of necessity all have fairly stiff recoil springs. Further, they have small slides that are hard-to-impossible to get a whole-hand over-the-top grasp on, meaning that getting these new shooters up to speed on the manual of arms is frustrating for them and for their teachers.

Then there's the elephant in the room...

I was shooting on the range after work the other day and a gentleman was on the lane to my right, shooting the Glock 43 he'd recently purchased. He called me over three times "Miss, my gun has jammed." And I'd clear the stovepipe or double feed and explain that he really needed to get a death grip on the gun. He was about 5'5", in his late seventies, and obviously playing through some pain in his hands.

I explained recoil operation, and how the gun needed a stable platform to work against, but really, the mild-shooting Federal RTP or CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ ammo is running right at the ragged edge of having enough ass to cycle that gun. It's running a light bullet at probably 1,050fps out of that stubby barrel and is probably barely at the limit for reliable functioning.

Thing is, how many of the people buying these guns are then being turned loose with Hornady Critical Defense Lite or Federal Personal Defense Low-Recoil personal protection loads that have barely enough steam to run the gun if it's held in an ideal two-handed grip?

("Just get 'em a revolver!" says the person in the back, who apparently thinks arthritic fingers work better with a 12-lb double-action trigger than they do with a heavy recoil spring. If there's a bigger disaster than an untrained shooter with elderly eyes and hands being handed a lightweight revolver with a heavy trigger and vestigial sights, I've never seen it.)

More shooting...

Sunday morning before clocking in, I ran another fifty rounds of Remington UMC 230gr FMJ through the Glock 37...

There were no malfunctions to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1060 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 940 rounds to go.
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That's festive...

On the upside, I've got a check showing up soon for a feature article in a magazine.

On the downside, I went out to the garage the other day and the battery in the Zed Drei was as flat as the driver's side rear tire. The battery was because I'd left the GPS on while the car was garaged for a week while driving the Subie, but the tire...

It's had a slow leak for a while, but it had recently gotten much worse. I charged the battery and used the cigarette lighter air pump to put thirty-five pounds of air in the tire and was rewarded with a quietly audible leak.

I can't see a nail, so unless we find one when we get it up on a lift, that's probably two cracked rear rims. (The passenger side rear has a very tiny leak as well.) So it looks like that check is going to spend very little time in my bank account before being re-deposited at Tire Rack for wheels and tires.

Clankity-clank!

My latest addiction is the game World of Tanks...

It's full of hypothetical "paper tanks" that never left drawing boards in real life, like the French "AMX-40" above.

The AMX-40 is pretty heavily armored for a light tank, but armed with a popgun. In the picture above, I just rammed a T34 out of frustration after bouncing round after round of 47mm off its glacis from 100-0 meters. It pushed me backwards through a whole village of mud brick buildings as I continued to fire ineffectively at muzzle-contact distance until one of its shots knocked out my gun.

Meanwhile, its buddy, the M5 Stuart, circled around a back alley behind me and finally put me out of my misery...

Today was a sick day.

Should have gotten a flu shot this year, as two separate varieties have been carried up into the store and I got hit by them both, just weeks apart.

A day's bed rest seems to have turned the corner on this latest episode, but it was still three days worth of feverish misery.
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It's got electrolytes!

#ZikaVirus is just nature's way of adapting humanity to existence in a #Trump v. #Sanders world.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 5, 2016

Magazine rack...

GPS magazine storage bag. I keep it clipped to the outside of my range bag. (No Clown Shoes patch on the flap.)

Orange is G22/35 .40 cal, yellow is G17/34 9mm, blue is .45GAP, white is 10mm G20, silver is G19 9mm.
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Halfway Point

I ran fifty more rounds through Project Whimsy after work yesterday. I was a little wild on that first magazine, but settled down okay. There were no malfunctions to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1010 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 990 rounds to go.
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Mixed Feelings...

From comments at a post elsewhere...

I have a love for beautifully-done interwar and early postwar sporters on K98, M1903, and M1917 actions.

Conversely, I see current hack jobs on Finn Mosins or Argentine ’91s and feel sad. I lament the fact that I will likely never be able to spring for a nice, intact 33/40(t) since Cooper groupies scouterized 99% of them in the Eighties and Nineties.

It’s easier for me to understand the person who chopped a 10-year-old used car into a hot rod than it is the person who did the same thing to a car when it was one of the last intact survivors of the breed forty years later. But in both cases, if it was their car, it was their right to do with as they pleased, even if what they pleased was dumb.

(And yet I find myself completely callous to the fate of parts kits like the M16 upper in the post. Once the receiver’s been torched and the thing parted out, someone may as well have fun with the parts, I guess?)

I understand buying a gun just to tinker with. I mean, I still have that Sistema I bought for the express purpose of using it to learn how to mess with 1911s, right?

A nice Argentine Sistema is a valuable and appreciating piece of history now, and I'd look askance at chopping one up. The one I bought, heavily pitted and re-arsenalled who knows how many times and with exactly 0% of the original finish remaining, featuring a garish import rollmark as a final indignity, was relatively worthless as an historical artifact, and so...
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Overheard in Front of the TV...

Man in the TV: "...only clinic to offer robotic hair transplant..."

RX: "EWWWW! Who wants robot hair?"

Me: "Robot hair would be cool!" *makes 6 Million Dollar Man sound effect* "If you had to get somewhere in a hurry, you could turn yourself upside down and run on your hair!"

"Hillary, you put that back right now!"

Of all these candidates, the only one I'd trust to not drink from the finger bowl would probably steal it.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 2, 2016

Tuesday morning reruns...

(Originally posted in March of 2011.)

Your tax dollars and mine have been spent on a report to determine that the officer corps of the US military is overwhelmingly composed of one skin tone and gender. The skin tone part is pretty easy to figure out, since it mirrors within a few percentage points the melanin spectrum of 40+ year-old US college grads in general, of which "people who are senior military officers" is a subset:

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic...

On the other hand, only 16 percent of officers are women while out here in the broader society, over half of us use the restroom without the urinals.

The reason for this is that combat arms postings are still off-limits to women. Without getting into whether that will ever change or even whether it should ever change, that brings us to the conclusion of this inane report:

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

This is ridiculous. The purpose of the armed forces is to kill people and break their stuff. This isn't the frickin' Peace Corps we're running here, it is a warfighting machine. Much like the Los Angeles Lakers, it doesn't get its score at the end of the game graded on a curve based on how well it reflects "the racial, ethnic and gender mix" of America.

(H/T to Ed Rasimus.)

"Statesman? I'd settle for a responsible adult."

That this clown show is the best we can come up with for candidates is proof that anyone with the sense God gave a rock is too smart to apply for the job anymore.

The brass ring is electrified and only an egomaniacal moron would even try to grab for it.
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Off day.

On my day off this past Sunday, I went into the shop with the Glock 37 and another hundred rounds of Remington UMC 230gr FMJ.

I hadn't eaten breakfast and, in fact, the only thing in my stomach that morning was a can of Mello Yello Zero, since I was anticipating meeting Bobbi for lunch and didn't want to ruin my appetite.

As a result, I was shaking like a dog passing peach pits and, although I kept the first box in the X ring with a few strays into the 10 ring, I was flagging fast. Common sense said to pack it in and save the second box for later, but I had the ammo with me...

On the first round from the first magazine of the second box, I dropped that one at 6 o'clock right next to the "9".

I might have cussed a little.

All hope of a Glamour Shots target ruined, I did a three magazines trying to work on fast presentations from low ready, still at seven yards. I saved the last magazine for some slow fire at ten feet, which would be that cluster of holes up by the upper number seven. I wanted to leave on a happy note. It was only moderately successful.

The Glock 37 has now fired 960 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,040 rounds to go.
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