Does Not Work That Way

"Who are you voting for in the #IndianaPrimary?"
"The #LibertarianParty doesn't have a primary in IN."
"Yeah, but who are you voting for?"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 30, 2016

"Indiana" is not having a primary this week. The Indiana Democratic Party and the Indiana Republican Party are having primaries this week. I don't see why I have any more say in who they want their delegates to vote for than they do in what I want for dinner.
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Starting up the Steyr...

Since I ran the Glock 37 concurrently with the P250 and Canik and the Glock 19 concurrently with the P320 and PPX,  it makes sense (at least to me) to have a non-Glock test running alongside the Glock 32.

Some non-Glocks are more non-Glock than others, of course, and the Steyr C9-A1 was designed by a dude who'd previously done work for the Austrian 800lb gorilla. Legend has it that when they didn't want to incorporate some of his new ideas, he set out to make his own theme park, with blackjack and hookers get a gun produced by Steyr that incorporated them.

The Steyr M9 (and its smaller S9 and C9 offspring) could be thought of as one dude's vision of a Glock Mk.II.

Friday I brought the Steyr C9-A1 to MCF&G along with the Glock 32 in order to get a bit of chrono work done and fire some initial rounds on the steel in the bays...

The gun had been field-stripped and a drop of Lucas Extreme Duty Gun Oil added at all points indicated in the owner's manual.

I had a fifty-round box of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ and a fifty-round box of Federal 9BPLE 115gr +P+ JHP.

Other than a light primer strike (that lit off on the second attempt) on round #8 of the day, the firearm went through the complete cycle of operation every time I pulled the trigger.

The slide release is so easy to reach with the strong side thumb, BTW, that it only locked open for me a couple times. It is very easy to ride the slide release if you shoot a thumbs-forward grip. Much easier than even with a Sig.

Velocities recorded are below (70°F, ~700ft ASL):

CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ
LO: 1055
HI: 1121
AV: 1097
ES: 66.19
SD: 19.41

Federal 9BPLE 115gr +P+ JHP
LO: 1273
HI: 1307
AV: 1296
ES: 34.10
SD: 10.53

Notice how light those numbers are from the Blazer Brass? This is from that same lot that was so weak it wouldn't reliably run the Canik TP9v2. It ran the Steyr okay, but the ejection was a sight to behold, as the rounds dribbled weakly from the ejection port...

It did make it easy to wear out the steel at twenty yards with those mouse-fart loads and the Steyr's low bore axis, though. (Did I just say "low bore axis"? I feel dirty.)

This makes 100 rounds fired through the Steyr C9-A1 without cleaning or lubing, with one failure-to-fire (#8). 1,900 rounds left to go.
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Special Snowflake Glock Part Deux

G32 with seemingly ubiquitous PHLster and UpLULA

Went to MCF&G yesterday morning to do some chrono work in the pistol bays. This project was interrupted by the need to leave the range and get a fresh 9-volt for the chrono, but fortunately someone was shooting in the next bay over and agreed to keep an eye on my chrono setup while I ran down the road for a Duracell.

I brought along a twenty-round box of Hornady Critical Duty 135gr FlexLock and a fifty-round box of Winchester RA357B 125gr Ranger Bonded hollow points.

The gun still showed that it liked a strong grip, as the slide didn't trickle all the way back into battery after firing one of the Rangers. If this is a persistent problem, I'm going to talk to smarter people and see what they say about going to a stronger recoil spring.

Ballistics, in case you don't want to decipher my chicken scratch in the picture:

Hornady Critical Duty 135gr
LO: 1176
HI: 1202
AV: 1186
ES: 26.28
SD: 8.66

Winchester RA357SB 125gr Ranger Bonded
LO: 1308
HI: 1379
AV: 1348
ES: 71.00
SD: 23.49

Note that, once again, Hornady delivers amazingly consistent numbers. That 8.66fps Standard Deviation is match-grade in anybody's book. Interestingly, Winchester claims 1350fps for this load from a 4.00" test barrel, and I observed 1348 from a 4.00" gun. This was a novelty to me.

If anybody's still turned on by energy numbers, that's 422 foot-pounds for the Critical Duty and 504 for the Ranger.

So, that makes 169 total rounds fired with three failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78, #126). 1,831 rounds left to go.
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "$%&# internet. %$&# people. I %$@&ing hate people. I wish they'd all go play in traffic and get hit by buses."

RX: "Wouldn't work. You'd need people to drive the buses."

Me: "After the first round, you get half the bus drivers to get out and get run over by the other bus drivers and then keep doing that until there's only one guy left, and I beat him to his knees with a lead pipe."

RX: "You'd never get them all that way. They'd be making new little drivers in the back of the buses faster than you could run them over."

Me: "Can I put this on the internet?"

RX: "Sure. There's your blog content for the morning problem solved."

Some Pointers for the Budding Arsenal

Kevin Creighton offers his views on the "Okay, I bought a CCW gun. What other guns do I need to buy?" question...
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That '90s Show...

Discovered these while rummaging around through boxes, looking for more .357SIG ammo...
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Project Other Whimsy

So, on to the next 2,000 round Glock test. Continuing the theme of special snowflake Glock chamberings, I'll be trying out the 32, Glock's midsize offering in .357SIG.

Trivial Pursuit, firearms category: I once had a very early Glock 33, the subcompact in the same caliber. Back then, the gun was still rollmarked ".357SIG", but this was before the court battle against Smith & Wesson over the Sigma. After that, Glock decided they wouldn't be putting other company's brand names on their guns, and so ".357SIG" and ".40S&W" became ".357" and ".40".

In the picture above, the pistol is in a Skeleton Gen2 holster from PHLster and is accompanied by the ever-present UpLULA, which is practically required to get the thirteenth round in those magazines when they're new.

The pistol was disassembled and a drop of Lucas Extreme Duty Gun Oil was applied to all lubrication points indicated in the Glock Armorer's Manual.

I brought two boxes of FMJ ammunition to the range: 124gr copper-plated from Fiocchi, and 140gr FMJ fromSellier & Bellot.

I did not chronograph anything yesterday, but the S&B definitely had more sturm und drang, with vivid fireballs at the muzzle and noticeably more muzzle flip.

The S&B also had one round (#65 of the day) that refused to fit in the Glock's chamber.

As a side note, the Gen3 Model 32 feels somewhat undersprung. This is unsurprising since, like the .40 cal Model 23, it uses the recoil spring assembly meant for the 9x19 Glock 19. The slide bottomed out hard in recoil with the S&B and trickled back into battery.

Usually.

On two rounds of the S&B, the slide required a nudge from the thumb to close it all the way.

Printing slightly high and left for me. God I hate the factory Glock "sights".

So, that makes 99 total rounds fired with two failures to go completely into battery (#63, #78). 1,901 rounds left to go.
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Sorting out the P250, Part II...

So I grabbed a box of that Armscor .380, the P250C, and my Bodyguard .380 and headed to the range, where I also secured the use of the range's Sig Sauer P238 rental gun.

I put three magazines (eighteen rounds) through the Smith & Wesson, and three magazines (twenty-one rounds) through the P238 with no failures to feed. The remaining eleven rounds went through the P250, also without any failures of any type.

Weird.

Now, this was a different box of the same ammo, which means that, even if it was in the same shipment, it could be a completely different lot number. I have no way of knowing, since the box from the rounds that jammed up the P250 is in a trash can back near Topeka. Was it just a lot that ran a little thick in the rim?

BG380 lower left, P238 lower right, P250C on the center circle, all at seven yards. I fired a box of .380 Blazer Brass through the P250 to function check it. It ran fine.

Incidentally, that box of fifty was fired at a pace that exceeded the range speed limit, roughly half-second splits, since I had the range to myself. The two smaller pistols were fired slow-fire, concentrating hard on sight picture and trigger press. Bigger guns are generally easier to shoot accurately.
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Harris Publications is Gone With the Wind

Newsstands were places that sold things like paper websites but with no comments section. Ask your parents, kids. https://t.co/F0zWwuxlUv

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

Bigger story can be found here.
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Tab Clearing...

• Suing the Senate because it's not doing what you want.


• Sudden Shooter Events: Lessons from the Hood


• Mr. and Mrs. America don't turn them in.

Reading Room

A thread at a forum was asking for recommendations for PopSci books that were interesting and enlightening. My current two standing recommendations:

• Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?)


• You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

And so it begins.

The Clash of the Midgets being still unresolved, the circus sideshow that is the 2016 Presidential Election has shifted its focus to my home state.

Despite the expenditure of cubic miles of $USD, the only thing this entire campaign season has produced that's worth a damn is that old hippie's ad with the Simon & Garfunkel tune...


Too bad Bernie wouldn't know America if it bit him on the ass. (Which it appears to be doing, via the baroque primary rules of the apparently hilariously misnamed Democratic Party.)

So far this morning my TV has showed me ads for every one of this pack of losers except Kasich, but the morning is young, yet.

If this is what it's like after the weakest links have all failed, I don't know how Iowans and New Hampshirites could stand it, back when the candidates were still thick as dog turds in Michael Vick's back yard.
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New guns...

From a press release for a new CCW gun...

"There are no plastic or mimed parts on the PKO-45."

Thank heavens. I hate it when my gun starts walking against the wind or gets trapped in an invisible box because of mimed parts.

"It boasts a revolutionary fixed-barrel-under-the-guide-rod configuration, resulting in less recoil felt by the operator."

That's super revolutionary. It's so revolutionary that John Browning's very first commercially successful autopistol used it a hundred and seventeen years ago.

But it looks like the PKO-45 is more of a copy of the Bayard 1908, itself something of a riff on the M1899/1900 Browning.


(H/T to Unc.)
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Automotif CXXIV...

1975 Oldsmobile Toronado. Oldsmobile's "personal luxury coupe" entry on GM's E-body platform. This thing stretches most of eighteen and a half feet between stem and stern.

Front-wheel drive, with a longitudinal 455 c.i.d. V8 (that's 7.5 liters for those of you who live places that have never been to the moon) driving a 3-speed Turbo-Hydramatic transmission via a chain off the output end of the crank.

Notice how much of it hangs past the Subie forester parked behind it...
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Sorting out the P250, Part I...

So I took the P250 to MCF&G yesterday morning and ran some chronograph tests.

The Armscor was not as weak as I would have supposed..

Armscor .380ACP 95gr FMJ
LO: 881.7
HI: 950.4
AV: 919.7
ES: 68.75
SD: 21.16

That's actually fairly warm for .380 FMJ range ammo. Thinking back carefully to those few strings of fire in Topeka, did I actually have any failures to eject? Or were they all failures to feed? Was I just superimposing memories of the Canik test and automatically assuming underpowered ammo was the culprit?

I have to say that I honestly do not remember any failures to eject. They were all failures to feed, and of a very specific kind, to boot.

See the picture above? Notice that the extractor claw is not popped fully out of the frame?

In a tilting-barrel recoil-operated gun, the slide moves forward and pushes the top round in the magazine forward. The nose of the bullet bumps into the angled feed ramp, which points the nose of the cartridge up and toward the chamber. At some point in its forward travel, the cartridge is freed from the feed lips of the magazine and the rear of the cartridge slides up the breechface, allowing the cartridge rim to slip under the extractor claw and the slide to close on the chambered round.

(I warned you that this was going to get nerdy and to tape up your glasses, didn't I?)

The first part of the travel is pretty easy. It's almost comical the way most folks have a knee-jerk reaction to "Polish the feed ramp!" as though this were the cure for every feeding ill. A polished feed ramp is pretty but doesn't have a ton to do with feed reliability. All the feed ramp needs to do is bump the cartridge in the right direction.

What is happening here is that the cartridge has made it around the "first corner", in that the nose of the round has been bumped into the correct upward orientation by the feed ramp, but it hasn't made it around the "second corner": The rear of the cartridge has not slid smoothly up the breech face and under the extractor claw.

The Armscor round is on the right, and a round of CCI Blazer Brass FMJ is on the left. Note that the Armscor round is a tiny bit longer, has a much pointier ogive to the bullet, and the rim appears to be a smidge thicker, too.

This pistol has been stone cold reliable over the course of 2,000+ rounds with everything fed it except the Armscor. The solution is obvious:

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Then stop doing that."

While I was at the range, I also ran a chronograph test on Speer's 90gr Gold Dot hollowpoint load for the .380ACP. To say I was surprised by the results would be an understatement...

Speer .380ACP 90gr GDHP
LO: 1052
HI: 1099
AV: 1080
ES: 47.80
SD: 14.45

That's smokin' hot for major label .380 ammo. That's 160fps faster than Hornady Critical Defense and 240fps faster than Barnes TAC-XPD fired from the same pistol. I hope to do some ballistic gel testing on this load soon.
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"The Wages of Smug is Trump"

Outstanding piece at Vox on "The smug style in American liberalism." Definitely worth the read.
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Ballistic Nerdery Ahead...

Spent some time at MCF&G with the P250 and a chrono yesterday morning. I'll have to go bust a few more caps this morning to confirm my theory, but I think I've figured out what the deal was with the Armscor.

Y'all start taping your glasses, this is gonna get nerdy when I get back.
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They work great until they don't...

I took that little Sig Sauer P250 Compact with me to Topeka, intending to run it in the class.

Lucky Gunner kindly sponsored the ammo for the class, and so instead of having to transport half a case of .380ACP halfway across the country, five hundred rounds of Armscor .380 was waiting for me at the range.

Saturday morning in the hotel room, I took the P250 apart, applied a drop of Slip2000 EWL to all the lubrication points, and reassembled the pistol.

After lunch on that first class day, preparatory to beginning the shooting portion of the curriculum, I swapped out the Glock 19 on my belt for the P250 and a Bladetech Eclipse holster. On the first drill from the holster, the gun began exhibiting issues. Multiple failure-to-eject and failure-to-feed issues, suspiciously like the Canik TP9v2 shooting Blazer Brass.

Fortunately everybody else in the class was shooting 9mm and Lucky Gunner had brought plenty of that, so I switched back to my G19 carry gun and finished up the class with it.

I brought the Armscor .380 ammo home with me and I'm about to take it to the range for some chrono work...

So, what are the lessons from this?

1. Just because a gun has functioned with complete reliability up until this point, there's no guarantee it will continue to do so.


2. Always bring a second gun to class. This is the second class I've been to now where a heretofore completely reliable pistol has $#!+ the bed hard, bright and early on the morning of the first day.

So...

I rolled out of Topeka in the passenger seat of a pickup truck somewhere around 8:30 or 9:00 local time last night. Caught a brief nap in a parking lot in Poseyville, down in southern Indiana, before continuing on to pick up my car near L'ville right around 0800. I decided to brave the morning rush hour traffic and headed right back out in the Zed Drei, arriving home a little after 10:30.

I'm exhausted, but don't want to go to bed and wind up waking up at midnight, so I'm going to try to stay awake a little longer. I doubt I'll be very coherent, though...
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Hotel Room Morning...

Gun school this weekend, hence the light posting...
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Overheard in the Office...

So, my coughing has indeed strained an abdominal muscle. And it's not one I can relax, since I use it to, you know, breathe. Physically fine overall except for that. But class this weekend is probably going to suck mightily.

RX: "Will you be among friends? I mean, in case you collapse?"

Me: "Oh, yeah. They'll loot my body and divide up my stuff."

RX: "Good. I just wanted to be sure someone would decide who gets your cool stuff, even if it wasn't me."

Testing, Testing, One, Two, Three...

So, in regards to an upcoming training class, I'd said up-front that I would be shooting the P250 Compact .380. Running it in a full two-day class would serve as a sort of proof of concept for the gun in my mind.

Then I'm in a Facebook thread where the instructors are chattering and mention is made of the fact that day one of the class will consist almost entirely of shooting 2" circles from distances between three and five yards.

Suddenly I'm thinking "Has my mouth written a check my ass can't cash? I haven't fired the P250 in over a month, after all..." So I grabbed a target and went to the range this morning.

A fifty-round box of .380 gives three full fifteen-round magazines and five rounds left over. The target in the picture above has fifteen rounds fired into the two-inch upper right "B" circle at three yards, fifteen into the lower left "1" circle at five yards, fifteen into the 3"x5" head box at seven yards, and the remaining five into the center circle at fifteen yards.

I had the range to myself, so I might have broken the speed limit some, but I wanted to make sure I could hit with the gat this weekend. As long as I remember that it seems to shoot to the top of the front sight post for me, I should be fine....

Is there any wine so sweet?

Apparently the Nazi Anime Fan wing of the internet has its jimmies thoroughly rustled by the fact that the genocidal founder of the Democrat party has been replaced on the Twenty by a gun-toting African-American Republican woman. And the Pinko Identity Politics wing of the internet doesn't even realize that's what just happened.

This is like sipping a martini made out of hippie and Nazi tears, shaken AND stirred.

Breaking: Treasury throws founder of the Democratic Party off $20 bill, replaces with gun-toting Republican pic.twitter.com/G9dVXpTaXv

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 20, 2016

Springtime

I got back from far-off Castle Frostbite in the kingdom of Cryogenica to find springtime well underway back in Broad Ripple. The streets are lined with color, the trees are starting to leaf in, and the whole place smells like a florist's shop with a slight undertone of bus exhaust.

I put in a couple miles on the bike, just pedaling around and around the neighborhood, to make sure I hadn't forgotten how to ride.
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The Big Apple

 I can't help it. I just gawk and snap photos like I've never seen a skyline before...

The Chrysler Building is still the standard by which other tall buildings are judged, in my opinion...

Changing planes at La Guardia or Newark can be a little fraught. If there's some sort of flight malfunction that causes me to need to stay overnight, I'd need to make provision for the airline to hold on to a big ol' Pelican case full of verboten. Boston? I won't even change planes in the cradle and the grave of American liberty if it can at all be avoided.
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Reading Recommendation...

Today's the big release day for Marko's newest novel, Chains of Command. We were on Amazon at midnight last night, which is I guess the 21st century equivalent of standing in line outside the bookstore waiting for it to open, only without costumed people in sleeping bags.

I've read the advanced reader copy, but I bought a copy of the dead tree version to go with the preceding volumes. This one has the best action scenes yet. And lots of them.
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Overheard at the Strip Mall...

Marko's teenage niece is visiting from Germany. We took her to Five Guys for burgers and then turned her loose in Kohl's this past weekend. Teenagers have a lot more Kohl's endurance than most, and so eventually Marko decided we'd amble next door to the Game Stop and meet her there.

I flagged her down in the checkout line and informed her of our plans, then caught up with Marko on the sidewalk out front.

Me: "Okay, I told her we'd meet her next door at Spiel Halte."

Apparently German mine not so good is, although very literal.
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Sure to wake up the room!

With all these voice-activated gadgets around, my band's next hit single will be "Hey Siri, tell Alexa it's okay, Google!"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 18, 2016

Project Whimsy Crosses the Finish Line

Sunday afternoon on the back yard range at Castle Frostbite, the Glock 37 (aka "the waterhead Glock", aka "Project Whimsy") fired a hundred rounds of commercial .45GAP, bringing the total to 2,010 since the last time it had been cleaned or lubricated, back in January.

The elusive Major Caudill fired a couple magazines.

The Remington 230gr FMJ left my fingers all gray and nasty as always, but all one hundred rounds fired without a hitch. The weapon went through its complete cycle of operation with every press of the trigger.

The Glock 37 has now fired 2,010 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, one failure to fire on round #1,712, and one parts breakage. This concludes the 2,000 round challenge and the gun is getting a well-deserved bath. Look for a wrap-up piece soon with more photos, thoughts, explanations, and future plans for the poor bobblehead Glock.
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Automotif CXXIII...

1963 Chevrolet Impala station wagon.
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Race for the Stick

Ygraine and Baby in a game of competition stick fetching.
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Saturday morning...

On the upside, I'm feeling a lot better.

On the downside, my head is empty. I am a giant, sucking void of anti-creativity right now.

I need to go watch some MSNBC or something to get back into the spirit of things. All I've done for the last several days is nap and surf the Bookface on the iPad.

I probably need to get out some, too. Take the a camera and go for a walk.
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Ramblings...

Heh. Bernie Gracchus and Donald Sulla...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 16, 2016

Update...

The fever seems to have mostly gone. I haven't made a Kleenex look like the Italian flag since about 0700.

There are some things that have made this more complicated than getting sick normally is, but those will have to stay (REDACTED) for another couple days.

I still feel like I've been beaten all over with a sock full of nickels, but two aspirin make that go away nicely.

The trick now will be clearing my lungs without triggering the sort of involuntary coughing fits that can bring on a good case of bronchitis. Delsym to the rescue.
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Inside the Iron Sandbox...

So, the first time my new phone rang and my iPad Mini started ringing, too...? That was a little unnerving. On the other hand, the way the phone automagically set itself up as a WiFi hotspot for the iPad was pretty neat.

The stuff in Apple's Iron Sandbox does tend to interface pretty seamlessly.
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New vs. Old...

Keads will be putting the new polymer-framed Colt XSP .380 through a documented 2k round test head-to-head against an original Eighties-vintage Colt Mustang.

Watch that space.
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Status Update...

I have not joined the zombies. Yet.
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Hey, when did that start?

Apparently Blogger now supports animated .gifs hosted internally. Huh.
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Ingenious.

The built-in pedometer and included fitness app on my new phone is ingenious in two ways:

1. It makes a game out of trying to better your totals from the day before, or at least not let the averages slump. Gotta move, even if it means just taking a few extra laps around the house!


2. And in order to make sure you don't get short-changed on your pace count, you keep the iGadget with you at all times.

Looks like I jinxed myself...

Today I need to go buy myself a good expectorant.
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Sorry 'bout that...

Having already suffered through the flu and some awful upper respiratory thing that tore through the gun store staff, I thought I was done being sick for the season.

Apparently not.

Fever, ache all over, and a really impressively sore throat. At least there's no coughing or nose-blowing with this one.  Massive amounts of vitamin C, Sucrets, aspirin, and sleep.

While I go nap some more, y'all read the latest from LawDog...

See you in a bit.
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Disconnect

"Rising minimum wages make automation more cost-effective"

It's an article of faith among Progressives that carbon taxes will disincentivize pollution, and yet the same people swear up and down that a hairnet & nametag tax won't disincentivize hiring the marginally employable.
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Stereotypes

From an article about another dumb thing to hang on police duty belts comes this gem:

Guns that fire rubber bullets attained brief notoriety in Russia after an argument about the merits of philosopher Immanuel Kant in a southern Russian bar devolved into violence in October 2013. One man fired several rubber bullets at his philosophical opponent, who was injured but not killed.

Wow. "...[A]n argument about the merits of philosopher Immanuel Kant in a southern Russian bar devolved into violence..."

That might be the most Russian thing I've ever read.
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Low-Information Voters

So this one woman on Twitter apparently noticed coverage of the Democratic party caucuses in Wyoming today, and decided to check and see how the GOP results were going. She liked what she saw!

.@LauraWalkerKC Now make fun of low-information voters loving Trump!

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 9, 2016

Others saw her Tweet and decided that the media coverage was biased!

It's weird, the media is only covering the Democrats race in Wyoming. https://t.co/xuCjsAuBUS

— Michael Wiley (@MinneMike) April 9, 2016

The joke, of course, is that the reason the media is only covering the Democratic caucus in Wyoming today is because the GOP had theirs last month.

Something something low-information voters...
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That's forever in blog years...

Tim Berners-Lee put up the first web page in 1991. If he's waited just a few years, he could have put a link on it to Charles G. Hill's blog, dustbury.com, which turned twenty today.
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Product Placement...

I hadn't seen Casino Royale yet, unbelievably, but that got fixed last night.

No wonder the subsequent Daniel Craig movies get judged so harshly. I was always like "Why do people hate on Quantum of Solace or Spectre? These are perfectly adequate Bond flicks." And they are, by the standards of A View to a Kill or The World Is Not Enough.

Loved the blatantly subversive fan service of the camera lingering on a dripping Daniel Craig emerging from the ocean. Y'all can do that as often as you want, Eon Productions.

Since I was watching it on the small screen with a Tanq and tonic instead of on the big screen with a bucket of popcorn, I was probably more detached than I would normally be with such an action-oriented movie. This made it easy to note the crazy-heavy product placement by FoMoCo and Sony. Pretty much every electronic device, from computers to cell phones to cameras, that appeared on-screen was a Sony product.

And as for FoMoCo? Well, Bond drove a rental Ford Focus to the lah-ti-dah seaside resort. As he's pulling in, he passes an Explorer pulling out. A couple duffers pull up in a Range Rover (then owned by Ford), and mistake him for the help, dismissively tossing him the keys to their SUV and demanding he park it. He does so by putting it in reverse and plowing it ass-end-first into what appears to be the FoMoCo corner of the Detroit Auto Show:


Notice he backs it between a Lincoln (FoMoCo) and a Volvo (FoMoCo) into a Jaguar (FoMoCo) and through careful camera work, the only cars whose distinct brand identifiers are visible in the background immediately before and after are also Ford products (a silver Land Rover beforehand and a silver Lincoln Town Car after.)

Of course Bond is back in an Aston Martin in this movie, too, since Ford still owned them in '06.

No Jacket Required

"Take Me Home" is playing...

Me: "Yeah, this is from Phil Collins' last good album..."@markokloos: "Before he turned into the Garfield of pop music."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 9, 2016

From elsewhere...

1910

I put one fifty-round box each of Sellier & Bellot and Magtech 230gr FMJ ammo through the Glock 37 today. The gun continues to endear itself to me way more than it should.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,910 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, one failure to fire on round #1,712, and one parts breakage. 90 rounds to go.
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Lyrics

He's Trump, he's Trump
He's on my screen
He's Trump, he's Trump, he's Trump
He's orange and mean

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 6, 2016

Aphorism

To the old saw "If you don't shoot weekly, you'll shoot weakly," I'd append "...and dry-fire daily so your shooting won't be fail-y."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 6, 2016

Message From the Past

The other day, Bobbi took a rack-mount terminal in to work that had been sitting in a corner of the living room for, well, a while.

When she moved it to the car, it exposed a little pile of stuff that had sat behind it. In that pile of stuff was a box from Farmer Frank. He'd sent me a small package with a couple boxes of .405 Winchester a couple years ago, and it was one of those things where you get a package, you know what's in it, and you set it aside unopened because the contents aren't something you intend to use right that second.

I'm not ashamed to say I teared up a little when I finally opened that box to store the ammo away. I should see if they'll let me bend the caliber restrictions at Indy Arms Co. if I come in early enough one morning, just to pop off a round or two.
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GlockGlockGlock

Took the Glock 37 and another hundred rounds of Remington .45GAP to Indy Arms Co. this morning. I planned ahead this time and already had one box loaded into magazines before I left the house.

The second round gave a *click* instead of a bang. While the hit looked a little off-center, this photo makes the striker indent look way more off center than it was. That's a pretty good lick, there. It went off on the second go.

The rest of the session passed without further incident.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,810 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, one failure to fire on round #1,712, and one parts breakage. 190 rounds to go.
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From the Department of Backup Redundancy Bureau

The North Korea monitoring project 38 North says that satellite imagery shows "suspicious activity" at a nuclear enrichment site in North Korea. 

Is there such thing as non-suspicious activity at North Korean nuclear sites?
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To the Citizens of Planet ManhattAngeles...

If you're puzzled by the The Price Is Right-episode-gone-amok into which the normally reliably staid GOP primary seems to have morphed, here is a field guide to your potential new cracker overlords.

If you have a cousin working in the ManhattAngeles oblast on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, you might call them for help in differentiating the tribes, because these howling savages are just outside the wire...er, "Loop", there.
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Back to the Glock

After two weeks of shooting nothing but the Canik, I was a little worried about coming back to the Glock 37. Would I have forgotten how to run the thing?

I took a hundred rounds to the range with me, but...and this is so girlie...I hadn't trimmed the nail on my trigger finger well back like I usually do when shooting Glocks. So, given the more vigorous recoil of the .45GAP compared to the 9mm I'd been shooting for the last fortnight, plus how thin and brittle my nails are, it bent funny and started to tear on the last round of the fourth magazine.

Not having a nail clippers and not wanting to tear the nail into the quick (because ouch!) I fired the last loaded magazine weak-handed and reeled the target in, saving the second box of ammo for Tuesday. Note to self: Put nail clippers in range bag. (Usually these are needed for a thumbnail blowing up while loading a shotgun.)

Anyhow, the gun shot like I hadn't set it aside for half a month, including the ten rounds fired weak hand. There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,710 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, and one parts breakage. 290 rounds to go.
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Brrr...

I had been planning on going to Marion County Fish & Game in the morning to shoot, but Weather Underground tells me we won't see the right side of 40°F 'til lunchtime or so, so it looks like it's the neighborhood indoor range for me.
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Isn't this where we came in?

So, back in the early Aughties, banks were handing mortgages out to anybody who could hold a pen and fog a mirror. The "NINJA" (No Income, No Job or Assets) loan became a thing. Lenders were chasing winos down alleyways and forcing them into $350k McMansions telling them they could "flip" the house for half a mil next week. I actually overheard a couple of night stock clerks at a Kroger back in Knoxville talking about the houses they were flipping, back in early '07.

It got so out of whack that it eventually replaced the Dutch tulip mania as an example of stuff that got out of whack in econ textbooks.

Predictably, the economy collapsed. Barack Obama got elected at least partly as a backlash to the collapsed housing bubble that took down Wall Street.

Which makes this headline delicious, at least if you find irony tasty:

Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit

WARNING!

There is apparently a new and horrible virus that crosses all platforms: Windows and iOS and Android, Edge and Firefox and Chrome and Facebook apps. It only happens when you're signed in as me, though, so don't worry. It's apparently not actually on the machines, rather it's somehow contained in my login information no matter which machine I try.

That's right: My name is a killing word.
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A complete breakfast...

Salmon Caught Near Seattle Are Full Of Cocaine And Antidepressants

"We were just outside of Barstow when the lox kicked in..."

They're missing out by not charging extra for this stuff. People in a hurry could grab a salmon & cream cheese on a toasted onion bagel in the morning and get their daily dose at the same time.

To learn if the salmon in your 'fridge or freezer is from the affected area, lick it and see if your tongue goes numb or if you feel happier.
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Monday morning...

Well, we're all out of rum and the lash is broken. This narrows our options considerably...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 4, 2016

Canik TP9v2 teardown and wrap-up.

The front sight came out of the box like this: Slightly chewed-up looking and with the dot off-center to the right.

Front frame rails after 2,000 rounds. There was still something like lube on them, despite it being applied two+ months ago.

Locking block area and takedown catch.

Underside of slide. That ragged area at the bottom of the feed ramp is odd...

Feed ramp. You can kinda see the ragged nature of what I presume is a relief cut at the bottom of the ramp. This is where the snouts of the P9HST2 bullets ran aground.

Breechface and extractor. Dirty, but everything looks normal here.

Muzzle crown.

The total round count was two thousand, of which one thousand was American Eagle 115gr FMJ generously provided by Lucky Gunner, so y'all go buy stuff from them so they're happy.

Malfunctions:

1000 rounds of Federal American Eagle 115gr FMJ: 1 malfunction (1 failure to eject.)
160 rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ: 21 malfunctions (11 failures to eject, 9 failures to feed, 1 failure to lock the slide back.)
50 rounds of Federal HST 147gr JHP: 2 malfunctions (2 failures to feed.)
50 rounds of Fiocchi 124gr FMJ: 1 malfunction (1 failure to fire.)
10 rounds of CCI Blazer Brass 124gr FMJ: 1 malfunction (1 failure to eject.)

Other ammo fired, including 150 rounds of Federal 115gr +P+ JHP, 50 Sig Sauer Elite Performance 115gr FMJ, 50 rounds of Winchester "NATO" 124gr FMJ Q4318, and several hundred Fiocchi 115gr FMJ, experienced no malfunctions.

There is the data. I leave it to you to draw the conclusion as to whether you want to spend your own dosh on this gun like I did. I personally would not carry this sample unless I absolutely had to, and then I'd fill it with Federal 9BPLE, since that seems to function the gun with satisfactory vigor.
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Overheard in the Office...

The TV is playing in Bobbi's room down the hall.

Plastic Surgeon TV Commercial: "Are people always asking if you're tired or angry?"

Me: "Yes! Because I am always tired and angry."

RX: "Well, you know what to do..."

Me: "Yawn and hit people?"

...and...

Plumbing Commercial: "Have a leaky faucet, clogged drain, or do you just need a plumber?"

Me: "How does that work? *ding-dong* 'Hi, do you have a leaky faucet or a clogged drain?' 'No, I just need a plumber.'"

RX: "Well, I think we've all seen movies that start like that..."

Me: "Bow-chicka-wow-wow."

RX: "...I just didn't know they could advertise it on TV."

Mm-mmm good!

Sauteed morels and Bobbi's oxtail stew for supper last night. (Recipe, more or less, at the link.)
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Tiny Colt

Some blogging at the other blog.
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So...

...about that CCI Blazer Brass 115gr FMJ that kept choking the Canik TP9v2?

Put another hundred rounds of it through my Gen4 Glock 35 (with the Lone Wolf 9mm barrel and 9mm extractor and RSA.)

There were no malfunctions of any type, just like all the other hundreds of rounds of this stuff I've shot through this Glock and my other 9mm Glocks.
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A Very SoBro Sunday...

Left the house with Bobbi this morning to walk down to Good Morning Mama's. I had a craving for one of their delicious breakfast burritos and Bobbi wanted to nosh on some corned beef hash. This little fella was on the roof peak of Roseholme Cottage, right over the front door. He was so still, I feared he might be dead, until I noticed the Cooper's hawk circling overhead...

We got to Mama's, where this 2016 Camaro SS Indy Pace Car edition was parked, and the joint was jumpin'. They told me to expect a forty-minute wait. Bobbi strolled down the block to Bent Rail Brewery, and called me to tell me that they were open for brunch. I told the nice people at Mama's to take our names off the wait list, and headed down to Bent Rail myself.

No wait for tables at Bent Rail. Of course, they're a pretty new addition to the brunch scene in SoBro.

I had the Korean breakfast bowl. House made ginger pork sausage, sliced cabbage, kimchi, and two poached eggs over some sticky rice. The sausage was a little dry, but the flavor was great, and you could just smoosh it through the eggs and kimchi to get it all juicy...

We walked toward home via the Monon Trail. Bobbi wanted to swing by The Dancing Donut, but they had already sold out and closed up for the day. We stopped in at Locally Grown Gardens instead.

Lovely produce, all manner of gourmet cooking ingredients, and...

...what's that back there in the cooler? Is that...? Could it be...?

It is! Morels! Oh, we are going to feast at Roseholme tonight!
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