Calm Your Tits...

First the orcas, now this...

Animals are getting uppity in Europe. First we had orcas attacking yachts off the coast of the Iberian peninsula, now there are eagle attacks in Scandinavia...

In the most recent attack, a 20-month old girl was playing outside a farm in Orkland, a small municipality in the south, on Saturday when the eagle came “out of the blue” and clawed her.

The girl’s father, who was not there during the attack, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the mother and a neighbor raced to fight the eagle. The raptor attacked three times before it was killed when hit with a piece of wood, Folkestad said.

Automotif DXLII...

There are two automotive phenomena in play with today's ride: The Indy 500 Pace Car, and the Indy 500 Official Car.

First, there's the Pace Car. Pace Cars have mostly been convertibles, but more importantly, the Pace Car needed to be able to be able to perform the chores of the actual pace car in the race. During the Malaise Era, this resulted in actual Pace Cars that were heavily modified to be up to the high speeds involved, and those modifications were not applied to the replica Pace Cars sold for the street. As an example, the actual '83 Riviera convertible Pace Cars for the track (there were two built) had 4.3L twin-turbo intercooled V-6 motors that pumped out more than 400 horsepower and were in no way remotely street legal.

Then there are the Official Cars, which are used in 500 Festival events and parades leading up to the race and in the festivities on race day. Frequently these are the same make and model as the Pace Car, but not necessarily. In 1983, they were, though: Riviera convertibles.

Of the Official Cars that Buick provided to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that year, sixty were white Riviera convertibles with maroon interiors, making these somewhat rarer than the 502 Pace Car Riviera XX replicas.

This one was snapped in September of 2024 using an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

Super New

The more mature a technology is, the harder it is to release a really jaw-dropping product:

So even if the engineers manage to improve an already near-perfect model, the new camera will not really be all that different.

That is exactly what happened in case of the Nikon D6: Like the D5, it still is a lighting-fast camera, it still has incredible high ISO performance and it still is indestructible. On top of that, the autofocus was improved significantly, but no one really took note of that, as the D5 was already practically infallible.

It is important to understand that major breakthroughs in physical engineering are far less likely to happen and if they do happen, they often go relatively unnoticed.

Always keep the Pareto-principle in mind: An improvement of 20% requires 80% of total development resources and is neither needed nor noticed by 80% of all users.

Meme Dump...

A penny saved is a pain in the ass.

People save pennies, but don't spend them. They pile up in coffee cans and pickle jars around the country and once in a blue moon someone gets arsed to roll all theirs and take them to the bank, or go dump the jar in a CoinStar machine.

So the government has to keep minting a jillion of the things so that retailers can make change for every purchase which totals up to a number that doesn't end in a 0 or 5. It costs three cents to make a penny. We're flushing money down the toilet and we've known it for almost my entire life.

But when it comes time to get serious about eliminating the penny, the legislature and the Treasury Department, and the general public make like that Spiderman meme.

The one thing I do know is that there's a particular flavor of conservative who absolutely lose their tiny little minds anytime you change anything about the money.

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Automotif DXLI...

I've been trying to get a shot of this mirror-wrapped Maserati Ghibli fo-evah, and finally got some good ones.

Automotif DXL...

1970 was a watershed year for Buick's Electra model. It was the last year of the third generation of the model, which had launched as a '65. Further, it was the final appearance of an Electra convertible in showrooms.

It was the first year of Buick's newest iteration of its big block V-8, the 455, created by boring out the older Buick 430 V-8. It was also the last year of high-compression motors under the hood of Electras. The 455 in this Burnished Saddle Iridescent 1970 Electra 225 Limited convertible had a 10.0:1 compression ratio and was rated at 360 SAE gross horsepower, but for 1971 it would be reduced to 8.5:1 so that it could run on regular pump gas, giving it a horsepower haircut to 315 SAE gross.

1970 would also be the last year for finned aluminum brake drums on all four corners on the Electra. The 1971 model year would see power front discs appear as standard equipment up front on the big Buick.

What was unchanged for 1970 was size. The 1970 Electra 225 Limited still stretched a hair longer than 225" between the bumpers and pressed down on the earth with just shy of 4500 pounds of road-hugging weight.

It still showed off the classic Buick styling elements, too. On the front fenders are the four Ventiports proclaiming its status as a top-of-the-line Buick, and stretching down the flanks is a chrome styling line echoing the classic Sweepspear.

This one was photographed in August of 2024 with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and a Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

Hey, Look!

Always be learning!

The first few times at the range with a handgun are a real big deal for most folks, and you’re likely to imprint pretty strongly on the first pistols you tried, the words of wisdom from your dad/cop friend/whoever took you to the range that first time and the coaching from the instructor at your first concealed-carry class.

For most people, that’s about as far as it goes. Shooting isn’t a hobby, nor are guns a lifestyle for most firearm owners. They’ll get to the range a couple times a year, maybe, and 20 years from now they’ll still be shooting the same way they were when they started out. They may retain some of the basics, or they may not.

The fact that you’re reading my column in this magazine indicates that you’re probably a little more into shooting than the statistically most common handgun owner. Like the music enthusiast who seeks out new bands to listen to, you’re probably more open to broadening your shooting horizons than Joe and Suzy Average. Perhaps you seek out coaching from different instructors in order to learn new techniques. I know I do.

Haven't we seen this movie?

Interesting choice of words for its headline from The Economist, there. I'd say this is pretty well-charted territory, actually.

The elections in the two states in the former East Germany were being closely watched in Berlin as a measure of the rising strength of extremist parties, left and right, as well as of the weakening position of the centrist parties that make up the current federal coalition. It was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had won a state election.

The returns were seen as a worrying indicator of the health and future of German democracy, and they were likely to intensify a quandary over whether and how mainstream parties can isolate extremists and keep them from entering government.

Well...

Automotif DXXXIX...

The second generation of the Toyota Camry, dubbed the V20 internally, launched in the North American market in autumn of '86 as a 1987 model. Available as either a sedan or a wagon, and in base, DX, and LE trim levels, the Japanese-built sedans were soon joined by ones built at Toyota's new U.S. manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. All Camry wagons sold in the American market were imported from Japan, however.

This Dark Blue '88 DX wagon could have been equipped with either Toyota's 3S-FE 2.0L inline four, rated at 115 SAE net horsepower, or the 156hp 2VZ-FE 2.5L DOHC 24V V-6. While a five speed manual was theoretically available, manual wagons were already vanishingly rare by '88, so this one's likely sporting a 4-speed automatic, but one never knows. I'd do bad, wrong things for a longroof Camry with a stick.

Despite being dull as dishwater, these things were phenomenons of reliability, doing as much as any other model to help establish Toyota's reputation in the US for boring longevity. The fact that this 36-year-old car is still out there tooling around as a daily driver attests to that fact with a positively Camry-esque blend of blandness and eloquence.

When the rats and cockroaches are doing drive-bys on each other in the post-apocalyptic wastelands with Glocks and AKs, they'll be driving Camrys like this one.

This one was photographed with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 in August of 2024.

Yowza

How in the heck can it be September already? It was April only five minutes ago!

Time has gotten so wonky since March of 2020. Things that feel like they happened just the other day actually happened a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, the last three weeks of this election season have dragged on for months.

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Meme Dump...

Shrinking knife...

I love the Emerson wave opening feature on Spydercos, but I don't use them for any sort of tactical reasons. It's just handy to have a knife that pops open automagically when you yank it from your pocket, without having to operate any buttons, flippers, thumb studs, or whatever.

As a result, over the years the one I carry has gotten smaller and smaller, starting with the big ol' Endura on the right, and then the Delica in the middle (which shows the wear of nearly a decade of carry) and finally the little Dragonfly, a gift from a friend, which I've been carrying for something like a year now.

Blade lengths: 2.3", 2.9", 3.8"

BezosMart appears to have them on sale at the moment, maybe for Labor Day or something. The current price on the Endura at the link is less than I paid for it from Amazon in 2013...

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It makes sense, in an evil sort of way...

Som information is being released regarding the planned terrorist atacks in Vienna that would have included the Taylor Swift show there:

“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said Wednesday. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”

If you're a bad guy who wants to kill thousands of people, first you gotta find someplace where thousands of people are gonna be. Sounds like the playbook was going to be similar to the one at that Ariana Grande concert in England.

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Meme Dump...

Automotif DXXXVIII...

By the early Nineties, the 3rd Generation Mustangs, known to enthusiasts as Fox Body cars, were getting long in the tooth. A replacement was already in the works, and it would be another front-engine rear-wheel drive car with an optional V-8; fan outcry had saved the Mustang from being re-cast as a Mazda-sourced FWD coupe. (That car was instead being sold as the Ford Probe.)

Sales hadn't been strong in the recession of the early '90s and so ambitious plans for the next generation 'Stang were shelved in favor of a much more modest upgrade. In the meantime, the Fox Body would need to soldier on for another couple model years.

For 1992 the only really new external visual cue was the black rubber strip in the side molding and bumpers was replaced with one in body color, as can be seen on this Bright Calypso Green LX ragtop.

The LX came from the factory with a 2.3L SOHC inline four; Ford's Lima motor that had been around since the days when it was found under the hoods of '74 Pintos. Now sporting electronic fuel injection and dual spark plug heads, it was rated at 108 SAE net horsepower. The only optional motor was Ford's 5.0L H.O. V-8. Either engine could be had with a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic.

The pony fender badges, rather than prominent chrome "5.0" ones, tell us this is a four-cylinder secretarymobile, like roughly half of all Mustangs sold that year. No race car, but certainly a pleasant cruiser with the top down on a sunny summer day. Besides, the fuelie OHC twin plug Lima probably made as much juice as any six cylinder available in a First Generation 'Stang.

This one was photographed in September of 2023 using a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

Ink on Steel, Old and New

Issue number 40 of RECOIL: CONCEALMENT is available, and I've got two pieces in it: A Classic Carry piece on the Harrington & Richardson self-loading .25 and .32 pistols from ye olden tymes, and a 400-round review of the new Bersa B1911.

The data box David Merrill did for the H&R .25 made me spew soda out my nose...

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Ugh.

I had intended to go to the outdoor range today, but it's going to be swamp-ass hot, like Gulf Coast levels of heat and humidity, and neither the Mustang nor the Zed Drei have any refrigerant aboard currently.

If I were faced with a week- or month-long stretch of this, I'd just cowgirl up and go, but when you can look ahead to Thursday and Friday and see it's going to be more bearable, it's easy to just punk out for a couple days. I'll maybe hit the indoor range on Thursday and Friday.

The next three days are supposed to have highs in the mid- to upper 90s and dew points in the low 70s, and it's those dew points that'll take the starch out of me. Bicycling and walking around the neighborhood will be bad enough, but 30 minutes or more in a car with no A/C? Nah. I'll skip that. Next week is supposed to return to more normal late summer weather.

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Lever-age

At the range last week I helped Michael Grasso dial in his .44 levergun with some .44 Special loads, just because having a gun in the house with an unsighted optic is anathema to all right-thinking people.

That mount for the Aimpoint Acro was pretty groovy. I hadn't gotten a good look at one before. I also dug the Magpul ELG furniture, although I'd expected to. I remember being skeptical of their shotgun stock before it came out and winding up having to eat crow, so...

Some people are skeptical, but I think a levergun has its uses, although it's possible to get carried away with one. 

I remember back at TacCon '19, Lee Weems made a pretty good case for why he used a .30-30 as a patrol rifle...

Punch Buggy

Commercials are some of the best movies out there these days. Also, the ID. Buzz is adorable as dammit.

One of the globe's historically bad neighborhoods.

The AP news headline reads thusly:

At least 13 people have died after a boat carrying migrants sunk off Yemen’s coast, UN says

It says something about how messed up that part of the world is that, not having read the story yet, I'm not 100% sure which direction the boat was going.

Odds are that it was full of people fleeing the Sudan and/or the Horn of Africa and hoping to get to the Gulf States, but given Saudi atrocities at the Yemeni border and the hot mess Yemen's been for years now, maybe they were going the other way and hoping to get to, I dunno, someplace reasonably stable like Egypt or Kenya.

*goes and reads story*

Yup, it was the former. Ethiopians hoping to get work in the Gulf States.

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Automotif DXXXVII..

Unable to compete at scale with the "Big Three" in Detroit, especially in the recessionary economy of the late Fifties, Studebaker decided to pivot toward the other end of the market.

The compact Lark, launched in 1959, actually shared a lot of the passenger compartment & roofline of the full-size Studebaker models, but had the front and rear overhangs shortened considerably. The wheelbase got a section taken out of it ahead of the firewall, too, shortening it to 108.5".

It was available in two basic trim levels. The Deluxe, which was the cheaper of the two, came as a two- or four-door pillared sedan or a two-door wagon. The fancier Regal could be had as a convertible, hardtop coupe, or wagon.

The trim on the cars, even the Regals, was quite restrained for a late-Fifties American car, and the Lark emphasized thriftiness.

The Alaskan Blue 1959 two-door pillared sedan in the photo would have sported a base MSRP of only $1,925, or a couple hundred bucks shy of $21,000 in today's dollars. While the glitzier models could be had with Studebaker's 259 cubic inch OHV V-8, the base Deluxe two-door sedan was only offered with the somewhat dated 169 cube flathead inline six, rated at 90 SAE gross horsepower.

While performance of the V-8 cars was reasonably peppy... the Lark's main competitor, the Rambler American, could only be had with a straight six ...the six cylinder Larks were torpid. The flathead Studebaker "Champion" inline six dated back to the 1930s, and the performance numbers reflected that.

Road & Track tested a '59 Lark Deluxe with a 3-speed manual and clocked a best 0-60 time of 21.0 seconds with a quarter mile run of 21.4 at 61 mph through the traps. A sufficiently determined driver who wasn't facing a headwind might eventually coax the thing up to a heady 80 mile per hour top speed.

People shopping at this end of the car market aren't generally looking for race cars, however, and they'd likely be more interested in the fuel mileage, which R&T recorded as ranging between 17 and 22 miles per gallon, which was quite parsimonious for the era.

Judging by the wheels and tires on this Lark, though, I doubt that the engine compartment bears much resemblance to the way it looked when it left the plant in South Bend, Indiana sixty-five years ago.

It was photographed with a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens in August of 2024.

Automotif DXXXVI...

The 1984 model year was the swan song for the full-size rear-wheel drive, body-on-frame Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight coupe and sedan.

Along with their GM C-platform stablemates, the Cadillac De Ville and Buick Electra, they'd been downsized for the 1977 model year and, in search of more fuel efficiency, for 1981 the base engine in the 98 became the 252 cubic inch (sold as the 4.1L) Buick V-6...although oddly they didn't call those cars "Oldsmobile 96's".

In 1982 an extra super deluxe trim level called the "Regency Brougham" was added to the Olds 98 lineup, with super plush upholstery and electroluminescent opera lamps on the B-pillars. Also standard on the Brougham were a tilt wheel, cornering lamps, and a padded vinyl roof. 

Base engine in the '84 Brougham was the Olds 307 V-8 with a Rochester 4-barrel carb, rated at 140 SAE net horsepower. Optionally, masochists could order the wretched Olds 350 diesel, which put out 105 horsepower when it could be persuaded to run at all.

The original MSRP of the Silver Metallic 1984 Regency Brougham in the photo was $15,201, which was enough to let you go shopping on a Cadillac lot back then, so long as you stuck to well-optioned Cimarrons.

This one was photographed in August of 2024 using a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens.

Meme Dump...

See the dot, hit a lot...

Back at the range with the Staccato C on Tuesday morning.

The reticle on the Trijicon RMR HD is selectable between a regular dot and an EOTech-esque "donut of death" that has a central dot, a large circle, and crosshairs-style tick marks at the top, bottom, and sides of the circle. That might be okay atop a carbine or something, and I guess it could be helpful for people who have difficulty finding the dot, but in that little slide-mounted MRDS window both Michael and I found it a little cramped and busy and we opted for the plain dot.

Anyway, the Staccato C made it through another two hundred rounds without any sort of malfunction, bringing the total round count thus far to six hundred rounds. Fourteen hundred left to go.

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Automotif DXXXV...

By the early Sixties, a Ford dealership had most of what we'd now consider a full-range model lineup. When the 1964 range debuted, a customer in a Ford store could choose among the sporty Thunderbird personal luxury coupe, the compact Falcon, the mid-size Fairlane, and the full-size Ford, which came in Custom, Custom 500, Galaxie, and Galaxie 500 trim levels.

In the photos above is a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner convertible in Skylight Blue. The '64 was the last model year for the Space Race-inspired lines of this generation, to be replaced for 1965 with a far more sharply-creased looking design

The base engine in the Sunliner was Ford's 223 cubic inch Milage Maker OHV inline six, rated at 138 SAE gross horsepower. Additionally, a buyer could opt for a range of V-8s: The Challenger 289 2-bbl rated at 195 horsepower, the 2-barrel Thunderbird 352 putting out 250 horsepower, the Thunderbird 390 four-barrel FE big block at 300 SAE gross, and the top of the range dual-quad 425 horsepower Thunderbird 427.

Going by the badges on the rocker panels and the dual exhausts, the convertible in the photos came with the 390 V-8. The transmission could have been a 3-speed Cruise-O-Matic, or a 3- or 4-speed manual.

Motor Trend tested a '64 Galaxie 500 XL hardtop sedan with the Thunderbird 390 motor and Cruise-O-Matic and got a 0-60 time of 9.3 seconds and a 17.6 quarter mile at 82 mph through the traps. With a cast iron drum at each corner, hauling the two-ton sedan down from 60mph took 163 feet. The convertible was only about a hundred pounds heavier than the hardtop, so the numbers should be similar. 

Check out those rocket exhaust taillights! You can easily picture some dude driving this thing to watch the first NASA Gemini mission launch.

This one was driving to Fresh Market in August of 2024, and not Cape Kennedy in March of 1965, and it was photographed with a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens, which would have been alien space magic tech when this car was new.

Reliability Check...

My friend Michael Grasso was able to obtain a loaner RMR HD from Trijicon to use on the Staccato C test pistol. There's some question as to whether the fact that the element slightly overhanging the rear edge of the ejection port would affect the reliable ejection of spent cases or not.

I was optimistic, since I've put thousands of rounds through several FN509's wearing a Trijicon SRO, which similarly overhangs the rear of the ejection port, without any problems.

We mounted the optic, got it dialed in, and proceeded to crank out two hundred rounds at a pace that left the slide hot enough to be painful to the touch. Not only were there no malfunctions of any type, the brass does not seem to contact the sight housing at all.

This morning I'll get back to the range and we'll try some different brands of ammunition with varying power factors.

Meme Dump...

Creepy Swimmies

I'm not much of a fan of bugs in general, and the bigger they are, the more they creep me out. So I definitely would not have liked going for a swim during the Paleozoic, when six-foot long gigantic sea scorpions were the apex predators of the Iapetus Ocean off the coast of Gondwanaland.

Meme Dump...

Automotif DXXXIV...

1979 marked the tenth anniversary of the Trans Am package on the Pontiac Firebird, a vehicle that had loomed large in American lore and popular entertainment through the decade of the Seventies.

Pontiac commemorated the occasion with the Tenth Anniversary Trans Am, which was actually listed as a separate model with its own unique VIN prefix. (Firebird: S87, Esprit: T87, Formula: U87, Trans Am: W87, TATA: X87)

Only 7500 were built and the only option buyers had was a manual or automatic transmission. Manuals came with the Pontiac W72 400 cubic inch V-8 with an 8.1:1 compression ratio and rated at 220 SAE net horsepower.

The "6.6 Litre" badge on this one's hood scoop tells us that it's one of 5,683 with the automatic transmission and 185 horsepower L80 403 cid Oldsmobile Rocket V-8.

The homogenization of GM's engine lines was well underway by now: Your base Firebird buyers got Buick V-6's, Formulas and Trans Ams came with Olds engines, and buyers in California got saddled with a 2-barrel Chevy 305.

Incidentally, while the Trans Am had spent the Seventies as an atavistic Muscle Car Era throwback with a range of 455 and 400 cubic inch V-8 motors, 1979 would be the last year for that. Thanks to tightening regulations, the biggest motor under the hood of a 1980 T/A would be the aforementioned Californian 305.

The TATA got special two-tone Platinum paint with Charcoal accents, an extra large screaming chicken decal on the hood that sprawled clean across the fender tops, and those nifty "turbo" wheels (which would reappear later on actual turbo Trans Ams). The interior featured a full load of options and it was the first Trans Am to top the $10,000 dollar mark, with an MSRP of $10,620, the equivalent of about $46,000 in today's money.

Car and Driver tested a '79 Trans Am with the W72 400 motor and the WS6 handling package, and deleted the A/C, to boot, shaving a hundred pounds off the nose of their test car. They managed a 0-60 time of 6.7 seconds and a 15.3 second quarter mile at 96.6 miles per hour. Quick enough for its era, but still a shadow of its former self. The TATA in the photos... a couple hundred pounds heavier, its L80 down 35 horses to the W72, and saddled with a slushbox ...would have put up even less impressive numbers.

These photos were snapped in July of 2019 at the Indianapolis Hamfest using a Canon EOS M and EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens.

I'm pretty sure my roommate's Lexus RX350, parked just out of frame, would demolish this Tenth Anniversary Trans Am in a drag race. I'm also pretty sure Trans Am Man could not possibly care less.