Monday Morning Memes...

Anti-Sleep Cat

Holden started out the evening curled in a ball at my feet, which meant I couldn't stretch my legs out full length.

Eventually my knees were aching enough that I sat up and picked him up and set him on the bed next to me so I could straighten my legs. I carefully set him so that he was stretched parallel to me, leaving me the maximum amount of room to toss and turn in comfort.

Somehow, in his sleep, he rotated himself through ninety degrees on the bed until he was stretched out across its width, about at my waist level, leaving me barely enough room for the width of my hips if I lay on my back. If I lay on my left side in any position other than completely straight as a board, my butt would be hanging off the bed.

He's lucky he's so cute.

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Alleged Jaguar

So artist's renderings of what is allegedly the all-new Jaguar EV have leaked.

It looks like an unlicensed Barbie Cullinan trying to dodge a trade dress lawsuit from Rolls Royce.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we regret to inform you...

...that it is, in fact, one of the Monday-est Mondays of the entire calendar year today.

The National Weather Service forecasts that it is likely to remain Monday all day long. 

At least there are Cyber Monday deals to take the edge off the day. Retail therapy can help!

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Undergeared...

Me heading out the door to lunch on Friday: “It’s 28 degrees out there. I won’t be doing outdoors photography. The 17-55mm/2.8 will be plenty.”

Me five minutes later slowly creeping up on a squirrel with the camera in front of my face:

With the 1.6x crop factor of a Canon APS-C sensor, the lens has an equivalent field of view to a 27-88mm zoom on a full frame camera. That 88mm is on the short end of telephoto length, fine for portraits but way too short for wildlife. 

Starting with that upper photo from probably a dozen feet away, I had to slowly inch my way up to maybe double-arm's-length to get the lower shot.

Meme Dump...

Local Sportsball...

The Indiana University Hoosiers took on the hapless Purdue Boilermakers in the annual Old Oaken Bucket cross-state rivalry game and dismantled them 66-0, to wind up with an 11-1 record. First time they won the contest since 2019.

This apparently might not be enough to get them into the playoffs, despite the fact that they beat Michigan at home, which Ohio State was unable to do...

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Meme Dump...

Happy Dashers

Getting more photos from the Drumstick Dash processed. Here are some of my faves thus far...

Lots of people can't even spell 'tariff'...

I've been scrolling around and adding twenty-plus percent to Sellier & Bellot, Magtech, Fiocchi, Wolf, PMC, some varieties of Winchester...

(This is to say nothing of CZ, Taurus, most HKs and Glocks, all the various Turkish companies, lotsa Berettas...)

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"Like a monkey with a screwdriver..."

So, let's talk about knives. Once upon a time, I used to look at a tactical folder as though it were a weapon which, when one thinks about it, is sort of odd.

Unless you live in the rare jurisdiction that bans pepper spray and firearms but is hunky dory with you carrying some one-hand opening, locking folder with a big ol' meat-eating blade, it's hard to imagine the scenario where you're going to put it into use. 

I suppose you could theoretically pull it out and wave it around as some sort of deterrent? But there's a lot of fantasy stuff out there where people are imagining squaring off with some attacker in a scenario reminiscent of West Side Story meets a "Teach Yourself Escrima at Home" DVD from Paladin Press.

The one really legitimate use for a knife is to defend against a gun grab or otherwise force an attacker off you that has grabbed you by surprise from behind.

And frankly a folding knife clipped to your strong-side pocket just isn't all that hot for that use. For starters, it assumes that your strong side arm is free and doesn't have 180 pounds of assailant wrapped around it.

Further, even if you do get the knife out of the pocket and into your hand, there's still the problem of deploying the blade. Sure, there are thumb studs and Spyder holes and flippers and assisted openers and even straight-up automatic ones with pushbutton releases. The problem with all those is that you have to get one grip on the knife to get it out of your pocket, shift your grip on the knife to get your thumb or forefinger into place to deploy the blade, and then shift your grip again to get the knife positioned in your hand to go to work with it.

And you have to perform all that hand jive while rolling around with Sumdood who's trying to yank your arm out of the socket and conk your head on the pavement. Don't drop it!

About the only folders that mostly evade this handicap are ones with the Emerson Wave or a facsimile thereof, which mostly open reliably and automatically as they're being yanked out of the pocket. Mostly. Under ideal conditions I'd say I probably get it right about 95+% of the time. Rolling around with Sumdood is pretty far from ideal conditions, though.

Hence the popularity of the small centerline fixed-blade knife. Carried in whatever way makes it best accessible to either hand...behind the belt buckle, IWB, even in some circumstances as a neck knife...the idea is that it can be reached with either hand and yanked out ready to go, already in a stabbin' grip. The purpose of these small knives isn't to square up with some other knife guy like you're Jim Bowie on a sandbar, but to do like the guy in the white shirt is doing in the above photo: Make like a monkey with a screwdriver to get the other guy to let go of your gun and/or you.

The Shivworks store has a few really excellent offerings like the classic Push Dagger or the Clinch Pick. Those are outstanding, and probably the go-to choices, but if you're on a budget, the TDI knives from Ka-Bar work great and are available from BezosMart with free Prime delivery.

(Also, get yourself to ECQC.)

Highbrow Memes...

Memes for Your Food Coma...

 

'Tis the Seasonal...

Stepped out the front door at 8:57AM this morning to go shoot photos of the Drumstick Dash. I could hear the countdown for the 9:00AM start from the front porch as I walked to my observation spot, which is at the two mile mark of the 4.6 mile course.

It was 34°F outside when I left the house, and we're still early enough in the season where that feels pretty darn cold. By the first week of February, anything above freezing'll feel like sunbathing weather, but today I was regretting not switching out the cotton socks for the wool socks in my dresser drawer by about 9:30. With good wool socks, the waterproof Merrell Moab shoes I wear in winter are good enough to wear well down into the 20s, but standing around on asphalt, the cotton tube socks just weren't hacking it for insulation.

I took the Canon EOS 40D with the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS zoom lens as well as my usual EOS-1D Mark IV, and even though the 40D is seventeen years old and can be had for less than a hundred bucks these days, I was pretty happy with the first few shots I've processed.

Happy Turkey Day!

Hopefully all the readers of VFTP have much for which to be thankful on this holiday.

Enjoy the feasting!

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Memes to Warm Your Wednesday

Tab Clearing...

• Leadership lessons from Star Trek: TNG.


• Facebook Destroys Everything.


• Clothes With History.

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Meme Dump...

Postings...

• Super badass twin turbo V-8 ragtop Benz.


• Resurrecting a camera.

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Monday Morning Memes

Slow start...

Spent the morning blogging about cool old rocket-ship-looking Thunderbirds.

More later.

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Automotif DLXX...

These straight-out-of-camera monochrome JPEGs of a droptop BMW M4 make it look pretty butch, I think. Shot with the Nikon D800.

Point, Counterpoint...

Jaguar's rebrand has run afoul of the culture wars, with Fox News calling it "Bud Light 2.0" which is kinda funny. I'm sorry, but the average Fox News viewer is going to boycott the new Jaguar for the same reason I am: Aren't neither of us the target demographic for the new over-$100k Jag EV.

The most sensible "con" take I've yet run across has been from Mr Jalco, a graphic designer, illustrator, and sometime auto writer and YouTuber:

Now, before we dive too deep, there are two things we need to establish. Firstly, I love Jaguar. I think they’ve made some of the most beautiful and iconic cars of the 20th century, and the potential offered by their brand and racing heritage is beaten only by Ferrari or Porsche. Secondly, I am absolutely not talking about their yet to be revealed new cars here. I haven’t seen them – hardly anyone outside the internal team has – so cannot and will not judge them. This is purely about the brand ident they have so far released, what it tells us about their direction of travel as a company and the quality of the creative thinking inside the company.

It's an excellent deep dive that explains "brands", "branding", and the uphill row Jag has to hoe to reposition itself in the market, to mix my metaphors as thoroughly as Jaguar has mixed the cases in its typography.

On the "pro" side of the ledger is this well-argued piece by Alex Goy at Driven:

As well as dragging some of the worst of humanity out of the woodwork, it also brought out a group of concerned Jaguar fans. For them, Jaguar’s been doing broadly the same thing since before they were born. The brand’s heritage, even post Ian Callum reinvention, has been the steadfast hook upon which Jaguar’s hat swung. Images of the E-Type (which has been out of production for nearly 50 years) are everywhere, and rightly so, the Morse (which hasn’t been on our screens for nearly 25 years) Mk II is used as a shining example of how great Jag used to be. The tales of derring do, of record breaking, of Le Mans, Geneva, and the Mille Miglia are staggering, and they hold a special place in a lot of hearts.

Keeping things the same as they’ve always been leads to two problems. Firstly, a lot of people want to let others buy new, and then snap ‘em up in 15 years time for £1,500 - which won’t help Jag now. Far from it. In 2023 Jaguar sold 64,241 cars. To put this into perspective - over 75 million cars were sold globally in 2023. Porsche shifted in excess of 320,200, BMW’s M division flogged over 200,000, and Genesis put over 150,000 new cars in homes during the same year. Lots of people are saying they want the old Jag, but the numbers show they didn’t want to pay for it.

Of course, the car hasn't even been revealed yet, and we're all talking out of our fourth point of contact until sales figures start coming in, but if the purpose of advertising is to get people talking about you, the new ad campaign has succeeded at that.

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End-of-Workweek Memes...

Posting Through It...

The graphs at this article are fascinating. Like you can literally see where he got divorced.

To work out what subjects preoccupy Mr Musk and how his views have changed over time, The Economist analysed his activity on Twitter (as it was) and X (as it became in 2023). Using artificial intelligence to trawl through his 38,358 posts between December 2013 and November 2024, we found that he is posting far more often and with a far more political bent. Climate change and clean energy used to be the realm of policy on which he opined the most, but he now bangs on much more about immigration and free speech (see chart 1).

It's safe to say that Elon Musk has the all-time worst case of Poster's Madness in the history of ever.

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Meme Dump...

Russia Russia Russia

Vlad and Kim announced that they are strengthening economic and military ties. I don't know what North Korea has to export beyond 152mm artillery shells of apparently dubious quality and starving conscripts, but apparently Russia needs more of it.

Meanwhile, have a detailed guide to telling various Russian tanks apart.

Also, allegedly this morning the Russians dropped an RS-26 ICBM (SS-X-31) sans warhead on Dnipro.

Midweek Memes...

Automotif DLXIX...

A couple of newlyweds having a grand old time waving from the back seat of a Sandshell Beige 1962 Ford Thunderbird last weekend. The photo was snapped with a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and an EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

It's only lightly cropped from the full 16MP resolution, so it should embiggenate nicely.

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Meme Dump...