Automotif CDLXXXI...

When the guy driving this 1973 Corvette noticed me and my camera, he put on a little bit of a show when the light at 54th Street turned green.

It sounded healthy and he stayed on it long enough to spin 'em again on the 1-2 upshift.

Unreal

It's like the entire business model of the Fox News Cinematic Universe and the entire larger constellation of Right wing social media grifters is finding dumb stuff to get not-very-bright people extremely agitated about.

Today's is especially silly.

Automotif CDLXXX...

Here's a 1951 Chevrolet 3100 pickup in Fathom Green, from the "Advance Design" series that ran from 1947 to 1955, when they were replaced by the "Task Force" trucks. It would have a Chevy "Stovebolt" 216 cubic inch pushrod inline six under the hood, rated at 96 SAE gross horsepower.

I almost didn't get the shot. The only camera I had to hand was the Nikon Coolpix A, which has a fixed 28mm-equivalent focal length lens. It takes it a full "one Mississippi" to extrude its glass when you switch it on, so I'm happy to have got the snap I did. It's a fantastic street photography camera, but this ain't the kind of street photography for which it's meant.

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Scammer's Arrogance

So I'd gotten into playing a game called MLB 9 Innings on my iPad. I'd spend about thirty minutes or so after lunch fiddling with my team and playing the various game modes. It had become a part of my daily routine.

It's one of those "Free to Play" games where you'll need to occasionally spend money if you like winning and upgrading your team, and every other week or so, I'd buy a $4.99 or $9.99 pack of in-game currency or player upgrades.

Every once in a while Com2uS, the publisher, would double-charge my Apple Pay account. I checked on the subreddit for the game and other players had noted the same thing, but warned that if you asked for a refund, they'd give it to you but lock you out of your game account.

Then the other night I spent $4.99 on a pack of game bucks... and got charged for that and a $29.99 booster pack that I did not either ask for nor receive.

So I went and asked for my refund, which I got, and my account was locked, as I'd been told, and I now have that thirty minutes after lunch back as free time to do some reading or something instead of playing digital baseball, and an extra couple gigs of free storage on my iPad.

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Rise of the Machines

The opening shots in the Humans versus Robot Dogs war have been fired in Massachusetts:

Moreira was barricaded inside a home on St. Francis Circle after a 911 call about a person holding someone else at knifepoint, police said at the time. The person escaped, but when officers arrived, at the home, Moreira allegedly opened fire on a SWAT vehicle and periodically shot near the officers who’d circled the home.

State police eventually decided to send in three robots, including Roscoe, to find where in the building Moreira was holed up. Roscoe cleared the top two floors of the building, then discovered him, holding a rifle, in the basement, police said.

He knocked the robot dog down, then started to walk up the stairs, but, when Roscoe righted itself and started following him up the stairs, he knocked the dog over again, then shot it three times. Its pilot lost communication with the dog.

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What I'm Reading...

I'm about finished with Kara Swisher's Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. She's been covering the Silicon Valley beat since before most of today's tech giants were even startups and she's kept allll the receipts. This book is a hell of a purse dump, let me tell you.

Hey, look!

Gaston, who passed away recently, was not a gunsmith by training or avocation, but it would not be out of line to say that he’s had as large an effect on the handgun market as such enduring legends like Sam Colt and John Moses Browning.

Controversial? Yup. Aesthetically challenging? Perhaps. The Glock G17 nonetheless transformed and—with the expiration of early patents—continues to transform the defensive-handgun market, like it or not.

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Every Picture Tells a Story

Look, I don't have much of a hard time believing that some percentage of stolen or illicitly purchased handguns in the US are finding their way to Haiti, but something like ninety percent of the long guns I'm seeing in photos there are your typical run-of-the-mill Third World Kalashnikov variants.

Which made the photo here interesting:

I'd bet lunch money that that's a picture of the BBC photo stringer's hired private security contractor. I'll bet it got wired to London in a big batch of photos from the current unpleasantness and someone in editorial or the design department (I don't know the exact online workflow at the Beeb, sorry) thought "Ooh! This one looks dramatic!" without understanding what they were looking at, and used it.

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Meme Dump...

That didn't take long.

The usual suspects are already in full "ship fuel can't melt steel beams" mode at Gab 2.0, I see.

Tab Clearing...

• In a time-honored Russian tradition, the FSB is likely going to work over the ISIS arrestees with rubber truncheons until they admit to being Ukrainian.


• The Fraud of the Century: How a carbon credit scam in France made millions.


• Avoid doing the monkey dance.

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Time flies like a jet fighter...

I was really not ready for all these fighter planes that were the New Hotness in the mid-late Seventies to be celebrating a half century of flight.

This time it's the Tornado, still in service with the Luftwaffe. I was six when the first prototype flew, and in middle school when they went operational with the Jerries.

I LOL’ed

I saw someone online refer to Candace Owens as “Canned Ass Owens” and it caused me to express mirth audibly.

Look, you don’t pick messy public feuds with the boss, and no single employee is more important than the organization. Start thinking like that and next thing you know you’ll be doing “documentaries” about testicle-tanning on Xitter.

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Ignorance is no excuse, they say…

I just closed a column with the sentence “Know the law, so the law doesn’t get to know you” and I could have kept going for another thousand words.

For instance, there are a lot of very pro-2A states with very relaxed, liberal handgun carry laws that, at the same time, have strict prohibitions against loaded long guns in vehicles.

This isn’t an “anti-gun” thing, it’s the result of the state having a strong hunting culture and therefore having laws intended to thwart poaching and “road-hunting”.

This is the kind of thing folks need to be aware of on roadtrips. Don’t just glance at your handy CCW reciprocity map and think that it’s an indicator of the entire regulatory climate along your route.

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Finding the Dot

Gideon Optics sent one of their Judge mini red dots to mount on the Taurus 327 Defender TORO, so we'll see how it does when screwed to the topstrap only an inch or so away from the 40,000 psi detonations of full house .327 Federal Magnum loads.

Of course, revolver duty is actually a lot kinder than the whiplash these optics experience when mounted on the reciprocating slide of a self-loading pistol.

I've been using a dot-sighted revolver for about a year now, and I had to learn a different technique of finding the dot than the one I have used for years with semiautos, but that's gonna take a whole post of its own...

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It's Caturday!

Huck would like to remind y'all that it's Caturday.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #252...

You know how I know that I've been living in plastic pistol land for a long, long time? The Walther PDP Steel Frame Compact test pistol arrived for a Shooting Illustrated review and I was like "Jeezis this thing is a boat anchor. How the hell is anyone supposed to carry this?"

I threw it on the scale and it weighed in at a hair over two pounds, six ounces. You know what else weighs a hair over two pounds, six ounces? The Smith & Wesson 5906, as do the various full-size steel 1911s that I carried every day for something like ten years. 

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Hey, look!

My review of the Girsan MC 14T is online now. The 14T is a blowback .380 with a tip-up barrel that's derived from the Beretta Model 86, albeit with some significant improvements. You should go read about it!

Make your answer in the form of a question.

You know, in retrospect I'm kinda sad that we didn't get more Aaron Rodgers as a host on Jeopardy!, especially as his orbit has gotten increasingly far out there.

Can you imagine this?

Contestant: "I'll take 'People Who've Walked on the Moon' for $400, Aaron."

Aaron: "It's a hoax, you sheeple!"

Contestant: "Okay, then, give me 'Famous Vaccine Inventors' for $200?"

Aaron: "AAAARGH!!!" *rips up note cards*

Later:

Aaron: "And for Final Jeopardy, 'The water is turning the frogs' this. You have thirty seconds." 

Music: 🎶 Doo-do-doo-do... 🎶

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Automotif CDLXXIX...

The Pontiac GTO is flashier, the Olds Cutlass 442 was rarer, and every muscle car nerd knows that the Buick GSX Stage 1 was the real hero of the bunch at the drag strip, but in my heart the Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport is the king of the '68-'72 GM A-body muscle cars.

They eschewed the flashy wings and scoops and rubber nose cones of their platform-mates, and that let the really clean lines of the A-body hardtop coupe, with its swoopy fastback roof silhouette, shine through.

Is this super-clean, lightly-modded 1970 Chevelle a real SS? Only the VIN knows for sure. The Monza Red paint was a Corvette-only color in '70 (Chevelles came in a slightly darker hue called Cranberry Red) and it lacks the cowl induction hood, but something over eighty percent of '70 SS Chevelles were ordered with the base juice lifter, 2-bolt main L34 396 and it's unlikely that most of those had cowl induction.

Anyway, whether it began life as an SS or got turned into one with the aid of a Year One catalog, this is one sweet ride.

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Phyllis Schlafly 2.0

On "Tradwife" social media influencers:

"It was only recently that I recognized the blatant hypocrisy hiding in plain sight: I tapped the profile link of a popular Aussie tradwife and was met with a barrage of links urging me to transact: an Amazon storefront, affiliate codes, a mailing list…even an e-book. I tapped through her website and discovered MLM-coded language: “Are you a stay-at-home mom looking to grow your Instagram and earn extra income while juggling the joys and challenges of motherhood?” Oh, no. The “anti-hustle” lifestyle is, in fact, a thinly veiled mega-hustle—one much more convoluted than the Tupperware parties that came before it.

I perused her site. Oh, look, I thought, a lead magnet! (In digital content marketing, a “lead magnet” is a free downloadable item you give away in exchange for an email address.) Hers just so happened to be iPhone backgrounds featuring affirmations like, “With humility, I embrace my role, upholding traditions as the keeper of our cherished home.” What struck me about her website was how familiar it felt: This was pretty transparently a content creator’s monetized hub, no different from the courses, e-books, and affiliate codes distributed by the boss-babe influencers the tradwives claim to disavow. Oh my gosh, I whispered to no one, She’s girlbossing all over us! The call is coming from inside the housewife!

I have to hand it to them: what a diabolical brand strategy! Build a career teaching other women how not to have a career."

Mash that like button and subscribe! This uplifting of tradional roles is sponsored by Betty Crocker!

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Spywriting

Yet another interesting account of being a guest speaker at the CIA employee's creative writing group, albeit this time from a former case officer:

"Writers emerging from one of the world’s most secretive organizations is perhaps not as strange or ironic as it sounds. On its face, of course, espionage lends itself to colorful stories. There’s the tradecraft—wigs, disguises, false passports, dead drops, brush passes. The secrecy and elitism of a closed world. The sex appeal of trying to woo informants, convince odd characters to betray their countries. The exotic, often gritty, locales. The danger and high stakes of global issues like terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue nation-states. If this isn’t top-shelf thriller stuff, what is?

But in the years since I left the agency, I’ve learned there are also less obvious things that compel a former to start typing. The quieter wraiths. Ghosts of decisions, the effects of war, failed or unresolved operations—all the things that pop into your head in the grocery store and wake you up at zero dark thirty. In my case, I helped apprehend an alleged Al-Qaeda terrorist in Baghdad—only to learn, years later, we might have nabbed the wrong guy. The irresolution and guilt still plague me; they came out in my novel in the form of a spy caught in the crosswinds of the Arab Spring who makes decisions that have lasting and unintended consequences. Espionage, I often say, is a profession of loose ends."

RTWT
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So anyway, I started blasting...

So I slapped a Swampfox Justice on the Rost Martin RM1C and took it to Indy Arms the other morning as part of a trip to help longtime friend-of-the-blog Global Village Idiot’s daughter pick out a pistol.

I brought along a box of Winchester 124gr NATO ball and figured I could get the lane next to theirs and put some work in with the new review gun while ducking into their lane every now and again to offer pointers and get feedback. The pistols she was considering were a Glock 43X, a Shield Plus, and a Taurus GX4.

I ran the pistol-training.com Q-PT target out to seven yards and popped off three shots at the center of the 8” circle, just to see how close to zeroed the dot was. They made one ragged hole about two inches high and right.

Rather than fiddle with adjustments that morning, I just started putting five and ten rounds in the magazine at a time and hosing. And I mean hosing.

Other than that one shot out of the circle at 12 o’clock, which came from getting a little bit too aggressive while prepping during recoil (b-BANG!), I’m really very pleasantly surprised, especially since the PD10 is the only striker gat I’ve put in much trigger time with over the last several months, since I'd been mostly shooting revolvers and the Walther PD380.

Automotif CDLXXVIII...

Much like the Porsche 356 Spyder that I saw earlier the same day, this Shelby Cobra is almost guaranteed to be a kit car replica. Also much like that Porsche 356 Spyder, who cares? It's awesome!

My BMW Z3 says "Roadster" right on the door sills, but it's not truly a roadster, because it has a permanently installed folding top. This Cobra is a true roadster, in that if you're out for a drive and it starts to rain, and you don't happen to have the top stowed in the boot and can't find an overpass under which you can wait out the storm, you're gonna get wet.

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Clickbait

Y'ever wonder about the increasing prevalence of those bizarro obviously AI-generated images that are popping up on the Bookface of late?

Here's a deep dive into the reason behind them...

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Sproing!

With the arrival of the vernal equinox today, spring is officially here! Well, technically it will be here at 11:06PM Eastern Daylight Time.

Hooray! If you're reading this you've survived another winter!

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Meme Dump...

Tab Clearing...

• Russian GPS jamming out of Kaliningrad messes with Western commercial and government aircraft operating into and out of the eastern end of the Baltic.


• When heterodoxy runs amok. (Might be paywalled.)


• The surreal experience of being a guest speaker for the CIA's creative writing group.

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Light, Shadow, Shape, and Texture

This photo was shot with the handy EF 24-105mm f/4L IS general purpose zoom lens mounted on the Canon EOS-1D Mark III.

It was shot in RAW and processed through Adobe Photoshop's RAW converter using the "B&W with red filter" setting.

Like I usually do, I have the 1D Mk3 set up to record both a RAW file and a high res monochrome JPEG. Even though I (almost) never use the straight-out-of-camera JPEG, this ensures that the image shown on the back of the camera is in monochrome and helps me keep my head in that B&W mode, looking for light, shadow, and texture rather than colors.

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Automotif CDLXXVII...

The real find last Wednesday, though, was this immaculate 1965 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport coupe parked out in front of Good Morning Mama's on 54th Street while its owner was inside enjoying a delicious brunch.

In Crocus Yellow with a black vinyl roof, this thing sure is a looker. While the late third generation "six-four" Impalas get all the love, I think the more flowing lines of the early fourth gen cars make them the best looking Impala SS of them all. That sloped rear window blending into the sculpted rear fenders is an aesthetic improvement over the more vertical rear window on the '64.

Despite what you might think, not all Impala SS's came with V-8s. The base motor on the 1965 Super Sport was the 140 horsepower 230 cubic inch "Turbo-Thrift" inline six. Next up on the option list was the 2bbl L77 283cid V-8, rated at 220bhp.

The "327" fender badges and single exhaust outlet tell us that the buyer of this car sprang the ninety-five bucks for option L30: which was Chevy's 327 cubic inch "Turbo-Fire" V-8 with a 4-barrel Carter WCFB carburetor and 10.5:1 compression ratio for a rated output of 250 SAE gross horsepower. (For $138, they could have gotten the dual-exhaust 300bhp L74 327.)

 Dig those groovy taillights!

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Automotif CDLXXVI...

Also from Wednesday's car-spotting session was this Cascade Green 1964½ Ford Mustang convertible. Officially, according to Ford and the VIN plate, it's a 1965 model, but the first Mustangs built from the spring of '64 until the actual start of Ford's 1965 model year later that fall are known by fans as "1964½" cars.

By building a sportily-styled 2+2 coupe with front bucket seats and a console-mounted shifter on the basic underpinnings of their compact Falcon sedan, Ford created a whole new class of automobile for the American market: the "Pony Car". It sold like gangbusters and was immediately* joined by the Plymouth Valiant-based Barracuda and, later, the Chevy Camaro, which shared the front subframe of the Nova compact.

The fender badges say it has a 289 V-8. Prior to the official start of the 1965 model year, there was no 2-barrel version of the 289 offered in the Mustang, with the cheap V-8 role being filled by the 2bbl 260cid Fairlane V-8. The 289 would be one of two 4bbl variants, either the 210bhp 9.0:1 compression version, or the hi-power "K-code" motor, which was considerably beefier, with an output of 271 SAE gross horsepower.

From a period Car and Driver road test:

"Crankshaft design for this engine became the subject of a special study. The crank is made of precision-cast alloy iron and runs in five main bearings. About 70%of the total unbalanced couple is balanced by counter-weights on the crankpin webs, and the remaining 30% is balanced by two external counterweights—one mounted in front of the timing sprocket and the other integrally with the flywheel. In most previous passenger car applications of this engine, the fourth harmonic unbalance occurs beyond the normal speed range. But on the high-performance 289 the fourth harmonic comes within its 7000-rpm range, so the vibration damper developed for the Indianapolis engine, with enlarged rubber contact areas and tuned for higher crankshaft speeds, was adapted. The high-performance 289 also has the cross-bolted crankcase from the Indy engine, plus a number of special design features such as high-tensile strength connecting rods, copper-lead alloy bearing shells, chrome-plated valve stems, mechanical valve lifters, and a high-lift, high-overlap camshaft. The cylinder heads give a compression ratio of 10.5-to-one, and the air intake system consists of a low-restriction air cleaner, an opera-throat four-barrel carburetor, and direct manifold passages. The exhaust system boasts individual headers merging into twin tail pipes. Power output is an impressive 271 bhp at 6000 rpm with a maximum torque of 312 lbs-ft at 3400 rpm.Naturally this unit can be tuned still further for racing purposes by such patent medicines as Dr. Shelby's Cobra Elixir (or imitations available from your local Performance Drugstore). Over 300 bhp may be reached without impairing engine reliability. Specific output of the hottest production model Mustang engine is 0.95 bhp per cu in, as against 0.73 for the standard 289-cubic-inch power unit."

*...and when I say "immediately", I mean immediately. Mopar fans will gleefully point out that the Barracuda was actually the first Pony Car to go on sale, having beat the Ford to showrooms by almost two weeks. The Mustang program was a poorly-kept secret around Detroit, and the rush program to put a glass fastback and bucket seats in a Valiant got iron on the streets before Dearborn did.

Safety First, Accidents Last

Still among my finest moments in prose:

If you’re standing in the produce section at the grocery store and some dude pops out of the cereal aisle going all mass-casualty on the place and you successfully use your AIWB-carried blaster to save the day, it’s going to take some of the shine off the moment if you forget to de-cock your P226 Legion and shoot yourself right in the meat department while putting it away.

Practice hitting that decocker or applying the safety every time you come off the sights.

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Attention Seeking

“A lot of the so-called mischievous behavior of cats is simply an attempt to get the owners’ attention,” Serpell says. “They’ve learned by trial and error if they sit on your desk and throw your pens on the floor, eventually you’ll give them attention or get up.” Taking an extra 30 minutes every day to interact with your cat could lead to a happier dynamic.

I don't know where the cultural trope of 'aloof cats' came from. Whenever my ex would lounge on the sofa to watch TV, his big black tomcat, Lucifer, would perch on his shoulder like a parrot on a pirate. No sooner would I lay down on the bed than Mittens would come a-running from wherever she was in the house to curl up next to my head.

When Huck gets anxious for attention, he'll rare up on his hind legs and knock stuff off of desks with a swipe of his paw. Holden will get upset that I'm paying attention to the strange flat glowing panel in front of me, rather than the cat, and mill around in the footwell of my desk while mewing plaintively until I finally pick him up and balance him in my lap for a bit (which is awkward because Holden is way too large to fit in a lap and it takes both hands to keep him balanced there.)

Meme Dump

Still Here

Roseholme Cottage didn't blow away last night. All we got was a pretty spectacular light show, lots of thunder, and a few spurts of rain. Not even any hail.

Quite a few places across a swath of Indiana just north of us weren't so lucky, however.

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Automotif CDLXXV...

Spotted on Wednesday afternoon rolling northbound on College Avenue was this Monza Red Corvette Stingray coupe.

I had the Nikon D700 with the compact 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G travel zoom. Plenty of focal length to grab details!

I love that style of wheels on muscle cars and pony cars of the era, but I'm not sure how I feel about them on a sports car like the 'Vette. They look pretty good on this one, though.

Telling a 1970 and a '71 apart from a distance like this is well-nigh impossible as best I can discern. If it has amber front turn signal lenses (which this one does not) it's a later '71 model, but earlier '71s seem to have had clear lenses just like the '70s.

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What's Old is New, and Then is Now

Have you ever had to check to see if a muzzle loading firearm was loaded? If you haven't, it's not that hard.

First you make sure that it's not primed or cocked, and then you drop a long dowel down the muzzle, and mark it at the crown. Then pull it out and hold it alongside the barrel with the mark even with the muzzle end. If the other end of the rod doesn't come even with the breech end, there's a powder charge and a projectile in there.

It's obviously easier with revolvers, whether cartridge or cap 'n' ball, since you can observe the contents of the chambers directly.

When self-loading pistols were first introduced, a lot of thought went into various ways to ascertain the chamber's status without having to cycle the action. Many early autos, like the Luger, had extractors that doubled as visual/tactile loaded chamber indicators.

Savage's Model 1907 pocket auto originally had a clip that encircled the breech, shaped kind of like a pocket clip on some pens, with a tab that extended rearward and would be forced outward by the rim of a chambered round.

Later models dispensed with it, as it required separate machining steps to both the barrel and slide, added an extra part, and could tie up the slide if the finger-like indicator tab were to break off.

Besides, loaded chamber indicators are very much a "trust but verify" sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather check the chamber manually regardless.

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I LOL'ed.

The Atlantic titled a story about the social media theories swirling around Kate Middleton as "QAnon for Wine Moms" and I just want to recognize greatness in title-writing when I see it.

Well played.

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Automotif CDLXXIV...

There is literally a zero percent chance that this Porsche 356 Speedster is not a kit car, but really, who cares? You can get kit cars that will handily outperform the original, plus a real Speedster is a seventy year old car that is worth the best part of half a million bucks these days, and who's gonna flog an investment like that out in traffic where any yo-yo in a Kia could bunt you into penury by running a red light?

Plus with a real 356 at this point, sheer economics mean you need to keep it as close to stock as possible, while you could set a kit car up for maximum hoonage.

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The best Monster Truck Rally story I've read.


• I had completely forgotten about Screaming Yellow Zonkers.


• How much do shooting skills degrade over time if you don't practice?

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

As more and more AI-generated product finds its way onto the 'net, Large Language Models are going to increasingly find themselves trained on the output of other LLMs...

"After the world's governments began their above-ground nuclear weapons tests in the mid-1940s, radioactive particles made their way into the atmosphere, permanently tainting all modern steel production, making it challenging (or impossible) to build certain machines (such as those that measure radioactivity). As a result, we've a limited supply of something called "low-background steel," pre-war metal that oftentimes has to be harvested from ships sunk before the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, including those dating back to the Roman Empire.

Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.

This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls "Habsburg AI," where "a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features." In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content."

Go and RTWT.

Open wide!

The Fujifilm X-T2 is the least fossil-y camera I have. Despite being three generations old (Fuji's up to the X-T5 now) its release date in 2016 makes it the newest interchangeable lens camera I own.

As a result, the low-light performance is mind-boggling to me. If I'm shooting indoor candids by available light, I'll open the lens aperture wide and let the camera pick the ISO and shutter speed.

These photos were both shot with the Fujinon XF 50mm f/2 R WR lens cranked all the way open. The camera selected ISO 2000 for the upper pic and a whopping ISO 12500 for the lower.

The sharpness achieved at a five-digit ISO seems amazing, considering that a decade earlier anything over ISO 400 was an unusably noisy mess.

I really like the 50mm "Fujicron". It's so compact but offers a good focal length and fast aperture for indoor candids.

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A bustle in your hedgerow

There's a house in the neighborhood that has its sidewalk flanked by a couple tall stands of some sort of ornamental tallgrass.

As I strolled past yesterday on the way to lunch, there was an explosive rustling noise and I turned to my right to catch sight of an Eastern cottontail doe. She froze in the yard and I looked away and got the camera up in front of my face before turning back toward her.

Exploiting the old trick that little animals get panicked by two forward-facing predator eyes pointing at them but are a whole lot less sure what to make of a camera, I was able to take three slow, sidling steps in her direction while snapping away before she lost her composure and bolted away.

Snapped with the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and EF 70-200mm f/4L IS combo, which is a fave setup of mine for critter pics.

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Incremental Improvements

I'm currently working with a Rost Martin RM1C for an upcoming review in Shooting Illustrated.

It arrived with an RMR-compatible optics plate, and the Swampfox Justice I had on hand bolted right up.

I like the fact that all RM1C's are optics-ready, rather than the annoying tendency, all too common among manufacturers, of releasing a non-optics model first and then...one or two SHOT Shows later...releasing an optics cut model like it's some big event.

Normally, here in 2024 I'd gripe about the fact that the optics cut wasn't deep enough to allow the normal height irons to co-witness, and the fact that the slide required adaptor plates rather than being cut to allow direct mounting using the RMSC or 507k footprint. Rost Martin gets a bye from me on this one, however, because it's not an entirely new design, but rather an Americanized version of the AREX Delta Gen.2 from Slovenia.

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Stop It!

People need to stop pointing guns at themselves.

Especially in retail & gunsmithing spaces, I see a lot of bad gun-handling habits get reinforced because "they're unloaded".

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Git Gud Scrub

Say "Moose and Squirrel"

Did you see the one about the retired light colonel who got catfished into giving away secrets on a dating site? Check this stuff out:

"Please my handsome beloved, give launch codes."

Jesus, this clown makes A1C Teixeira look like Kim muhfuggin' Philby.

"She is communicating with you through her soul and her deep, penetrating eyes you have conjured up in your imagination based on a few almost naked pictures she has likely posted. She thinks you're great and hot and successful and masculine. She loves you! The way no other woman has before. Oh, Svetlana, I love you, too! You’re super hot, but I also love you for your brains. We share an interest in US national defense issues! You’re a rare gem who gets off on talk about military targets. Yeah, baby. Let me tell you about my missile!

But actually, this is Svetlana: An overweight Russian named Boris who is slugging vodka and belching up borscht while typing with potato fingers."

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