Meme Dump...

So basically...

What happened was that pollen season got started with a bang and I was late noticing and starting prophylactic Claritin use. So both my sinuses and lungs began filling with fluids and then, unusually, I managed to pick up a low-grade upper respiratory tract infection and a flareup of bronchitis at the same time.

I'm finally on the mend, but it's been an unpleasant week

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Here comes the rain again...

And not a moment too soon, either. The amount of pollen in the air has been giving my sinuses fits, such that every time I blow my nose, the bones in my skull creak and groan like the hull of a u-boat changing depth.

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Tab Clearing...

• Wingo: The short-lived indoor shotgun wingshooting game.


• Training Terminology: Flash Sight Picture, Hammer, and Controlled Pair.


• Hipster Tactical reviews the Daewoo DP51.

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Automotif CDXCIII...

The owner had de-badged the decklid of this super-clean Cherry Red '87-'93 Saab 900. With the alloy wheels and spoiler it's probably a 900S or Turbo, but I'm not enough of a Saab nerd to pick up the subtler details.

...and back to Ouch.

Between torn external intercostal muscles from grappling with a very large dude while trying to shoot him with a sims gun, and strained internal intercostal muscles from a day of violently trying to cough my lungs clear of deep-seated nastiness, I gotta say that the former may hurt worse, but the latter is no picnic either.

Robitussin, take me away!

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Brr...

I somehow ended up out from under the covers last night, and just to make it worse, the legs on my pyjama bottoms had ridden up nearly to my knees. So I lay there, with my metabolism as low as it ever gets during the day, radiating heat into the chilly bedroom air until I woke up shivering with my teeth chattering.

I bundled myself into a fleece woobie and burrowed back under the covers but I still haven't recovered from that. I'm sore all over.

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Bad Info Drives Out Good

Greg Ellifritz put up an informative post on social media regarding the (in)efficacy of birdshot in a home defense role recently.

It was shared widely on the internet with predictable results, as the legions of shambling mouth-breathers tried to set Greg straight.

He's had about enough of that.

"I got my first shotgun instructor certification in 1999. I’ve been teaching shotgun skills longer than some of these commentators have been alive. I carried a shotgun every day in a 25-year police career and used those shotguns to convince some very bad men to submit to arrest. I’ve seen, treated, and investigated gunshot wounds from birdshot, buckshot, and slugs. I’ve killed lots of critters with shotguns in the hunting fields. I’ve attended countless shotgun ballistic gelatin shooting demonstrations and autopsies of victims killed with shotgun pellets. I’ve written 162 different articles on using the shotgun for self defense as well as producing the largest firearms stopping power research study in the last two decades.

I might know a thing or two about what shotgun pellets do to human bodies.

But when I try to share that knowledge with the general public, I get shit upon from the anonymous population of uneducated internet trolls who gain self esteem from insulting other people."

Bad info drives out good. I definitely know the feeling, as it's why I rarely discuss gun stuff in GenPop-accessible places myself these days.

Save the birdshot for birds.

Happy Perfect Date Day to all who celebrate!

I need to watch Miss Congeniality again. That is such a good movie.

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It's like a whole 'nother country over there.

Forgetting that you have a gun or ammo in your purse or briefcase at the local courthouse can be embarrassing.

Forgetting that you have a gun or ammo in your purse or briefcase at the TSA checkpoint at the airport can get you jammed up legally.

Forgetting that you have a gun or ammo in your purse or briefcase in Boston or NYC will almost certainly get you jammed up. You go through the checkpoint at Freedom Tower or the 9/11 Memorial or some other tourist attraction with your out-of-state toters permit, and it's gonna be a bad day.

And as for traveling overseas? That could be really bad.

"An Oklahoma man faces up to 12 years in prison on a Caribbean island after customs officials found ammunition in his luggage.

Ryan Watson traveled to Turks and Caicos with his wife, Valerie, to celebrate his 40th birthday on April 7. They went with two friends who had also turned 40.

The vacation came to an abrupt end when airport staff members found a zip-close bag containing bullets in the couple's carry-on luggage. Watson said it was hunting ammunition he had accidentally brought with him — but under a strict law in Turks and Caicos, a court may still impose a mandatory 12-year sentence.

"They were hunting ammunition rounds that I use for whitetail deer," Watson told NBC Boston in an interview conducted last week that aired after their first court appearance Tuesday."

There's a reason I keep the bags that I use for carry-ons at the airport "sterile". I don't take them to ranges if I can help it. If I have to while on the road, I keep them as far from the line as possible and painstakingly go through them in the hotel room that night.

People throw the phrase "responsible gun owner" around a lot. This is just part of that.

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Ouch.

Something had my back all jacked up last night. I didn't get a lot of really good sleep.

Hopefully tonight will be better.

I did have a really long detailed dream that was likely caused by watching The Three-Body Problem before going to bed. Very science fictional dream. Lots of space kablooie.

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My mind has been changed... mostly.

At the TacCon presenter's dinner this year, Andy Stanford passed out SureFire Stilettos to attendees as door prizes.

When the Stiletto was introduced, it was very much the flavor of the month and all the cool kids used them for a bit before moving on to whatever the next awesome light was. I am very much an uncool kid and I stuck with my trusty EDCL2-T, which I'd been using since they were introduced back in '17.

I stuck with that 2-cell light until a few months back when I downsized to its single-cell EDCL1-T cousin as part of a general pocket clutter shrinkage project: Sabre Red Mk.6 to a POM dispenser, Spyderco Delica to a Spyderco Dragonfly, et cetera. Since doing so, I haven't found myself feeling limited by the single cell light's 500-lumen output. It's still plenty if your job doesn't include nighttime traffic stops and clearing structures.

The Stiletto is roughly the same size as the single-cell EDCL, but nice and flat and more comfortable in the pocket.

When I popped the packaging open I immediately felt stupid. See, the reason I didn't jump on it like everyone else back then is... um... I didn't realize it had a "tail cap" button that served as a momentary switch for the full 650 lumens.

For some reason I had thought the only buttons were the ones on the side (one a light control and the other used for programming the sequence of toggling between 650, 250, and 5 lumen settings) like the setup on the Guardian or Sidekick. 

That side button is fine for normie flashlight use but sucks for "tactical" applications. Further, you don't want to have to toggle through brightness settings to get to the full output in a "tactical" light, but having it immediately pop on with 650 lumens and then toggle down to 5 reduces its utility as a normal task light. That was the genius of the EDCL series, where a light press of the tailcap got you a task light, but a full press summoned up the face-melting output.

So I've been carrying and using the Stiletto for something over a week at this point and here's my rundown:

PROS:

• It really is comfortable in a pocket. It's slim and light and my fears of it turning on in a pocket seem to have been overblown.
• The dual button configuration makes it handy for both normal and "tactical" use. You can program the side button so the bright light comes on first, but why would you? Use the tailcap button for that.
• It doesn't look "tactical". Some security people have started getting squirrely about knurled metal "tactical" flashlights, even ones without scary fanged bezels. You're less likely to be told you need to leave it in the car than the EDCL1-T.
• You don't generate a steady stream of dead CR123 lithium batteries that need to be disposed of.

CONS:

• Supposedly it's plenty tough and rugged and waterproof, but I just don't get the same reassuring vibe from plastic, no matter how "high-impact" it is, that I do from knurled metal.
• When the internal batteries go flat, you have to plug it in to recharge it and that takes time. You can't just toss a fresh cell in there and be up and running immediately. Also, SureFire... Micro-USB? Really? The rest of the world is basically standardizing on USB-C. Why not step boldly into The Current Year?

On balance, though, the Stiletto is an improvement over the EDCL1-T, I think, so I reckon I'll stick with it for a while, unless some flaw I haven't noticed pops up.

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FOMO

Registration for TacCon 2025 opens tomorrow night, Wednesday the 24th of April, at 9PM EDT.

TacCon 2024 tickets sold out in eleven hours.

Be there. I will.

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Automotif CDXCII...

Here's a current generation (2019-2024) Bentley Flying Spur, built on the same chassis as the Bentley Continental GT and the LWB variant of the Porsche Panamera.

The V8 badge low on the front fender means that under the bonnet you'll find a 4.0L twin turbo motor putting out just a hair less than 550 horsepower and backed by an 8-speed Porsche PDK transmission. (Hey, back when they were still British-owned and part of Rolls-Royce, they used TurboHydramatic 400 3-speed or 4L80-E 4-speed slushboxes purchased from General Motors.)

Tab Clearing...

• Asked to write a blog post, an AI churns out glurge.


• John Hearne writes about Understanding Criminals and Their Motivations.


• Bobbi on troubleshooting a mysteriously malfunctioning door.

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Automotif CDXCI...

It's been a good month for spotting Japanese Domestic Market imports here in SoBro.

Here's a very early-1990s Nissan Atlas 150 Double Cab with a funky paint job and groovy rims. Most of these things seem to be 4WD with 5-speed manual gearboxes and middlin' big diesel fours in the 2.3-to-2.7L range.

The Answer, My Friend, Ain't Spitting In The Wind

Elsewhere on social media I came across an angry and despairing rant from a Columbine High School graduate whose younger sister was there on that day. The sister was unhurt, thanks to hiding in a closet, but it was all day before they learned that, since she was one of the last students to get out of the school and get bused to the rendezvous point at the nearby elementary school to be reunited with her parents.

The woman, in her angry reminiscences, was like "...but thank god that the Columbine shooters didn't have AR-15s, because things would have been worse..." with the implication that they were somehow illegal at the time.

I didn't have the heart to explain that they were plenty legal and the only reason they weren't used is that they were kinda spendy in those days and not as popular.

Nothing I can say to her is going to change her mind, certainly not within a 280 character limit.

There was a time when I would have gleefully waded into that sort of righteous online pissing contest, convinced that I was performing, not to change her mind, but rather to persuade some imaginary throng of bystanders.

Nah. That's not how it works. It took me a while to realize that. Everybody gets mad, walks away still thinking what they thought before the flamewar, and the only people who come out ahead are the advertisers, slurping up the eyeballs and attention and engagement.

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But what is it for?

Ah, square trigger guards on 1911s...

"The big change on the frame is the large, squared trigger guard. This was a fad touch on custom 1911s for a hot minute back in the day when dudes wore tube socks, foam-front trucker caps, and bootie shorts at pistol matches.

And the reasons given for it vary. It provides a secure place to park the support hand index finger for those who like to wrap it around the front of the trigger guard. It allows more room for people with jumbo-sized fingers, or maybe people wearing heavy gloves.

Personally, we’re convinced that the two major drivers behind the big, square trigger guard were: A) Some people thought it looked cool and different, and B) It was not an easy modification to execute well and cleanly; it was sort of a calling card for the pistolsmith who did it. Now, with Springfield Armory’s Emissary, you can just buy it that way from the factory."

The entirety of my Springfield Armory Emissary review is online for your delectation. You can read the whole thing at the link!

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Portrait Glass

I really enjoy candid... well, technically I guess "casual" would be a more accurate term ...portrait photography. I'm usually relatively close to the subject, so anything in the 85mm to 135mm focal length (in full-frame terms) range generally works for what I'm doing. Probably a fast 85mm would be my favorite axe.

I would love to get a dedicated portrait lens for my Fujifilm XF cameras. I'm in more or less constant danger of winding up with their 56mm f/1.2 or 90mm f/2 if I find a deal on a used one.

The only thing that's saved me so far is that I got a smokin' deal at Roberts on a used XF 50mm f/2 R WR. While the 75mm equivalent focal length is a little shorter than I find ideal, it's compact, fast, and sharp as a tack. It sure spends a lot of time on my X-T2.

Tortured Poet

These roses are red
Yet those violets aren't blue
Haiku is hard, man

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Automotif CDXC...

Here's a 1991 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am convertible in Bright White.

1991 and 1992 were the last years for the Third Generation F-bodies. The Fourth Gen cars were already in development and, although they were derived from the Third Gen cars (in much the same way as the SN95 Mustang platform was a heavily-revised Fox), they featured significant improvements.

One problem the 3rd Gen F-bodies had is that there wasn't room for a 5-speed manual gearbox that could handle the torque of the 5.7L TPI motors, and so '91-'92 were the last years for the LB9 Tuned-Port Injection 5.0L.

Rated at 205 SAE net horsepower, this fuelie 305 was the only motor available in the Trans Am convertible. Presumably this is because the convertibles were actually converted from coupes with a roofectomy performed by American Sunroof Corporation in Michigan and the torque from the 245hp L98 350 would have twisted the frame like a pretzel without the stiffening provided by the roof structure.

Re-Wilding the Internet

It didn't used to be like this...

"If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural."

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US v. EU

Good post from Chris Arnade...

"Every few weeks Twitter gets caught up in a fight when someone proclaims that Europe is better than the US, or vice-versa1. I usually stay away from these dust ups because it’s an ignorant debate. The question is badly defined, subjective, and impossible to answer, so the fights devolve into two groups talking past each other, until someone eventually drags out a picture of Breezewood, and then for all effective purposes it’s over2.

To the pro-Europe side, Europe is a cornucopia of crime-free, gothic-cathedral-having cities with great public transportation, quaint row homes, and sensible policies on guns, health care, and child care. America, in contrast, is a dystopian landscape of depressing suburbs with oversized cars, soul-sucking strip malls, and people shooting up drugs and each other.

To the pro-US side America is a land of hard-working, money-making, independent-minded people who hate being told what to do, especially by mid-wit bureaucrats with zero appreciation that human flourishing requires true and almost absolute freedom. Europe, by contrast, is an impoverished, crowded, backward, continent determined to stay impoverished, crowded, and backward because of a stubborn and stupid commitment to high taxes, high regulation, and low entrepreneurialism."

The title is self-admitted clickbait, but it's worth reading the whole thing.

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Meme Dump...

Apropos of nothing in particular...

"Strip Mall Funeral Parlor" is the name of my next band.

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Automotif CDLXXXIX...

Spotted pulling into the SoBro Fresh Market on a Grey Poupon run was this Series I (2010-'14) Rolls-Royce Ghost in the disappointingly prosaically named "Silver" color.

With a chassis derived from the then-current BMW 7 series and powered by a twin-turbo 6.6 litre BMW V12 rated at 563 SAE net horsepower, the Ghost's power is certainly "Adequate", even when dealing with a curb weight that's only about a case of Perrier short of two and three quarter tons.

Photographed with the Nikon D700 and Nikkor 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G superzoom lens.

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EV Speedrun Challenge

"Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.

Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters."

Basically, Tesla's challenge was to learn how to make a car company faster than established car companies could learn how to make Teslas.

The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

ZCQOTD: "This man has built an impregnable stone house with lovely west-facing balconies on the summit of Mount Stupid."

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Automotif CDLXXXVIII...

Speaking of unexpected sights, check out this absolutely pristine '84 or '85 Ford Tempo GL coupe in Medium Regatta Blue.

The Tempo was the downsized front wheel drive replacement for the Ford Fairmont. It was the second FoMoCo car to feature the new curvy aero styling after the '83 Thunderbird and presaged the coming of the bombshell '85 Taurus. (If you weren't around then, it's hard to understand what a splash the original Taurus made after a decade of square-edged boxmobile sedans from Detroit.)

The Tempo's platform was derived from the Escort and it was powered by Ford's 2.3L pushrod HSC, for "High Swirl Combustion", inline four cylinder engine, driving the front wheels through either a 3-speed auto or 4-speed (in 1984) or 5-speed (for 1985) manual. For '84, the HSC had a 1-bbl Holley carb and was rated at 90bhp. In 1985, the carb was replaced with electronically controlled throttle body fuel injection, which actually dropped power to 86 SAE net horses. Performance was tepid, and 0-60 times could best be described as "eventually".

For '86, the Tempo received a facelift, getting flush headlamps that better complemented the aero styling. (NHTSA approval hadn't come through before the styling of the '84 models had been finalized.)

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Random 1911 Musing...

Y'know, I wonder if the proliferation of relatively cheap CNC machinery is responsible for the overall rise in the quality floor of 1911s over the past couple decades?

I mean, thirty years ago if you weren't spending a G on a 1911, it was basically understood that you were buying a pistol kit that might cycle ball reliably. Nowadays even the Turks will sell you a Government Model clone that will probably run adequately out of the box, at least with good magazines and bullet profiles that aren't too weird and are in the normal 185-230gr weight range.

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Do it, bro!

Photobucket has been sending me messages for literal years that my inactive account would be deleted and that if I didn’t respond, it’d be a goner.

I’ve never responded, but those dudes still haven’t deleted my account (which I am hoping they will. I only had it because a couple forums on which I was active a decade or more ago didn’t have their own photo hosting.)

Are you gonna bark all day, little Photobucket? Our are you gonna bite?

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Sorry...

I absolutely have to get some chrono testing done this morning so I can ship off a review this afternoon.

I won't go to the outdoor range on the weekends... it'd be impossible to get any chrono testing done then anyway ...and today's the only dry weekday in a solid block of rainy weather stretching from last Tuesday to this coming Friday. We're on pace for one of the wettest Aprils on record here in Indy.

Duty calls.

More this afternoon...

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Automotif CDLXXXVII...

This one almost slipped past me before I realized what I'd just seen and jogged down to the corner to grab a photo of it at the traffic light.

What we've got here is a right-hand drive JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) 1994-'96 Toyota Mark II in the Tourer-V trim level, meaning it's packing a 280bhp twin-turbo 1JZ-GTE 2.5 liter inline six. These midsize RWD sedans are popular tuner cars in Japan but were never imported here.

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Totin' trends...

It's been interesting noticing the trends at TacCon now that I've been there for seven years.

The first one I attended, at DARC in Arkansas back in 2017, was largely after the "Caliber Wars" were over. I'm sure there were a few .40s and .45s in attendance, but 9mm was the overwhelmingly most common chambering and it wasn't even close.

I obviously didn't get pictures of everybody shooting in every class, but I'd feel pretty comfortable stating that probably half everybody was shooting a Glock of one variant or another, with M&Ps being the second most common, and the remainder a mishmash of Sig Sauers, HKs, and Berettas, mostly. I only got pictures of one guy using a red dot; an RMR mounted on an 9mm M&P.

Next year TacCon was at DARC again. Glocks were still the most common gun, but probably only a plurality at this point. Sig P320s were already vying with M&Ps as the second most commonly seen pistol. There were a handful of people using red dot optics in 2018, and John Johnston made it into the man-on-man shootoff with one.

At 2019, down in Louisiana at NOLATAC, there were more red dots, and Rick Remington won the shootoff with an RMR atop a 9mm Wilson. Glock alternatives continued to grow in popularity.

After a one-year hiatus during the Plague Year of 2020, TacCon was held at Dallas Pistol Club in 2021.

That's when I first started seeing significant numbers of the smaller pistols, like Glock 48s and Sig P365s. Red dots were commonly spotted in every class and were no longer limited to hardcore dot proponents who'd had pistol slides custom milled for RMRs.

2022 was back at DPC again. Red dots and smaller pistols were everywhere, even in the shootoffs.

2023? More of the same.

For 2024, the biggest difference I noticed was that there was a greater number of people who were willing to talk openly about living "the snubby lifestyle" à la Darryl Bolke. I spent the weekend at the the range, catching rides back to the hotel in the evenings; I'd get dinner and socialize in the lobby a bit and then head to my room to process photos. There weren't many potential scenarios I could visualize there that I didn't feel reasonably comfortable solving with a 3" .38 Special revolver, especially since I was surrounded most of the time by switched-on, like-minded individuals. 

Gear-wise, dots had become downright prevalent. Walthers had become more common. I don't know how Walther's doing in terms of overall market share, but they've certainly penetrated the serious training hobbyist demographic. The majority of optics were now Holosuns. Enclosed emitter optics were trending. If you added 365s and 320s and the few die-hards still shooting the hammer-fired classics together, there may have been as many Sigs as Glocks, if not actually more.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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Automotif CDLXXXVI...

Here's a 1987-1990 Pontiac Firebird Formula. If that's the factory paint, I think that's an '87, because that's the only year that solid (non 2-tone) Bright Blue Metallic was available as an option on the Formulas.

The third generation of the F-body, before its mid-cycle refresh for the 1991 model year, is a sort of historical record of the American performance car renaissance. 

When the third gen Firebirds debuted for the 1982 model year, the base Firebird came with a 151cid throttle-body injected 90bhp Iron Duke four cylinder and a 4-speed manual and the baddest Trans Am had an LU5 305 cubic inch V8 with "Crossfire fuel injection" rated at 165 SAE net horsepower.

For 1990, the last model year before they uglified the nose cone, the cheapest loss-leader Firebirds had a 140bhp 3.1L V6 with a 5-speed gearbox and the Trans Am could be had with a 245bhp L98 Tuned Port Injection 350 under the hood.

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Angry Manbaby

As you may know, Elon Musk has been nursing an incredible case of butthurt for something like twenty years because the rest of the board at PayPal wouldn't agree with him that "X" was a totally bitchin' name for an online finance company.

He's been so obsessively assmad about it that he inflicted "X" on one of his offspring as their legal moniker, thereby pretty much guaranteeing future estrangement issues when the kid becomes old enough to realize that daddy is a nerdy weirdo.

Most famously, as soon as he bought Twitter, he renamed it "X", which was the corporate equivalent of drunk-dialing the person who dumped you back in 2001 just to go "NEENER NEENER! I don't miss you at all!"

If you want an example of how petty and obsessive he is about this issue, check this shit out:

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

They can't do anything about the hordes of ░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ spambots, but they had coders diligently working to make sure you didn't hurt Elon's fee-fees by deadnaming his company.

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Oof.

Left Dallas yesterday morning slightly after 0800 CDT and got back to Roseholme Cottage sometime just before 11PM Eastern. That's a long day on the road and I am wiped out. (And I was just passengering. I find that, when I'm driving these days, something around six hours is nearing my limit.)

I'm hoping to muster the energy to deal with a suitcase full of dirty laundry sometime this evening, but I have a feeling that today's otherwise gonna be pretty much a write-off.

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Pew! Pew! Pew!

The man-on-man shootoff against reactive targets at TacCon is always something worth watching.

Gun Nerd Solstice

Wrapping up TacCon today and heading home. It's a busman's holiday for me, in that rather than going to gun school myself, I'm just wandering around taking photos of people attending the training event of the year.

People will ask me the polite "Hey, how you doing?" thing by way of conversation, and it's so uncommon to be able to answer "There is literally no place I'd rather be and nothing I'd rather be doing."

You gotta love it...

"Caitlin Clark couldn't play for a Division One NCAA men's team!" -Joel in IT, 5'8" 240lbs

Wide Open

Mike at The Online Photographer asks how often people shoot with the aperture on their lenses cranked wide open. For myself, the answer is "only when I'm doing available light candid portraiture indoors" pretty much.

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Automotif CDLXXXV...

This was something that doesn't happen often. Myself and fellow Indy-area car spotter Jim Grey both caught this 1979-1985 Jeep Wagoneer Limited, possibly the same day. Certainly we both saw it on College Avenue.

The faux-woodie fad was starting to wane by the early Eighties. For '79, you could get your 4WD Wagoneer with either a 97bhp 258 cubic inch inline six, or a 360cid American Motors V-8 fitted with a Motorcraft 2bbl carburetor and pumping out 127 SAE net horsepower.

I LOLed.

A very tall tree in a neighbor's yard had gone the way of all living things.

I'd been eyeing it nervously for some time because a largish limb had come off in a storm, only to have its plummet interrupted by getting snagged in some lower branches. There it hung, right over the sidewalk, like some giant toothpick of Damocles. I'd idly wonder, strolling under it on windy days, if this would be the day that it completed its groundward journey, leaving me pithed like a giant, pale, baseball cap wearing frog.

Anyway, they had a tree company out the other day and they stripped it of its remaining limbs, leaving the giant, forked trunk standing naked in the yard, awaiting the next run of good weather so they could finish the job.

Bobbi, commenting on the remains of the oak, said "It's the Treenus de Milo."

(Personally, I think it more resembles the Winged Victory of Some Ol' Tree.)

...and fruit flies like a banana.

Reminder to my fellow GenX'ers: Reminiscing about the Eighties and Nineties today is like our parents and grandparents reminiscing about the Forties and Fifties back in the Eighties.

"If Back to the Future was set today, Marty would go back to 1994. The kids in the past would be listening to Nirvana. Marty would amaze and confuse them with White Stripes and Radiohead songs, and intimidate his dad by pretending to be Neo from The Matrix. He'd be baffled by the lack of wifi."

If they re-shot Christine today, the demon car would be a 1999 Chrysler 300M and its radio would randomly play Kenny Chesney tunes.

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As predicted...

Last October, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas terrorist massacres on Israeli citizens, I wrote:

Zahal has probably a two week window where they could get away with rather a lot of murder and not many tears would be shed until long after the shooting died down.

It was gonna be a tough job rooting out Hamas from their nests among the densely-populated Gaza Strip, but with the outrage still fresh, much of the world would probably look the other way for a reasonable amount of collateral damage.

What's happened though, is the process got bogged down and drawn out and basically the Israelis have been speed-running America's post 9/11 flailing.

It took us almost seven years to go from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers to Nisour Square, but they made it from the Supernova music festival slaughter to wiping out the World Central Kitchen aid workers in less than six months.

News cycles are fast, attention spans are short, and the general public's grace is finite. This latest episode is only going to increase outside pressure on the Israeli government to pursue a cease-fire.

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Automotif CDLXXXIV...

BMW's plug-in hybrid i8 still looks exotic ten years after its launch. It's got a 228hp turbocharged 1.5L inline three cylinder motor in the back, with a 129hp electric motor driving the front wheels. It can putter around town on just the electric motor, or use the electric motor as a booster for the gas motor in performance mode. Car and Driver got a 4.0 second 0-60 and a 12.5 quarter out of their U.S. spec test car.

Mostly just intended to be a tech demonstrator and a tentpole car for future hybrid Bimmers, they made a bit over 20,000 of them from 2014 to 2020, of which 6,776 were imported here.

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LOL you loser

I’m sorry, I just can’t take a grown-ass man running around calling himself “IcyReaper” seriously.

Go stuff yourself in a locker, dork.

Eye Roll John Winger GIFfrom Eye Roll GIFs

Some people didn't get the message.

Joke's on you. 

April Fool's Day is on the 2nd of the month this year because of leap year.

The neighborhood hangout...

I got around to processing a couple of the shots I took at Fat Dan's on Saint Patrick's Day.

Taken with the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS, which is one of my favorite combos.