Automotif DXIV...

Saab's 99 evolved into the 900 for the 1978 model year. Like its predecessor, it had a longitudinally-mounted four cylinder motor up front, driving the front wheels.

The 1987 Saab 900's got a facelift, with integrated bumpers and a more aerodynamic nose.

The 1991 900 Turbo, like this Beryl Green Metallic convertible, got a displacement bump for its 16V turbo inline four, to 2.1L. Now rated at 140 SAE net, the 900 Turbo was actually a fairly sprightly car for its era, although the convertibles were burdened by an almost 300 pound weight penalty over the coupes.

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Hot.

Fixin' to be hot today here in Indy. The weather dude says we're likely to tie the previous record high for the date, 95°F, set back in 1913.

Going to be keeping a close eye on the air conditioning, because this would be a terrible day for it to freeze up.

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Automotif DXIII...

If the badges are to be believed, this Classic White 1970 Chevy Nova is an SS396. If the exhaust note is to be believed, there's some serious business going on under that bulging aftermarket hood.

The '70 model year was the end of the road for the factory big block Nova Super Sports, with the 396 (actually 402 cubes by then) available in either 350hp L34 or 375hp L78 forms. The big motor Novas were kinda in a class of their own by 1970, since Ford didn't even offer a real performance version of its compact Falcon, and the biggest motor in A-body Mopars was the 340, which was a spicy small block, but still a small block.

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Meme Dump...

Happy Hunting Ground

Today was hot and sticky and I was about to give up my car-spotting expedition and head home when...

"You're not here for the hunting, are you?"

So a teenager here in Indy got busted for ordering seven machine gun conversion devices (six Glock switches and a DIAS) from Hong Kong.

For bonus points, at the time of his arrest he was currently on probation... for illegally possessing a machine gun.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess homie wasn't a MENSA member.

Trump's Bump Stock Ban Struck Down

The press is in a real tizzy about the most pointless piece of firearm regulation in the last couple decades getting struck down by SCOTUS.

(And it was pointless no matter what angle you looked at it from. They're dumb and I wouldn't take one if it fell off the back of a truck and landed at my feet, but at the same time they do nothing to make guns more dangerous or "assault-y". They're range toys for turning money into noise. I can already do that with my thumb and a belt loop, neither of which I have a tax stamp for.)

Same guts as Sony!

Boeing & Airbus got stuck with some off-brand titanium, it looks like.

“This is about documents that have been falsified, forged and counterfeited,” said Joe Buccino, a Spirit spokesman. “Once we realized the counterfeit titanium made its way into the supply chain, we immediately contained all suspected parts to determine the scope of the issues.”

The titanium in question has been used in a variety of aircraft parts, according to Spirit officials. For the 787 Dreamliner, that includes the passenger entry door, cargo doors and a component that connects the engines to the plane’s airframe. For the 737 Max and the A220, the affected parts include a heat shield that protects a component, which connects a jet’s engine to the frame, from extreme heat.

When you're reading the list of parts that might be suspect, encountering "the bits that hold the engines to the rest of the plane" will really make you sit up and take notice.

The train of events is very modern and international: Titanium International Group in Italy looked at the certification docs of a batch of Chinese titanium it had purchased from Turkish Aerospace Industries and thought they looked hinky, as did the metal itself. The Italians contacted their customers to warn them and now here we are with an FAA investigation.

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Automotif DXII...

We've had a '78 Indy Pace Car on these pages before. This one's either never had the door decals installed, or lost them in a repaint. I'm going to go with the latter, since it has neither the rear quarter IMS logo decal nor the Limited Edition decals on the fenders, both of which were installed at the factory, unlike the door decals that were dealer-installed. Also, the fender badges seem oddly placed and the rear spoiler's not there.

This makes the third '78 Pace Car that I've seen in the 'hood now. Below is the second one from last summer, with all decals intact.

Increasingly Unhinged

I know this looks like a store-brand knockoff of OANN, but this guy's actually on Russian state-owned TV spouting this stuff.

Generally, though, I prefer the Russian political talk show format where they stand in a circle and yell at each other about blowing up the world. It’s like Meet the Press and professional wrestling had a baby and dropped it on its head.

Anyway, he's ranting like this because Armenia is basically fed up with Russia's shit and is leaving the Russian-dominated CSTO.

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Automotif DXI...

Photographed with an Olympus E-M1X & Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4

The Plaza was the de-contented base model of the 1950's Plymouth, below the midrange Savoy and the high-zoot Belvedere. Mostly intended for fleet purchases, although also purchased by frugal individuals, it had a very limited option list.

The 1955 model, like this Miami Blue 2-door club sedan... well, it may be a business coupe, since the only differences are the lack of a back seat and rear roll-down windows in the latter ...shows off the first year of Virgil Exner's "Forward Look" styling.

The factory motors would have been either the 230 cubic inch PowerFlow inline six rated at 117 SAE gross horsepower, or the optional 157 horsepower 241cid Hy-Fire V-8.

However, if the MoonEyes tank, leaf springs up front, enormous headers ahead of exhaust cutouts, and six-bolt rear wheels that indicate a truck rear end is under there aren't enough of a giveaway that there's something more serious going on under the hood, then the "Hemi" decal on the fender sure should.

Classic period drag car.

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Tab Clearing...

• Felon down! (I wonder if you can see the exposed screws on those things from orbit?)


• I was assured this kind of racist crap only happened in the past.


• The Atlantic seems to be worried that cancellation is losing its clout.

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So Meta

“Metaphor for hubris sinks during visit to sunken wreck of metaphor for hubris.”

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Confusion

There's a lot of "How often does lying on a 4473 get prosecuted as a standalone crime?" floating around out there, and the answer is "Almost never because it's almost never discovered as a standalone crime."

Generally it's only after running the trace on a gun that's already been involved in a crime that it gets discovered. Sometimes it's thrown on as a pile-on charge in those cases and I guess sometimes they just don't bother using stretched-thin prosecutorial resources on someone who's already going down for whatever felonies got a trace run on the gun in the first place.

Hunter Biden's situation was unusual in that he was essentially dimed out by a concerned significant other, absent the gun being involved in any actual crimes.

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Meme Dump...

Panopticon

"I used to think telepathy would be cool, but then Mark Zuckerberg gave it to me."

All that has changed in the past decade. In the same way that electricity went from a luxury enjoyed by the American élite to something just about everyone had, so, too, has fame, or at least being known by strangers, gone from a novelty to a core human experience. The Western intellectual tradition spent millennia maintaining a conceptual boundary between public and private—embedding it in law and politics, norms and etiquette, theorizing and reinscribing it. With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.

Big Facts

Time marches on...

At the camera store yesterday I asked if they had any 16GB SD cards.

The counter guy looked at me with pity.

I literally said to the sales clerk "What year is it?" and he replied "2024" and I realized he probably wasn't even born when Jumanji was in theaters.

Pardon me while I walk into the ocean. I might be some time.

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Automotif DX...

The Buick Riviera as a distinct model (as opposed to a trim package name) debuted in the 1963 model year as personal luxury coupe intended to compete with Ford's Thunderbird.

It carried that banner alone for GM until it was joined a few years later by the Oldsmobile Toronado. By the late Sixties, the Riviera, Toronado, and Cadillac Eldorado shared a platform (although the Riv was distinguished from the other two by hanging on to rear wheel drive until the '79 model year.)

1995 saw the eighth and final generation of the Riviera, like this Medium Autumn Green example. The base engine was originally the 205hp GM 3800 corporate V6, with an optional 225-horse supercharged version of the same motor.

For the '98 model year, the supercharged 3800, now producing 240 SAE net horsepower, became the standard motor. The final Rivs were rowdier than anything seen since the old 455cid days of the late Sixties, and the ovoid styling and clean interior looked nice, but 1999 was the end of the road for the Riviera nameplate at Buick.

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Le sigh...

Blog Poster: "I went to the Walmart in a census-designated-place in upstate NY with a population of less than 2k and wow, the camera section in modern big box stores has really shriveled up."

Commenter: "Well here in Austin, Texas, a state capital city of a million people and a regional... if not national ...hub for creatives, we have three camera stores!"

Ah, internet. Don't you ever go changing on me...

For reference, Indianapolis had two local/regional camera chains when I moved here in 2008, but one is now gone and the other has shrunk down to just its mothership storefront downtown.

Indy has about the same population as Austin, but isn't quite the regional mecca for artsy types as the Texas capital, especially with us having Chicago right up the road. Plus we have Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus (OH and IN), St. Louis, and Louisville all an easy half day's jaunt or less away. We punch way out of our weight class in the cool cars department, but we're pretty typical of a middlin' big American city when it comes to the arts and creative stuff.

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Tab Clearing...

• I've blogged about the collapse of the camera section in big box stores before, but here's someone else taking note of it.


• You may not be at war with Russia, but Russia is at war with you.


• California totin'.

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Space Cowboy

One of the silliest lines I've heard regarding the Taurus TORO revolvers is "A red dot on a revolver? Isn't that like putting a spoiler on a horse-drawn wagon?"

No, it is not.

It is like putting a GPS in a horse-drawn wagon. A wagon may be slower than a car, sure, but it still needs to know how to get to its destination.

On that note, here are some thoughts of mine on life with the Taurus 856 TORO...

Star War

So, I watched original gangsta Star Wars and Empire on Tuesday night. Then I watched Return of the Jedi yesterday afternoon. I tried watching The Phantom Menace last night and fell asleep. That's the third time that's happened when trying to watch it.

This morning I cued up Phantom Menace again over breakfast and finally managed to watch it to the end.

If you had asked me to bet everything I owned on the length of Episode I versus the original, I’d have lost it all. The original feels like a brisk 90-minuter while Ep.1 feels like a three hour slog, but Wikipedia says they’re a bit over 120 and 130 minutes, respectively.

When the Boomers have all died off and the GenX-versus-Millennial war kicks off in earnest, the Star Wars prequels are going to be the Fort Sumter of the conflict.

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Automotif DIX...

Apologies for the potato-quality photo, but I had to snatch the Fuji X-T2 off the passenger seat and get the lens cap off in a matter of seconds to nab this '98-'04 Ferrari 456M through the Mustang's windshield at the intersection of Meridian & 96th.

The 2+2 Ferrari 412 had been gone for a couple years when the 456 launched, so the return of a front-engined Ferrari caused something of a stir at the time. As a historical footnote, the 456M was the last Ferrari to feature pop-up headlamps.

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TSA Follies

The airport here in Indianapolis has the newer baggage scanners that don’t require you to remove your laptops or tablets from your carryon, which is handy. Things tend to move pretty ricky-tick at IND.

Last week was, like, maybe only the third or fourth time I’d ever flown without checking a bag, so I was looking forward to the experience of hopping out of my Uber at the curb and just breezing my way to the gate like most normies do.

I tossed my shoes, camera, and my gun burkha into a tray, my camera bag into another, and then slid both of those and my Maxpedition Fliegerduffel into the tunnel. Then I stepped through the porn-o-scan to await my gear so I could trot off to the gate.

They pulled the Fliegerduffel to the side for further inspection.

That was weird. I half expect them to pull the tray with my gun burkha, because it’s got my wallet and my wallet has a Sparrows Hall Pass and a lockpick card, both of which have drawn scrutiny in the past, but are devoid of sharp edges. My suitcase, though? Maybe they wanted to look at the trauma shears in the blowout kit attached to the MOLLE loops?

Nope, the dude opened the bag and pulled out my little toiletries kit. Nothing in there but some nail clippers and some tweezers, so…?

Friends, the dude pulled out my Secret solid antiperspirant and swabbed it with the bomb detector swab. Hand to God, I have never seen that before.

Holden is attached to the bag via MEOWLLE loops.

As far as the return flight goes? Well, the less said about the seething mob of aberrant humanity I was trapped in for better than thirty minutes at the MSY security checkpoint, the better.

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Automotif DVIII...

A 1968 Ford Mustang hardtop coupe in Acapulco Blue. The fender badges say it's a six-cylinder car, which for the '68 model year would have been the 200 cubic inch Thriftpower inline-6 with a 1-bbl Autolite carb, rated at 115 SAE gross horsepower.

Of the first generation Mustangs, I go back and forth between the '67-'68 cars and the '69-'70 models as my favorite. I'm currently in a '68 mood...

Tab Clearing...

• A look at the retro-styled Heritage Roscoe, to tide you over until the next issue of RECOIL: Concealment hits newsstands this month with my feature-length review.


• The Day the US Conquered the British Empire: June 6th, 1944


• Tightening Your Accuracy and Performance Standards

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The Normie Take

If you don't own a red MAGA baseball cap or a "Let's Go Brandon" bumper sticker, but also aren't some raving Bernie Sanders voter who brings your tofu sandwich lunch to work in an NPR tote bag, Ben Dreyfuss's take here is pretty much how things look:

I live in a small town. I drive by the same five police cars every day. If I constantly played “Fuck The Police” as loud as possible and flipped them off as I drove by, if I were ever pulled over for speeding, I would not expect them to let me off with a warning.

Trump, more than any politician in my lifetime, chose a political strategy that involved him antagonizing half this country. From day one, he “owned the libs.” He made himself the main character in our culture. And he won a personality cult on the right that loves him. But, he earned the intense disdain of the other half of the country.

There are lots of reasons why I think that was bad for this country and the world, but one reason you shouldn’t do it out of self-interest is that a lot of people are going to be rooting for your downfall. And they are going to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. And if you are a criminal who has broken/does break the law, your chances of getting away with it are going to drop precipitously.

If you have a person bound and gagged in your trunk, you probably shouldn’t speed.

So many people in Trump’s orbit were convicted of various low-rent crimes over the last decade, and none of that would have happened if Trump hadn’t won in 2016. They would have gotten away with all of their fraud and bribery schemes. They had gotten away with them. Then they decided to loudly associate themselves with a hugely divisive person who antagonized so many people that the world gave them a closer look.

That’s what happens in life! It’s just a fact of human nature. It’s how attention works. Of course, that now applies to Trump. And it applies to his enemies, too.

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Too Much Scooby Doo.

Don't want none of that...

The upcoming Microsoft Recall feature is a security disaster, some experts are warning...

Microsoft maintains Recall is an optional experience and that it has built privacy controls into the feature. You can disable certain URLs and apps, and Recall won’t store any material that’s protected with digital rights management tools. “Recall also does not take snapshots of certain kinds of content, including InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, or other Chromium-based browsers,” says Microsoft on its explainer FAQ page.

However, Recall doesn’t perform content moderation, so it won’t hide information like passwords or financial account numbers in its screenshots. “That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry,” warns Microsoft.

I have no clue who thought this was a good idea.

Of course, given how easily many people fall for Nigerian foreign minister scams, a lot of people's computers are open books anyway.

Oh, and speaking of privacy issues:

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security issues obtained by 404 Media.

Individually the incidents, most of which have not been previously publicly reported, may only each impact a relatively small number of people, or were fixed quickly. Taken as a whole, though, the internal database shows how one of the most powerful and important companies in the world manages, and often mismanages, a staggering amount of personal, sensitive data on people's lives.

The data obtained by 404 Media includes privacy and security issues that Google’s own employees reported internally.

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Hey, look!

So, the Spyderco is a better knife than the Victorinox—if all you need to do is cut stuff with a knife. The Climber, on the other hand, does knife stuff pretty OK, as well as being able to do a reasonable job with a lot of other chores, too.

Of course, the Victorinox is only doing a “reasonable” job with all those screwdriver or bottle-opening chores. People who need a tool that can do really good work with the knife blade as well as handling all kinds of normie tool chores will usually pick a multi-tool like a Leatherman MUT or Gerber Center-Drive. Sure, they’re big and bulky, but they can do both knife and tool stuff really well.

By now, probably half the readers are glancing at the top of this column and wondering if “HANDGUNS” is some new spelling of “POCKET KNIVES” with which they had previously been unfamiliar. Gentle reader, I have a point! (And not simply the one on the knife.)

Carry guns come in all kinds of flavors.Probably the statistically most common ones these days are one of three kinds: teeny little micro-.380 ACP semi-automatics of the Ruger LCP variety, small-frame snub-nose revolvers or itty-bitty micro 9 mm pistols like the Kahr PM9 or Glock G43. These handguns are like the Spyderco Delica. They only do one thing—serve as a defensive CCW piece against would-be human assailants at fairly close distances—very well.

Some pistols are multitools, others are single-purpose...

Executive Poker

I've written about "gent's folders" before; smaller pocket knives that aren't all aggro and tacticool-looking.

Most of the ones I've played with so far were the short-bladed kind, which are not only non-threatening looking but also legal in the widest variety of places.

If you're not constrained by regulations regarding blade length or a locking blade on your folder, there's also the "stylus" type of gents folder, which I hadn't really played with before, so I decided to give the CEO model from Columbia Knife & Tool a whirl. (I sold some old ammo at this weekend's otherwise dismal Indy 1500 gun show and decided to share some of my small windfall with Brad, the knife guy.)

As the name would suggest, this style of knife is very slender, and will generally slip into any pen pocket large enough to accommodate a fine writing instrument, like that Monteverde Regatta.

You could carry it in your pants pocket, I guess, but I think its natural home would be a shirt or jacket pocket where pens are normally carried.

The blade is a bit over 3" long (3.11", to be technical) which can run afoul of local regs in places like Boston or Chicago. It's made of 8Cr13MoV steel, which is a lower-tier Chinese stainless that's roughly similar in properties to Japanese AUS-8... you're not getting exotic alloys at this price point. It's less rust resistant than good ol' 440C but easier to sharpen and less likely to chip in my experience.

There are complaints from reviewers at Amazon about the lack of a flipper on this variation (they make one with a flipper for a couple bucks more) but I prefer the slimmer profile of the flipperless one. This isn't a tactical knife.

The pivot is smooth and fitted with a ball bearing; a good shove on the thumb stud will often pivot it right into the locked position, although this is not an assisted opener. The pocket clip makes it sit nice and low and only someone who's paying a great deal of attention to your chestal region will notice it's not a pen. The lock is positive and the blade on my example was nice and sharp right out of the box. It's well up to normal everyday knifely chores.

Given its intended use, I give it a solid B grade. It's nothing exotic, but it's good-looking in a very clean and simple way, and the price is right.

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Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

I was today years old the first time I heard about this website. Someone went and dropped a reference to this wonderfully off-kilter web page and I've been stuck in the mystery flesh pit all morning.

Careful! It's deep!

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Your car is not a gun safe.

No, seriously.

Eleven days later, on the morning of Oct. 23, Hallie Biden took her two children to school, dropping them off at 8 a.m. When she returned home, as Hunter slept inside, she searched his black pickup truck and found the handgun in the center console, according to police records. Around 11:20 a.m., she put it in a black shopping bag and drove her BMW to Janssen’s Market, a local institution frequented by the Bidens that offered baked goods, fresh flowers and high-end groceries.

She threw the handgun into a trash can and entered the store. A review of video footage showed that she bought beef, bread rolls and a bottled drink.

When she returned home, she later said, Hunter’s car was gone, so she called and told him she had found his gun and thrown it into a trash can. He immediately became alarmed, angrily telling her to go retrieve it, text messages show.

For bonus points, Hallie says the truck was unlocked and the windows rolled down.

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Tab Clearing...

• It's funny 'cause it's true.


• The "My Bad $20".


• The Gun Culture 2.0 blog turned twelve, which is a lot in blog years.

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