Star Wars Memes

Squirrel!

As foliage thins on the trees, squirrel photography season really gets into gear for me. I'm a lot more likely to use longer zooms as my walking-around lens. These were with the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II on the Nikon D300S. That's the equivalent of a 300mm focal length on a full-frame camera.

You don't get these shots with a cell phone.

Ballistic Testing...

At the range yesterday doing ballistic gel shooting with a few loads in two different chamberings, one of which was .327 Federal Magnum. The test gun was this Taurus 327 TORO with a Gideon Judge optic.

As a control round, I used a .32 H&R Magnum Hornady 80gr FTX Critical Defense. The Critical Defense did not expand through 4LD, and I didn't expect that ti would. It came to rest backwards in the gel block, 13" in.

The .327 Federal Hydra-Shok 85gr projectile, normally an iffy expander in 4LD, proved that even an iffy projectile can expand if you put enough ass behind it. It mushroomed nicely and came to rest, also base-first, at the 14" mark, just beyond the Hornady bullet.

The 100gr .327 Fed Gold Dot worked exactly as predicted: It expanded like a catalog photo and was found tangled in the denim on the far side of the 16" gel block. This is pretty much identical to what you get from 9mm 124gr +P GDHP and HST, which are pretty much the current gold standards, and it's what the load was designed to emulate.

That's the load I'm going to sight the dot in with.

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An Historic Invasion of Memes...

Automotif DLXIV...

Initially I thought this might be the Mercury Monterey I saw in the Broad Ripple Kroger parking lot back in 2017, but examining the photos, it sure doesn't appear to be.

This one has a single exhaust and is a faded Silver Turquoise Iridescent, while the other is Peacock and has dual exhausts. Also, the side mirrors are different.

Wild to think that there might be two of them in the area.

Lord of the Memes

Precision Targeting

Does something in your neighborhood Facebook group or favorite fandom Subreddit really get you spun up about something political? Maybe it was supposed to.

The new disinformation being peddled by foreign nations aims not just at swing states, but also at specific districts within them, and at particular ethnic and religious groups within those districts. The more targeted the disinformation is, the more likely it is to take hold, according to researchers and academics who have studied the new influence campaigns.

“When disinformation is custom-built for a specific audience by preying on their interests or opinions, it becomes more effective,” said Melanie Smith, the research director for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization based in London. “In previous elections, we were trying to determine what the big false narrative was going to be. This time, it is subtle polarized messaging that strokes the tension.”

Iran in particular has spent its resources setting up covert disinformation efforts to draw in niche groups. A website titled “Not Our War,” which aimed to draw in American military veterans, interspersed articles about the lack of support for active-duty soldiers with virulently anti-American views and conspiracy theories. Other sites included “Afro Majority,” which created content aimed at Black Americans, and “Savannah Time,” which sought to sway conservative voters in the swing state of Georgia. In Michigan, another swing state, Iran created an online outlet called “Westland Sun” to cater to Arab Americans in suburban Detroit.

Sowing discord on the social media channels of opposing nations is becoming an art form.

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Monday-Flavored Memes...

Automotif DLXIII...

You don't see a '62 Corvette out just tooling around every day, that's for sure.

Spotted this one at lunchtime on Saturday, rolling through SoBro and enjoying the sunny, temperate early autumn weather before we turn the heat on again for the week.

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Important Safety Tip...

Don't piss off a crow. They hold grudges.

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

On the other hand, get on a crow's good side and they will express gratitude.

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Nostalgia...

Last night's Svengoolie double feature had the classic Jim Henson flick The Dark Crystal, and I'd forgotten what a fun romp that was.

Combined that with last week's Labyrinth and you have a bangin' GenX Nostalgia Machine...

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Hot Rods of Summer

This past summer has been an unusually good one for classic hot rods.

Effin' Memes...

Norks on Film

Video leaks confirm North Korean troops in Russia, likely to be used against the Kursk salient.

North Korea has one of the largest militaries in the world with about 1.2 million soldiers, but most are underfed and poorly equipped, and have been used as labor forces rather than for military operations.

But the soldiers sent to Russia were special operations troops, including from North Korea’s elite Eleventh Army Corps, often called the “Storm Corps,” South Korea’s spy agency said this week.

The “Storm Corps” is among North Korea’s best trained and best equipped units, said Go Myong-hyun, senior research fellow at Seoul’s Institute for National Security Strategy, which is affiliated with South Korea’s intelligence agency.

Great Memes of History!

Hard Night at the Office

I dreamed I was selling cars again, which was weird, because it's been thirty-five years since I worked at a car dealership.

In the dream the dealership didn't have a showroom, but rather a big open-plan office with low-walled cubicles. I had this young just-married couple looking to buy a car and they very specifically wanted a manual transmission. We test drove something like a mid-Eighties Camry with a four-cylinder and a five speed, and some imaginary dream coupe that looked something like an MX-6 but was made by some imaginary French company that only existed in my dream world.

I got off into some interminable nerdy explanation to them about the synchros, and then about the differences between straight-cut and helical-cut gears, using a couple file folders to mime how the gear teeth meshed.

There were hundreds of cars on the lot but only three had manual transmissions and I was trying to find the third one in the computer, but we hot-desked in these little cubicles and whoever had used this one last had played a browser game that left always-on-top pop-up windows all over the desktop, obscuring our sales software.

I was trying to explain to the dude, who was the one insisting on a manual, that there was no real performance advantage to a manual and it would make for a more tedious commute in traffic, but then I woke up.

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Smoothbrains at Threads...

"Not a sports car any stretch of the definition"?

What kind of pig-ignorant mouth noise is that?

It is the definitional example. The MG-TC is the type specimen of sports cars. All other sports cars are shadows cast on the cave wall by the TC.

That's the sportsest sports car that ever sportsed!

To this day I remember the time I parked my Porsche 924S next to an original gangsta TC in the parking lot of the Blockbuster in Midtown ATL and just sat there and swooned over it until the owner came out.

Hand to God, he had stringback gloves. A flat cap, too. Dude had the Official MG-TC Uniform!

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Tab Clearing...

• Tribal Lore of the People of the Gun: A great list of essential reading from Gorillafritz. If you don't know where yo've come from, it's hard to figure out which way you should be going.


• A weird longing for the communist past among some Russians, and the weird love of Russia from some Americans are two things I just do not understand. The Cold War sucked.


• Bobbi fell into a burning (jalapeño) ring of fire.

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Friday Morning Memes…

Nostalgia…

Ah, the Nineties...

The time from the rise of always-on broadband to the fall of the towers was truly a golden age in ‘Murrica. 3D graphics cards were invented, premium unleaded was ninety cents a gallon, and Zuckerberg and Musk were just teenage dorks you’d never heard of. God, we had no idea how good we had it.  

RETVRN

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Memes... In... Spaaaace!

Fernandomania...

I mentioned the other day that the Yankees and Dodgers hadn't met in the Fall Classic since 1981. That year the Yankees won the first two games before a twenty-year-old rookie phenom from Mexico pitched a W in a complete game, turning the series around. 

The Dodgers won four in a row and the Series, the pitcher won the NL Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young, the first and only time a player has taken both awards in the same season.

That pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, has left the building.

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Meme Dump...

This was cool...

I actually got the Powerbook 540c to boot!

These things were so baller for their day. They had built in stereo speakers with 16 bit sound, 640x480 active matrix color display, 33mhz 040 CPU, dual battery bays... it was one of the first laptops that could also work as a hoss of a desktop machine. 

Of course, they were originally something like five grand, which'd buy you a pretty nice used car back in 1995. They had product placement in movies, of course, since they looked so cool.

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Info Flow

"It isn’t necessary to buy politicians if you can launder narratives through the information ecosystem and have politicians repeat them."

There's a weird pattern to information churn, especially in the Very Online Right, these days.

Stuff gets posted in Facebook groups or forums or wherever, and the various influencers, podcasters, vloggers, et cetera trawl these spaces to find stuff that's generating buzz or is outlandish enough that it will draw clicks. 

Then these social media influencers amplify it, generally in as clickbait-y a way as possible, to grab eyeballs and ad revenue. This causes it to buzz even more on social media and it gets noticed by staffers in various politicians' offices, who pass on to their bosses that "People seem to really be riled up about this. You need to jump on this bandwagon!"

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Monday Morning Memes, Special Highbrow Edition

Has it been that long?

The World Series was between the Yankees and the Dodgers when I was 9, 10, and 13 years old. Those are formative years when it comes to remembering things, I guess. The baseball history books I read were full of storied World Series between the two teams.

It's hard to believe that this year will be their first October matchup since I was in middle school.

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Meme Dump...

Bobber Beemer

I really love the looks of this slightly rat bike-d old air cooled Beemer bobber.

I gotta say, though, that the rider looks like he belongs with the bike a lot more than I do. It's practically like those pictures you see where dogs and their owners grow to look like each other.

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I'll never order a lemonade & ice tea blend the same way again.

The op-ed and political pages at the Washington Post and New York Times have been laboriously "sanewashing" the former president's speeches, translating his rambling, discursive weirdness into something resembling policy positions in the interest of trying to present somewhat normal coverage of a typical quadrennial political horse race.

Yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, though, the Donald finally said something too weird for the WaPo to try and spin it into normal political dialogue.

Seventeen days from the election, here in arguably the most decisive swing state, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump spent the first 10 minutes of his speech without mentioning politics.

Instead, he delivered a long tribute to Arnold Palmer, the late golfer who was born here and is the namesake of the airport where Trump was speaking. Trump’s soliloquy about Palmer included an account of how other athletes reacted to seeing him in the showers.

“Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.

That was a dong too far for the Post's writers...

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Dead Wagon

The US auto market has essentially given up on station wagons for whatever reason.

Take, as Exhibit A, the 2018-2020 Buick Regal TourX wagon, based on the Opel Insignia Country Tourer.

I can't believe that Buick released a longroof with AWD and the 250 horsepower turbo four from the base Camaro, and it put down performance numbers basically identical to my '94 Mustang GT & '98 Z3 2.8, plus it looked really good, and the market shrugged and said "Whaddaya got in a blobby crossover SUV instead?"

Heck, Buick didn't just give up the Regal wagon, they gave up all the Regals...and actually all the cars. Buick is solely a purveyor of SUVs and crossovers now.

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