"Like a monkey with a screwdriver..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Also, get yourself to ECQC.)

Happy Turkey Day!

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

Enjoy the feasting!

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Slow start...

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

More later.

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Posting Through It...

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

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

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

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Memewhile...

Did some video game reminiscing at the other blog (and there's fixin' to be more), but in the memetime, here...

Yowza

How in the heck can it be September already? It was April only five minutes ago!

Time has gotten so wonky since March of 2020. Things that feel like they happened just the other day actually happened a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, the last three weeks of this election season have dragged on for months.

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Blog Stuff

I'm debating whether to peel the car content out of here entirely or just cross-post it at a new blog as well as here.

The Automotif posts are fun for me and, well, there are over five hundred of them at this point...

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Too Much News

Billy Joel could get a whole new verse for "We Didn't Start the Fire" out of any given week since about March of 2020.

This is your reminder to get off the internet, snuggle your [cat/dog/kid/significant other] and go outside and touch some frickin' grass.

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Quest for Drier

As a frequent pedestrian in my neighborhood, an umbrella is a thing I like to keep in the canvas Harry Herpson High School tote bag in which I carry my iPad and a couple foam koozies.

I rarely have to walk far. It's only a few blocks to the store or a restaurant, so unless it's absolutely raining buckets, I don't need some giant mobile domed tent of a brolly.

I had to buy a new one earlier this year and, not knowing anything about which umbrella brands were good or not, I ran into the enshittified search engine on Amazon and got stumped. A little bit of research around the web saw me picking up a collapsible unit from Prostorm.

After six months of use, I gotta say that it was a good call. Reasonably priced, the auto-extend and auto-collapse features are handy. It's like the Microtech out-the-front mechanism, but for umbrellas. It has nine ribs rather than eight in order to add to its sturdiness in windy conditions, and that plus the venting in the deep bowl of the umbrella itself has kept it from getting inverted even in gusty conditions.

Collapsed down, it's only about a foot long and easily fits in the bottom of the tote. This one gets two (dry) thumbs up from me.

Bug

So the germ that had me feeling a little ookie for a couple days last week has pretty much knocked Bobbi flat.

She's definitely improved over yesterday, but I imagine it's going to be tomorrow before she's feeling up to going anywhere.

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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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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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...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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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.

This is not an advertisement.

When I write a firearms review, I tend to follow a pretty standard template.

In the first part of the article I give a little bit of historical context to the blaster I'm reviewing. I try and give some context for why it exists and what market niche it was intended to fill.

In the second part of the article I give a physical description of the thing itself. I'll describe the sights, control layout, its weight and dimensions, probably a description of how to field strip the thing, if applicable.

I'll wrap it up by giving a report on how the thing functioned (or didn't) in actual use. At most, here, I might mention that I'd carry the gun myself, or that I think the thing has good sales prospects. There will then be a data box of some sort with specifications and the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

Inevitably, I will receive inquiries asking whether I thought it was "good" or "bad" and should my inquirer spend their own hard-earned dough on one?

Friend, I have given you all the applicable information you need to make that decision. It's up to you to compare that data to your needs and wants and determine whether you want to buy one or not. 

I've practically chewed your food for you, Gentle Reader; I'm not going to rub your throat to help you swallow.

Similarly, when I write about a cartridge, it's not because I "love" the cartridge or "hate" the cartridge. I was once the sort of dork who had a "favorite caliber" (it was 10mm, in case you're new here) but I also once laboriously made tedious little top ten lists of my favorite songs, too. I was a kid. Kids do dumb and tedious stuff and get really serious about it; hopefully most people grow out of that phase.

So when I write up some five or six paragraph explainer about what Federal was thinking when they came up with .327 Fed or .30 Super Carry, for example, it's not because I want you to like the round. Or that I want you to hate the round. I'm just explaining why the round exists in the first place. I don't care one way or another whether you like it or not.

And yet every time I do, I get someone doing this...

Well... bye.

Back in Atlanta, when I'd hear someone going on about how much better things were back in whatever city they'd moved there from... and Atlanta is a veritable city of transplants ...my standard response was that old airline advertising slogan: "Delta is ready when you are."

In that spirit...

I was today years old...

...when I learned the word "mondegreen", and I already love it madly.

Per Benjamin Dreyer:

"Perhaps you’ve run across the term “mondegreen”? I’ve long known it to mean a misheard lyric or bit of poetry, but its full meaning I learned only minutes ago — because I finally deigned to investigate. “Mondegreen” was coined in 1954 by writer Sylvia Wright to commemorate her having misapprehended the phrase “laid him on the green,” in this line from a Scottish ballad: “They have slain the Earl of Moray / An’ laid him on the green.” Wright heard wrong, thinking there were two slaying victims, the earl and “Lady Mondegreen.”"

Bobbi's been pushing me to read Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, and I think the linked column has pushed it to the top of my to-read pile.

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Enshittification Finally Caught Me

I'd heard others complain about the the current parlous state of Amazon search results before, but had yet to really experience them for myself.

I mean, if I'm going to go get some Pom pepper spray from the Pom store or a box of Surefire CR123 batteries from the Surefire store or a Terry Pratchett book from Kindle, there's not a lot of searching involved. I know what I'm looking for and going right to the thing, like way back in the day when I won a bet with a friend by going into a Gap store and finding the shelf my jeans were on with my eyes closed.

And when I'm buying groceries direct from Amazon Fresh, they're unlikely to try to steer me to a third party vendor selling DIET MOUNTIAN DAW.

But generalized search is a hot mess, apparently. Per Cory Doctorow:

"Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads."

The other day I realized I needed a fresh batch of winter socks and so, not wanting to drive over to Meijer, plugged "wool socks" into Amazon's search dingus.

Now, I'm no connoisseur of insulated hosiery, but I'm pretty sure that I'd never heard of XoxOY or Insoool or these other companies offering me $3.99 six-packs of wool socks with thousands of positive ratings written in some dialect of ESL whose origin was hard to pin down.

Fortunately I recollected that Browning licensed their name to a line of outdoor clothing and I'd had their wool socks before, so I plugged "Browning wool socks" in and found some that looked like the ones I'd had and were sold by and shipped from Amazon proper.

Then this morning I noticed it was supposed to piss-pour rain all day and frankly my sole remaining umbrella is on its last legs. So, hey-ho, off to BezosMart!

Friends, if I'm uninformed on socks, I'm positively ignorant on umbrellas. My umbrella-buying experience has generally been limited to grabbing a Totes off the rack at the drug store or Target and tossing it in with the soda and chips in my basket.

I'm sure there is an umbrella equivalent to a Glock: durable, workmanlike, reasonably-priced. Likewise there's probably a Rolls Royce of umbrellas, made by English brolly craftsmen to exacting standards of workmanship and constructed of the best materials well enough that your grandkids will be able to use it to stay dry at their parents' funerals.

I have no idea what those umbrella brands are, though, but I'm pretty sure that they're not being sold in three-packs for $7.99 by WOW-DRY. I'd be afraid to open one of those umbrellas for fear of finding a note written in Malay saying "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a Sihanoukville umbrella factory!"

In the end I bought one that seemed not too terribly scammy or gimmicky and was priced reasonably commensurately with its purported features.

We'll see how it goes.

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Did you know...?

That's the building we used to jokingly call "Broad Ripple's skyscraper", before the neighborhood sprouted a jungle of 4- and 5-story "mixed use" residential/retail spaces.

It was a professional building, with dentist's offices and whatnot on each floor. Now it's owned by the bohemian Hotel Broad Ripple.

Hence the big peace symbol.

Back during the Cold War, conservative Boomers and Silents called that "the footprint of the American chicken". 

GenX and Millennials mostly knew it from the button on Private Joker's helmet cover, next to the scrawled "BORN TO KILL" slogan. Occasionally, on posters or fliers touting a Sixties hippie-themed school function, a clueless X'er or Millennial would hilariously get it mixed up with the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star logo.

I once heard a fundie preacher... I've mentioned that I grew up in a Baptist concentration camp, right? ...tell the congregation that it was actually a secret satanic symbol; an inverted cross with the arms broken. I guess when you're looking for the devil behind every bush, you get a lot of false positives.

In actuality, as I learned while reading P.J. O'Rourke's essay "Among the Euroweenies" in Holidays in Hell, it originated in 1958 as the logo of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It's a combination of the semaphore signals for "N" and "D".

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Happy New Year!

Let's hope 2024 is a good one!

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