Back toward the light...

If you can read this, you've made it.

Oh, it's gonna be cold and miserable for a couple months yet, but we just passed the darkest day of the year. From here on out, the sun spends a bit more time above the horizon every day. 

Getting better…

We’re not that many days away from the sun coming up before 8AM and setting after 6PM.

The SAD gets a lot more manageable from there, although even sunny days feel a little watered down until late March.

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Happy New Year!

Another year to get better at stuff than you were last year!
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Talked to Frank James the other day.

He's busting ass at rehabbing; says he's working as hard at it as anything he's ever worked at (which, coming from a farmer, is not a phrase that gets tossed around lightly.)

I was at the range with a test gun for a forthcoming magazine review, and it seemed very meet and right to get a call from Farmer Frank while I was there.
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Fingers still crossed...

Back in green
On the scene
Parked by the trail
No steam to be seen

Still keeping an eye on things, but feeling ever more hopeful. It's not even like I necessarily need the thing to be roadtrip worthy. If it can get around town in foul weather ("Winter Is Coming!™")and schlep the occasional load from Home Despot, I've got the Zed Drei for fair weather driving and long trips.
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The toughest dude I have ever met.

Mas Ayoob visited Frank James, who is working hard at rehabbing, and brings us a status update and a message from Farmer Frank.
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The cries of my people have been heard...

Seen in comments to the McKay's post today:

Unless there's another McKay's I Knoxville with the same paint scheme and trashcan arrangement (with free zine rack in background), the sign is gone.  

So Gunsmith Bob and I ran by there this evening to see. Sure enough, the offending sign was gone!

The market has spoken.

Thank you for being so quickly responsive to customer feedback, McKay's! We immediately went in and rewarded you in the best capitalist fashion: With green pieces of paper.

Keeping those cards and letters coming...

SayUncle noted a couple days ago that "[i]f everyone who bought an AR-15 magazine since 2004 wrote their congresscritter and told them to not support any restrictions on gun rights, no bill would see the light of day."

Perhaps coincidentally, this thread popped up the next day at P-F.com:

 I spent six years working on Capitol Hill. One as a staff aide for a particular Senate committee, two as a legislative correspondent for a Senator, and three as a legislative aide for the same Senator.

For those of you who don't know, a legislative corespondent (LC) is basically a fancy title for a young twenty-something just out of college who receives the letters and emails that you write, and is usually the person who writes you back. Generally, Congressmen have one or two LC's who do all of their letters for every issue, while Senators have a whole team of LC's that handle letters for certain issues that they're assigned (IE: a military LC, a healthcare LC, an education LC, etc.). Here's a few things that I picked up as an LC that might help you should you choose to write your Congressional delegation:

If you're going to write, you should go read the thread.

Fetch me my time travel trousers.

Over at P-F.com, one poster indicated that he was looking for a carbine for his wife, preferably a Colt 6920 (basically a semiautomatic M4 carbine.) Another poster replied:

Have her take a look at Wal-mart if you can’t fine one anywhere else. I saw a 6920 today for just under $1100.

Imagine, if you will, using a magic browser plug-in that would let you copy and paste that whole thread on TheFiringLine.com or GlockTalk.com back in, say, 2003. Or even better, 1999. Back in those days:

1. Wal-Mart was definitely not in the business of selling scary-looking rifles.
2. Colt only sold the 6920 model through law enforcement distributors.
3. The rifle was unsalable anyway, since it was slathered with a full menu of Evil Features prohibited by the so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" of '94.

If you told the folks on an internet gun board back in '99 that in the year 2012, you could walk into Wally World and buy an honest-to-Stoner Colt®-brand "pre-ban"* M4gery, they would look at you like you were John Titor, only less plausible.

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*Now there's a word I haven't used in a while. Ask your parents, kids.

Exploiting the breakthrough...

New Jovian Thunderbolt has a post up with the breakdown on how to apply for a Maryland toter's permit. I'd imagine they are going to be inundated with applications in the wake of last week's momentous court ruling, so don't wait!

You know they're going to kick and scream, but a few tens of thousands of voters people leaving permit applications in the inbox might help them reevaluate the political wisdom of too much resistance.

Hey, you! Get off of my cloud!

Last month we won Heller.

Last weekend I went to get trained up at Blackwater.

Yesterday Palin got tapped for Veep.

This morning I burned a ton of lead downrange and was just absolutely lights out with any gun I touched. And then I went out for lunch with a friend. Plus it's a positively beautiful day outside. My face hurts from smiling.

You know, the world may end tomorrow, but for today, ain't nothin' gonna break my stride. :)

Optimistic Googler of the Day:

Someone hit this place by Googling "indianapolis cheap ammunition". Good luck with that.

Oh, and while you're at it, Google "gps coordinates of secret fishin' hole" too, and tell me what you come up with...

Need something upbeat to read this morning?

Here you go.

Makes you want to go change a life for the better, doesn't it?

The Internet, much like Soylent Green, is people.

Carteach0 has a post up about the connectivity of the internet prompted by his connection going dead recently:

How much of my present life is defined by my friends (and more) on the internet?
It was a very long, and mostly sleepless night. Rest would not come, nor peace.
There are folks I speak to that have become very dear to me, and I was cut off.

...and it's true. For all the YouTube flash and Amazon cash, the internet is people. It's Morse's and Bell's and Marconi's dreams of connectedness come true. It's grown from the Cold War-era experimenting of university geeks into maybe the most amazing project humanity has undertaken and every day the line between "cyberspace" and "the real world" blurs more and more.

Some eight years ago, while I was still in Atlanta, I had just started posting on a couple of internet bulletin boards, GlockTalk and TheFiringLine. I had an horrific motorcycle accident, and not only were the printed Get Well wishes from forum members a comfort, but while I was recovering and still wheelchair-bound, a guy from the boards who lived in Knoxville drove down to visit on weekends. He and my Ex and I spent those weekends playing Diablo II and chatting, and when I lost my job in the aftermath, the guy from Knoxville offered me the extra bedroom in his apartment ("Not a problem. My rent is the same whether someone's sleeping in that bedroom or not,") and a hand in looking for work here in K-town, so I loaded up my car and moved north.

One of those boards, TheFiringLine, was run by a guy named Rich, now better known as the publisher of SWAT Magazine. Rich had retired early, thanks to his amazing executive skills. Executive skills, of course, number among them the ability to Pick The Right People, and a lot of the people Rich picked to be staff on his board are probably very familiar now, even to people who have never logged onto a gun BBS in their life: Matt, Lawdog, JShirley, Don Gwinn, JPG, Oleg, the aforementioned guy from Knoxville, Kathy, and others. In the intervening years I have managed to meet many of those fine folks in real life and am proud to number them among my friends.

A few years ago, I discovered blogs and decided to try my hand at this blogging thing. Through the medium I've had the privilege of meeting many of the good people from those circles face to face: Les Jones, Say Uncle, Instapundit and Dr. Helen, Michael Silence, Kirk, Countertop, TD, Cowboy Blob. A bunch more have become friends through email. Most recently I trekked northwards to meet Roberta X and be given a gracious guided tour of Indianapolis, a tour I never would have gotten without the magic of this wonderful series of tubes called the internet.

At this very moment, somewhere some pasty-faced academic is sweating out his dissertation on the de-humanizing impact of the 'web. I think he's barking up the wrong tree. How can it be de-humanizing when it's made of people?

It was late on a recent Saturday night, I was in a poopy mood, and I had just updated my blog and toddled off to bed. As my head hit the pillow, the phone rang. On the other end were traffic noises, the muted drone of a cop radio, and a Texas drawl: "Leonard Cohen, Tam? What's wrong?"

Don't tell me it's de-humanizing.

What a wondrous digital world that has such people in it.

Luke 10:25-37

Friday's altercation on the Q train began when somebody yelled out "Merry Christmas," to which rider Walter Adler responded, "Happy Hanukkah," said Toba Hellerstein.

"Almost immediately, you see the look in this guy's face like I've called his mother something," Adler told CNN affiliate WABC.

Two women who were with a group of 10 rowdy people then began to verbally assault Adler's companions with anti-Semitic language, Hellerstein said.

One member of the group allegedly yelled, "Oh, Hanukkah. That's the day that the Jews killed Jesus," she said.

When Adler tried to intercede, a male member of the group punched him, she said.

Another passenger, Hassan Askari -- a Muslim student from Bangladesh -- came to Adler's aid, and the group began physically and verbally assaulting him, Hellerstein said.

"A Muslim-American saved us when our own people were on the train and didn't do anything," Adler said.

Good on ya, Hassan.

So you wanna be a po-leece-man?

In a world where too many people in all walks of life couldn't spell "Honor" if you spotted them the H, the N, and both O's, MattG's answer to the question "What helps a police officer become better at their jobs?" is refreshing. The world could use a couple more like him.

A request from a good man:

Seen at Carteach0's blog:

As much as I live by the law of true tithing, I am picky in how it's applied. That being so.... why am I willing to dive in on a food drive?

The simple fact is.... I've been there.

When I was young, there was a time my family had very little. How little........ I had a mattress on the floor and that was pretty damn good. Mom figured out how to cook three meals a day in an electric coffee pot and we didn't go hungry, not really. It didn't last forever, but I never forgot.

With this food drive...... I have a scene in my mind.....

I see not just cases of food, but pallet loads. Stacked head high in bay after bay.

I see the folks from the food bank there.... staring at the results with their mouths open.... and I see a few of them with tears in their eyes.

I see the school administrators at a loss for words, and a local reporter taking pictures of what my class has done.

I see my students learning it's possible to pull together and do something so good they'll never forget it. For the rest of their lives they'll talk about the time they....... and they'll remember they can each make a difference if they try.

The canned food drive is over on November 20th.
That gives me only days to make this happen.
I already told my children's mother that 'my' Christmas present will be canned goods, and it will arrive early this year...
As in before the 20th.

Just by chance, if you want to take part in this, I would welcome the help. I'm not good at accepting help for myself, but I'm a whore for my students. To teach them
what they need, or help them out, I'll happily toss my own pride in the gutter if that's what it takes.

Help a brother out.

Boomsticks: I love a happy ending.

My downstairs neighbors were leaving to run some errands a few minutes ago and were kind enough to bring me today's mail before they left. Atop the stack was this month's SWAT magazine. Like I do every month, I dropped the book I was reading and popped the magazine open to go look for the Pat Rogers article. Instead, the magazine fell right open to a beautiful sight...

A two-page color glossy photo of Jim Zumbo blazing away with a stubby M-16 variant on full auto, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning.

The accompanying nine-page article covered the whole back story of the Zumbo/Outdoor Life debacle from Mr. Zumbo's point of view; his current, much-changed feelings on the topic; and the results of him taking a tactical carbine course from none other than Pat Rogers. I started the article with, I admit, a bit of a smirk on my face, and finished it with a grin only slightly smaller than the one Mr. Zumbo was wearing while he let rip with the buzz gun. Thank you, Mr. Zumbo. And thank you Ted Nugent, Denny Hansen, Pat Rogers, and Rich Lucibella. This was one of the most happy-making things I've read in a while.

If y'all blog readers don't subscribe, you should, or at least pick up a trophy copy on the news stands when it shows up there soon. Behold the power of the intaw3bz, indeed... :)

Somewhere, Mr. Heinlein is smiling.

A sunset. On Mars.

We took this picture. We did this. We did. Us humans. It's going to happen; maybe not in my lifetime, but soon. For every mouth-breathing idiot who wants to kill his neighbor because of their race, religion, or choice of dandruff shampoos, there are a dozen brilliant, dedicated people toiling away to make the future happen.

You can't stop this train.

(H/T to Paul Simer.)