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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Tab Clearing...

• Basically, nowadays Twitter is just 4chan but with a constant barrage of ads for crypto schemes and janky Chinese consumer goods, except 4chan doesn't keep pestering you to give them eight bucks a month.


• Flaco the owl's glorious year of freedom has come to a sad ending.


• Some men just want to watch the world burn.

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And so it goes...

Mojo Nixon is with the King now.

Requiem for a Heavyweight

I had my Nikon D1X out to get some exercise a couple days ago, and when I went to take a shot, the shutter made a weird noise and it looked like the mirror didn't cycle properly. I powered it off for a quick count of ten Mississippi and turned it back on again and everything seemed to return to normal.

Then yesterday after noon I was out with it again and when I went to take a shot the mirror stuck in the up position. Even with a fresh fully-charged battery, the camera just makes a muted whirring noise when the shutter button is pressed and the mirror doesn't budge.

Nikon D1X & 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D VR

I think this is the end for my D1X. Time to put a body cap on it and shelve it alongside my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, which had taken to spending more time throwing error codes than functioning properly.

Considering that Nikon launched the D1X in early February of 2001 with serial number 5100000 and mine is serial number 5100496, it's an old one. I was down to one really good NiMH battery pack and one that was on its last legs. It was too old to even work with my favorite Nikon DX lens, because it couldn't control the electronic diaphragm on the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E.

At this point it's a 20+ year-old DSLR that, to judge by the body, saw years of hard pro service before I bought it back in 2015; the equivalent of a workhorse getting a job giving kiddie rides at a petting zoo as a retirement gig. It's not economically repairable, but I've had some good times with it. Took it to Blogorado back in '15, shot some roller derby with the Atomic Nerds in Albuquerque, and it accompanied me on plenty of neighborhood walks.

I knew this day was coming, but I'm still a little sad.

Good job, Nikon.

Mixed Legacy

So, as you have probably heard, Gaston Glock shuffled off his mortal coil a couple days ago.

He probably had more impact on the world of handguns today than any other single individual not named "Sam Colt" or "John Browning".

Not that he was necessarily a design genius or brilliant gunsmith or whatever. He was an engineer who owned a company that hired designers and gunsmiths, but the end result is that he made a pistol that was dirt cheap to manufacture yet adequately reliable, accurate, and durable.

I carried Glocks for years. I likely will again at some point. I was a moderator at the GlockTalk forum twenty-three years ago. I even had a Glock desktop theme on my Win95 computer. (Remember desktop themes? Mine played a .WAV of that Tommy Lee Jones "nickel plated sissy pistol" quote when I shut it down.)

At the same time, there's no denying that Gaston's dirt-cheap-to-manufacture pistol really kicked off the race to the bottom that has consumed the handgun market over the last thirty years.

So my feelings on hearing this week's news are... complex.

And so it goes...

Via Facebook I learned that David Drake passed away yesterday. His website confirms the sad news.

The sheer number of times I referenced him on this blog should tell you what a loss this is. Other than a few fantasy series and some of his "co-authored" stuff (meaning Drake sketched the outline and the junior author did the grunt work of writing), I have pretty much nearly everything he wrote.

I think I'll re-read With the Lightnings in memorium.

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A Dark Day in Hoosieropolis...

Former IU coach Bobby Knight went to that great Assembly Hall in the sky yesterday. 

He was a titan of basketball, which is the official state religion of Indiana (and my lack of appreciation for squeaky round ball is how I know I'm merely a naturalized Hoosier and not a true native) and his passing is the top story in the local news.

Tom Cochrun wrote about his memories of Coach Knight here.

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Sad news...

I just learned that Bruce McCall passed away.

You might know him from his illustrations for The New Yorker, who eulogized him yesterday:

Bruce McCall, the artist behind the cover for the May 15, 2023, issue, died on May 5th, at the age of eighty-seven. McCall, who insisted upon chewing his beloved Groucho Marx cigars long after a taste for tobacco stopped being even remotely acceptable, was a dear friend and a poet at heart. His artistic sensibility was formed far beyond the strictures of art school, first in the stark and frigid landscape of Ontario, then in the stark and frigid world of Madison Avenue advertising. His work as an ad man lent him an extraordinary drawing fluency and speed, and a knack for copywriting—his paintings are often filled with a droll humor splayed across billboards and signs. Ardor for the shining mirage of Detroit, Michigan—on the other side of Lake St. Clair—never left his heart. He loved cars, and drove everywhere in congested Manhattan traffic long after most everyone else had opted for public transportation.

I first encountered him on the pages of Car and Driver, where he was a frequent contributor.

So it goes.

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And so it goes...

Apparently Tim Vanderweert, the blogger behind Leicaphilia, which I have linked frequently, passed away yesterday.

As followers of his blog know, it was only a matter of time...in fact, we all thought we'd lost him once already...but he stared down the Grim Reaper with grace and aplomb for quite a while.

RIP

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Space Fail

Artemis will not be going to space today.

The launch of #Artemis I is no longer happening today as teams work through an issue with an engine bleed. Teams will continue to gather data, and we will keep you posted on the timing of the next launch attempt. https://t.co/tQ0lp6Ruhv pic.twitter.com/u6Uiim2mom

— NASA (@NASA) August 29, 2022

Coda

Tim at Leicaphilia has made a final post...

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Another loss.

New Jovian Thunderbolt started blogging back in '07. We weren't really tight, but we'd exchanged emails and IMs over the years, linked to each other's blogs every now and again, hung out at NRAAM this one time back in the day. He was a fixture in the sidebar and a fairly frequent link, being the coiner of the term "metrocon".

He'd been having health issues lately and last weekend they finally caught up with him. And so it goes.

We are diminished.

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RIP RX

My beloved shirt pocket camera, an original Sony RX100, has finally packed it in after three years of getting banged around and used in all kinds of weather and accompanying me on a lot of adventures. 

It's amazing how many memories you can pack into one of these little things.

They sell waterproof "tough" cameras in shock resistant cases, but even though they're probably small enough to go in the pocket, they tend to have have small noisy 1/2.3" sensors and slow lenses and lack the controllability of a real camera. You don't have the full range of PASM modes, you can't shoot RAW, et cetera. 

I used to use a Nikon Coolpix P7000 for this role, but the newer enthusiast compacts with 1" 20MP sensors and fast glass... the Sony RX100 and Canon G7X families ...are pretty perfect for this gig.

I mean, I carried it in the document pocket of my gun burkha in classes frequently, and it's taken some pretty good licks from the butts of pistols during the draw, especially when running from AIWB. It's been in Texas & Arizona summer heat, coastal Georgia fug, Indianapolis winters...

I think any little camera in that job is going to eventually lose the war. I try to buy 'em used in the $100-$200ish range and figure that if I get a two or three year run out of one, I'm doing pretty good.

I guess after payday on the 1st, I'll start shopping for a fresh one.

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The other shoe dropped.

Back in 2009, I wrote

After giving away a copy of Parliament of Whores yesterday, I wound up dragging my own copy down from the attic and re-reading it for what must be at least the sixth time. Despite having vast swatches of it memorized, it's still laugh-out-loud funny. Every bon mot to ever spill from my fingertips is due to reading lots and lots of P.J. O'Rourke and Florence King.

I recollected it in January of 2016 when Florence King passed away.

Yesterday we lost P.J. O'Rourke.

I uglycried in public.

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He doesn't need the dashboard light anymore.

Meat Loaf has left the building at age 74.

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Dammit.

Well, it turns out that the reason my monthly stipend check has not arrived this month is that my lawyer all those years ago did not purchase a lifetime annuity with a twenty year guarantee, but a regular twenty year structured settlement. My monthly income just took a nine-hundred dollar hit, and my future plans are all up in the air. Younger me should have paid closer attention to those papers and asked more questions.

I've had better days, y'all.

Posting may be light for a bit. I have a bunch of recurring payments I need to go cancel for now.

There may be some milsurp rifles on the block in a bit. Berthiers, Carcanos, Finnish Mosins, an oddball Mauser or two, that sort of thing.

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Around the blogs...

• Bobbi and the Big Dish


• We are diminished.


• Remington 870

NRAAM Cancelled

🚨Important Announcement: NRA Annual Meeting Cancellation

Full statement here➡️https://t.co/SGwUBj4wgG pic.twitter.com/fIdx1BZNhW

— NRA (@NRA) August 24, 2021

I had kinda sensed this approaching, what with the continued bad news out of Houston. I'd never planned on going anyway since it's outside of my easy one-day driving range, so fortunately I don't have a room to cancel. 

I feel bad for everyone involved. I gotta say that 2020 v2.0 isn't any more fun than the original, so far.

How festive.

Some jackass got my debit card number (including the expiration and three digit code) and linked it to their PayPal account. 

I found this out by suddenly being on the hook for two eBay purchases totaling a bit over five hundred bucks. My bank and PayPal have both been super helpful and it looks like everything's going to get put right in a few days, hopefully, but that's five bills I really didn't have right now. Also, I had to cancel the card and now I get to go to the bank and try and get a new one.

Not how I planned to spend my Tuesday.

The dude at PayPal was super helpful and told me that the scammer had the two fraudulent purchases shipped to an Indianapolis address. That info, combined with the date of the first one (two days after I'd arrived home from NH) narrows it down to either the local pizza joint or the restaurant around the corner from my house. Neither is super palatable to think about. With the pizza joint, at least I can go to online ordering through a service like DoorDash rather than reading my card number to someone on the other end of the line.

This is only the second time this has happened to me in over a decade, but it's never fun. 

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And So It Goes...

I was driving home from a short work trip to Ohio when I heard the news of Hank Aaron's passing on the radio. It left me unexpectedly verklempt.

Watch Aaron's record-breaking home run here. Do you see what he didn't do? There was no exulting at the plate. No standing there and watching to see where it went. The Hammer hit the biggest home run in baseball and started legging it towards first like it was just another hit. That was sportsmanship. 

Of course, back in those days if you'd had the gall to stand at the plate with your arms raised and watch your home run leave the park, the pitcher would have put the ball in your ear on your next at bat, whether it had been your first homer or your 715th...