Sign of the times?

The natives are getting restless.

To build a fire....

So, I mentioned Stephen King in a post and, like clockwork comes the response:

"Stephen King? Pphhhhtt! Prolific hack!" two... three... four... waitforit! "Now, H.P. Lovecraft was the scariest writer ever!"

You know, it's very fashionable to pooh-pooh King, and his very popularity and prolificity are automatic strikes against him for anyone with the faintest pretensions to bohemian hipness or literary snobbery. But when he brings his A-game, the man sure can spin a yarn. I've found most of his novels to be pretty formulaic and dull, but when he connects, it's rarely just a dribbling grounder; he usually goes yard.

I like Lovecraft, but I also think that Lovecraft is the most overrated author among the neckbeard set. Given all the time I've spent among SF fans, among whom he's completely revered, there was no way his works could live up to the billing when I finally got around to reading them. Sure, he's good, but to hear the Cheeto-smeared-t-shirt crowd at DragonCon talk, the first three paragraphs of The Mountains Of Madness will cause you to run out and buy a nightlight, if they don't drive you stark gibbering mad from terror. Instead, I wound up disappointed because it wasn't bound in human leather a la the Necronomicon, nor was my sanity blasted from my mind by page five... or page 105, for that matter. I'd read so many Lovecraft ripoffs over the years that the real thing was hardly terra incognita when I got there; the haunted house just isn't as creepy if you've already been given the floor plan and know where the bogeymen are going to jump out. It's important to remember that every writer with pretensions to the "horror" genre feels obligated to write at least one Lovecraft pastiche, but that's all Lovecraft ever wrote.

So a great part of it is that I came to Lovecraft as an adult, and none of his stuff really scared me; a lot of my friends who have more affection for his works first read them as students in grade school, and therefore they get the benefits of the rosy glow of nostalgia that I well know, since I feel the same about Tolkien or Kipling.


(Incidentally the title of this post is both a clever reference to what the comments section is sure to look like, and an homage to a really scary story that has nothing to do with anything at all even remotely supernatural or gory.)

Creeped me right the heck out.

I mentioned recently that Stephen King's book Pet Sematary was the only novel of his that had ever really scared the bejabbers out of me. Shortly after writing that post, I decided to re-read the book, only to discover that I had apparently... uh... "lost" my copy.

I picked up another one at Half Price Books the other day.

Cover me; I'm going in.

Ammo prices.

When I go to the range, I always drag my ammunition along packed loose in ammo cans. Last Sunday I shot the .22LR can completely dry and had to borrow a handful or two from Bobbi. We stopped by Gander Mountain on the way home, and I picked up a 550rd carton of Federal, but 550 rounds makes a thin layer on the bottom of a .30 cal can, and yesterday's activities left a bare hundred rounds rolling around in there. I bought 500 rounds of cheapo bulk Winchester to replace it, but...

And of course I'm shooting more rimfire because I'm shooting less centerfire. When you've only got 100 rounds of .45 left in the ammo can, and it was priced like imported sin to boot, you find yourself rationing it out. "Okay, one warmup mag, three magazines strong-hand-only, and two weak-hand-only; that's... 42 rounds. Even if I can't find any cheap .45 between now and next weekend's range trip, I'll still have over fifty rounds..." Even the "cheap" 9mm to feed my 9mm trainer is still priced like .45 was just last year.

I really need to stop making excuses and get the reloading press set up today.

Ugh, November...

My first good bone-deep chill of the season settled in this past week. I won't really be warm again until April...

It's an addiction.

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.

Just Another Random Sunday...

1. Had a good range day at Iggle Crick: 42 rounds of 9x19, 42 rounds of .45ACP, and ~450 rounds of .22LR (that's six mags through each of the 1911s and a bunch of rounds through the various deuce-deuce trainers.) I kept them pretty much all in the A-Zone except for a couple of outliers no doubt caused by one-handed rapidfire work with the DA revolvers. It was the first time I'd had the .22 I-Frame out since early Spring, but since Winter coat weather is almost upon us, I need to get back in shape for carrying the 432 in an outer pocket.
   
2. We stopped off at Bradis Guns on the way home. I grabbed another 22/45 mag and numbered all three with a paint marker, and picked up a 500rd brick of Winnie .22 as well as 50 rounds of 9mm. I finally got hands-on with one of the new Chiappa/MKS Puma .22LR 1911s. It felt a bit chintzy, but the whole gun was only $289, which is comparable to the price of a Ciener conversion. There was also an EAA-branded 1911 rimfire conversion kit for only $189...
3. Got to the blogmeet and hung with the crew. Got to spend time with fellow Broad Riparians Mr. & Mrs. Red, which was fun. Handed out the Cup Of Turonistan, as well as passing out proselytizing copies of two of my favorite books by my guru, P.J. O'Rourke: Holidays in Hell and Parliament of Whores.

Book nook.

The four walls of the dining room at Roseholme Cottage sport floor-to-ceiling shelving devoted to naught but my roommate's SciFi books, shelved alphabetically. She's posted a picture of the Aaa-Far wall.

I always shelved non-fiction by a rough Tamara Decimal System and shelved fiction by author, but Instead of arranging authors alphabetically, they were ordered by how likely I was to want to grab one of their books to re-read. Thus, Heinlein took up a couple shelves at eye level, while, say, Songs of a Distant Earth, some Jack L. Chalker books, and a Robotech serial novel I'd somehow picked up but never got around to trading in were down by the floor in the back row of a two-book-deep shelf.


(Arthur C. Clarke always annoyed me; someone who just can't wait to be subsumed into the Great Hive Mind and actually sees loss of the individual self as an improvement may be shaped more or less like me, but I would argue that speciation is underway.)

Getting more for their taxpayer dollar...

The citizens of Anytown, TX are getting a good return on their peace officer dollar; Matt G is the kind of cop everybody wishes they had on their beat:

"This... punk... came to your house uninvited, and attempted to enter your residence by force. Who does he think he is?!? Be angry. Be furious. Because anger makes you strong. And you could use the strength."

RTWT.

I've been knowing Matt for close on to ten years; one thing that's always impressed me is how much he cares about his job and the people for whom he works.

Overheard in the Office:

Me: "It's good to know that not only am I still tops with Google for 'face-eating monkeys' and 'horrible screaming death', but also for 'electric boobs', for some reason."

RX: "I think I'm still number one for 'Brain On Toast'."

Me: "Ewwww!"

RX: "Oh, so 'horrible screaming death' is just peachy but 'brain on toast' is icky?"

I did not know that...

The U.S. Navy's Curtis F9C Sparrowhawks are some of the coolest planes ever; sleek little biplane fighters that operated from the rigid airships of the USN.


I'd never realized that they were in service for almost three years and that they performed over 100 successful midair "hookups" in their first month of trials alone. According to the pilots, once you got the hang of it, it was easier than lining up a landing on a regular airstrip. I wonder if there's a unit history published someplace? Or hopefully one of the fliers left an autobiography...

It would be a shame if every single Sparrowhawk pilot had passed away without any of them leaving a memoir; they were sole eyewitnesses to a very unique little chunk of aviation history.


EDIT: A search for deck plans so I could get a feel for the hangar arrangements turned up a discussion at a forum called "airshipmodeler.com", which proves that there truly is an internet discussion forum for every interest under the sun. Do you reckon they have arguments about "Which blimp for bear?"

Today In History: Explains a lot, really...

On this date in 1443, a commander in the army of the Ottoman sultanate switched sides in the middle of the Battle of Niš, helping the Hungarians hand his own army a stomping. After the battle he changed religions, took up the crusade against his old employers, and became the national hero of Albania for leading an unsuccessful but bloody revolt against the land's Turkish overlords.

For all this, he got to design the Albanian flag, received favorable mention in Gibbons' epochal tome, got his face on a postage stamp, and had a Hoxha-esque commie biopic made about his life.

Albania is still a mess.

Try to remember not to forget...

...that there's a Blogmeet tomorrow.

Sorry...

The Firearm Blog got me musing about "high capacity" rifles over at the other blog.

Mmmm... Gravy.

How good was Bobbi's bacon mushroom skillet gravy?

Well, if Shootin' Buddy hadn't been there, I probably would have just slid the gravy bowl over in front of me and fallen to with a spoon.

They say "gravy" isn't one of the Four Food Groups, but I remain unconvinced. Besides, with this recipe, it could count for both the Gravy Group and the Bacon Group.

Hey, Michael Daly...

As the bumper sticker says, "We don't care how y'all did it up north."

Amused To Death.

The absolute tizzy that the press has worked themselves into at the terrible act of lèse majesté committed against their demigod is pretty chucklesome, especially when you consider that if the Salahis had done the very same thing a year and a half ago, they'd be fêted as heroes by the press and made into popular martyrs if they got hit with anything as minor as a fine for trespassing.

Note to NBC: lèse majesté is not actually a crime in the U.S.A.

The hooraw over this just keeps getting better, though. Like all the reporters talking about the horror of this being done at "our first State Dinner!"

Um, additional note to 30 Rock: We have been having State Dinners since, oh, the 19th Century or so. But we know what you mean...

Anyhow, note the excitement at MSNBC as Amun-Re, the Sun Descended, greets "the D.C. elite, Oscar-winning entertainers and Hollywood moguls." No mention is made of that Indian guy... no, not Deepak Chopra, I mean the other Indian guy. The unimportant one.



Right now I could listen to the Shrub mispronounce "nukyular" for an hour straight, because the grownups have definitely left the building.

Lucky in one respect.

It looks like the autumn leaf crop is just about all in for the year here at Roseholme Cottage.

Thanksgiving bumped our trash pickup back one day. We've got fourteen of those big paper leaf bags you get at Lowe's still sitting in the back yard waiting to be schlepped to the curb, and it's nice to know that I can do it at my leisure this morning, properly gloved and booted and hatted, rather than in a stumbling pre-dawn hurry while still clad in my pyjamas.

EDIT: Fourteen bags of damp leaves, two bags at a time, from the back yard to the curb out front, and done at a brisk trot, made for a good dollop of morning cardio for my out-of-shape self.

These dreams go on when I close my eyes...

Apparently if you go to bed with a stomach full of turducken, bacon mushroom gravy, and wine, and you've just finished reading Monster Hunter International, you get some pretty good dreams...

Like the one I had last night where the elk herds that lived in the greenbelts along California's highways were being wiped out, and the government was blaming poachers, but really it was packs of Browning Citori-armed skunk apes that had been boosting shotguns from isolated skeet shooters. They had Danny Glover surrounded in a cabin and it was getting pretty intense, but then the alarm went off, so I never found out what happened.

Black Friday.

For schoolchildren and some government employees and office workers, it's a four-day weekend.

For much of the rest of America, it's The Week With Two Mondays.