Drill, baby, drill.

Three hours in the chair with Almost-A-Doctor Mandy yesterday. Lots of smoke. And lots more where that came from.

That was my first time with the drill. At one point, Mandy noticed my tummy trembling and pulled the drill out of my mouth "Are you okay?"

"I'm sorry," I gasped between giggles "It sounded like a bad robot sound effect from a B-grade sci-fi movie, with all that chirping and squeaking. I was trying to hold still."

"You were laughing? I saw you shaking and thought I was killing you!"

Heading back in this AM so that Almost-A-Doctor Katie can continue with the deep-cleaning. Looking forward to that face-full-of-Novocaine feeling. Not so much the "just-flossed-with-barbed-wire" sensation after the Novocaine wears off.

Wow. Just wow.

So some entertainment blogger wants to put me in a camp, and even muses on how good a second civil war would feel. To quote Robb Allen:

Go ahead buttercup. I don’t think you’ve thought your cunning plan all the way through.

But that flaw in his logic wasn't what set me to laughing. No, what really got me going about the guy's little screed was the part where he insinuated that the people with whom he disagreed were, and I quote, "contemptible morons... being played by the rich".

Let me get this straight, Jeffrey: Your job, your career, your entire raison d'être, as it were, is to read the tea leaves about the talkie motion picture shows at the Bijou and then explain to me why it's important or relevant or matters two farts in a windstorm that Avatar wins an Oscar for Best Visual Effects and why I should give a damn about anything that comes out of James Cameron's piehole other than the words "Action" and "Cut", and I'm the moron being played by the rich?

Buddy, I am rubber and you are glue, okay?
.

Branching out...

It was an idea that was kicked around a lot when I worked there, and now it looks like it's happening: Coal Creek Armory is opening another storefront and range.
.

Now that's austerity we can believe in!

To show how serious they are about slashing costs, Congress has eliminated the congressional page program, claiming that it cost $5,000,000 a year (that's almost one mile of interstate highway!) to do something that had been effectively rendered obsolete with the invention of text messaging and email.

From now on, if congresscritters want underage minors to sexually harass, they'll have to ring out for them and have them delivered on their own dime just like everybody else; they'll no longer be considered a perk of the office to abuse like the free postage.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #55: KRISS Super V

From the LuckyGunner blogger shoot: A KRISS Super V with EOTech and Da Switch.

Summertime in SoBro, Part IX...

One evening last week, when Bobbi's nephew finished up his paint-scrapery on the house for the day, Bobbi offered to feed him, and so off we went to sample a revered Broad Ripple institution: Boogie Burgers!

Boogie Burger used to be located in a dinky little hole-in-the-wall at the mystical corner of Westfield Blvd & Westfield Blvd in the heart of Broad Ripple. The fact that the place could only seat about ten people, tops, added to the ambiance. (Except, of course, when you really wanted a Boogie Burger and the place was packed to the gills.)


Now they've moved on out Broad Ripple Avenue, almost to Keystone, and are in the building most recently occupied by the Red Eye Diner. Unlike the Red Eye, the parking lot at the new Boogie Burger is almost full every time I drive by. Yes, their burgers are that good.


The Boogiemobile is always parked out front. The dinky strip center in the background, by the way, is the home of H₂O Sushi, one of the best sushi joints I've ever tried. Almost immediately on the other side of Boogie Burger is Khoury's Mediterranean Grill & Market & Hookah Bar, which is yummy, too.

"He did it!" "Nuh-uh, she did it!" "He did it first!"

So, watch any of the political shows over the weekend?

Boy, that was a nasty little round of accusations over the credit downgrade, wasn't it? I haven't seen so much finger-pointing, blame-shifting, and responsibility-shirking since I was babysitting the Carlson kids and found the kitchen floor half-an-inch deep in grape Kool-Aid and smooshed Captain Crunch.

I found it an especially entertaining response considering the nature of the accusation...

Video intermission...

Under this video of Travis Haley at S.W.A.T. Magazine's Facebook page, somebody commented "Sharks have Travis week." I LOL'ed.

Insider trading...

Just in case you like messing with corn futures with your pocket change...

And things might get a little interesting in the live cattle market, too, since a lot of them are apparently being converted into dead cattle.

Also, smaller cans.
.

Consider the source...

Well, it was an online poll. I'd imagine that if they had mailed out the poll on postage-paid cards in American Rifleman that the numbers would have been different...

...but I think the intertubes still would have been in the lead.

Of course, that's just oriented towards gun purchasing information. When it comes to news and current political issues, the monthly news magazine is practically dead.

Seriously, since we're talking about the NRA, how many of y'all used to get America's First Freedom rather than "Ducks & Muskets Monthly"? Yeah, me too. At least, I did until the rise of the new media meant that it had effectively become News I Read On Teh Intarw3bz A Month Ago. Compared to that, even a magazine that heaps praise on the Taurus Judge and spends more time talking about shooting at feathered things in one issue than I have in my entire life is useful.

Another day at the office...

Apparently the helicopter that went down was carrying some guys from DEVGRU. No word if they were the same guys who pulled off the Abbottabad raid (and we may never know, at least officially.)

If so, it's a reminder of the ops tempo that SOCOM has been dealing with for ten+ years now. The media only notices them once in a blue moon, when something big like taking down Bin Laden happens, as though they'd been sitting around waiting for something to do, twiddling their thumbs since the Battle of Takur Ghar.

UPDATE: Latest RUMINT is that none of the operators on board were the guys from Neptune Spear... (...who are probably busy elsewhere already.)

Fundamentally Unserious.

A Chinook helicopter went down in Afghanistan last night, killing all aboard. I know this because the TeeWee newsreader this morning said "A US helicopter was brought down in Afghanistan, killing 31 US troops, mostly from the Special Forces. We'll be back after these messages with who claimed responsibility..."

"Claimed responsibility"? Are you kidding me?

Did Edward R. Murrow ever say "An Army Air Force B-17 was shot down over Düsseldorf today. We'll be back after these messages with who claimed responsibility"? No, he didn't. And do you know why? Because he wasn't a microcephalic hairspray-headed cretin whose entire world outside of Manhattan cocktail parties consisted of nothing but an endless globe-spanning daisy chain of identical luxury hotel rooms joined by a pressurized tube of first-class airliner cabins and the back seats of Cadillacs, that's why, you plush-bottomed yahoo.

We know who shot the helicopter down in Afghanistan: That would be the people we are fighting in Afghanistan. My cat knows who shot the helicopter down, and she has a brain the size of a chickpea. Did you think I was going to sit breathlessly on the edge of the couch through the commercial break, wondering who had claimed responsibility? "Gosh, who could have brought down a Chinook in Wardak Province? The IRA? The Cubans? Oh, I hope they tell me who claimed responsibility."

We need to take a cue from the old Roman republic and fling murderers, traitors, perjurors, and idiotic bubbleheaded moron newsreaders to their deaths from atop the 30 Rock*.

_____________________________
*L'esprit de l'escalier note from Sunday afternoon: The punchline would have been a hundred times better if I had them hurled to their deaths from the Trigenta Rock. Ah, well...

Save A Soybean, Eat A Vegan.

Driving through Broad Ripple the other day, I ran up behind an elderly Volvo with a faded "HOPE" sticker and one that said "Vegetarians Taste Better" and I thought to myself, "Well, duh! Carnivores tend to be kinda greasy and stringy..."

The other bumper sticker asked "You wouldn't hook a puppy, so why would you hook a fish?" with a picture of what must be the world's dumbest Beagle lunging for a hook of a size normally used to land hard-fighting Great Whites. I thought this was a particularly ignorant bumper sticker, since any fool knows that the reason you hook fish is because they're too hard to shoot and the Fish & Game people tend to get bent out of shape when you use dynamite. ("Dynamite! The One Bait Fish Always Rise To!")

Tab Clearing...

• Phlegmmie linked to this awesome Google Earth view of the cloud of satellites orbiting Earth. If you had asked me to guess how many there were, I'd have been off by a factor of ten.


• The "terrifying arsenal" bar is set pretty low in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be these days. I especially like the way they clutch their pearls over the "lethal hollow-point and soft-tip" ammo, two ammo cans full of which I have riding around in the trunk of my car because I was too lazy to lug it into the house after my last range trip. (I rationalized the decision by thinking, "Well, it'll just be going back to the range anyway, so I might as well just leave it in the trunk.")


• Scary Quote Of The Week: "I recently had a reliable source tell me the EPA, OSHA, and other regulatory agencies have been told to explore how they can supply their own revenue such that they become self supporting. “Run like a business” and even potentially make a profit. My source explicitly called out the EPA and OSHA but one can easily imagine how this mandate will be extended to the ATF and hundreds of other government organizations.
  
  If the color didn’t just drain out of your face and you nearly fainted you either don’t have a very good imagination or you have a government job." -Joe Huffman

Everybody just lie on the floor and stay calm. You too, Contessa.

Some kids at the Virginia Tech campus called the cops and said they saw a guy sort of carrying something that might be a gun, maybe. New York City network newsrooms immediately went into lockdown, with the kind of wall-to-wall coverage you normally only get when we're invading Iraq again. I half expected MSNBC to whip up special "Gunman On Campus" theme music.

Big Bang Theory.

A new gun blog, Rational Gun, has an informative post up on the development of the Knight's SR-25 EM, a shorty .308 AR-type carbine.

There was a guy shooting a 16" .308 at the carbine class I attended last year; I can't remember off the top of my head if it was an Armalite or a Bushhamster. I do remember that I wished he'd been using a can. (I mostly tried to shoot in the other string.)

I need to clean my brain out with a wire brush...

With all the Media fawning over their Pharaoh's birthday today, for some reason I can't shake this mental picture of Chris Matthews singing a breathy rendition of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President".
.

I feel safer already.

Interesting view of an interesting place over at Roomie's blog, if you haven't seen it yet.
.

The big chill.

The other night, the thermostat at Roseholme Cottage cut the air conditioner off at 0mygod30 and the silence woke me up, so steady a presence has its background drone been these past couple weeks. The little a/c unit would gradually fall behind during the day and then spend the whole night trying to catch back up, and it finally did at 0400...

The worst of the heat wave is over in Indy. It may reach 90 today, but that's not a certainty, and daily highs will be progressively lower in the 80s through the next week. It's 66 out there right now, which feels positively chilly, especially since it was 83 at this time yesterday morning.

Now if it would just rain...
.

...like flowers and butterflies, particle accelerators need no excuse.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man:

In trying to determine exactly how the universe came into existence, scientists have been recreating sub-atomic explosions - like the one that may have happened around the time of the big bang - using atom-sized particles of lead.

They shoot the particles through a 16-mile long accelerator at the speed of light and when the particles collide in a vacuum colder than -271 Celsius, they put on a spectacular show.

[snip]

'So by studying these we can learn more about what the universe is made from and perhaps one day how it all began.'

Dude, it's cool. You don't need to make any excuses for crashing things into each other at the speed of light in an underground tunnel longer than Manhattan that's had the air pumped out and been chilled to a couple degrees above absolute zero. That doesn't need a reason. You can just say "We're crashing stuff into things and junk at the speed of light because it's frickin' awesome and you're just jealous. Nyah, nyah, nyah!"