Overheard in the Hallway:

Voice From The TV: "Libyan rebels say that if Gadahfi is caught, he will be tried, and executed by a firing squad."

Me: "I'm not sure the Libyan rebels have the whole concept of a 'trial' down pat yet."

A PhD in "Would You Like Fries With That?"

My first good belly laugh of the morning.

I needed that.

Meanwhile, in Lafayette...

Lafayette, Indiana, home of the low-speed riding lawnmower chase and rogue heifers that attack cops on the city streets, may be a sleepy small city on the tranquil banks of the Wabash, but it sure is good for providing the occasional story to spice up a slow news day.

The latest would be the news that the town had to cancel a planned parade for a local wounded veteran when the city fathers received the news that the police were currently giving him a parade down cell block A for having

...arrested [him] on suspicion of criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon, a Class D felony, and carrying a handgun without a permit, a Class A misdemeanor.

It seems he was involved in an argument with some dudes outside a bar (this is my shocked face) and decided to emphasize some of his debating points by discharging a handgun, first into the air and then into the ground. Something struck one of the dudes in the chest and, next thing you know, instead of riding on a float with Miss Soybean Festival 2010, our protagonist found himself riding in a Crown Vic with Officer Krupke.

Inside sources claim that the weapon in question, and I know you'll find this as surprising as I do, was a Taurus Judge. Maybe the boys from Brazil can use this in their advertising?

Don't miss this opportunity...

Sean at An NC Gun Blog has opened his October 22nd shooting event to his readership. Said shooting event is going to be a one-day, 8-hour Handgun I course with TigerSwan at their home range in Fayetteville, NC. Cost is $210 plus ten bucks for lunch and other incidentals.

I have heard nothing but good stuff about TigerSwan. Were I still living in K-town, I'd be hopping across the mountains for this class without a moment's hesitation.

National Hair Shirt.

I can hear The Today Show faintly in the other room. It seems we are well and truly reaching the climax of our national month-long banquet of sackcloth and ashes commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Saudi Arabian radical Islamic terrorist attacks on American soil which murdered thousands of American citizens.

Except people being interviewed are saying things like "...and then 9/11 happened...", like it was an earthquake or blizzard, and "...my husband died...", like he'd just had a little myocardial infarction at his desk one fine autumn day.

Ten years after Pearl Harbor, we had reduced Japan to a glowing pile of radioactive cinders and then rebuilt it and were buying cheap Japanese consumer goods by the shipload. Ten years after New York City was attacked by foreign enemies, all I see as evidence around Indy are a maudlin memorial being erected downtown, TSA probulators and porn-O-scans at the airport, and the occasional young man with an empty sleeve or trouser leg.

Dude, where's my country?
.

Overheard in the Hallway:

Me: "Boomslang! Boomslang!"

RX: "Actually, it's pronounced 'boomslahng'."

Me: "Yes, but that's not as fun to say. Plus, it's pronounced 'Nee-ha-RAH-ghwa', but we say 'Nicaragua'. And it's pronounced 'Deutschland', and we say 'Germany'."

RX: "...and it's pronounced 'Fran-swah' but we say..."

Me: "Frank-case!"

RX: "We do not say Frank-case."

________________________
*Firefox's spell-checker doesn't know 'Deutschland'. "Did you mean 'Sudetenland'?" it offers as a possible alternative just dripping with historical irony.

That '70s Show.

Well, we have high gas prices, gold is up, the economy's stagnant, and now the president's relatives are getting likkered up in public.

It's a good thing we don't currently have an embassy in Tehran, that's all I'm sayin'. (Although, given the grace with which our current Dear Leader handles Anglo-American relations, we still have a shot at boycotting an Olympics.)
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Today In History: What a crappy way to go.

On this date in 1422, Henry V, one of the studliest of English Kings and a dead ringer for Kenneth Branagh (at least in my mind's eye) pooped his last in the Château de Vincennes, dying of a case of dysentery he'd picked up in an earlier siege. His sudden death left his son as king of England, demonstrating a great flaw in the whole scheme of monarchy: Namely that not only can it leave a crazy simpleton in charge, but that crazy simpleton might, in fact, be just nine months old at the time.

Incidentally, the Château de Vincennes served later as a prison (whose guests included the Marquis de Sade) an arsenal and a fort, and it was the walls of the Château against which Mata Hari was stood up and shot in 1917 after being convicted of espionage.

Boy, there are just places on this earth where you can get bulk discounts on your history.

More zoo photos...

I think this guy's an Inland Bearded Dragon, but he has acquired the nickname "Bust-A-Pose lizard", due to his exquisitely evolved ability to make sure you only photograph his good side.


This is the famous common tie-dyed lizard, sometimes known as the "whoa, dude". Its natural range used to extend all the way to the back row of the Grateful Dead concert, but now only runs from the parking lot of the Phish show to the western edge of Burning Man. Most frequently seen basking at the bottom of tequila bottles, lurking in clouds of bhang smoke, or hiding in thickets of peyote cactus.

Tools I found on the internets:

Two handy tools I discovered on the internets and have used frequently ever since:

• Billy Beck's "cannibal pot" analogy for the evils and perils of collectivism.


• Joe Huffman's "Jews In The Attic" test as a quick and easy headspace gauge for any proposed piece of legislation.

Both are extremely useful for framing concepts in discussions, too, and I use them a lot in meatspace these days as well as on the 'nets.

Not that it would ever happen...

...but assuming the God Squad actually got their fantasy Constitutional Amendment Defining Marriage, what would happen to all those queer folk out there with pre-ban marriages? Would their marriage certificate be grandfathered, and become as valuable as a transferable M240?

Would their marriage be annulled? Or would they be sent to federal prison (in separate cells, of course)?

I'll tell you one thing: This just goes to show that registration inevitably leads to confiscation. We should get the .gov out of the marriage business entirely.

Overheard in the Office:

RX: "I grew up in a part of the country lousy with artesian wells. It was neat to be walking through a pasture or woodlot and see a horse trough with a pipe next to it and water just bubbling up out of the pipe."

Me: "I grew up in a part of the country lousy with Cartesian wells. You'd walk around and see these pipes spewing mathematical symbols and philosophical arguments into the air."

The Far Side of the World.

So, the other day, I was going to refer to Wouter's Blog in a post as "antipodean". Out of curiosity, I went to see what Wikipedia had to say on the topic, and had typed in a-n-t-i-p-o-d... when autocomplete let me know that there actually was such a place as the Antipodes Islands. Huh.

The Antipodes, situated some 530 miles southeast of New Zealand and about a hundred miles northwest of the ass end of nowhere, are inhospitable, largely treeless, and covered with a lush mat of grasses, mosses, and bird droppings.

They were important during the last part of the 19th Century because, in those days, the most common way to go drop off a cargo of ne'er-do-wells and hooligans in Botany Bay and then pop over to New Zealand to pick up a fresh load of Mokomokai to bring back to London was to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and right into the Roaring Forties.

Since nobody had weather radar or a good GPS on their clipper ships, they were all the time getting blown off course and wrecking in these and other nearby islands. Eventually, the New Zealand government built regularly-patrolled castaway depots on them, to put a stop to shipwrecked sailors dying of exposure while huddling in huts made of driftwood and biscuit tins.

As a sign of the boundless optimism of the age, an English family business decided to try and struggle back from its losses after its rope factory burned down by branching out into the whaling business, and they decided that the Auckland islands, some four hundred miles to the west of the Antipodes and every bit as depressing, would be a splendid place to plant a colony. It fizzled quicker than a Fred Thompson presidential campaign, and the Enderby family went broke.

I have this uncontrollable desire now to go to stand next to that old cemetery on Auckland Island just so I can say "Yup. This is the middle of nowhere, alright."

This Machine Breeds Fascists.

Folk musician Woodie Guthrie, named after Mussolini's hero and New Jersey governor Woodie Wilson, was an icon of the Old Left in America. He palled around with L.A. commies like Hoosier Will Geer and even wrote a column for The Daily Worker.

These were the background influences of the postwar American left, who slogged on their Gramscian march through the institutions, seizing the groves of academy and assaulting up the stairways of ivory towers humming tunes that had originally been strummed on Woodie's guitar, with its famous sticker.

In light of recent events, there is a certain delicious irony in the fact that Woodie played a Gibson.

This land is your land, all right, Woodie; you helped build it with your own two hands. Too bad you didn't live to see it.

The subtle racism of... well, really it's not too subtle.

In a slow-on-the-draw (get it?) editorial from the Orlando Sentinel, all the usual cliches get trotted out to bemoan Florida's "firearms-preemption-with-teeth" law, deriding all those buckaroos and buckarettes who are jest itchin' to turn the parking lot of the local Publix into the O-K Corral. (Were this editorial cliché anthropomorphized, it would be on wife #2 and shopping for a Corvette, yet journalists can no more help repeating it than one of those talking dolls when you jerk its string.)

I'm going to pass up on the chance to mock them for being only 150 news cycles behind the internets, which might explain why it's a safer bet to book Steve Jobs for a speaking engagement in 2013 than it is to buy stock in a newspaper company, and focus on this part instead:

Like many of Florida's local governments, we actually don't like the state-knows-best, locals-haven't-a-clue bias in the '87 law. It's intended to keep urban areas like South and Central Florida suffering gun violence from enacting tougher firearms rules than some rural communities.

Oh, I see how it is. You can trust folks in rural communities to behave themselves with guns, but you need to crack down on... you know... Those People in the cities with some harsh gun laws to keep them from getting up to mischief.

Hasn't that always been what gun control's about? From the Sullivan Act in New York City, meant to keep the swarthy wops from killing each other in wine-sotted papist rages, to Southern states passing laws to keep them uppity darkies disarmed and down on the plantation, that's what gun control is, all the way down to the bone: It's not about guns at all, it's about control.

Who knew?

All that dough spent on the space program and gigantic radio-telescopes, all that grant money used to let grad students while away late nights updating their Facebook pages and mailing off manuscripts in hopes of becoming the next Stephen Baxter, and it turns out that you could have found the center of the universe with your TeeVee remote and the battered 1992 Rand McNally from your glovebox.

Who knew?

Overheard outside the Fun Show:

Friend-of-a-Friend: "I also got this German Dreyse .32 with a cracked frame. They were so desperate for guns to issue to... here, look where they riveted the frame through the crack... The Germans were handing these old World War One pistols out to second-line guys in World War Two."

Me: "Whoah. It's cracked right through, alright. I wouldn't shoot that on a bet."

FoaF: "Wanna buy a Dreyse?"

Me: "Nah, I have one already. I think I'll pass; I'm good on Dreyses."

FoaF: "Twenty-five bucks..."

Me: (fishing in pocket) "Sold."

FoaF: "Heck, the magazine's worth that."

Me: "I actually shoot mine, so I figure I'm buying a complete set of spare parts bolted to a cracked frame."

VFTP is this many!

My first post on this blog was six years ago today. I hadn't a clue what I was doing or why I was doing it.

Six years, 7,915 posts, and more than four million visitors later, I still don't. I hope to figure it out sooner or later, though, so stay tuned!

(It is, by the way, purely a coincidence that the Indy Blogmeet is today.)

The wood police.

I swear to Mises, if Ayn Rand had put a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the federal environmental cops were raiding musical instrument manufacturers because they weren't complying with federal wood-labeling laws, critics would have howled with derision at the fanciful and unrealistic scenarios she was making up to ham-handedly hammer her point home.

This is the part where I am grabbing you by your lapels, shaking you and yelling "Now will you people listen?"

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." -Dr. Floyd Ferris in Atlas Shrugged

Seriously.

Federal laws get ever more ridiculous, like that scene in the Monty Python movie where the Knights Who Say "Ni!" demand that Arthur cut down the largest tree in the forest with a herring. Except, where Arthur flatly told them it couldn't be done and he wouldn't do it, we just grab the fish and say "Duh, okay," and trudge off into the forest to try and comply. As Eric wrote at Classical Values back in '09:

I think it is no accident that they make the loss of freedom as boring as it is possible to make it. They think this will make most people go away, and they are right. Only a maniac (or someone with a special interest) would actually spend his time reading this bill. There is probably not one member of Congress who read it, but then, they say that about all the monstrous bills cranked out by this monstrous government which every last one of our founders would decry as precisely what they were trying to avoid when they wrote the Constitution.

But nobody's going to say boo about this, because it's about plants and trees, and that's nature. And we'll do anything for nature. Anything.

Is there any possible law or regulation, any edict from the Palaces on the Potomac, that would result in, not just massive noncompliance the way that 55mph speed limits and marijuana laws do, but a collective and unanimous laugh in their face? Derision on the front page of every paper? Mockery on every newscast? Open, public defiance?

Welp, gotta run. Gotta sharpen up my herring and get ready for the day.

"Blow up your dome-piece..."

Unc links to a tale of an elderly couple who botched a suicide pact that involved shooting themselves in the grape. Apparently whatever they used caused little enough damage that they drove themselves to the hospital.

Regardless of what the caliber actually was (my guess would be a .32 of some sort), allow me to expand on the whole "shot in the grape" thing.

A generation of people raised on the TeeVee and vidjo games hears "headshot" and thinks "FATALITY!" with some kind of special animation as your score rolls up. In reality:

1. The brain only takes up about half of your head. The rest of it can make for messy-but-not-particularly-incapacitating wounds.
2. The skull is shaped to protect the brain.
3. Pistol bullets are weak. Even the strong ones.
4. Most inexpensive pistol bullets have a round nose. The part of the skull that is full of brain is also round. Anybody who has spent thirty seconds at a billiards table knows what most often happens when two rounded surfaces come into contact.
5. Even if a shot hits right in the face, which is not notably round, there is so much spongy bone before you get to the part where the important stuff is that even major-caliber pistol bullets probably won't reach it.
6. And if the hit is too high above the eyebrows, that pistol bullet will likely make like the aforementioned billiard balls.

Ergo, "shot in the head" doesn't necessarily mean what the general public thinks it means. There is at least one Vietnam-era helicopter pilot who has a hole from a DShK bullet in either side of his flight helmet. (Which must make for the mother of all souvenirs...)