Yesterday Was Leg Day

I may have mentioned that the Mustang has a brand-new clutch in it. I also may have mentioned that the traffic in downtown Dayton was a parking lot yesterday.

Today, needing to run some errands, I glanced at the weather and thought "You know, the Mustang would be fun, but it needs the a/c charged and it's hot and sticky and blazing sunny out there right now. The air in the Zed blows cold, especially when it's got all this humidity in the air to work with. Let's take the Bimmer to the store."

(Normally this would be a "It's a nice day, let's drop the top and take the roadster," sort of decision but today it was "It's swamp-ass sticky, let's leave the top up and take the car with the a/c." Besides, the Mustang had put in a bunch of work the last couple days.)

So I go out to the garage, hop in the Zed...and nearly slam my left foot through the floorboard when I go to depress the clutch pedal.

There was a moment of panic before I realized that nothing was broken on the car, I had just spent two days using the Nautilus Machine clutch on the pony car and forgotten how light the BMW's is by comparison. I mean, it's dealing with a fraction of the displacement and torque, so that makes sense.

Pony in its new paddock.

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"Battle-Worn"

I'm gonna be honest, I just don't understand the guys on internet gun fora who wring their hands over the wear marks that show up on a gun that gets used. You'll see guys freaking out over everything from the brass smears left on an AR's shell deflector to the finish wear on the chamber hood of a recoil-operated pistol.

It ain't "battle-worn" but it's had the chicken strips rubbed off.

This is what happens to machines when you use them, and they should be at least taken in stride. Frankly, if you are carrying a custom 1911 called the Special Operator Close Quarters Combat Model and show up at gun school and the thing looks like its Extreme Conditions Finish™ has never been exposed to any conditions more extreme than the ones on the top shelf of your gun safe, you look a little goofy. You might as well still have the price tag hanging off the trigger, there, Minnie Pearl.

The other extreme, though is this fad for "battle-worn" finishes. Dude, that thing doesn't look "battle-worn", it looks like you rubbed the slide with sandpaper.
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Automotif CLX...

1994 Ford Mustang GT, 5.0 five-speed, photographed in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express in Charleston, WV, about halfway between Stately Manor and Roseholme Cottage.

The pony trotted all the way to its new barn with no hiccups today.

Gassed up in Charleston before setting out this morning, and then topped up on the far side of Dayton. Despite spending thirty minutes in an absolute parking lot* in the middle of downtown Dayton, the pony managed a hair over 20MPG for the first two-thirds of the day's jaunt.


*Well, that's it. I'm downloading Waze.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

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Road trip! #fordmustang #fivepointoh

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on May 29, 2019 at 5:23am PDT

Memorial Day 2019

Remember.

Gun Culture 2.0

The Professor is a smart dude. You should listen to him and read his stuff.
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Ten Years of Trek Time...

• Last season of the original series on broadcast TV to the first feature film? Ten years (1969-1979).


• The first feature film to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier? Ten years (1979-1989).


• The first J.J. Abrams Trek flick to now? Ten years (2009-2019).

Automotive Inflation...

An excerpt from an hilarious Ezra Dyer piece at C/D on the thousand-dollar car:

What all these cars have in common is that they run and drive and I kind of want them. I wasn't looking for an Iron Duke Fiero, but something about a $1000 price tag fires the imagination. You could take the body off and make it a dune buggy! Or put a golf-cart motor in it and call it your Testeless Roadster. Or drive it around town and start rumors about yourself. People would be like, "I heard he invented shampoo and he's superrich, but he'll only drive a Fiero with one headlight popped up."

I understand these urges.

What's interesting is that in my adolescence, a thousand bucks was generally the floor for a pretty decent used car. Beaters were under a grand, and over the thousand dollar mark would generally get you a car less than a decade old with a minimum of dings and a five-digit odometer reading.
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Keyboard Purgatory

Keyboard purgatory:
1) Nice, clicky Azio has wonky Bluetooth. Constantly in the buffer.
2) Ancient Bondi Blue iMac keyboard dredged from office closet has random keys cease working, likely from 2 decades of dust.
3) Now on dinky portable Apple wireless. Ugh.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 24, 2019

There are a hundred and eleventeen keyboards lying around the house and strewn across the attic. I'm mostly just sad that the otherwise awesome Azio had such issues with connectivity. That, and it went to sleep at the drop of a hat and needed to ceremoniously reconnect all the damn time.

Apple's older tiny keyboard isn't bad, but I'd hate to type a novel on it, or even a 2,000+ word feature article. I like that it's battery-powered. The newer replacement is rechargeable. This is theoretically awesome, but I'd hate to need to type something right now and need to recharge my keyboard, as opposed to just throwing a couple fresh AA cells in it.
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Hey, look!

The first half of the SCCY CPX-3 review is up online!

The Last Film

You could be forgiven for thinking the Canon EOS IX is the "EOS 9", but it's actually the "Eye Ecks". That stands for "Information Exchange", and that's a key feature of one of the last...and shortest-lived...film formats out there, the Advanced Photo System format (APS for short.)

126 Instamatic, 110 Instamatic, Disc...each were an attempt to give casual shooters an easy-to-use form factor that didn't involve having to thread leaders on takeup spools while simultaneously preventing the clumsy-fingered from putting a thumb through fragile shutter components while loading the camera.

While indeed easy to use, these formats suffered from iffy image quality, especially the 110 and Disc, due to tiny negatives. The APS, on the other hand, had negatives almost the size of regular 35mm film.

The mode dial is relocated to the back of the camera because there's a little hatch on top where it normally would be on a Canon body. You just pop that open, drop the cassette (which has no exposed leader) in, and the camera does the rest.

Higher-end APS cameras, like this one, read and write magnetic data off the negatives, hence "Information Exchange". You can rewind mid-roll, and then reload it and it will advance to the first unexposed frame. It can record other data, like date/time or exposure settings.

All this was made possible by rapid advances in digital technology in the Eighties and Nineties, and those same advances would, of course, also lead to the creation of imaging sensors that would supplant film.

While 35mm film is still being made, APS sank without a ripple in 2011. This means that any you buy today is at least half-a-decade expired. The Fujifilm Nexia D100 I got claimed to have been cold-stored, and seemed to work okay. Colors were a bit muted.

It's a crapshoot on film, but on the Canons, at least, the APS cameras use standard EF-mount lenses, with a 1.2x crop factor. (This makes the excellent EF 40mm f/2.8 pancake a 50mm equivalent, BTW...) Similarly, the Nikon Pronea 6i uses Nikon's F-mount. Both the EOS IX and Pronea 6i use a pair of CR123 batteries, which is something kept in ample stock at Roseholme Cottage.

With the discontinuation of the film, the cameras are available for next to nothing, so it's a cheap experiment.
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Mini Cam

Well I'll be dipped. The little Rollei A110 actually works still! I shouldn't be surprised; it's a solidly constructed little brick that went for (if I'm converting Deutschmarks right) between $150 and $200 when they started shipping in '75. That's not a cheap toy camera.

It needs to be manually focused, and I sometimes missed. (Although it made the dogwood look ethereal on that drizzly day...)

 Oops. ("Hey, what Instagram filter is that?")

The film was current production Lomography Tiger 110 with a 2020 expiration date. Unlike some Lomography films, Tiger isn't supposed to be color-shifted. Still, a high-end 110 with a built-in meter like this one would have read the plastic tab on the 110 cassette. That tab could be used to specify "High" or "Low" speed film, but Kodak never set a standard for what was high and what was low. Most manufacturers went with 400 and 100 ISO. Some higher end companies went with 64 as the "Low" setting, since there was Kodachrome 110 slide film, once upon a time.

The Lomo Tiger is 200 ISO, and I'm betting that the cassette had the long tab, so that the camera reads it as low speed. A number of photos have that slight magenta cast you get from lightly overexposed color film.

Just because you can do something...

Seen at Pewpewtactical.com's FB page...

Never have I ever been shooting an AK underfolder (or HK91A3) and thought to myself "Hey, this stock is so badass and comfortable that we need to find a way to retrofit it to other guns."
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QotD: Trigger Warning Edition...

Mosby has some strong opinions on trauma gear...

"If you carry a gun, and you’re not carrying a tourniquet or two, you’re either LARPing, or you’re a fucking idiot. The fact is, a “gunfight” implies bilateral ballistics, and the enemy gets a vote. If you assume your one box of ammo a month “practice” regimen means you’re automatically a far better marksman than the bad guy you are going to end up in a gunfight with, well, I’ve got an 8 ounce jar of fairy dust I’ll sell you cheap, and it’s guaranteed to make you stronger, faster, higher flying, and generally more attractive to members of your preferred sex."

I can only imagine the REEEEEEEEE this will kick off. Go and RTWT.
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "So... if a pregnant woman sneaks across the Rio Grande and gets caught... can she be deported before the fetus gets due process?"

RX: "You know, $#!+ like this is why no one likes you."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 20, 2019

On a newsstand near you!

The latest issue of RECOIL Concealment is now on a newsstand near you (I think. If the newsstand near you is a Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Walgreens... I got mine at Walgreens.)

Inside, you will find one of those shilling sellout reviews full of uncritical praise that... Well, I'm kidding, there. But you should read the review, so they'll let me write more.
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Cycling Daze Are Here Again...

After months of sitting idle, the Broad Ripple SUV's tires were dead flat. We aired them up and pedaled the not-quite-a-mile down to Next Door SoBro for lunch.

It was my idea because their loaded smashers are my kryptonite...

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The #loadedsmashers at @nextdooreatery are my kryptonite. 😮🤤

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on May 18, 2019 at 8:19pm PDT

Adaptable. Portable. Not so pocketable.

While the EOS M is a tiny camera and well-suited to using the Peak Design Cuff strap, the problem is that the APS-C sized sensor makes it hard to have truly tiny lenses. Canon makes an EF-M 22mm f/2 pancake that looks interesting, but that's more than I'd really prefer to spend on a toy lens.

The EF-M mount lens library is so small* that you practically need Canon's EF-to-EF-M adaptor. Add the thickness of the adaptor and then whatever EF or EF-S lens you mount on it, and we're now well out of pocketable territory.

Also, the first two versions of the M had weird and clunky interfaces, with sparse and dumbed-down external controls. You had to use the (excellent) multi-touch screen to do most things. If I were to commit to the M, I'd have to go with the M3, which added a front dial, articulated screen, and a full PASM dial & exposure compensation dial on the top plate.


*The lens library is small enough to make me question Canon's commitment to the mount. While rumor is that it will continue on as Canon's crop-sensor mirrorless complement to the EOS R, they may just be selling off overstock until they can give it the old heave-ho the way Nikon did with the ill-starred Nikon 1 family.

Fascinating neighborhood history...

"The other “bayou” was the fascinating Bacon’s Swamp. Today, the area that used to be covered by this large Marion County bog is part of Broad Ripple. Although Google Maps still shows a lake there called Bacon’s Swamp, this is really just a pond, re-engineered out of what used to be a genuine freshwater wetland.

Like its neighbor a little to the south, Bacon’s Swamp was created by the melting Wisconsin Glacier. About 20,000 years ago, the ice left an indent on the land that filled with water. As limnologists (freshwater scientists) describe, the process of swamp formation, lakes age and die like living creatures, filling up with sediment and plant matter and gradually losing the oxygen in their depths. Bacon’s Swamp evolved into a peat bog, one of the southernmost in the United States."

This is right in our 'hood. The Bacon farmhouse, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was on Keystone Avenue where the Donut Shop is today, almost a literal stone's throw from Indy Arms Company.
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Facebook's Hidden Dislike Button

Me: "Did you like it?"
RX: "I clicked 'Like', didn't I?"
Me: "But did you really like it, not just Facebook Like it?"
RX: "I don't Facebook Like things."
Me: "I do. If I don't Facebook Like things, then it's impossible to Facebook Dislike things."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 16, 2019

"Huh. She clicked 'Like' for every single post in this thread but mine..."
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