Looks like that's not going to happen.

 The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site is normally outfitted as a polling place, and now that we can vote anywhere in the county, it was tempting to go cast a ballot in the museum.

At least until I checked wait times. It's currently showing 70 minutes, down from 100. My closest spot is showing 19 minutes, so a leisurely walk rather than a short drive it is.

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Well, that's convenient.

 Marion County has changed its election procedures this year so that county residents can show up at any polling place in the county. You used to have an assigned polling place for your precinct and both of the last two for our precinct were located on the grounds of churches that also had K-12 schools.

Now that we can vote anywhere, the nearest polling place is in a church that doesn't have a K-12 school on the premises. It's only a few blocks away and the weather's supposed to be pretty nice for this time of year, so I may walk or bicycle over there, since I won't have to lock anything in the trunk this year...

A very Broad Ripple Halloween offering...

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"Bring Back the Third Gen!"

 Any time discussion of the Third Gen Smif autoloaders comes up on social media, someone will pine for their reintroduction, but it's just not going to happen, at least on any large scale.

Even if they still had the tooling (and I'm not entirely sure they do), the costs would be prohibitive. The 3rd Gen Smiths, even with every short cut they could try, were still more expensive to build than the classic P-series Sigs.

And they were very well-built guns. The fit and finish on an early 5906 or 1066 is easily as good as a Kimber 1911. Flats were flat, radiuses even, the fit between major components like slide/frame and barrel/slide was easily as good as what you'd see on, say, a nicer Kimber these days. They were expensive to build and fiendishly complex internally when compared to simpler, newer designs. But American consumers were conditioned to look at "imported = luxury" and "domestic = cheap" so trying to sell someone an eight hundred dollar 5906 next to a P226 with the same price tag was like trying to sell someone a Buick for the same price as a Bimmer. (Never mind that the "Bimmer" in question had a slide that was a heavy-gauge stamping with a pinned-in breechblock; technologies pioneered by Sauer for last-ditch 'volkspistoles' in WWII. )

I generally sort autopistols into three eras. The first was made using turn-of-the-century machining techniques, where you took pieces of steel and whittled away everything that didn't look like a pistol. The second took large advantage of techniques like stamping and casting to bring manufacturing costs down. The third went as simple as possible, with striker ignition, toaster parts for internals, and injection-molded plastic frames. Also, the complexity of manufacture doesn't necessarily equate to reliability or durability or anything. The Third Gen nines and .45's were pretty durable service autos, but the complex internals meant the tens and .40's chewed up internals on a regular basis. (I mean, that was true to a greater or lesser extent on other guns, too, so...)

While they'd taken as many shortcuts as possible*, the Third Gen Smifs were definitely the last gasp of the first era of semiauto pistol design.

*The nylon disconnector, for instance, which apparently actually increased durability.

I've seen this before...

Where have I seen this before? Oh, yeah...

People just seem to instinctively love them a Man on Horseback.

THREE IN A ROW!

 The Arms Room blog has now had a Sunday Smith on three consecutive Sundays! Madness!

Weltschmerz

How had I not been aware of this song? I heard it the other day when I was having lunch in Half Liter's biergarten and it has been an earworm ever since...

Called it.

I'd been holding off on registering for SHOT Show 2021 because I knew this was going to happen...

Given the amount of international travel required and the fact that not only will the 'Rona still be running around, but it'll be in the middle of regular flu season, too (and this year I got flattened by the regular old flu and spent half of SHOT in my hotel room wishing I was dead), I didn't think there was a hope in hell of them going forward with it in January.

EDITED TO ADD:

I LOL'ed at this hot take. He ain't wrong.

I'm not going to lie, I was more relieved than not at getting the cancellation email. 

Normally SHOT's a busy week for me, a lot of work and travel, and the only really fun part was seeing industry friends all in one place. But even my fairly tight group of friends generally only manages to get together for a half hour or forty-five minutes for cocktails in the evenings before people have to head back off to meetings or business dinners or back to the hotel to write articles and/or edit photos & video. That's a lot of head...and foot...ache to spend a couple hours, total, with friends. I get a lot more face time with the people I care about in the weekend of, say, Tac-Con.

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It doesn't work like that.

 So, when a dude tried to get all stabbity in Philly the other day, the police stayed out of knife range, maneuvered until they had a clean backstop, and shot the guy. This has sparked the usual outrage.

“Why didn’t they use a Taser?” the [decedent's father] asked outside a family residence on the block.

Because Tasers cost money, Taser training takes time and money, and Philly taxpayers have not seen fit to spend that time and money. Also, Tasers are pretty spiffy when they work right, but they aren't phasers set on stun and many departments mandate a cover officer with a drawn gun being there when a Taser is deployed in case something goes wrong.

He said his son struggled with mental health issues and was on medication. “He has mental issues," Wallace said. "Why you have to gun him down?”

Last I checked, the knife works the same whether the person going all stabbity with it is crazy or not. Stabbings aren't any less fatal when done by people with mental issues. 

“Why not a warning shot?” Woodall, 56, asked. “Why not a Taser? Why not a shot in the leg?”

A warning shot?!? You are smack in the middle of the sixth most populous city in the US. Whose window do you want that "warning shot" going through?

And miss me with that "shoot him in the leg" nonsense. 

First, your average shooter is lucky to hit the target at all when operating under any pressure, let alone a specific part of it. If Philly can't pay for all their cops to have Tasers and Taser training, what do you think their departmental marksmanship program looks like? 

Second of all, a cop in the Philippines just bled out and died after getting kicked in the leg by a chicken, and you want to shoot people there? You need to stop watching movies and lose the damfool notion that it's possible to shoot people just a little bit.

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This year just keeps getting weirder.

•  Cockfighting...which is legal under certain restrictions in the Philippines...has been banned during the Time of the 'Rona, but there have been underground cockfights still happening. The po-po raided one of these illegal events and, as the spectators scattered, one of the officers scooped up an illicit combat chicken. In the struggle to corral the hostile cock, its razor sharp spur opened the officer's femoral artery and he bled out on the spot. Killed by a chicken. (Insert ad for PHLster Flatpack here.)


• Swordfish in the Mediterranean Sea are frickin' impaling sharks to death, just the way they did in those ocean cross-section drawings I used to do in second grade. I KNEW it!


• Halloween, a blue moon, DST ending, and the election, all within a few days!

Laser Beams!

 In the late Eighties, along with the purchase by Tompkins, PLC, Smith & Wesson got a serious upgrade in tooling as the new owners brought the company into ISO 9000 compliance. Along with the CNC machinery came lasers for marking, supplanting old-school rollmarking for most purposes.

Looked at in a 100% crop from the EOS 5DS & 100mm f/2.8L macro lens, the burned aluminum looks pretty neat-o.

Who Guards the Guardian?

 I've talked up Surefire's Guardian before. It's my go-to travel light, especially on the (admittedly rare) occasions when I fly and don't check a bag. It's a one-light solution that gives me everything from a wide, even 15-lumen MaxVision beam for finding my way to the loo between tent pegs and camp chairs at Paul-E-Palooza to shining a conventional, focused 800-lumen spotlight on the tree line across the lawn at Castle Frostbite. 

Even if I have my regular EDCL2-T along with me, the honkin' big internal batteries on the Guardian save wear on the pocket light's CR123s. I also liked that it could theoretically be used to juice up a dead phone or other USB accessory...

I say "theoretically", because I did inadvertently discover one weakness. While it claims to use a "USB-C" connector, it's a variety of USB-C that matches no other connector in Roseholme Cottage. Having not used it since SHOT back in January, I pulled it out of a traveling jacket pocket to find it was flatter than the Texas Panhandle and I couldn't find the cable. No other cable in the house, not even on the numerous squids, fit it.

It's going to be in the camera bag pocket I use for other critical cables from now on, ensuring that I always know where it's at, as well as making sure it comes with when I travel.

What is this world coming to?

 Sunday Smithery getting perpetrated on two Sundays in a row?!?

(Relatedly, I really need to point the 100mm f/2.8L at more guns. That's a nice macro lens.)

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Saint Crispin's Day

On this day six hundred and five years ago, the French got their crepes folded at Agincourt by a force of English yeoman archers and dismounted knights & men-at-arms.

The pre-battle speech Shakespeare put in the mouth of Hank the Fifth is one of the most epic locker room pep talks of all time, and Branagh's delivery of it in his cinematic adaptation of the play is pitch perfect. Better even...and it pains me as a good American to say this...than George C. Scott's famous speech in Patton.

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Busman's Holiday

What does a research librarian do while she's laid off during the Time of the 'Rona?

Well, research.

"In the past I’ve had to remind student patrons that you can’t cite Wikipedia on research papers, and if they asked why, I never had a great answer, just something along the lines of, “Um, it’s kind of lazy, don’t you think?” But now I’d advise them to visit a Talk page or two to understand what research is. It’s not just looking online for stuff; it’s a process of assessment, of re-searching through what you’ve found to determine what’s superfluous, what’s missing and what requires thought. The nakedness of this process on Talk pages makes it accessible. Professional researchers can be precious about our work, but research is a skill we can and should all acquire, given the abundance of information and misinformation mixed up at our fingertips.

Plus, it feels great. Few things are as satisfying as uncovering a hard gem of truth in the shifting sands of opinion, politics and legend. I worked my way slowly through the Sichuan pepper entry, unraveling the truth of an assertion while waiting to hear back on job applications, adding a citation while my baby slept."

Automotif CXCII...

 1983-vintage W123 300D still out there as a daily driver.

Boasting 87 bhp and a monster 127 lb/ft of stump-pulling torque, they'll barely get close to a hundred mph on a slight downhill with a tailwind, but they're harder to kill than a cockroach.

 My dad's boss had a 240D of similar vintage, and I once had to drive it to a local service station to get a tire plugged.

 I realized I was in the wrong lane at a red light and, needing to beat the panel truck next to me across the intersection, started brake-torquing it when I saw the crossing light turn yellow.

 The light turned green and I side-stepped the brake pedal with the little diesel clattering away for all it was worth. The panel truck still beat me across the intersection (I'm not a hundred percent sure the driver knew it was a race) and quickly pulled enough of a lead that I got a good look at the trailer full of lawn mowers and the crowd of bemused Mexican dudes peering out of the open back of the truck.

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The internet was a mistake.

I'm really torn between "...making me regret the invention of the internet" and "...credulous morons."

But I repeat myself. https://t.co/DDdDuJGRf3

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) October 24, 2020

Automotif CXCI...

 Barring something freakish in November...which is not at all out of the question in 2020...Thursday was probably the last sunny, 80 degree day to take a leisurely outdoor lunch on the patio at Fat Dan's.

I was enjoying a Fat Burger with cheese and sliced jalapenos, accompanied by fries and a frosty pint of Toppling Goliath's Pseudo Sue, when there came an angry rumbling noise burbling southward on College Avenue...

Gojira!

When you drive a car painted like that, it's probably no surprise when people actually get up from their sidewalk cafe table and jog over to take a photo.

I love the way the colors pop and the contrast (in more ways than one) with the IndyGo Red Line bus in the background. I'm pretty much settled on the Nikon 16-80mm f/2.8-4 as my favorite crop-sensor zoom I've ever used; it actually does what I'd hoped the Canon 17-55mm f/2.8 would do.

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Accidental exploration...

 The urban geography of Indianapolis is similar to Atlanta in that it has a perimeter highway, I-465 instead of I-285, and is basically quartered by the main north-south and east-west interstates inside that perimeter. Atlanta's east-west interstate is I-20 and Indy's is I-70, while I-65 traverses the inner metro of IND in the same general northwest-to-due-south orientation as I-75 in the ATL.

Yesterday I drove down to the general area of Bloomington, IN, and my path out of town caused me to muse that the entire southwest quadrant of Indianapolis, that area south of I-70 and west of I-65 but inside I-465, was largely terra incognito to me, despite having lived in Indy a dozen years now.

Roseholme Cottage is roughly in the gap between "reliving" and "college".

My return path got shunted by my robot navigator straight through this part of town. Normally I'd tell the robot to stuff it and stick to the route I knew, but since I'd been musing about it on the voyage down...and I didn't have any particular timetable to be getting home...I figured I'd get my sightseeing on. I went ahead and let R2D2 steer me through "Truck Stops", "Industrial Wasteland", and past "$20k Houses".

For being "Industrial Wasteland" and inside the perimeter highway of a major city, the corridor of Bluff Road between 465 and 70 is surprisingly bucolic for much of its length, passing legitimate working soybean fields at the southern end and not turning really gritty until you pass Holy Cross cemetery.

I ought to go back and explore some.

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Automotif CXC...

This 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan, with a very seasonally-appropriate paint job*, was parked up on the northbound side of College Avenue yesterday morning. I was headed southbound on the way to Roberts Camera, but I pulled over and jogged across the street, D7000 in hand, because obviously.

*Adobe Beige and Sierra Gold?
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What gun for...wait, I know this one.

 As is often pointed out, one of the most dangerous animals in North America is good ol' Odocoileus virginianus, the white-tailed deer, aka the hoofed rat. Once extirpated over much of its natural range, it was inexplicably brought back from the brink of extinction to menace the crops and rural highways of America.

Deer kill a lot more people than sharks every year, usually by leaping through Camry windshields or causing Buicks to swerve off the road and into the trees.

However they will also, under the right circumstances, attack you, as a woman walking her dog in Colorado found out.

Apparently a kindly septuagenarian in the subdivision had found a fawn and nursed it to adulthood, whereupon it repaid her kindness by going buck wild, as it were, on her neighbor.

The neighbor got away with a goring, the deer was put down by the po-po, and the little old lady got tickets for her unruly and illegal pet's rampage.

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