Fabulous NRA convention stuff to follow...

...but only after I've driven back down to Louisville.

Saw TD again yesterday and got to meet Squeaky in real life. It was cool! More later...

Overheard on I-65 South...

R: "Look, the Muscatuck river!"

T (singing): "How much musk would a muscatuck tuck if a muscatuck could tuck musk?"

R: "Ew!"

The Department of Irrelevance.

In the outer burbs of Houston, a 900-foot diameter sinkhole has created a lake in the middle of what was a subdivision, swallowing power poles and vehicles and providing a new home to a 'gator. Crude oil has bubbled from the ground to give it its own little oil slick. The hole could enlarge to engulf more of suburbia at any time. What does the government spokesperson quoted want us to know?

Danny Diaz, a Texas Parks and Wildlife game warden, said a patch of crude oil floating on the east side of the crater might irritate the alligator’s skin, but the reptile is using the water on the other side.

Well, thank you Mr. Diaz. I was afraid we were going to have to chuck some skin care products in there for the lizard. Let's hope it doesn't get a cocker spaniel stuck in its throat, because so few people know how to perform the Heimlich maneuver properly on prehistoric saurians.

Holy crap.

I had no idea that professional wrasslin' had such a huge history and lexicon, nor that it had enough fans who could type and connect to the internet, enough... and I can't say this with a straight enough face ...pro wrestling scholars (gawd, I laughed just typing that,) if you will, in order to give it a huge section of Wikipedia. The entries have an awful sort of trainwreck fascination to them.

It's always sad when a streak ends.

I've been a big girl doing my own laundry for more years than I care to name in public, and this is actually the first time I've ever had a sock fall into the wormhole.

Sigh. I liked that sock, too.

Overheard in the hallway...

Alpha Geekette RobertaX (heading out the door to the Hamvention): "Now to go mingle with the normals..."

Me: "How the ^%&* are you going to do that at a Ham convention?"

Think what you're missing!

Marko has canceled his satellite TeeWee service after some hilarious contretemps.

Just think what he's missing!

"Did time-traveling Nazis in flying saucers build the pyramids? Some scientists say ‘yes’. Next on the History Channel."

I'm beginning to think that you could take your garbage man, put him in a white lab coat on a Discovery Channel show, introduce him as the head professor of the phrenology department at Draw Tippy Turtle University, and folks will believe whatever asinine things come out of his cakehole.

If the shoe fits, Barry.

Speaking to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence, Dubya's speech included the lines

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Although no names were named, Sen. Hopeychangey immediately protested too much. The candidate endorsed by Hamas immediately shot back that he was not either a Nazi and that the Shrub was a big ol' meanie for calling him one.

Hey, if the shoe fits...

Today In History: Button holed.

Button Gwinnett, delegate from Georgia to the Second Continental Congress, signatory to the Declaration of Independence, and the man after whom the biggest swath of Atlanta's suburban sprawl is named, was as conscious of his honor as most gentlemen of his era.

When his biggest political rival began to publicly heckle him over a failed military expedition to British East Florida, Button challenged him to a duel. On this date in 1777, Button and Lachlan McIntosh met for grass before breakfast in the hamlet of Thunderbolt, Georgia. Gwinnett winged Gen. McIntosh in the leg, but in turn was shot in the hip and died of gangrene three days later.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Electric Boobs.

Well, not really. I just wanted to say "electric boobs", since it will make Google no end of happy.

Actually it's an electric bra. Solar-powered. More of a solar-powered cami, actually. Just think how smug and ecologically superior you could feel when flashing people from your Prius and they're all wearing old-fashioned internal combustion lingerie. Or something.

(H/T to Dustbury.)

Bob Barr and the Libertarians.

What's kind of amusing is how many people who aren't going to vote for Col. Tighe because he's "not a real conservative" and they're sick of "choosing the lesser of two evils" are going to pull the lever for Bob "Daddy State" Barr because he's supposedly had some kind of Road-To-Damascus experience and weaseled his way into the Libertarian party.

Of course, what makes this doubly ironic is that, as anyone who's read Reason magazine for more than eight years knows, big-L libertarianism has been overrun by folks who don't know anything more about libertarian politics other than that they hate Chimpy McHitlerburton and the Iraq War and they don't want to be Democrats because that's what Mom and Dad are, and besides, the Clintons are such squares. Now these former Rage Against The Machine-listening WTO protesters are going to be voting for anti-porn, anti-gay, anti-drug Bob Barr. It's almost too delicious for words.

I'm starting my own fricking political party. And to keep idiot suckweasels out, I'm closing the enrollment right after I sign up, so everyone else can piss off.

Republics and Republicans.

"Nowadays, when all anyone seems to know about the Roman Empire is that it fell, comparisons are constantly offered between the Romans and the Americans which have little to do with historical reality. Most attractive is the one which assumes that the "fall of Rome," like the soon expected fall of America, was due to moral weakness and gross (preferably sexual) self-indulgence. The analogy would be less foolish if it were the case that Roman morality declined in the fifth century A.D., when the barbarians came. Actually, the first complaints about the city's moral decline were heard in the second century B.C. at a time when Rome was not falling but rising and there was as yet no such thing as an emperor. We live in a country founded by colonial gentlemen who not only understood Roman history but were fond of quoting it in Latin. Recently, the United States has produced a generation of leaders who do not even know that Rome was a republic and that it did not become a hereditary monarchy until the emperor Augustus gave up on the old constitution at about the time of Christ."

-from The End of Kings: A history of Republics and Republicans. The cause of my low writing output yesterday and last night. I probably won't type much until I finish the last fifty pages this morning. Two thumbs up. A must read. Thank you, staghounds.

Edwards throws his endorsement to Barry.

Says all five of his supporters should, too.

Today in History: "Put the boys in, and may God forgive me..."

On this day in 1864, the cadets of the Virginia Military Institute fixed bayonets and met the 34th Massachusetts in the middle of a muddy field near New Market, Virginia. Against all probability, the cadets carried the field and captured the Union front-line positions.

Fire Mission.

Target: zombies in the open.

Ouch.

Shooting is a hobby that involves having an explosion go off in a tube you're holding in your hands.

Sometimes the explosion gets out of the tube.

That's gonna leave a mark.


(via email from the Pergelator.)

Breaking News:

Frank Sinatra is still dead.

Signs of the times.

Death toll in China earthquake up to 15,000 and counting.

Another typhoon on the way to Myanmar, plus cholera and malaria.

Fires in Florida.

Gas and foreclosures up.

The dollar down.

A big, smiling Hillary.

The TeeWee cutting itself on in the mornings is supposed to help wake us up, not to chase me back under the covers.

Like a gun, only smaller.

Caleb likes his new Jetfire. Having owned three myself, I think he has excellent taste in mouseguns.

Yes, yes, I know the P-32 is lighter and thinner, but:

1) A Jetfire can be concealed anyplace short of a nudist colony, too, so the point is kinda moot.

2) Sure, the 950BS is chambered in the oft-reviled .25, but it's not like .32ACP is the Hammer of Thor, either.

3) The single action Jetfire shoots better for me on my worst days than the Kel-Tec does on my best. With these pipsqueak cartridges, accuracy is very important. From a Jetfire, Colt Vest Pocket, or a Baby Browning, I can put the bullet exactly where I want it; not so much with the Kel-Tec. Your results may vary.

Those times I just can't carry a gun, it's the next best thing.

Toiling in the fields.

Just finished weeding and turning the soil at the far end of the raised bed in the back yard. I put in a grape tomato start and am ready to plant some carrots and radishes. As I was cleaning fallen leaves and maple spinners out of the herb rows, I noticed that the last of my three garlic bulbs has sprouted. Yay! I was worried about the li'l guy.

Okay, maybe not big news to anybody else, but it was huge for me.

Today In History: "Pilot to bombardier..."

On this date in 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department displayed a tenuous grasp of Constitutionality and a complete innocence of the concept of "Public Relations" when it decided to branch out into the Close Air Support field.

I'd say that would be a wake-up call.

If you were to suddenly come to, and found yourself in the middle of a field, dressed as Darth Vader and swinging a crutch, that might be a sign that your drinking problem has gotten a little out of hand.

Which is not to say that most Star Wars nerds couldn't use a good beating with a crutch by the town drunk every now and again.

Look! Guns!

Great Scott! It's a post at The Arms Room!

Cat haiku.

Paws tucked daintily
Under her chin, she's sleeping
Dream mouse dies screaming

It just works. Mostly.

I am not a tenth the computer geek I once was.

I stopped using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and started using Firefox a few years ago, not because of security issues or lack of plug ins, or whatever, but for two simple reasons: 1) Every now and again (and I mean rarely.) IE v.WhateverItWas would just bail on me. It wouldn't lock up or crash the 'puter, or anything bad like that, it would just go away and I'd have to restart it. Nothing fatal, just annoying. 2) I got addicted to tabbed browsing, because it was so much handier than having a ton of windows open. In a usual browsing session, I have tabs open at VFTP, either Digital Fossils or The Arms Room, AOhelL, whatever blog or news article I'm writing about at the moment or planning to write about in the next few hours, Wikipedia, and Google. Six tabs are just easier to manage than six seperate windows. My Firefox install has always been bare-bones, with no extensions or plug-ins or any of that stuff. I've also been using Firefox on my road computer, the slime-lime green toilet seat iBook running OS 10.3, for at least a year. For all that time, it's been as stable as I could hope for on both the laptop and my Pentium 4/Win XP home computer; I have been a happy Firefox user.

Recently, I decided to do a little experiment over at my other blog. I unhooked my faithful Wintel box, and set up to use nothing but 8-year-old Macs for all my computing needs. I loaded up OS 10.3.9 on my G4 tower and my old G3 iMac, and downloaded the latest 10.3.9 updates for my iBook, too. I installed the latest version of Firefox (2.0.0.14), and set off down the information superhighway, only to find out that Firefox no longer plays well with the Mac OS; the thing has turned into an unuseable freeze-o-matic in Blogger. A browser in which I can't load my own blog is worse than useless to me, so I've reluctantly started using Safari, which also has tabbed browsing. Of course, Safari doesn't have the handy inline spellchecker that Firefox does (I don't actually "spellcheck" because I trust my spelling, but I've gotten addicted to having typos underlined in red so that I can see them before I hit "publish",) and even worse, Safari doesn't support Blogger's WYSIWYG compose mode, and typing every post in straight html is the very definition of "tedious". I am now forced to choose between Safari, with tabbed browsing and crappy blogging, or downloading IE and having good blogging and no tabs. This both blows and sucks at the same time, a feat heretofore thought impossible. Thanks a whole hell of a lot, Mozilla.

I got yer "Zoom Zoom" right here.

Best window sticker evar.


(H/T to Dustbury.)

Today In History: They don't make wars like they used to...

Every time the US has deployed military force in the last two and a half decades it was, to see the protesters in their black body suits with white shoe-polish skeletons, about to be a veritable armageddon. The corpses of our boys and the poor enemy's alike would be piled in windrows, and the only winner would be the corpse-eating rats. Every commanding officer down to the lowliest second lieutenant knew that any casualty suffered by his unit might be the one that ticked over the news media's ghastly odometer and turned him into the digital age's George Armstrong Custer.

On this date in 1942 Marshal Timoshenko launched the almost 650,000 men under his command into a general offensive along the Donets, striking towards Karkhov and Dnepropetrovsk. Opposing him was von Bock's Army Group South, with a TO&E strength of almost a third of a million troops. By the time the dust had settled over the Second Battle of Karkhov some two weeks later, the Russian morning roll call list would be lighter by almost 200,000 names, while the Germans had lost "only" 40-60,000 KIA, wounded, and missing. And Second Karkhov was by no means the largest or fiercest action on the Eastern Front.

It's all a matter of scale, I guess.

Groovy Link of the Day.

RobertaX has discovered a link made of 100% pure free-range Awesome. Check it, yo.

Just give your attacker what he wants...

...and maybe instead of shooting you in the face, he'll just shoot you in the belly.

Hi, Dad!

Tell Mom "Happy Mother's Day". I'll call tonight.

How can people be this dumb?

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum are both fanning the old populist class warfare flames by talking about taxing the eeeevil oil companies.

Now, granted, it's been a long time since either of them worked for an organization that couldn't literally print money at will, so they may have forgotten a salient fact of the business world, which is that a corporation gets its money from... where? Class? Anyone? Its customers, that's right.

So if they want a bajillion dollars in taxes from the eeeevil oil companies, then those eeeevil oil companies are going to have to get the money from where? Anyone? Bueller? That's right, the idiots voting for Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. And me. And you.

Morons, the lot of 'em.

Wikiwander.

I noticed this morning that on this date in 1934, there had been one of the huge dust storms that characterized the Dust Bowl. While reading that article, I got distracted by a link to the Llano Estacado region of West Texas, an area of wall-to-wall f^%k-all. Except for Palo Duro Canyon, from which Col. Ranald Mackenzie evicted the Kiowa and Comanche in an eponymous battle in the 1870s. Col. Mackenzie had been a general during the War of Northern Agression, including being wounded at the Battle of Cedar Creek, where he had commanded a unit under General Phil Sheridan.

Sheridan, of course, had a distinguished career, and the air-droppable M551 tank was named after him. The tank was deployed for both Operation Just Cause and Operation Desert Storm, but saw the most service in Vietnam, where it was used by the 11th ACR, the Black Horse, during the invasion of Cambodia. The 11th is now best known as the OPFOR at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, near Barstow in California. Barstow probably wouldn't be a blip on anyone's consciousness if it weren't for the fact that Route 66 passes through. Route 66 was part of the National Highway system, and in the 1930s, it was crowded with westbound Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl.

Fashionably attired, heavily armed.

Phlegm Fatale sets out to bring something to the firing lines of Texas of which they had heretofore been somewhat short: Polka-Dots.

Today In History: War of Conquest.

On this date in 1940, in the middle of World War Two, a great big belligerent nation invaded a tiny neutral country with hardly any armed forces.

No, I 'm not talking about Germany and Luxembourg, although that happened on the same day. I'm talking about the British invasion of Iceland on May 10, 1940.

In July of 1941, the British withdrew their troops, leaving the occupation of Iceland to the neutral (wink, wink) United States.

Alert the Department of Irony.

Apparently an admiral is being ashcanned for engaging in a little extramarital affair back when he was an aide at the White House in 1990 (including some actual nookie at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), and then allegedly engaging in some less-than-creative perjury to cover up.

Silly Navy officer! If he'd waited just a couple of years, National Command Authority might have lent him a cigar. And some better excuses.

Today In History: Armageddon.

Thutmose III was a Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty in ancient Egypt. He ascended to the throne as a very young boy. Unfortunately, Hatshepsut was his co-Pharaoh. Also, his aunt and bummer of a stepmom, plus she was ambitious, shrewd, and smart as a whip. In other words, she wore a fake beard and ran the country while young Thutmose sulked in the wings.

To make matters worse, young Thutty Trey was hardly allowed to do anything fun. Aunt Hattie had silly notions about running a kingdom based on trade, diplomacy, skullduggery, and exploration, instead of the way young Thutmose wanted, which mostly involved galloping around in chariots and killing barbarians. One can imagine that this caused some sniggering among his friends: "Hey, Thut! C'mon and lets take a couple of chariot squadrons and go shoot up some Libyans."
"Nah. Can't. Mom won't let me play with the army. She says wars of expansion cost too much money."

In due time, however, Hatshepsut went the way of all flesh. With the old battleaxe gone, Egypt's vassals and client states in Canaan wasted no time in telling the Kingdom of the Nile to take their tribute demands and go piss up a rope, figuring that the boy who had spent the last twenty years as Junior King-In-Training in his stepmom's shadow would aquiesce meekly.

Seeing the chance he'd been waiting for all his life, Thutmose wrote back "Yeah. Me and my army, that's who." Coalescing around the king of the oasis city of Kadesh, the Canaanites challenged the Egyptians to battle on the plain in front of the walled city of Megiddo.

Thut mustered the Egyptian army, which consisted of three crack corps of charioteers and a mob of men good for not much other than standing around the baggage train with spears and who could be called "infantry" only in the sense that they were armed and on foot, and set off for Megiddo at the (for the time) breakneck pace of fifteen miles a day. They reached the last pass before the fortified city and made camp, and the next morning, May 9th, 1457 BC, Thutty Trey deployed his three chariot corps in an L-shaped formation, two to the west and one to the south of the city, leaving his spear-carriers to guard the camp.

The Canaanites had drawn up their chariot forces along the top of a shallow rise along the edge of the elevated plain and behind a shallow stream to await the Egyptian attack. For some unknown reason, as the Egyptians advanced, the rebels abandoned their positions and rolled forward to meet them, and their chariots were scattered by the onrushing Egyptians. Unit cohesion couldn't have been too good amongst the Canaanite charioteers, since their force was allegedly combined from the retinues of over three hundred princelings and chieftains. For whatever reason, they rushed back towards Megiddo, where they had left their own mob of footsoldiers.

Seeing their social betters in headlong flight before the enemy, the Canaanite footsloggers understandably panicked and slammed the city's gates right in their retreating faces. Their charioteers were forced to abandon their vehicles and be hauled over the town walls on ropes and bedsheets. Fortunately for them, the Egyptian advance had turned into a disorganized mob, looting the abandoned war cars after the owners had bailed. The city fell after a lengthy siege, and Thutmose went home feeling more manly than he ever had before.

This is the first actual organized battle in history for which we have any records with which to fix it in time and place, and therefore it marks the dawn of military history. One reason the records we do have are so sketchy is that they all come from the Egyptians, and if they are taken literally, one would think that Thutty himself wiped out most of the foe while his army gaped in slack-jawed wonder at their leader's prowess. Thus the battle of Megiddo also marks the dawn of military propaganda.

And what of our hero, young Thutmose III? Well, he set about spending the rest of his reign occupied with one glorious military campaign after another, whooping about the ancient Near East in his chariot, killing barbarians. And tearing down every statue of Hatshepsut he could find.

Next they'll change the Yeoman Warders to "Tofueaters".

Rachel Lucas on the latest depressing news from the place where Great Britain used to be.

There goes the economy.

The WIRED headline reads: Motion-Capture Suits Will Spice Up Virtual Sex

Allow me to quote Dennis Miller on this one:

"Folks, the day an unemployed ironworker can sit at home in his Barcalounger with a channel clicker in one hand and a Foster's in the other and f&*k Claudia Schiffer for $19.95, it's going to make crack look like Sanka."

More on Priest-Kings.

Lawdog has more on folks misunderstanding the concept of just what we're supposed to be hiring someone to do this November. (HINT: "Fixing the Economy" and "Affordable Health Care" are nowhere mentioned in Article II of the Constitution.)

Why Solomon Made The Big Bucks: Quandaries of Justice

A criminally negligent idiot sits in an Indiana jail today. If I were an official news agency, I'd have to say "alleged criminally negligent idiot", but I'm not, and I think in this case the facts pretty much speak for themselves.

A look at his record shows that his career arc probably would have landed him there sooner or later. Unemployed. Probably guilty of child abuse. Already lost some of his children to Protective Services. His idea of safe storage of a semiautomatic pistol was to remove the magazine and place it on a bookshelf, this despite the fact that his son had already accessed it once and fired off the round left in the chamber.

His son repeated his feat, climbing the bookcase, retrieving the pistol, and firing it again. This time the bullet struck and killed his sister. The idiot father was arrested at his daughter's burial service and spent the rest of his day in an orange jumpsuit, sobbing into the camera.

Something tells me, however, that this was the kind of guy who didn't put covers on the electical outlets. Or store dangerous chemicals in safe places. Or cook on the stove with the pot handles turned inwards. And if the child had been electrocuted, or drank a tall frosty glass of Drano, or died from severe burns after wearing a pot of boiling Ramen for a hat, would he still be free to get a chance to contribute to the death of another one of his children while we all shook our heads at the fateful "accident"? Are some kinds of negligence more heinous than others?

Whoah!

The absolute coolest thing I have ever seen on the intarw3bz in all my born days:

"They're watching you, Neo."

Lock Mess Monster.

The issue of the internal lock that S&W added to their revolvers is one that has generated far more heat than light on the internet over the last several years. Initial resistance was mostly split along two lines: The first was aesthetic; the new lock appeared as an ugly little metal zit on the side of the gun just above the cylinder release, complete with an inscribed "L"-and-arrow indicating which direction to turn it to disable the gun, and a Rube Golberg-esque flag that popped up to indicate that the gun was locked. The second was philosophical; people refused to buy a gun that had a feature that was such an obvious nod to the anti-gun crowd and could render a sidearm inert at a time when it was needed most.

The issue was complicated when, after a year or so, rumors began to trickle down about revolvers that had spontaneously locked themselves when firing. Several prominent gun writers pooh-poohed these claims in print, predictably resulting in incendiary internet diatribes about "paid shills of the gun industry". The argument has smoldered fitfully along ever since.

Recently a thread on ARFcom, complete with pictures, concerning yet another spontaneously-locked revolver has triggered yet another flareup of "See? I told you so!" on the web, including posts from people on Evil Black Rifle gun boards who are no more likely to carry a S&W revolver than they are to sprout wings and fly.

As usual, the truth about the matter lies somewhere in the middle, and I'd like to offer a couple of thoughts on the matter. Remember, I'm just someone who worked in the retail firearms sales and repair industry from 1993 to 2007 and who has owned probably close to a hundred S&W revolvers, including three with the dreaded internal lock. My opinions are no more valid than anyone else with a keyboard and an internet connection:

1: Locks are not some demonic S&W invention. Springfield, Bersa, H&K, Glock, Taurus, Ruger, and S&W all have locks on some or all of their handgun lines. These locks are all done with varying degrees of mechanical aptitude and aesthetic obtrusiveness. Barring a significant change in the American political and legal climate, locks on handguns are with us to stay. A ban on handguns is more realistically likely than the disappearance of integral locks. Deal with it.

2: S&W are not the only locks that have failed. Over the years I have seen one failed S&W lock with my own eyes. I have also seen one Bersa, one HK USP9F, and a double handful of Tauruses that have suffered some manner of lock-related failure that rendered the gun inoperable.

3: Verifiable S&W lock failures seem confined to a narrow class of firearms. Almost to an incident, they seem to occur on flyweight Titanium/Scandium magnum revolvers shooting magnum loads. The recoil impulse on these guns is so savage that bullets are pulled from their crimps sometimes. It is therefore unsurprising to me that the gun could rotate under recoil briskly enough to leave the lock parts hanging in place under their own inertia, locking the weapon. This is a serious design flaw with the S&W lock and one that they should rectify, especially before some gnawed hiker corpse is found in bear country with his two-ounce riboflavin-framed .44 Magnum in his hand, locked up like Fort Knox.

If you absolutely must have a helium revolver chambered for he-man magnum loads, instructions are available on the big Smith & Wesson fan forum for disabling the lock by grinding off one little metal stud with your handy-dandy Dremel Tool, invaluable sidekick of shadetree gunsmiths everywhere.

From anecdotal evidence I have gathered, another component of these lock failures is that the locks on the subject weapons have all been used (or, in industry parlance, "fiddled with"). One reason I think that this is a component, if not a necessary prerequisite, is that the lock parts are manufactured via the MIM (metal injection molding) process, which is not known for turning out glass-smooth surfaces from the factory. Out of the box, this results in locks that have enough stiction that they are difficult to apply on purpose, let alone by accident. Were someone to take their new flyweight bear gun out and fiddle the lock back and forth to watch the little flag pop up and down, they would notice its application become a mite easier as the rough mating surfaces were bedded together by the repeated application of the key. One may rest assured that neither of the two lock-equipped revolvers I own has ever had the lock turned.

"What?" you say, "You own Smiths with locks?" Yes, I do, although I cordially dislike the little bugger on mostly aesthetic grounds. The two Smiths I own with locks are models that I wanted that had no pre-lock equivalents, so it was deal with the lock or deal without the gun. One is a steel-cylindered AirWeight .32 Magnum that is my everyday backup CCW gun, and the other is an all-steel large-frame .44 Special. Neither generates enough recoil impulse to make me worry about the lock at all. Incidentally, I also used to own a Titanium-cylinder .45 ACP revolver with the lock. The gun generated enough recoil to cause lightly-crimped ball ammo to jump its crimp, but in the thousand or so rounds I put through it before I traded it, it never had an issue with the lock. Again, I just don't think it had the Wheaties, recoil-wise.

One other reason I just can't get my dander up about this issue the way others have is that when an end user looks at those pictures on ARFcom, they see "OMG! A S&W LOCK FAILURE!!!1!!". I look at them and see "Ho hum. Another broken gun." Having worked in places with 'We Fix Busted Guns' signs out front for so long, I have seen so many firearms that have broken in so many ways that a new one fails to engage (pardon the pun) my interest. Frankly, if I had an AirLite .44 Magnum, I'd be as, or more, worried about the riboflavin cylinder failing or the little sheet metal tab in the topstrap getting eroded away and the frame getting flame-cut to uselessness as I would about the lock getting inadvertently activated.

A final grace note: I have to wonder how many people on those threads have shaken their heads at the sight of the jammed-up .41 Magnum S&W and pompously stated "Look at that! I'd never carry such an unreliable gun for self defense. Damn Smith & Wesson!" and then walked out their front door after stuffing their holster full of a semiautomatic pistol on which they have never performed One. Single. Malfunction. Clearance. Drill.

Idiots.

Ouch.

I am finding it extremely hard to be loquaciously funny when I have the skull-splittingest headache I've had in years. Luckily I just found some aspirin after searching all morning and giving up.

I am not a sickly child. I hate to whimper. But ouch.

Maybe not the best choice of words.

CNN headline: Incest dad: I cared for my secret family

Well yeah, see, that's the problem.

Overheard...

...in the hallway:

Idiot Box: "...and tune in next week to see who America loves!"

T: "You know what I'd love? An airstrike on the American Idol studio. With cluster bombs."

R: "That'd be cool."

T: "I'd definitely tune in to watch that."
_____________________________________________

...in the office:

T (to geriatricat): "Uh, Tommy, get out from under the desk. I don't like the way you're nosing around down there."

R (to geriatricat): "Fresh litter, Tommy! The power strip is dangerous!"

T: "And do you have any idea how long the odor of burnt cat ass lingers in a room?"

The plants are happy, and I am sad.

It's raining outside. A quick check of Weather.com's 10-day forecast shows that it's calling for rain seven out of those ten days. Glub.

Breda's got a gun.

A Bersa Thunder .380, to be specific. You can tell it was love at first shoot.

Plus, she dug around and found someone who makes custom wood grips for them. I wish I'd known about those; I'd have sold a blue jillion sets of those grips.

Grow-y stuff!

The Nepo... Necro... Nemophila is struggling along and the Delphinium is shooting up at a watch-it-grow pace. I'm pretty stoked about the Delphinium because A) it is supposed to have totally jawesome stalks of purple flowers come late spring, and B) How can you not like a plant whose common name is "Black Knight"? Among old herbal lore about this plant is that it will keep witches out of your barn. I told this to RobertaX, who asked if the lore said anything about it keeping Democrats out of the garage. The Scotch Moss we planted next to the front steps is hanging in there, although looking a little brown in some spots, and the Catnip is still unsprouted.

In the back yard, the dill and chives are coming in strong. Two out of three garlic bulbs have sprouted shoots, although some Mediterranean-flavored tree rat seems to have nibbled on one of them. Also, a few scattered scallions are poking up out of the dirt in their patch. I feel positively horticultural.

Tote a gun?

Read this. Now.

Xavier summed up the basic rules as neatly as I ever seen it done. Learn it. Live it.

Crass materialist that I am...

...I have added one of Amazon.com's cheesy "Buy Me Stuff!" buttons to my sidebar. In addition to demonstrating my total lack of shame, it's a pretty good look at the eclectic stuff that I consider to be fascinating reading.

Awesome. And by "awesome", I mean totally sweet!

The most absolutely cool thing I've read so far this week.

Bonus points for brilliantly describing the monosynaptics that seem to be going into convulsions over the whole thing.

Need further proof that idiots go into politics?

Gather 'round, Gentle Readers, and Auntie Tam will give you a free lesson in economics.

There is a thing called "Division of Labor" that makes an economy more productive. As an example, your corner automobile mechanic needs to put a rebuilt gizmo in your car to replace the broken one. Now, theoretically he could keep trained gizmo rebuilders in his employ, as well as all the parts necessary for rebuilding gizmos, and do it on the premises. However, it is much more economically feasible to have one or two gizmo rebuilders in town that specialize in nothing but gizmo rebuilding, and have all the local mechanics use their services.

He removes the gizmo from your car, sends it to the rebuilders, and installs a rebuilt one in its place. He charges a percentage over what the gizmo rebuilder to compensate him for his time in diagnosing the bad gizmo, replacing it, and a bit of that "profit" thing which is why he started the business in the first place. Thanks to the economies of scale, you still get your gizmo rebuilt more cheaply than if the mechanic had to do it himself.

In modern medicine, a large part of its success is based on the accuracy of diagnoses. These diagnoses are made possible by a bewildering array of tests and labwork. These tests and labwork require test kits and reagents and centrifuges and gas chromatographs and all manner of other stuff that would be impractical to keep in every doctor's office, along with the technicians to operate it all. It's more practical, and cheaper in the long run, to send your test samples off to the gizmo rebuilders.

Simple, right? Apparently not. For example, this piece of Basic Economics seems to have flown completely over the head of some legislators in Missouri.

You don't have to be a vote-pandering, dumb-as-a-stump, collectivist simpleton to get into politics. But it helps.

Yeah! What they said!

I'm bad and I'm nationwide international.

Go Team Me!

Today In History: Ode to Joy.

On this date in 1824, music reached its highest form of evolution with the premiere performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Beethoven received five ovations after the debut performance; it was customary for the Emperor to receive three.

On Philips' website, they claim that it's a rather definitive piece of music.

Our man on the scene...

...with early exit polling in Indiana's 5th District.

Granted, "one" isn't much of a sample size, but Zogby and Gallup had to start somewhere, too. "One hundred percent of voters surveyed voted for McCain and Burton in the GOP primaries. Also thought poll workers were hot."

Cruel and unusual.

I'm getting a few Google hits on "Indiana alcohol on election day" for some reason. I am given to understand, via my native Hoosier roomie, that alcohol sales here are a no-go until the polls close. The people who wrote this law probably never envisioned the nightmare scenario of having to choose between Clinton and Obama while blind, stinking sober.

I know that the Limbaugh brigade of GOP monkey-wrenchers out there are going to need to be half in the bag before pulling a lever for Hillary.

Hints from Heloise:

Today's most recent inexplicable Google inquiry:

"turbo 400 engages at too high rpm"

When's the last time you checked your transmission fluid level? You're welcome.

My fellow Americans.

Mr. Paul Harmon is a fellow Hoosier and a Concerned American. He wrote the featured letter to the editor on today's Indianapolis Star editorial page. In the meat of his letter, which was all about how leadfeet should slow down on the interstate to save gas, Mr. Harmon stated:

President Jimmy Carter knew what he was doing when he lowered our speed limits. Maybe it's time to go back to driving slower.

Let's face the fact that with a Texan in the White House we aren't going to get an energy policy with any teeth.

Mr. Harmon is referring to the 55 mile-per-hour National Maximum Speed Law, or NMSL (rhymes with "numbskull"), which was enacted in 1974.

Who was president in 1974? Class? That's right.

Mr. Harmon is a fellow Hoosier, a Concerned American, and he no doubt votes. He is also apparently as dumb as an acre of fungus.

78 degrees and sunny.

Whichever one of the pompous suckweasels has the larger support base amongst the slackers, ne'er-do-wells, and welfare leeches is going to win this one, as they can safely venture to the polls without Mother Nature mussing their coiffures or raining on their iPods.

If it was raining, I'd give the sure nod to Hils, as the hard gynocratic core of her support would charge a wall of bayonets for der fuehrerette; Barry has more appeal among the college-age slacker crowd, who are more likely to be dissuaded into staying home and lighting another bhang by a little rain. I'm gonna say the weather throws this one to The Man From Hope And Change by a squeaker.

Well, that was gross.

Do you know how much funk can accumulate inside a keyboard in five years? I should have put it in a ziploc bag and sold it to an allergen lab; there must have been enough cat hair to kill a dozen asthmatics.

On the upside: My Logitech now sounds as loud and clicky as an IBM Model M compared to thirty minutes ago.

My head feels vacuumed out.

I promised LEM a second column this week and this morning I figured I'd dragged my heels long enough and so a little after noon I tossed an extension cord through the front window onto the porch, sat down with my old Duo 280c on my lap, and vomited forth the contents of my skull through my fingertips. A little over a thousand words later, I felt physically drained. I linked the Duo to the WallStreet, copied the file over, emailed it to myself, and then used the big desktop machine in the office to forward it on to the editor.

I should have blogged up the Indy Gunblogger Meetup we had yesterday, but RobertaX did such a fantastic job of it that I'd feel a little redundant. Plus, it's all I can do to string two coherent sentences together right now. Suffice it to say that I had a grand time and really enjoyed meeting everyone; conversation that agile doesn't happen every day, but hopefully we can get it to happen every month or two. Og is even funnier in person, if you can imagine that. The Old Grouch is misnamed. Caleb from Call Me Ahab is as smart as you'd think he is if you've been reading his stuff; give him another bit and he'll be Indy's answer to SayUncle. Mark Alger of BabyTrollBlog, who can actually write, said nice things about my writing and I hope I didn't blush too badly. And I met Frank W. James without squealing anything too fangirlish like "OMG! I've been reading your stuff since I was so new in the gun business that I barely knew which end the bullets came out of out of which the bullets came!" (True Story: The first time he commented on my blog, I immediately called Marko. "Dude! You are not going to believe who reads my blog!" Whoops. That was fangirlish, wasn't it? Oh, well.)

So with my skull lighter by a dozen paragraphs, I will sleep the Sleep of the Just tonight and awaken tomorrow ready to do something entirely less taxing, like yard work. The green stuff in the places that are Not Lawn is about sprouted enough for even my botanically ignorant self to tell the weeds from the hygrangiums and I am going to put on my gloves and go after the former with a vengeance and try not to pull out too many of the latter by mistake. An afternoon of that, and maybe I'll have enough stuff in my head to make it worth squaring off with the keyboard monster again on Wednesday.

I've lost track, but...

...I think I'm supposed to drink green beer out of a dreidle today and set off firecrackers while listening to a mariachi band in lederhosen play "That's Amore".

It's important not to forget the true meaning of any of America's hojillion imported holidays, which all seem to revolve around sponsorship by Anheuser Busch.

Back in a bit...

I gotta go generate some copy. I've had five paragraphs swirling around in my head for the last week and it's time and past time to get them out so I can think of other stuff.

Life under the political microscope.

This morning, three out of four commercials in one break were for... well... I'm not going to say their names, because those two pompous suckweasels have already turned my Google AdWords banner into a vapid wasteland of political crap even crappier than bogus antivirus crap and offshore Viagra crap.

Please please please make it stop!

Today In History: Lights! Camera! Go! Go! Go!

On this date in 1980, after a six day siege, the Special Air Service stormed the Iranian embassy in London to free the hostages held by the terrorists inside. Prior to this incident the SAS had kept a low profile, mostly being thought of, when thought of at all, as the guys that drove around the desert in jeeps during WWII. Now live TV cameras caught images of black-clad men stacking at doorways and rapelling through windows, and people who had been unaware of the existence of the "dynamic assault" saw one in action.

Suddenly, Anti-Terrorist forces were the "in" thing and the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment were the rock stars of the British armed forces and the HK MP5 was the dream gun of nerdy gun nuts everywhere. You couldn't swing a cat in the entertainment industry without hitting a dramatization, a fictionalization, an Americanization, or a lying technical advisor who claimed he'd "Been With The Regiment". If it hadn't been for an unavoidable failure in OpSec on that May day in 1980, Rainbow Six might never have existed, and then what would a generation of gun nerds and video gamers have done with their spare time?

In case anyone was wondering...

...where to find the Platonic Ideal of PSH, here you go: The Platonic Ideal of PSH.

Meetings.

So I'm off in a few moments to meet a bunch of imaginary people from teh intarw3bz. Of course, this is going to take place at a local pub.

Someday I should tell about the time I went off to meet a bunch of imaginary people from teh intarw3bz as the token chick at a deer hunting camp in the middle of a swamp.

You know what? You meet the coolest imaginary people on teh intarw3bz.


UPDATE: Wow. Almost a dozen folks on only 48hrs notice. Come June, we'll have to rent a place or something...

It's a funny old internet.

I'm Tamara K., and I approve this blog.

I didn't do it.

But I wish I did. :-D

This week's caption contest...

...from Cowboy Blob is just cuter than dammit. I had to submit an entry.

Curiously excited around here.

There is apparently some manner of automobiling sporting event going on here this month. From all the excitement amongst the locals, you'd think it was a UT home game or something. The city's maybe not as riled as Knoxville before the Vols play, say, Alabama or Florida, but I'd say we're at at least a Kentucky or South Carolina pitch here.

Once is coincidence...

Twice is suspicious...

Three times is enemy action.


(H/T to Michael Silence.)

Perhaps his political ideas are more original...

...than his blog title.

Some folks have already expressed doubt. From where I'm sitting, it looks like the doubters are right; he's put up two posts full of the same class warfare crap you can find elsewhere. Do these folks just cut and paste their schtick from some central Democrat Candidate Website, or what? (Eeevil corporations. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Yadda-yadda, yackitty-schmackitty...)

(Oh, and thanks for covering my six there, Glenn. ;) )

It's not working.

The backup weather chick on one of the local channels tries to smile real big when she talks, apparently in an effort to appear bubbly and friendly.

It only succeeds in making her look like she's just smelled something vile while she's talking. I'm just sayin'.

Let Daniel be called, and he will declare the interpretation.

What does it mean when you dream about Hillary Clinton delivering a speech to an assembly in a high school gymnasium, except the assembly is all a bunch of dinosaur-looking aliens? You know, the kind with velociraptor heads. Oh yeah, and Hillary is wearing Col. Wilma Deering's stylin' lamé jumpsuit from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

I'm thinking it's a prophecy regarding eating steak fajitas liberally drizzled with smoked chipotle sauce too close to bedtime, but I could be wrong.

I've dragged my feet as long as I could...

...but the Z3 definitely needs to be sold. It's a little silly for me to sit around all broke and lonesome when I've got a paid-for Bimmer in the garage that only gets driven three or four times a week. I'll put it on fleaBay Motors tomorrow, but I figured I'd mention it here first in case any of y'all would like a crack at it at a special VFTP Price.

It's a '98 BMW Z3 2.8 5-spd manual, silver, with a black leather interior and black top, and I have the tonneau cover that goes with it. I was, I believe, the second owner when I bought it in '01 with 30k miles on it, and it now has 100k, at least a third of which are highway miles from roadtrips to and from Atlanta, Augusta, Chattanooga, Indianapolis, and Nashville. Power everything, including seats and top; heated seats; factory premium stereo w/six disc changer; sports suspension package w/17" wheels & tires. I have all the docs, all the paperwork since I bought it, and a clear Tennessee title. It's in great shape, with only a little ding in the snout and a small scuff or two in the clearcoat on the rear bumper that you have to be looking for to notice. It does leak a little around the top seals in heavy rain if stationary and not parked nose up, but the seals aren't cracked and are probably revivable with some sort of rubber conditioner. Speak before I list it tomorrow and the price is $10k.

Guns for dinosaurs.

If you're at all into guns, hunting, dinosaurs, and science fiction, know that L. Sprague De Camp wrote your ultimate short story back in 1956. Entitled "A Gun For Dinosaur", it takes the form of a narrative, told by a professional time-travel hunting guide explaining to a potential client why he won't take him back to the Cretaceous in pursuit of a thunder lizard head to mount on his wall.

You see, he refuses to take clients who aren't large enough to handle the ferocious recoil of a .600 Nitro Express double rifle, due to an unfortunate incident involving an earlier client and a .375 Magnum Winchester Model 70, an incident that he goes on to describe in great detail and which is, actually, the meat of the story. No pun intended.

I read the story in a collection of his shorts, The Best of L. Sprague De Camp, and have re-read it literally dozens of times since. It's fun on so many levels, with an interesting viewpoint character, a good feel for hunting and firearms, and a terrifically detailed look at pre-Robert Bakker dinosaur paleontology, with lumbering tail-dragging lizards and aquatic apatosauruses. I'd often wished he'd reused the mileu for other stories in the years since I first read it.

While browsing RobertaX's bookshelves yesterday, imagine how happy I was to find that Jim Baen apparently had the same idea I did. Rivers of Time, published by Baen in the early '90s, contains "A Gun For Dinosaur" as well as eight more stories of Reginald Rivers, time-travelling Aussie and professional hunter extraordinaire and all up to date with the changes that the intervening 30 years between the writing of the original story and the last decade of the 20th Century have wrought on society, hunting, and paleontology. If you are at all interested in dinosaurs, hunting, shooting, or SF, read it. You will not be disappointed.

Today In History: Flying Fashion Victim.

On this day in 1952, a deHavilland Comet took off from London for Johannesburg, carrying the first paying passengers on the first commercial jet airline flight. The Comet was a sleek looking, futuristic plan that whooshed its passengers about in luxurious jet silence, compared to the Douglas and Convair piston airliners of the time that rattled occupants fillings loose with the roar of multiple radials.

It was something of a shock, therefore, when Comets began falling out of the sky for no adequately explainable reason just over a year later. Exhaustive investigation pointed to a likely culprit: Square windows. The Comet's square-with-rounded-corners windows served to focus stressors at their corners, and when combined with the riveting method used on the skin, stress cracks propagated that caused explosive decompression failures, large chunks of skin to rip away, and the plane to land somewhat sooner and more vertically than anyone, least of all the pilots, had intended.

The defect was rectified in subsequent Comets and it would go on to have a long and distinguished career, but it would now be remembered by posterity not as "The First Jetliner" but as "That Plane That Crashed Because Of Square Windows. Oh, yeah, and The First Jetliner."

Signs You Fear Your Career Might Be Circling The Bowl #423:

You start confessing 30 year old adulteries with back-bench politicians in order to boost book sales.

Like a cycle, only viciouser.

Boy, I get all in a poopy mood, and my output tanks. And that makes me feel poopier, which causes my output to decline further, which...

Blah.

Maybe I can make myself happier by digging through the last two month's worth of emails and figuring out who I've stiffed on responses and apologize profusely to them. Yeah, that should cheer me right the hell up.

Today In Conspiranoiac History: The Big One.

On this date in 1776, Adam Weishaupt founded the Bavarian Illuminati. It wasn't until a technological advance was made in the late 1800's that the citizenry could hope to protect themselves against their machinations.

You asked for it...

LabRat at Atomic Nerds discusses boobies, tits, hooters, puppies, and melons.

Today In History: They don't usually use that door.

On this date in 305AD, Diocletian, in ill health, resigned from his office as Emperor of Rome. He retired to a life of gardening and contemplation in a palace in what is now Croatia.

The fifty-first man to claim the title of Emperor, he was the first to leave office in any manner other than feet-first. Un-poisoned, his head still attached to his shoulders, and no Praetorian cutlery inadvertently left in his ribcage, he left an Empire to his successors that was currently free of revolts, coups, and barbarian incursions.

Of course they dropped the ball in less than a year.

Neat-o!

At just over 53k hits, April of '08 will be VFTP's biggest month ever without an Instalanche. (March's Instalanche helped nudge its total just over 56k.)

Go Team Me!

I'm so proud of me.

For all my dabbling around with computers for lo these many years, I am hardly what one could call a supergeek. Therefore the success of my latest experiment has me nearly dislocating my shoulder trying to pat myself on the back...

Speaking of barbaric customs...

The headline read Girl thrown on fire for being 'low class', and before I clicked on it, I thought "Well, that's it for Britney..."

The Dr. is out.

NRAhab has the skinny on Dr. John McGoff, who is attempting to challenge for the GOP nomination in Indiana's 5th District, and his involvement with Joyce Foundation-funded and Brady-affiliated anti-gun organization "Indiana Partnership to Prevent Firearm Violence", which makes him even less of a Republican than John McCain.

Fortunately, 5th District Republicans won't have to hold their nose in this primary like they will in the national race, because McGoff's opponent, Dan Burton, Votes Freedom First.

Today In History: "They are not men; they are devils!"

Camarone Day.

Sixty-five Legionnaires against three battalions of Mexican troops. When the last five Legionnaires standing ran out of ammunition, they fixed bayonets and charged the Mexican lines rather than surrender.

Gun Lust.

ColtCCO is selling his Remington 600-based .308 Scout Rifle built by the oft-referenced-here-at-VFTP Gunsmith Bob.

I have handled this rifle. I have lusted over this rifle. The only reason ColtCCO even has this rifle is because I didn't know Gunsmith Bob was selling it, and by the time I was aware that it was on the block, the sale was a fait accompli. I have offered the lad serious bucks for the rifle in the past and been turned down.

It is now up for sale. The asking price is less than I had offered in the past, back in the day when I was defecating in high cotton. The person who has the money and does not buy this rifle is a fool. I would climb over a pile of factory Steyr Scouts to get at this thing. I am putting my Bimmer on the block as soon as I can get it washed and pictures taken and if this rifle remains unsold when I have the ducats in hand, I will buy it.

I was an idjit once. Do not be an idjit like me. Do not let this rifle go past without buying it.

Bleh.

Ma Nature has forgotten that it's supposed to be Spring, the sun is playing peek-a-boo behind clouds, and the mercury's struggling to top 50 degrees. As a result, I have given up weeding in the flower beds today as a Bad Idea and am going to finish laundry and write some more. I need to take the defibrillator paddles to The Arms Room next.

In other news, this week's column is up at Low End Mac.

Things I'd like to hear...

At a news conference:

Q: "Mr. President! Mr. President! Do you think we're winning in Afghanistan?"

A: "I don't know, lady; it's not like there's a f^&#ing scoreboard. What do you think this is? A basketball game? Like 'They're committing more fouls than we are and I think we can beat them from the free throw line'?"

More Indy blogger meetup stuff.

RobertaX is the chair of the prom decorating committee now. Organization of date, time, and place is occurring here.

Misunderstanding the concept.

So the heat is on here in Indy. Both campaigns are showing how green they are by filling mailboxes with metric tons of ads printed on the pulped carcasses of dead trees. The airwaves are jammed with promises that Barack will heal the sick and the blind, Hillary will get you a gold house and a rocket car, and both of them are promising they'll not only slash gas prices and punish rich fat cats, but they'll also get you a great-paying job and your own personal physician to live at your house and fix what ails you for free, Free, FREE!

One woman wrote in to the Indy Star to say that she was pulling for Hillary, because Hillary would fix the economy, Hillary would get jobs for Hoosiers, and Hillary really understood that It Takes A Village. What the woman thought it took a village to do, she didn't actually explain. Meanwhile, the Man from Hope and Change promises in his flyers that Indiana jobs are his number one priority.

To read and listen to all this, you'd think that we were democratically electing a Priest-King (or -Queen, as the case may be) to reign over every aspect of our daily lives. Let's turn to the instruction manual and see what it says about this godlike being's chores: Hmmm... Commander-in-Chief of armed forces... reprieves and pardons... can make treaties and appoint ambassadors & judges if the Senate (representing the individual States) signs off on them...

Wow. The section's actually pretty short, and there's damn-all in there about jobs or gas prices or the economy. As a matter of fact, if I didn't know better, it looks like the President is just supposed to be the executive of the small amount of interstate bureaucracy required in a confederation of sovereign states, and that he's supposed to be the interface of said confederation with foreign governments. Provided that the Senate (representing the individual State governments) approves of almost all interactions.

Of course, considering how few Americans have actually read the Constitution or would know where in it to look for the President's job description, it's little wonder we're in the mess we are today, looking for Priest-Kings to save us from all ills...

An analogy that is made of funny.

So there's a kerfuffle in Marko's comments regarding whether or not teh gayz are going to burn in hell, and if so, for how long.

Commenter A said:

In the real world, you can see it for yourself at the so-called Gay Pride events and demonstrations.

To which Commenter B (who happened to be RobertaX) replied:

...but tell me, what would be our opinion of Americans of Irish descent if we judged them on the basis of participants in St. Paddy’s Day parades?

...which for some reason just kicked my gigglebox over.

Damn Irish! You've seen what they do, shoving their Irishness up in my face at those parades! Pouring green beer in the river and peeing on lamp posts. Dyeing their hair green! And I've seen 'em infiltrating the schools, too! Hanging up their harmless little "St. Patrick's Day" decorations so that our children will grow up thinking it's normal to believe in leprechauns and vomit in the street. Why, last March, little Freddy came home from school and actually said "Faith and Begorrah!" Now, I don't have anything against the Irish myself, mind you. But they should keep it to themselves. I mean, even my husband and I enjoy a Guinness every now and again, but we wait 'til the kids are asleep!..

And yes, I was cackling like mad as I typed that.

If you want to see some sick and depraved crap, a public party is the place to go see it, be it a gay pride parade, Freaknik in Atlanta, St. Paddy's day in Boston, Mardi Gras, Sturgis, or spring break in Panama City Beach. Which is why I generally stay away from places like that.

Today In History: Burn, baby, burn.

On this date in 1992, following the announcement of the verdict in the trial of the LAPD officers who put a beat down on Rodney King, Los Angeles burned. Well, actually only parts of it did. Mostly just the parts where the mob doing the burning lived, really.

In Atlanta, we had sort of a riot-ette. I rode around in it in a friend's car and we took photos all night.

Random Stuff From The Web:

More fascinating crap than you ever wanted to know about Japanese bathrooms.

Just in case you want to try this at home, kids: The Intimist.

Meetup?

So, when are we Indy-area gunbloggers going to do some kind of feed 'n' chug? Maybe y'all could pretend to be yuppie trendoids and we could meet up someplace in Broad Ripple? (Admit it: It may be overrun with yuppie trendoid poseurs and knee-deep in hair salons, but the food & beer is teh awesome...)

Thanks, but...

To all the well-meaning commenters, emailers, and folks in meatspace who suggested alleviating my suffering with the miraculous Neti Pot:

Folks, I still to this day plug my nose when jumping in a pool. I can't submerge my head under water without blowing a vigorous stream of bubbles through my nose. The very thought of water getting up my nose... Well, let's say that if I was waterboarded, they'd barely have time to get the wet cloth over my face before I was selling out my own blood kin and screaming "Do it to Julia!"

Suggesting that I pour water up my nose, even a small amount of warm, beneficial water from a happy-looking little mystic clay pot, is like telling the arachnophobe that she should eat the live spider because it's small and furry and full of vitamins. It ain't gonna happen.

The blind policing the blind...

Breda alerted us to an article on (surprise!) even more malfeasance, corruption, and violence by UN Peacekeeping troops. Malfeasance, corruption, and violence largely financed by that ripe suck which is the U.S. Taxpayer.

My first thought was "Pakistani and Indian troops? In the same country? To keep the peace?!? Whose bright idea was that?"

That depends on what your definition of "divisive" is...

Rev. Wright continues to backpedal, while simultaneously spewing new gaffes. I like this part:

In Wright's lengthy, colorful address, he delineated what he felt the differences were between African-Americans and white Americans, including those in music, linguistics and education.

"Different does not mean deficient," he emphasized.

Is anybody else reminded of Reggie White's widely-publicized goofy remarks? When you find yourself in a hole, Reverend, the first thing to do is to stop digging...

Today In History: Sic Semper Chubby Tyrannis.

On this day in 1945, Benito Mussolini got his, stood up against a wall by Italian partisans.