Paranoid much?

Insisting that meddling Westerners were after their Lucky Charms, the bearded and turbaned dried apple dolls of the Iranian Guardian Council accused foreign governments of meddling in the election aftermath with their fancy Great Satan tools like Twitter and BBC and Grand Theft Auto and Denial of Service.

This should point out the utter craziness of the basic premise behind the Iranian theocracy: Imagine, if you will, that you found the half dozen or so most heavily Brylcreemed and polyestered AM radio preachers in America, the ones most disconnected from reality, and made them into a sort of Supremely Supreme Court; the ultimate arbiters of everything in the country. Before you knew it, video games and Tinky Winky would be illegal, it would be a death penalty offense to hide satanic messages backwards in your music or to be Marilyn Manson, the national anthem would be changed to "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam", and the Kennedies would have to find honest work again, perhaps smuggling liquor from Canada like they used to.

New CCW permit arrived in the mail.

This one has the following expiration date: "________".

That's right, for $100 the Indiana .gov will give you a lifetime toter's permit. It took about nine weeks from the trip to the main cop shop downtown to my maildude handing me the envelope.

...

I was going to say something about this, but for once, I find myself at a complete loss for words.

Glrg.

Rosy-cheeked Aurora, goddess of the dawn and bringer of the flannel tongue, is here and I have got to get all my stuff stacked at the front door before Shootin' Buddy shows up to head to the range.

I guess I'll be dirtying the freshly-scrubbed K-22. Mebbe something else, too. Although they're copacetic with rimfire rifles on the indoor range, it's generally too much of a pain in the keister to maneuver even the little Papoose safely in the cramped, crowded confines of Popguns on a weekend. Hopefully I'll get a chance to go later in the week; roomie bought me a membership for my birthday back in January, and I should be making better use of it.

...and then to the Blogmeet this afternoon!

In the meantime, here's old video footage Caleb shot of a GSG-5 in action at Marion County Fish & Game.

Back home again in Indiana...

...and more or less straight to bed.

Rumor has it that we will be shooting at Popguns tomorrow Ay-Emm. The range opens at 11AM, and I'll be the chick with her nose pressed up against the glass waiting for the doors to open.

Then to the blogmeet at three pip-emma.

Typing will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon or Monday morning, because the drive home from K-town has left me just absolutely worn out.

Quote of the Day:

Redefining the descriptor "drily", Jim notes:

I certainly wish history had something to teach us about how seriously we ought to take aerial threats against Hawaii by insane oriental governments.

Moved.

I'm packing the car for the trip home, and a more detailed post is forthcoming when I get back, but here's the Cliff's Notes version:

I went to pick up my car yesterday, I called my roomie to let her know the score and give her an ETA. Gunsmith Bob and I figured that, since I was here for an extra night, we might as well make use of our ticket stubs from Wednesday night's rained out game and go watch the Smokies play before I drove home.

It was a great game, complete with a come-from-behind win in the bottom of the ninth, and the giddy silliness of a minor league ballpark was what I needed to take my mind off the automotive trauma.

Unbeknownst to me, a couple folks decided to point out my open guitar case on the sidewalk while I was away. When I dragged home late last night and opened my email before falling into bed, I nearly started crying. Thank you everybody. You can stop now, really. I'm already going to be spending my first afternoon home writing thank-you notes.

I've got to finish packing the car so I can head back north, and I've got a fun-filled post to write about the Bimmer Adventure when I get there. Catch y'all on the flip side...

Ouch, my life.

It's a bad thing when smoke is pouring off your right front brake caliper, right? Especially when you're 400 miles from home?

I'll be taking it by the dealership in the AM. Gillespie Motors, where I used to have it serviced, is nearby, but I figure the Bimmer shop is more likely to have parts in stock so I don't have to spend an extra night in Tennessee. Hopefully it's just a warped rotor and all I'll need is a set of pads and a replacement disc.

Since I'm broke, watch for the Big Gun Sale when I get home. :(

The holster drama llama has followed me home!

So, Caleb has managed to stir some blog drama....

Now some guy in comments at Hell In A Handbasket is teeing off on belt snobbery. I had to respond:

"Screw leather belts too, I carry with a rigger belt, was sturdy..."

Well, "sturdy" is the operative word here, not "leather". Lots of people use rigger's belts for CCW. Me, sometimes, for instance. Just make sure it's a good one that's not going to roll into a tube under the holster.

Uncle Mike's makes one with a plastic stiffener that works great for around $30. I used it for a couple years, and still have it someplace.

Look, at the end of the day, I don't care how folks carry their guns, it's still (mostly) a free country. I'm just trying to offer some things I learned from accumulating my own boxes-o'-holsters.

Carrying a Glock 29 in an Uncle Mike's nylon pancake rig with 1.5" belt loops on a 1" leather JC Penny belt sucks. The belt rolls up under the holster. The holster slides and shifts on the belt. The gun flops in the holster. Ask me how I know this.

At the time I was doing so, I thought that the people who were always going on about stiff belts designed to carry a gun, with a snug holster that had loops properly sized to grip the belt, were all a bunch of effete know-it-all snobs. A belt was a belt and a holster was a holster, right? Only not.

Easier and usefuller.

Brownells may be the single most important company on the planet for inveterate hobbyist gun tinkerers and professional gunsmiths alike, but their website was always a little... how to put this gently? ..."user-hostile".

It seems to be all better now.

Thank you, Brownells!


(H/T to Sebastian.)

Things I Don't Get.

1) Why does my Marlin Papoose have a magazine safety? I had never really noticed this before, until I stripped it for cleaning, reassembled it, and went to function-check the gun and was rewarded by a complete absence of clicky noises when the trigger was pulled.

Magazine safeties are silly and of extremely dubious utility on pistols, and utterly pointless on rifles. Especially on takedown .22 rifles that are pimped as emergency guns for the outdoorsy crowd. If you're in some hypothetical wilderness survival situation and lose your magazine, you'll be reduced to trying to beat small game to death with the buttstock, which will almost certainly expend more calories than you'll get out of a squirrel or rabbit.


2) How come the only .22 pistol on the market that is deliberately designed for small hands is such a ruptured ball of crap? Seriously, the idea behind the Walther P-22 is great; it's small and light and sized perfectly for teaching children to shoot, but if you put a serious number of rounds through it, it will be reduced to scrap before your kid is old enough for a driver's license. For the same money you could get a vastly superior Ruger or Browning, but those are sized for adult hands.

It would be awfully disappointing to be teaching your kid gun safety and marksmanship with a P-22, only to have the zamak slide separate and undo all that money you'd spent on orthodontics...

Bummer.

We drove out to see the Tennessee Smokies play the Carolina Mudcats, but Ma Nature had other ideas.

By about 20 minutes after the scheduled start time, the tarp was still on the field, and you could have floated a bass boat in the lake behind second base. Basically we went out, had hot dogs (well, I had the especial de la maison of Smokies Ballpark: BBQ Nachos) in an open-air restaurant with a hefty cover charge, got rained on, and then drove home, all without getting to see any baseball.

On the upside, I did pick up some tchotchkes: Stuffed dolls of the Smokies' mascots, Slugger and Diamond.

Charting an epiphany.

Lissa has an imaginary conversation with her younger self about the feel-good collection of useless grandstanders that is the United Nations.

It was the "peace-keeping" missions that always got to me. I mean, sure, you may have some well-disciplined and good-intentioned Canucks or Danes along, trying to score points for their motherland in the International Miss Congeniality competition, but their efforts are for naught when the bulk of the "peace-keeping" force is made up of two battalions of the Absurdistani Light Rifles who treat the assignment as a sort of rape-and-petty-theft wanderjahr.

Any organization that would put Syria on a Human Rights Commission has, to put it mildly, a fundamental structural flaw.

It means "Someone I Think Is Icky."

“Right Wing” is rapidly replacing “Neocon” (which replaced “Reactionary” which replaced “Fascist”) as the favorite vague pejorative of hippies. Make the appropriate notations in your Berlitz.

What I don't get...

...is if you're already using corked bats, why would you need the 'roids?

At least I know that my favorite baseball player, Greg Maddux, wasn't using steroids. Or if he was, he should have asked for a refund.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard: "We will pwn j00!"

"We will very soon inform the public the details of these destructive Internet networks and we warn the people who want to use cyberspace to incite riot, threaten people and create rumors that legal action will be taken against them and the penalty they will pay is very heavy," the Guard said in a statement carried by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Further, they denounced Moussavi supporters as a "bunch of c4mp3r f4g5" and stated that the internet is not a big truck, but rather a series of tubes.

Since the Revolutionary Guard is a bunch of lamers and n00bs, the threat was considered to be of questionable validity.

We're big babies...

Part of being a Smith & Wesson fan is pissing and moaning and throwing a temper tantrum every time the company changes anything about their revolvers. It doesn't matter whether the change had any real effect or not, it's always a sure sign that the bean-counters are in charge and the company is going down the crapper and I'm never buying another gun from them and furthermore I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue see if I don't!

Presented for your consideration:

The Fifth Screw: Well, it didn't really do anything. A five-screw sideplate is a little easier to re-install than later ones, but apparently not all that much.

The Fourth Screw: This one actually did something. The cylinder stop bolt in modern Smiths goes in with a bunch of poking and tweaking at a tiny spring. On older ones you just dropped the bolt in and then inserted the spring and plunger through the hole in front of the trigger guard. then stuck the screw in the hole. No muss, no fuss. Of course, this only matters if you're taking the gun apart and putting it back together yourself.

The Recessed (countersunk) Charge Holes in the cylinder: They only did it in magnum revolvers anyway. No real loss.

The Pinned Barrel: Here's one that can start arguments. With the pinned barrel, you'd screw it in until the hole lined up, and then drive the barrel pin in. This worked fine provided that it hadn't been an off day and the threads were cut to spec. If the threads weren't cut to spec, the force of firing could bugger them all up over time. The barrels after '82 were crush-fit snugly which lessened the chances of this, but...

The Two-Piece Barrel: With the crush-fit barrel, it was torqued 'til tight. Sometimes, this resulted in the front sight not being, you know, straight. The two-piece barrel eliminates this by mounting the front sight on the sleeve, which is always straight, no matter how the actual barrel is tightened. Of course, the inner portion is still crush fit, which can cause distortion of the rifling, something that didn't happen with the pinned barrels... All three methods have faults; you pays your money and you takes your chances. However it's funny to hear people claim that Smith went to two-piece barrels because they're "cheaper". These people obviously can't count machining steps.

Metal Injection Molded Lockwork: Meh. It seems to work fine, but it sure does make it harder to get a nice trigger pull. It does get rid of the hammer-mounted firing pin, which is marginally more breakage-prone than the frame-mounted variety. The MIM triggers, with their hollow backs, look cheap, too.

The Lock: Lots of people have locks on their guns: Bersa, Walther, Ruger, Taurus, HK, Springfield Armory... But none of these people sell tradition like S&W does; it's gone over like New Coke or water-cooling on a Harley. It doesn't help that the lock is visually obtrusive and mechanically suspect, especially on the hard-recoiling flyweight revolvers that make up such a large part of S&W's lineup these days.

Anyhow, this ties into another thought I've had on the subject, concerning Smith & Wesson's new "Classic" lineup. More on that later.

...and the deadbeat goes on...

The numbers are in for the month of May, and U.S. credit card lenders got stiffed by a record number of Americans.

Why this comes as a shock to anybody is a mystery, since for the last decade lenders have been passing out cards along with the freshman orientation packets on college campuses and including them as prizes in boxes of Cracker Jacks. When you hand out lines of credit to individuals that any sane person wouldn't trust with a burnt out match, you've got to expect that some of them are going to have all the sense of solemn obligation of a three year old at her birthday party. "Okay, they've trusted me, and now it's time to be responsible and pay them bac... Ooh! A pony!"

Of course, part of the whole collapsing bubble in which we're trapped right now is that Counting Chickens Before They Hatch has become the newest fad in the financial sector, with whole teetering edifices built on imaginary numbers generated by loans with less hope of being paid back than the Washington Nationals have of winning the World Series...

Training class.

Rob Pincus of ICE Training is going to be teaching a 2-day Combat Focus Shooting course at Coal Creek Armory this July.

If you're going to spend money on a pistol, shouldn't you spend a little on learning how to use it?

Oh. Em. Gee.

My roomie has discovered the throbbing epicenter of surrealism on teh intarw3bz.

I have never seen its like.

No User-Serviceable Parts Inside.

I have a confession to make. I was spoiled rotten for fifteen years. Working at a gun store with real live gunsmiths, any time I needed a revolver serviced, I could just bring it to work with me.

Oh, sure, I knew how they worked, and had seen up inside them plenty of times, but when it came to actually turning screws on them? Never did it. Some people may not realize this, since everybody always talks about how "simple" revolvers are, but the inside of a Smith & Wesson double-action revolver is the scene of a complex mechanical ballet that makes the guts of an autopistol look simple. A Glock or 1911 is a stone axe by comparison.

So when I mentioned on the phone to Gunsmith Bob that I was going to bring my well-used K-22 Combat Masterpiece down for a cleaning and a bit of trigger work, he told me "And you're going to do it. You have, what? Fifty of the things? There's no excuse for you to not be able to do basic work on them. We're going to have a little class."

Wish me luck.

Great new thrill rides!

The screamalicious Bad Debt Loop-the-Loop! The terrifying Revenue Plunge! The laugh-a-minute Red Ink River Log Flume! The spooky Ghost of Responsibility Haunted House!

It's all part of the plan for Six Flags to offer more relevant excitement as part of their bankruptcy filing.

Raise your hand if you overslept...

Yeah, me too.

His insurance guy stopped returning his calls, too...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declined Sunday to guarantee the safety of his defeated rival Mir Hossein Moussavi in response to a question from CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

Translation: He's toast.

We control the horizontal, we control the vertical...

...but some script kiddie in Minsk pwns your local power grid.

[T]he Obama administration - no doubt at the behest of the Greens - is paving the way. Billions of dollars in the "stimulus" plan is for purchase and deployment of "smart" power meters, centrally controlled network devices that can let power be remotely turned on or off. The power companies like them because it makes it easy to implement "rolling blackouts" - think California in 1999. The Obama administration and the Greens like them because they now can make you use less power.

The bad guys like them because they can now use automated malware technology to take over the entire power grid at once...

I'm sure this seemed like a good idea to somebody, but that person must have had the trust of a kitten and the foresight of an anencephalic flatworm.

Time travel.

I cut the TeeWee off in the bottom of the fifth, with the Braves down ten to nothing. Today's laugher is making yesterday's blooper-fest look like a close game.

It's like awakening from a dream and finding out that 1991-2005 never happened. I half expect to see Bob Horner step up to bat, or hear that Pascual Pérez got lost circling I-285 on the way to the ballpark again...

Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside...

Somewhere, a hippie just vapor-locked.

Snark from Steyn:

Steyn on health care:

According to the U.N. figures, life expectancy in the United States is 78 years; in the United Kingdom, it’s 79 — yay, go socialized health care! On the other hand, in Albania, where the entire population chain-smokes and the health-care system involves swimming to Italy, life expectancy is still 71 years — or about where America was a generation or so back. Once you get childhood mortality under control, and observe basic hygiene and lifestyle precautions, the health “system” is relatively marginal. One notes that, even in Somalia, which still has high childhood mortality, not to mention a state of permanent civil war, functioning government has entirely collapsed and yet life expectancy has increased from 49 to 55. Maybe if government were to collapse entirely in Washington, our life expectancy would show equally remarkable gains. Just thinking outside the box here.

People's selective blindness on this issue is amazing. Your most committed fan-of-government Obama voter will, like any other person with enough functioning brain cells to guide a fork from plate to mouth, carp endlessly about the ineptness of the DMV, the inefficiencies of the Post Office, the cronyism of the zoning board, and yet they will then turn around and clamor for this same witless behemoth to be placed in charge of their doctor's office too. What was that definition of insanity, again?


(H/T to New Paltz Journal.)

"If you are dense, please call the number on the bottom of the screen that you can't see..."

The Federal Communication Commission, on its Web site, said Friday's switch to digital television by 971 full-power stations had prompted hundreds of thousands of calls for help...

According to the Nielsen Co., three million people somehow managed to ignore almost a year of public service announcements, scrolling banners, billboards, smoke signals, passenger pigeon flights, and direct broadcasts from orbital mind-control lasers, and wound up watching digital static on their TeeWees.

I would think that if, after all that hoopla, you still aren't able to watch your stories in the afternoon or Dancing With The Stars over dinner, maybe you should just give up on the whole TeeWee thing and go for a walk, or read a book or something.

Disappointing.

So, the Braves didn't get beat yesterday so much as they actively lost the game. One moment I was watching a Major League Baseball game (well, sorta; it was in Baltimore so they were using that goofy designated hitter rule that allows managers to sleep through games without having to trouble their grizzled heads about complicated things like pinch hitters,) and the next thing you know I'm watching The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training.

Good and bad, right and wrong, food and fuel...

Frank James has a thoughtful two-parter on economics, politics, and farming:

I firmly believe that those who attach a moral value or a judgement of right vs. wrong on how a commodity is used are following the same lines of thought as that raised by Karl Marx in Das Capital and later enumerated in The Communist Manifesto.

RTWT.

Book addendum...

While I was at McKay's yesterday, Staghounds pulled a book off the shelf in the Military History section and said "You need to read this, it's excellent...", except I'd already read it.

By sheer coincidence, later that evening, Gunsmith Bob pulled the identical book off his shelf and said "I'll let you read this while you're here, but I don't want to lose the copy, so..."

Two recommendations, same book, same day. I'll therefore recommend it to y'all: My War Gone By, I Miss It So.

I first read it in the back of a minivan headed to SHOT Show in Orlando. I started on page one in the driveway in Knoxville and glanced up fifteen minutes later to see that we'd somehow already made it to Florida. I'd let y'all borrow mine, but I don't want to lose the copy, so...

Overheard in the bookstore...

In something rapidly approaching tradition, on my visits to Knoxville I meet my friend Staghounds for lunch at Calhoun's and a trip to McKay's used book store.

McKay's is pretty coherently laid out, and we were over in what would have been the 300's had they actually been using the Dewey Decimal System, pointing out interesting books to each other (going to a used book store with another avid reader of similar tastes is the best way to find new stuff) when I hear him say "'Selling Women Short'? I didn't know that women were traded on the futures market..." which caused a fit of giggling that took a few minutes to bring under control.

I found some interesting books, but McKay's is big enough that I'll be able to make another stop there with Gunsmith Bob before I head back north of the Ohio. I've never been in that place when it wasn't jumping and the parking lot wasn't packed like they were giving dollar bills away inside. I've never left without spending at least $20, and the average is closer to $50. When Peter of Bayou Renaissance Man fame would visit, he'd usually earmark at least a C-note specifically for an afternoon-long visit to McKay's and head back to Louisiana with a couple boxes full of books. Whatever their business model, they need to license it to a store in Indy...

Brace for nomex bathrobes...

Apparently six people have turned into roman candles when their non-flame-retardant lounging attire combusted.

This seems to occur when cooking over an open flame, and so we here at VFTP would like to steal a march on the CPSC and hand out a few safety pointers:

1. Don't let your clothes catch fire.
2. For Vishnu's sake, if you botch step one, remove the burning item of apparel promptly. Don't just stand there and stare at it like a duck in thunder while the rest of your garments go up in in flames, making you look like the centerpiece of a pretentious artsy hippie festival.
3. If these steps appear complicated or confusing, may we suggest alternate kitchen wear?

June Blogmeet Is Go.

Details here.

Bimmer: 1, Buzzard: 0

There are many "firsts" in life: your first kiss, your first date, the first time you bunt a buzzard into the Great Beyond with your vehicle...

That's right, I hit my very first buzzard yesterday, on I-74 in southern Indiana, just shy of the Ohio state line. I was tooling along at eighty in the slow lane and thinking "Wow, that's a big bird. Is that a hawk? Huh, it looks like he's going to land in the fast lane. He did! Whoops, my car has spooked him and he's taking off. OH $H..!!!" Now with him straining for altitude right over my hood ornament, I could see that he was not, in fact, a hawk...

There was a clatter of impact as all the hard parts of a buzzard pranged off the windshield header. I looked up, expecting to see a tear in the top, but it seemed to be intact, so I continued on to my next gas stop at Georgetown, Kentucky, sure that the roof of the Zed Three was strewn with buzzard subassemblies and wishing for a good rain to wash them off.

My fears were unfounded, however, as Buster the Buzzard didn't even chip the paint so's you'd notice. I hope his buddies ate him. I shouldn't have wished so hard for rain, however, because it then proceeded to rain like a cow peeing on a flat rock from Lexington all the way to the far side of the Tennessee border.

I-75 South was crowded with Michigan and Ohio plates. I don't know what it is about cars with Ohio plates outside of Ohio, but they all drive one of two ways. Either they creep along at one mile-per-hour under the limit, as though there were a valiant member of the Ohio State Patrol sitting in the back seat and peering over their shoulder at the speedometer, or they drive as though they'd just escaped...

Peace On Earth...Purity Of Essence...

"I don't avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence." -Gen. Jack D. Ripper

So, yeah, about the codger who lost contact with Mission Control at the Holocaust Museum today... Have you read his manifesto? Yowza.

Just because you think they're all always after your Lucky Charms doesn't mean you can go start shooting at the voices. (But if you just have to start shooting at the voices, shoot at the one in your head first, please. Preferably out in the woods, or someplace with linoleum or tile floors.)

...and that's all I have to say about that.

Joe Huffman encounters the most irrefutable argument in the gun-banners' arsenal, which goes something like this:

LaLaLaLaLaLaIcan'thearyou!

If ten percent is good enough for Jesus...

...then it should be good enough for the Other Jesus.

That's kinda weird.

Remember me going on about the Michael Flynn books about the private space program?

Well, in the books the lead contractor was a Brazilian aerospace company, and the whole SSTO program was being developed on the island of Fernando de Noronha; probably a third of the first book takes place on the island, and the author describes it in some detail.

Well, it showed up in the news this morning as the place where they're stacking the floaters from the Air France... uh... accident.

You don't have to be completely clueless to write for the Tennessean...

...but it helps.

Rodney Stanley, opining on the restaurant carry bill (and displaying his utter cluelessness on the state of the law in Tennessee):

Instead of weapons being used to protect one's home and personal vehicle, they could now be used by citizens in public venues.

You mean like they are right now? And have been for many years?

Look, Rodney, this probably comes as a shock, but all those folks around you in the mall and Wally World and the grocery store may already be legally packing heat, they just had to unstrap if they wanted to grab a burger for lunch at Applebee's instead of Hardee's. This law just fixes that. Unclench and return to normal breathing, okay? You're in no more danger of a shootout over the last bit of Bloomin' Onion at Outback next month than you've been over the organic arugula at Kroger's these last fifteen years or so...

That's some layers of editorial oversight, baby. Are you sure you're not wearing pyjamas?

(H/T to Unc.)

Today's photo caption contest:

"Fly, my monkeys! Fly!"

Alternate Caption:

Pelosi: "Don't tase me, bro!"

Overheard in the Gun Store:

Me: "Geez, I've got more rimfire ammo than y'all do."

SalesGuy: "That's not funny."

They had a few of the 500-round cartons of Remington Thunderbolt, but other than that it was onesy-twosies of shotshells, CB shorts, and one box of CCI SGB's.

SayUncle wins the internets.

Just the title of this post had me laughing 'til it hurt.

Your morning dose of apocalyptic cheerfulness:

"Welcome to the savage world of the year 2009."

I wonder how the unemployment rate stacks up between '92 and '09? I'd check, but I'd just depress myself.

On the other hand, in 1992 Dodge was still making the Dynasty, and in 2009 it's long dead, so there's an upside...

Quote of the Day:

Hecate reviews Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, and offers her thoughts on the victim mentality versus the survivor mentality:

The urge to stay a victim is seductive. Our society favors victims, cosseting them and setting up well-funded groups to be their advocates. These groups depend on a steady supply of victims for their existence. Government and law enforcement officials also depend on a steady supply of victims to justify expanding their power and control over every aspect of subjects' citizens' lives.

Her comments on "stuck victims" are are interesting, too.

Funniest video evar. (At least this week.)

The video that single-handedly justifies the existence of YouTube.

"U.S. citizens detained..."

CIA spies aboard the USS Pueblo were... no, wait, wrong year...

Two CIA operatives posing as journalists working for Al Gore have been found guilty of spying on the Dear Leader (no, not ours; North Korea's,) and sentenced to twelve years hard labor in re-educational confinement strength-through-joy camps.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelley told reporters

"We are deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities, and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release. A carrier battlegroup accompanied by the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is at sea steaming for Korean waters now. I am authorized to confirm the deployment of additional USAF squadrons to Japan and the ROK, but I can neither confirm nor deny any rumors you have heard about the lights being on late at Pope AFB and Fort Bragg. I can say that we will show those people that you do not screw with a blue passport."

Actually, I made up all that stuff after "release". What he really went on to say was

"We once again urge North Korea to grant the immediate release of the two American citizen journalists on humanitarian grounds."

Which is pretty funny, really. You've gotta be a special kind of stupid to appeal "on humanitarian grounds" to a nation which fences its people in with guards dogs and electrified barbed wire while they starve to death so that their Dear Leader (not our Dear Leader, North Korea's,) can afford imported booze and hookers.

"Hey! I can see the New Socialist Man from up here!"

You can't make this stuff up...

Apparently, there was some fear that newly-minted squid officers would charge the podium and hack the Dear Leader to death with their ceremonial dress swords (which are, incidentally, dull as butter knives and only marginally more dangerous or weapon-like than a bent coathanger.)

Said newly-minted squid officers then marched off, damp diplomas in hand, and received the keys to jet fighters, Tomahawk launchers, whole teams full of SEALs, and other deadly weapons.

Security kabuki at its finest.

(H/T to Unc.)

The new Obama Administration show:

Dancing With The Czars!

That's pretty funny right there.

If you listen to fools, the mob rules.

California's impending götterdämmerung is almost too painful to watch for two reasons: First, because you and I will be expected to pay for it, and second, because it's just a foretaste of what's coming to a city or state near you.



It's come to California a little sooner than the rest of the country, because in California, democracy is more perfected than anywhere else in America. This leads to popular referenda with questions like:

1. Do you want a gold house and a rocket car? Yes. No.
2. Do you want to pay for it? Yes. No.

Thankfully democracy is not quite so perfected elsewhere in the US, because nine times out of ten, when you ask someone "Do you want free stuff?", be it bombers or boulevards or baseball stadiums, they'll answer in the affirmative without the slightest thought as to from where the money to pay for all this is supposed to materialize.

However there are people who would like to bring more perfected democracy to the rest of America. Here's one:



Wasn't that scary?

It is to anybody who lives in New York, Illinois, or California, because they already know how that works. See, the guy in the video says the presidential candidates will need to campaign everywhere instead of just battleground states. BS. With the presidential election decided by popular vote, candidates won't even have to waste money on commercials in Boise or Des Moines anymore. Just as the Illinois governor's race is decided in Cook County and Peoria doesn't matter more than spit on a griddle, so the presidential election will be decided in the BosWash, Chicago, and SoCal megalopolii and you kids in New Mexico might as well sleep in that day.

Just think how much fun that will be!

Pop Quiz:

Where in the Constitution does it specify the eligibility requirements for citizens to vote for the President? You know, age, sex, property owned, stuff like that...

(Insert Jeopardy music...)

Okay, pencils down.

Which of you answered "It doesn't"? You all get A's. It just says that the states will send electors who will cast their votes; the federal Constitution says nothing about how the states will choose their electors.

Quote(s) Of The Day:

Mark Steyn can get a little "Markie One-Note" about the failure of yuppie wombs to counter the fecundity of the Muslim Peril, but that takes nothing away from the fact that he's just brilliant; a veritable self-propelled, organic "Quote of the Day" machine.

From a book review at The New Criterion:

The all-pervasive micro-regulatory state “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so after a while you don’t even notice. And in exchange for liberty it offers security: the “right” to health care; the “right” to housing; the “right” to a job—although who needs that once you’ve got all the others?

From an Orange County Register column on the Dear Leader's latest forelock-tugging Apology '09 world tour:

Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It's not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?

As always, RTWT. (Er, both whole things.)

Seen in Broad Ripple...

Driving through sunny Broad Ripple today, on the way to the Brew Pub for lunch, we passed a street scene typical of this hip, artsy district: Surly teenage skate wanks, families with strollers, bohemians walking dogs, children on bicycles, giant hot dogs and ice cream cones randomly perambulating about the streets...


The picture was taken at the mystic intersection of Westfield and Westfield, and involved a lot of conversation in the car along the lines of "Do you see that too?"

"What, the giant walking hot dog?"

"Yeah... Whew! For a minute there I was afraid it was just me..."

Sure enough, an hour or so later and a few blocks north, we were sitting in the Brew Pub finishing up lunch when the edible duo bopped nonchalantly by on the sidewalk past the windows, causing who knows how many conversations to grind to a momentary halt as diners took in the oddball sight.

I knew it!

Number 126 on the list of Stuff White People Like? Vespa Scooters. I knew my roomie was suspiciously pale.

Namely, scooters are perfect for gentrifying neighborhoods which are often short on parking and heavy on people who are impressed by Vespas.

That puts us smack in the target demographic, all right. I should look into a scooter myself.

(...and this was the giveaway for my pal Marko.)

Being room temperature is no excuse for breaking the law.

NYC issues parking tickets to dead guy. (Video.)

While he is cooling to ambient in the car.

For several weeks.

Amongst some hippie drivel at HuffPo...

...I managed to get a pretty good chuckle out of one line.

The setting is a classroom in Idaho in the far off future of 2109 AD. The teacher is telling her class of enraptured pupils about how President Obama saved the world back in 2009. Somehow it segues into a lecture on the horrific carnivorous eating habits of us early 21st Century primitives:

Professor Dawkins, who was the foremost evolutionary scientist of his day, denounced what he called "speciesist arrogance" -- this idea that human beings are the pinnacle of creation -- and he called other species our "cousins,"...

...and, as Shiva is my witness, the first thought that sprang unbidden to my mind was "Well, they are our cousins. Our rich, tasty cousins. Yum!"

...and right on cue:

No we can't!



(H/T to The Irritable Architect.)

No we can't!

Remember when you were little and you were whining to go to Disneyland or order a large pizza for supper or to get that shiny new toy, and your dad said "No, we can't afford it"?

He said that because he was a grownup, and it was his job to be responsible.

We need a new political party in Washington, to get the checkbook away from the 537 people who have been kiting checks like a runaway teenager who boosted mom's purse. Not the G.O.P., because they're part of the problem.

We will call ourselves the G.U.P.: the GrownUp Party, and our motto will be "No we can't!"

Chant it with me now:

"But all the other kids have ice cream and free universal health care!"

"No we can't!"

"Dad, I need a loan to keep my lemonade stand and automobile manufacturer in business!"

"No we can't!"

"No fair! Suzy got bailed out of her dumb high risk loans! Bail me out, too!"

"No we can't!"

"I want to go to Mars, North Korea, and Six Flags!"

"No we can't!"

We could have us a movement.

New cabinet level post proposed:

Now that the federal government has more czars than the Romanov dynasty, the Obama administration is thinking about appointing a czar czar, to keep track of all of them.

Better check your premise...

In a column dripping with pretentious hipster scorn for the ignorant cousin-marrying hillbilly rednecks of Kentucky taking guns to church, Gawker writer "The Cajun Boy" opines

Jesus must be looking down on all of this beaming with pride right now. You just know if he were down here with us he'd be packing, and probably using his heat to murder OB/GYNs who perform abortions.

No he wouldn't, you ignorant tool; it's illegal to bring a gun to church in the state of Kansas. You know, so people won't get shot.


(H/T John the Red, via email.)

Prepare for no blood in the streets!

Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, who apparently doesn't like living in the governor's mansion, vetoed the "Guns In Restaurants" bill. The bill allowed Tennesseans who have completed a training course that includes legal instruction and marksmanship qualification, as well as passed an FBI background check, to carry their sidearms in restaurants that served alcohol, as long as they promised not to drink.

The veto was overridden by the TN state legislature approximately 27 seconds later, leaving Phil a sad, and very lame-duck, panda.

Now Tennesseans can look forward to the same kind of blood-soaked carnage I have to face every time I go to the Broad Ripple Brew Pub. Which is to say "none at all". (And Indiana doesn't even care if you tip back a few wet ones while you're packing, so long as you don't go ventilating passersby with your hogleg.)

Stone cold stupid.

Bob S. brings us the charming tale of a young man in Florida who sought to gain, and I quote, "street cred" for his future career as a hip hop artist by committing armed robberies.

This is one of the popular myths that people want to attach to firearms. That every "gun owner" has the same culture, the same values, the same principles. We don't. The results are clear & easy to see - Some people commit crimes with their firearms and some people use their firearms for sporting and self defense purposes without breaking the law. Same types of firearms, just completely different cultures.

As an aside, I will note that our larval thug's weapon of choice was a BB pistol and his getaway vehicle was a scooter. "Street cred" indeed.

Gun Safety for Dummies.

MSNBC has a chirpy piece about all the wonderful technology that's slated to take the place of common sense and good gun handling.

Of course, all the gadgets and gizmos in the world won't keep a dumbass from shooting himself in the foot, as long as he's the dumbass with the key to the internal lock and the fingerprint reader recognizes him as an authorized dumbass.

Gun safety begins with education and ends with good habits, rigorously and constantly practiced. All this Rube Goldberg garbage dangling off guns these days makes them safe only in the same way welding the barrel shut would; by making them useless. Which is what the other side views as the endgame, anyway.

Rule #4.

The Tactical Wire kills wrong guy.

About this weather...

There is a polar bear on my front porch. He doesn't look very endangered, and he wants to borrow my Wooby. In June.

The TeeWee weather gnome says that we are being shortchanged by some thirteen degrees today. I want to know who has those degrees, and I would like them back.

Priorities.

Okay, so apparently we have two US citizens imprisoned in North Korea for some strange offense against the benevolent government of their Dear Leader. Granted, they were hippies working for Al Gore, but they're U.S. citizens nonetheless. Their hippieness just makes the irony more delicious when they get rescued by the USS Iwo Jima.

Which of course isn't going to happen, because North Korea is slinging nukes and missiles around like a spilled ashtray in a roadside fireworks stand and all we've done about it is drop some stern glances of disapproval and threats of... well, nothing, actually. What are you going to threaten them with? Cutting off trade? The only thing they trade is dirt, and that only on the domestic market. Although there are rumors that they're looking at branching out into the ICBM export business. Maybe we could get Al Qaeda Pakistan to slap a prohibitive tariff on N. Korean rockets. That'll show 'em how miffed we are!

Meanwhile, our Dear Leader is busy kowtowing to the wogs in some oppressive third-world hell hole. If he had a forelock, he'd be tugging it.

Well, at least it won't be a dull four years.

The ammo shortage explained...

...with beer!

Wooby weather? In June?

Yesterday was hail.

Today, I am wearing my Wooby while reading on the front porch. In June.

Tomorrow will perhaps be a rain of frogs, or the water turning to wormwood in the White River a few blocks north.


(PS: I love my Wooby. Not only is it warm and soft, it is incredibly fun to say. Wooby! Woobywoobywooby!)

Protecting turf.

One of the key ingredients in a good global depression is a vigorous trade war.

(H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

A thousand words.

This made me laugh. Well, more of an uncomfortable chuckle, actually...

Random Gun Stuff:

1) I like taking ammo to the range loose in ammo cans. I've been using them for my most commonly used range calibers: .22LR, .38 Special, 9x19, .45ACP, and .223. I finally got another ammo can, and dumped all my .44 Special (except the Buffalo Bore) in it. Now I can use the freed-up MTM Case-Gard boxes for .44-40. I feel so organized.

2) I still need .45ACP dies, darnit. I've got all my major handgun calibers covered except this one. I'd like to get some .32ACP dies, too.

3) I have this .243Win ammo sitting here, and nothing in which to fire it. Someone had expressed interest via email, but I lost the email in the morass of my in-box. There are 18 rounds of Federal Premium 70gr Nosler Ballistic Tip in one of those little camo MTM belt containers, a full 20rd box of Federal Premium 100gr Sierra Gamekings, and nine rounds left of Remington 100gr Core-Lokt in the factory box. Email me and we'll engage in an act of voluntary capitalism between consenting adults.

4) I picked up a blue gun to be able to practice some gun kata in the living room without having to use an actual firearm. It's one of those Ring's blue guns; a Springfield Operator. (I need to dremel the tac rail off of it so it will fit my leather.) The molding is extremely detailed, down to the Novak's imprint on the rear sight. I will note that whoever owned the gun Ring's used for their mold has a wicked flinch; that rear sight is drifted way to the right...

Mother Nature tried to kill my 'maters.

We got a spot of weather here in scenic Broad Ripple yesterday; hail the size of buckshot coming down in gutter-clogging sheets.

Three of my tomato plants have snapped stems and the hostas in the front yard look like they've been peppered with a shotgun.

It was pretty cool to sit under the porch roof and watch, though. If you can't do anything about the weather, you might as well at least enjoy the show.

Of course, what is a minor annoyance to me and my tomato plants can be a disaster for others.

Today In History: Dangerous Jobs.

Oh, sure, being a lumberjack or crab fisherman is dangerous, but usurping the imperial purple in Rome? That was nearly always fatal. It's a wonder anybody took the job.

Anyhow, on this date in 350 AD, a well-to-do young lad named Nepotianus, who'd had several relatives in the emperoring business, hired a bunch of gladiators and marched into Rome at their head. The timing seemed auspicious for a bit of throne-grabbing, since the general Magnentius was already in open revolt in Gaul, and our boy Nepotianus figured he had every bit as good a claim as anyone else.

Unfortunately for Nepotianus, his talent ran more towards improvisation than long range planning. Sure, everybody was running around calling themselves "Augustus" at the moment, but some royal ancestors and a platoon of gladiators were not as solid a claim on the throne as command of a major field army. By the end of June, troops loyal to general Magnentius had crushed Nepotianus' little power grab and paraded his head on a spear through the streets of Rome.

Things to do...

Y'know, I still haven't taken my CZ-52 to the range, and I've had the thing since February...

I really like shooting those Czech rayguns; there's plenty of sturm und drang, what with fireballs at the muzzle and spent brass being flung into the next ZIP code, so you don't stand around wondering if it went off or not, yet there's hardly any recoil.

Maybe I should take the Radom Tokarev along and do some kind of head-to-head thing, like a writeup with pictures and stuff.

It's not really a run on guns and ammo...

Everybody has been going on and on about the run on guns and ammo, but as current events demonstrate, it wasn't a run on all guns and ammo, just certain kinds.

Stores that are completely out of 9mm and .308 have plenty of 12ga birdshot. Rifle and pistol primers may be scarce, but 209 shotshell primers and #11 percussion caps are plentiful. Your local shop may be out of H4198, but there's probably plenty of Pyrodex and Triple 7.

Take from this what you will...

GM axes dumbest division.

Once upon a time, the U.S. military needed to replace the Jeep. So it spent a brazillion dollars and came up with seriously capable off-road truck with the nickname-unfriendly acronymical sobriquet "HMMWV" made by AM General here in Indiana.

When compared to normal passenger vehicles, it was huge. Nearly a lane wide, with enough ground clearance to practically straddle a fireplug without dinging the oil pan, the HMMWV's mechanicals were shoved up into the truck to protect them from landmines, which resulted in a hood so high you needed Sherpas and oxygen to check the dipstick and a transmission tunnel that made a chat with your passenger a long-distance call.

Not only that, but it was positively agricultural in performance on pavement; it could be out-drag-raced by any minivan and its top speed necessitated drafting UPS trucks on the freeway to keep from getting rear-ended by diesel Rabbits.

It was terrifically butch-looking, however, and once Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up on the street with one, every Walter Mitty on God's green earth wanted one, too. At least until they found out what they were like up close. See, being a fairly specialized vehicle designed for the government, the price was nosebleed steep for 1992, and most folks willing to dump over fifty G's on a vehicle didn't want a slow one with an interior that could be cleaned out with a hose. Sales were, needless to say, as lethargic as the vehicle's highway performance.

General Motors bought the name "Hummer" from AM General in 1998 and decided to cash in on the popularity of the real military HMMWV by offering a more profitable vehicle. They took their existing pickup/SUV chassis and dropped a HMMWV-esque bodyshell on it and took the Walter Mitty market by storm with the new "Hummer H2" which was, essentially, a Chevy Suburban with a codpiece.

With the H2 selling well, GM slapped a chest toupee on their compact pickup and started selling it as the Hummer H3 and discontinued civilian sales of the actual HMMWV, which had been saddled with the moniker "Hummer H1".

This all occurred, of course, just in time for the price of gas to double and then, after a few more years, the economy to crater. Suddenly nobody wanted really big SUV's that cost a bajillion dollars, and that was bad news for a one-trick pony of a division like Hummer. Plus the government, which has just pumped oceans of money into GM, is threatening to raise the average fuel-economy requirement and mandate production of cars powered by moonbeams and unicorn farts, and when you take the king's shilling, you gotta dance to the king's tune. So it's adios Hummer; second baby out of the GM sleigh...

I'm pretty sure that's not what she meant...

"Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory..." -Nancy Pelosi

Funny, but I did just that on Sunday afternoon, without even knowing that one of my Dear Leaders had directed me to do so.

My inventory showed that I was low on .44 Spl and .32 ACP. On the other hand, I noted that several of my 30-rd mags still had green followers, and so I replaced them with shiny new MagPul anti-tilt units.

I try and replace springs whenever I replace followers, whether the old spring needs replacing or not. If the old spring still measures out good, I throw it in my "Just In Case" box.

When it comes to magazines and ammunition, I've always believed in the old maxim "If some is good, then more is better, and too much is just enough."

Retiring replicants gets more expensive every year.

Prop gun from my favorite movie of all time sells for $270,000 at auction.

The irony being that, since it appears to include the serialized part of a gun (the receiver of a bolt-action rifle) that is not torch-cut to BATFE specs, this sale would most likely have required an FFL if it was across state lines. Hope all them i's were crossed and t's dotted...

A tiger? In Iraq?

Folks can be phobic about all kinds of things: Heights, spiders, confined spaces, snakes, kittens...



(For those who didn't catch the reference in the post title: Here.)

Scalper's market...

Some people at the gun show this past weekend were so optimistic that they'd dragged old boxes of .380 out of their basement or off back shelves in the stockroom and had them sitting on their tables for forty or fifty bucks a box.

Needless to say, there weren't many takers at that price point, but it's good to want things, I guess.

Meanwhile there was a trickle of various small-name local and regional reloaders selling every box they'd brought at $25.00-29.00/50. There're a whole bundle of little Econ 101 lessons in pricing signals and the Greater Fool Theory buried in there, but a lot of gun show vendors couldn't spell "Economics" (or "Customer Service" or "Salesmanship", for that matter) if you prompted them with a Taser.

I'm taking my comedy where I can find it these days.

The funniest part of the whole drawn-out Sotomayor root canal thus far has been hearing newscasters chewing through their teleprompters in their tall-corn Midwestern drones only to pop out a perfect sophomore Spanish 102 "soe-toe-my-YORRR" in mid-twang, before turning to the weather in PEE-roo.

Before anybody twits me with that "Oh, so correct pronunciation is liberal bias, huh, you hick?" schtick, I'll remind you that you probably pronounce Deutschland as "JER-muh-nee".

I'll take "Kevin Bacon" for $500, Alex...

So, my pal Joanna is going to be on Jeopardy! on Wednesday, June 3rd. Jeopardy! is, of course, hosted by one Alex Trebek, who also appeared in the X-Files episode, "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" with Charles Nelson Reilly, who was in Cannonball Run II with Burt Reynolds, who was in Striptease with Demi Moore, who was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon.

Quote of the Day:

"Steyn’s only mistake here is to assume that Obama would have any serious interest in American exceptionalism in the world. As far as Obama is concerned, what is exceptional about America is Obama."

*Snerk*

Meme for the Fearless.

If you are immune to the mockery of your friends, Marko challenges you to list the five most embarrassing albums on your iPod.

I'm safe for the moment, because my Nano only holds 4 gigs of stuff, which means that there's nothing in there but some really hip, happenin', cool music and a couple of episodes of Firefly. ("Out Of Gas" and "Jaynestown", if you must know...) Dig into my iTunes directory, on the other hand, and you'll find some blackmail material...

1. Blaze of Glory: That's right, I actually once paid money for the Jon Bon Jovi soundtrack album to Young Guns 2.
2. Decade: Duran Duran's greatest hits. Teenybopper squealing not included.
3. Demos & Remixes: The album itself isn't what's embarrassing, what's embarrassing is that I was such a huge Trent Reznor fangirl in '94 that I paid some obscene amount of money for a bootleg NIN CD.
4. Dr. Feelgood: I have no idea how or why this awful Mötley Crüe CD ended up in my collection, but I dutifully ripped it anyway.
5. ELO's Greatest Hits: Now there's an oxymoron for you...

The saddest part? That only gets me into the G's. (iTunes, in its anal-retentive robotic way, files the last under "G" for "Greatest"...)

It probably had Lucas electrics, too...

The English aircraft industry, like Australian fauna, has always been weird and insular and quite frequently turns out creatures that may not be evolutionary successes, but are spectacular in their oddness nonetheless.

Overheard at the gun show...

Looking at some really good gun belts, under a sign reading "AMISH LEATHER BELTS":

Me: "Who knew the Amish had such thick hides?"

RX: "Have you ever tried skinning one? Oh, they make such a fuss! It's a good thing they're pacifists, because they look like they'd probably bite you if they weren't, and then you'd have to stun 'em or something."

Speaking of Michael Flynn...

...it turns out he has a Livejournal, where I found this video which has become my new anthem.

Third Book-itis.

So, output has been sketchy of late because I discovered a good used book store while house-sitting for a friend a few weeks back, and I've had my nose in two trilogies.

What is it with trilogies in SF/Fantasy genre fiction? Is it some unspoken law, ever since Tolkien's monster epic had to be split into three separate volumes to avoid giving buyers a hernia, that any story has to be split into a three-book-long arc? Anyhow...

Don't let Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serrano fool you; it's really a trilogy, just available as a single volume trade paperback. The concept is an interesting one: According to the author, it was set into motion by a friend suggesting "Why not fox hunting and space ships?"

And so we get the tale of young Heris, scion of an illustrious naval family, who has resigned her commission due to a scandal and gets a job skippering a private yacht for a wealthy dowager who is absolutely gaga over hunting and jumping and the whole horsey social scene. So not only do you get enjoyable space opera, you also get family and navy politics (as well as regular old politics politics) and a quick and dirty education on what people find so fascinating about getting muddy while chasing critters across fields while clinging to the backs of big ungulates.

This trilogy's Third Book-itis comes from Moon getting fairly ambitious with the number of viewpoint characters and plot lines in the last book and then getting a little rushed in wrapping it all up. Still, it was a very enjoyable read.

The second trilogy was by Michael Flynn: Firestar, Rogue Star, and Lodestar. These were going to have a hard time living up to their hype, what with cover blurbs from multiple reviewers that compared Flynn's writing favorably to Heinlein. Plus, when my roommate saw the books, she said "Oh, I envy you! You get to read those for the first time!" The icing on the cake was the Amazon reviewer who said that they were the best books in their (admittedly small) genre; better even than my favorite, Kings of the High Frontier.

Well, it worked. The first book sucked me in so hard that I didn't come up for air for over a day. It's a near-future story that is largely set around one woman, the wealthy heiress to a commercial empire, who is absolutely phobic over the idea of a large asteroid striking Earth and who sets out to do something about it.

What gives the story its depth, however, is that she doesn't just wave her dollar wand and *poof* there's a spaceship and everybody rockets off into the future, happily ever after. Instead we have a sprawling, Clavell-esque tale, with multiple viewpoint characters spread across aerospace companies and educators, test pilots and poets, as our main protagonist subtly uses her influences to nudge humanity into space, save the world, and still show a good Return-On-Investment to keep the board of directors and her trust fund cousins happy.

Third Book-itis in this case comes from the fact that Flynn's first book in the series was released in '94 and the third in '00 and I'm reading them in '09. The danger of writing near-future is that it might be history by the time it gets read. If the story and characters are stand-alone, that's no problem; William Gibson's Neuromancer is just as much raw, seminal cyberpunk today as it was in 1984 and Heinlein's '50s juveniles sell out every time they're reprinted.

Flynn's first two books, being largely character-driven, hold up amazingly well. The third one, however, takes place almost twenty years after the first, and to emphasize the passage of time, he has to play up the slang, the styles, and the technology differences between 1999 and 2017, and doesn't pull it off as well as he could have. The "new" slang sounds forced and the "future" computer jargon seems a little dated and it obscures characters that we want to see more of. It's still worth the read, but it leaves you feeling like Flynn was punching far above his weight class in the first two books; I'll need to read more by him to find out.

Anyhow, it might be a couple days before I'm writing really productively again. Why? Two words: Diamond. Age.

SQUEEEEE!

Behold, an animal capable of squaring off with the Slow Loris in a Cuteness Deathmatch.


(H/T to Dante's Firing Range.)

"...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."

Dallas, TX is an unlikely addition to the list of places I wouldn't spit on if they were burning.

A word of caution before you head out for the long Memorial Day weekend: It's also No-Refusal Weekend. Which means? Well, if Dallas police pull suspect you're drinking and driving, you'll be stuck with a butterfly needle attached to a vacuum-packed container, and two vials' worth of your blood will taken and tested. And, no, you can't refuse the test...

I'll cheerfully contribute to the defense fund of the first drunk Texas cowboy to tell Chief Kunkle to "Come And Take It".


(H/T to Billy Beck.)

Smartgun Fail.

Discussion is ongoing at Unc's joint on the latest Authorized User or "Smart Gun" concept out of Deutschland.

The problem with the whole "Smart Gun" concept is that it is derived from an incorrect view of weapons. If you look at firearms as a type of sporting goods, then there's nothing particularly wrong with Authorized User technology. If it fails or malfunctions, it's no big deal in the grand scheme of things; you miss your duck or deer or clay pigeon or paper bullseye, and your afternoon or weekend is ruined, but hey, that's the price of safety.

But if you look at a firearm as a piece of emergency equipment, then Authorized User technology is a no-go. A cop's partner may need to use her gun; my roommate may need to use mine. It needs to work right the first time, every time. It cannot malfunction or, if it does so, it must "fail-dangerous", in such a way as to leave me the ability to use the gun to defend myself, even if the Authorized User function no longer works.

Look at it this way: Would you put fingerprint recognition sensors on a fire extinguisher? How about a biometric sensor on a reserve parachute? No, you wouldn't, because it needs to be as easy as possible for anybody to operate, even under duress and in harsh environmental conditions.

It's a series of tubes!

Bill O'Reilly had his secretary download an internet from the blog, and it made him confused.

Gee, he always struck me as such a hep cat; you know, really groovy and with it.


(H/T to Instapundit.)

More Chicago politics writ large...

The UAW delivers the votes; the UAW gets the spoils...

GM is widely expected to file for bankruptcy before the end of this month. If this were a typical bankruptcy, the company would be allowed by law to tear up its UAW collective bargaining agreement and negotiate for drastically reduced wages and benefits. That's not going happen. Phrased another way: The government won't let that happen.

Although they also got a whole bunch of GM stock certificates, which are about as worthless a medium of exchange as Confederate money these days. (Although they'll probably be as collectible in the future, and for the same reason.)


(H/T to Sebastian.)

How do I miss stuff like this?

You guys in Augusta have some of the best nutters commenting in your paper!

THE SWINE FLU is a plot by the right to kill off the poor, the old and anybody that doesn't fit their idea of a good American. Just watch out people, it is going to get worse.

Hahaha! Silly crazy person!

Anyway, what worries me is that I didn't get my immunization at my Secret Conspiracy Local #420 meeting last month, and the plot has already leaked out to the Bad Americans.

I was alerted to the leak of our nefarious plan by Barefoot Clown, whose comment is the QotD:

Fortunately for the "bad" Americans, the Republicans are running this conspiracy with all of the skill and competency they've shown for the last eight years.

Are we still here?

Are we still here? Nobody's been overrun by screaming hordes of North Korean troops? No?

Good.

Captain Crazy had me worried this morning. I've been digging a slit trench in the tomato patch all afternoon.

My Supreme Court nominee...

Lynda Carter is a woman of Mexican ancestry, which puts her on the list of Qualified Supreme Court Nominees in this day and age of Affirmative Action politics. Among her other qualifications, she stopped a bullet cold, made the Axis fall, changed their minds, and changed the world. She is obviously more qualified than Sotomayor.

As an added bonus, she would be the first Supreme Court justice with an invisible jet. Plus, she could use her golden lasso to compel witnesses to tell the truth, which would be both very useful on the job, as well as making for great television.

Wonder Woman for the Supreme Court!!!

Worth a thousand words...

The future of dead-tree newspapers.

Forget it, Jake! It's Chi-Town!

When the president comes from the bowels of Chicago politics, where the spoils system is evolved into a baroque and elaborate thing rivaling kabuki or Byzantine imperial court protocols, rumors like this should not be surprising.

Everyone knows that the first thing you do after you get elected is give the janitorial contracts in the city buildings to your buddies and deny the renewals of your opponents' liquor licenses.



(H/T to Shermlock Shomes.)

Overheard at nap time:

When I was little, Grandma would tell me that God had given me a brain and that if I didn't use it, he'd give me an aneurysm. That's a heck of a thing for a grade-schooler to worry about, and I've been mortally scared of waking up with the IQ of an eggplant ever since. As an adult nothing frightens me worse than the thought of Alzheimer's, of having my essential me-ness float off, never to come back, so what happened yesterday morning was pretty rattling.

I've got a pretty good sense of direction. I don't get "lost" in that I don't think I've ever been in a place that I couldn't find my way back the way I'd come, and once I've been somewhere, I can almost always dead-reckon my way there again. Well, yesterday morning somebody misplaced the coffee shoppe that sells filters for the Chemex at Roseholme.

I mean, I knew where I was; I certainly wasn't lost. But where was the ferschlugginer store? I could picture it in my mind, but it wasn't at the expected intersection. Or the other intersection. I had to orbit the block to find the joint, and was thoroughly shaken by the experience.

So I told my roommate about my experience, and my Alzheimerphobia, and she decided that the thing to do would be to awaken me from my evening doze on the futon and check to see that I was oriented in space and time:

RX: "Tam. Wake up."

Me: "Mmpph... huh? Wazzat?"

RX: "What's the date?"

Me: "Huh? I don't know. The 26th?"

RX: "Name two states."

Me: "Denial and confusion."

RX: "Who is the president?"

Me: *pause* "Oh... damn it!"

RX: "You're oriented, all right."