Problem with definitions.

I would wager that 75% or more of Americans believe one or more of the following:

1. The moon landing was faked.
2. The US government has communicated with aliens and/or is in possession of a wrecked UFO.
3. 9/11 and/or Oklahoma City was an inside job.
4. JFK, RFK, and/or MLK was bumped off by a shadowy cabal and not a lone gunman.
5. Some secret organization runs, or attempts to run, the world for their own benefit.
6. Vaccines are poisonous and/or fluoride in the drinking water is bad for you.
7. The automakers and/or the oil companies had a 100mpg car but conspired to bury it.

Conversely, many people think some or all of the above statements are a little whacky. Notice one thing they have in common, though? None of them require their believers to belong to a "Hate Group".

In America you have the right to believe whatever you want, no matter how kooky anybody else thinks it is. I can just about guarantee that 99% of the people reading this hold one belief or another that I consider goofy, and I'm 100% certain that the reverse is true.

"Hate Group", however, is a phrase with a meaning, and that meaning isn't "People whose opinions I find silly". If I started thinking that is what it meant, why, then I might start hating people whose opinions I found silly, and if that isn't staring into the abyss overlong, I don't know what is.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma...

Who do the firefighters call when their station catches fire?

At least they didn't have to drive far to get to the scene of the blaze, and there wasn't much chance of getting lost en route.

Just for future reference, here's Sparky the Fire Dog's kitchen safety tips page.

Jimmy Carter must be proud.

Here we see what a stern warning from Barry is worth:



Not since the peanut farmer from Georgia have we enjoyed such square-jawed, steely-eyed determination at the helm of our foreign policy.

No shock there, really.

Given the mauling he and his congressional minions have been taking at the hands of the Gray Panthers, the news that Obama's approval ratings have slumped below the halfway mark in God's Waiting Room should come as no real surprise.

According to a new Quinnipiac University poll of Florida voters, the president's approval rating now stands at 47 percent in the Sunshine State, while 48 percent of voters there disapprove of the job he is doing.

I know you are but what am I?

Given the recent Town Hall kerfuffles, this is especially hilarious.

I'm rubber, you're glue; what bounces off me sticks to you!

The political discourse currently being offered by the lefties (up to and including the cat in the Big Chair) is easily as unsophisticated as anything I've seen since waiting my go on the monkey bars in kindergarten...

When did LGF turn into a front for Daily Kos?

I'm not a regular reader of Little Green Footballs. And by "not a regular reader", I mean I don't think I've darkened the door there for at least six or eight months, what with tepid centrist quasi-Republicanism not being my bag.

So anyway, when I got pointed to this piece, I was caught pretty much flat-footed, especially by the following quote:

Their website contains advertisements for white supremacist militias and Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul).

The website in question, and I went to check it out, has ads for Big Head Press, a Vin Suprynowicz book of some sort, some goldbug investment sites, and various other slightly wookie-suitish things that anybody who hangs around the more libertarianish corners of the web sees all the time.

This is "white supremacist militias"?

It seems that LGF is taking a page from the MSNBC playbook. Looks like Charles Johnson should schedule an appointment with his proctologist; he appears to be backed up badly enough to turn his eyes brown.

Poetic justice.

In a perfect world, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi would board a Gulfstream for Tripoli as the sole passenger.

And halfway there, the pilot and co-pilot would exit the aircraft, leaving Abdel alone with his thoughts and a suspicious ticking noise...


(H/T to TJIC.)

Important Public Service Announcement:

Much ado has been made about open carry recently, but almost all the posts are stuck on either defending the 2A right to carry, or fighting against it on the grounds that it scares people (the Left's main argument, since there haven't been any open-carry incidents that the media didn't manufacture out of whole cloth).

Almost no one takes the next step, which makes it the moral duty of anyone carrying openly to be able to retain their weapon against a gun-grab (not a political grab, a REAL, physical, grab). This moral duty EXCEEDS the morality of your right of carry, by the way.

Read, as they say, The Whole Thing.

If you do not have some retention training, get some. If you can't, you might want to think about how you carry. This is one of the main reasons I rarely OC.

You don't have to be innocent of irony to be a Democrat these days...

...but it helps.

Apparently, some of the party faithful are getting their knickers all in a twist because... are you ready for this? ...some people are throwing "Nazi" and "Hitler" references around about their guy and his ideas.

Either these people have had their irony glands surgically removed, have the memory of an amnesiac fruit fly, or they are dumber than an acre of fungus.


(H/T to Kleinheider, via Unc.)

The latest news from Planet Obama...

Actual text from Barry O.'s Chevrolet photo op:

But NASCAR is about a lot more than just racing cars. It's as much about what you give back off the track as you give on the track. It's about what you're doing to protect our environment and help America become energy independent -- using solar energy, and working to offset carbon emissions...

I'm surprised he didn't claim that NASCAR was also about health care reform and a two-state solution in the Middle East. But mostly NASCAR, like everything else, is about Barack.

(...and, much like the planned Obama economy, NASCAR uses restrictor plates.)

Everybody else is doing it...

...so why can't I?



(H/T to Breda, Marko, PDB, and half the rest of the freakin' intarw3bz. All my base are belong to them. I can haz cheezburger?)

Who's the sad clown?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," he said. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."

Somebody call the whaaambulance for Paul Helmke.


(H/T to Caleb.)

Spin & Sabotage.

YouTube video catches MSNBC lying through their teeth:



Listen, you broadcast dinosaurs: You don't control the horizontal or the vertical anymore, got it? We can adjust our sets any time we want to. We have our own cameras these days. The whole world is watching now.

Makes me sad...

Michael Bane is playing with the .327 Magnum, which is a cartridge that makes me sad. Let me explain:

When H&R partnered with Federal to introduce the .32 H&R Magnum back in 1984, the cartridge was specifically designed to work with the Harrington & Richardson revolvers, which are not known for their vault-like strength. As a result, the SAAMI-specified maximum pressure for the chambering is 21,000 c.u.p., which is not terribly much more than .38 Spl +P and actually slightly less than .380 Auto. By comparison, the established "Magnum" cartridges (.357, .41, and .44) all operated at 35k+ c.u.p..

This left the .32 H&R a weak sister. Aftermarket companies could only hot-rod it so far before their attorneys started getting the vapors at the thought of someone grenading a cheapo H&R revolver and, as a result, the zippiest factory loadings you'll find will only shove a 100gr bullet at 1000-1100 feet-per-second.

The .327 gets past this with an entirely new case that is longer than the old one, but it would have been just as easy to develop a ".32 H&R Magnum +P" specification that would have worked just fine in existing Rugers and Smiths. This wouldn't have gotten Federal's name on a cartridge, though, and they wouldn't have been able to load it quite as hot with the heaviest bullets. Plus it wouldn't have sold a bunch of new guns.

At least if it doesn't catch on and the caliber dies, you'll still be able to shoot .32 S&W Long and .32 H&R Mag in the guns...

I'm laughing at the idea...

Apparently race car driver Jimmy Johnson's rain-postponed White House visit will be going down today.

Well, they say it was "rain delayed". I think it took a couple weeks to find someone to explain NASCAR to a Hyde Park attorney.

"He's a driver you say? Whose driver? You mean there's not anybody in the back seat? No back seat? Fascinating. So this is a fuel economy competition then?"

What a witty turn of phrase!

Check this post title.

Wish I'd thought of that.

Riddle me this...

How come owning a gun makes me a paranoid wannabe cop, but owning a fire extinguisher or first-aid kit doesn't make me a paranoid wannabe firefighter or EMT?

The platters that matter...

...are being played right now on Gun Nuts Radio.

Word of the Day: How to speak Tamarese.

Wookie-suiter: (whuh'-kē soo'-tər) n.

A libertarian. Esp. one who owns multiple Mosin-Nagants and a longbox full of comic books, reads science fiction, and refers to their minivan as the "Millennium Falcon".

"I am not a wookie-suiter! I don't even own a minivan; the Millennium Falcon is a BMW convertible!"

Set the controls for the heart of the sun...

Straight from the horse's mouth, here's the video of the cat with the gat, in all his wookie-suited glory.

Yeah, he's a little crazy, but it's the right kind of crazy.

Plus, it helps feed the endangered polar bears!

I laughed pretty hard at this one, found at Hoosierpundit:



Meanwhile, while I was at the grocery store yesterday, I saw a car with an "I'm A Health Care Voter" bumper sticker. It was very slick; obviously the product of a graphic designer, not MS Paint and Cafe Press. Guess what color it was?

Poor lefties. They've been playing on astroturf for so long that they don't know grassroots even when fed a mouthful of divot.

If three people do it, they may think it's an organization...

Can you imagine fifty people a protest? Friends, they might think it's a movement.

UPDATE: Straight from the horse's mouth, here's the video of the cat with the gat.

Quote of the Day:

About 233 years ago a little strip of geography along the eastern coast of North America spawned a population of gun owners, civil libertarians, and private property advocates. They tried a small experiment in limited government which grew and worked out quite well for a long time. -Jim, at The Travis McGee Reader.

Thunder Wrench?

MattG takes issue with the Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special; specifically, with how tight Les builds his guns.

I'll note that the first time I field-stripped my Springfield Professional, the bushing was so tight that I was holding the pistol with both hands while Marko cranked on the bushing wrench, and even that wasn't as bad as some Baers I've messed with. I think Les builds them too tight because customers expect them that way: "Jeebus, Larry, the lockup on this new Concept V is so tight that I can't even run the slide! It must be awesome!"

More notes from school...

1. Birdsong's Black-T finish is the bomb-diggity shizznit for corrosion resistance; my Pro is still rust-free after being carried, sweated on, and stomped into a mudhole over the last eight years. But when your hands are sweaty and covered in Bullfrog SPF 30, that stuff is so slick that it makes the proverbial wet bar of soap look sticky by comparison.
2. More magazines are better magazines. Have a plan to keep them organized in your pockets. In addition to the full ones in my belt carriers, I'd go out onto the range with full mags in my left front and both hip pockets. Empties and partials would go into my right front between strings so I wouldn't get them confused.
3. You know what would be awesome? Making sure you change the batteries in your Peltor electronic earmuffs before you go to gun school. That would be awesome, because then they'd be something other than a slightly lame set of ear pro. Note to self: Change batteries.
4. I was getting incipient wet-molding with my cowhide Brommeland Max-Con V by the end of day two. In other words, being out in the 90 degree sun, I was sweating enough on my inside-the-waistband leather holster that it was starting to mold tightly to the gun; I could feel it dragging at my draws noticeably by the end of the day. This had never happened to me before in the two years I've been using this holster. So for day three I went to my horsehide Milt Sparks Versa-Max 2, which rides almost identically to the Max-Con V, but has a slightly more vertical cant. Also on day three, I was wearing those baggy cargo-type trousers instead of jeans, which put my belt line maybe an inch higher. Guess which slowed my draw down more: Sticky holster or changing the height and angle of the draw by maybe an inch and five degrees? Yeah. Carry your gun in the same place all the time if at all possible...

Failed marketing idea...

"Want fuller, plumper, redder, poutier lips? Try new Sunburn! from L'oreal."

It was a long, hot weekend in the sun for my nearly pigment-free self. I slathered on the Bullfrog slightly faster than I managed to sweat it off and wound up with only a little bit of raccoon face and red neck. The only places that got hit badly were my temples and my lips.

(I wear my Wiley-X's tipped slightly so that the temples of the goggles go above my hearing pro; this also leaves enough ventilation around the tops of the eyepieces to keep them from fogging up, which they will do if worn normally despite the "ventilation slots" in the foam rubber eyecups. The part of my temples thus exposed apparently sweated the sunblock off faster than I reapplied it.)

Gun School: Post #3. A weakness in my plan!

It is important to bring a whole lotta magazines to class, because nobody wants to be That Guy. You know, That Guy? That Guy who only has two or three eight-round mags and is constantly holding the class up to thumb rounds into them from his pockets between evolutions? Don't be That Guy.

I grabbed my eight best spares and tossed them in the range bag the morning of day one. I also threw my backup 1911 in the bag.

The gun on my hip was my Springfield Pro, which has a magwell. The magwell requires thicker bumper pads to firmly seat the mags. I have two Wilsons with low-profile pads on the bottom specifically for use with my Colt, which does not have the Smith & Alexander magwell.

Two of the magazines I picked up were those two magazines. Can you see where this is going?

Now I have six mags that work easily in the Springer and two that are delegated to my right hip pocket. Between strings, I'm thumbing rounds out of them to top off the mags in my left hand pockets. Luckily I stayed ahead of the pace and avoided That Guy-ness, but on day two, I was using the Colt, which can use all of the mags regardless of baseplate thickness.

Gun School: Post #2. Mea Culpa.

So, once upon a time, I was involved in an intarw3bz back'n'forth at TheFiringLine with Pat Rogers.

He had made some statement in an article about how he didn't really care for a lot of the features on my Springfield Professional pistol. As a very happy Pro toter, I asked what his beefs were with the gun. One of the things he came back with was the sharp, 20lpi checkering.

I said that I liked the coarse checkering, because it helped my girlie hands get a grip on the pistol, even when they were sweaty or oily or slathered with Bullfrog SPF 30. He countered that checkering that coarse tore hell out of one's hands at gun school. I parried with the fact that A) It had never bothered me, even in several-hour-long range sessions, and B) I bought it to carry, not for gun school; I had other, more-or-less identically set-up guns for school.

Then I sold almost all my 1911's (not counting the still-unfinished Sistema project gun), except for the Pro and the '66 Colt, both of which sport... Can you guess? That's right; razor-sharp 20lpi checkering on the frontstrap.

This being a summertime class, with temperatures near 90 and humidity best described as "sticky", my hands were all nice and sweaty and soft. Another guess for you: Who was sporting a bandaid on the second joint of her strong-hand pinkie by the middle of day two to ward off an incipient raw spot?

Note to self: Plan on bandaids or a shooting glove unless or until I get a replacement for my old dedicated trainer. One with a smooth frontstrap.

Lame Excuse Post...

There was supposed to be another gun school post today, but by the time I got home, cleaned my sidearm, rinsed the worst of the crud off, had a bottle of Ruination, and ate, it was beddy-bye time. And now it's this morning and all y'all got was a half-recycled post from yesterday morning.

Today's class starts in an hour or so. Hopefully I'll have more time to write this afternoon.

I'll take "Not Bloody Likely" for $500, Alex...

The wallet of the future will be your mobile phone!

At least, that's what the perky headline at CNN said. I say "fat frickin' chance". Look, I got a cell phone so I can call somebody if I have a flat tire in Two Mules, Kentucky, not to use as the Passport to the Exciting World of Tomorrow. Most of the time, I'm not even sure where it is. I don't even know the phone number off the top of my head.

The article goes on to state that

A 963-person survey by Forrester Research, for instance, found that 15 percent of Japanese mobile phone users make payments and purchase products in stores with their phones.

I'm not sure how they think that has any correlation with America. I mean, 15 percent of Japanese eat boiled squid eyeballs and allow themselves to be shoved into subway cars by professional "stuffers" for heaven's sake. Have you seen how they do that? I usually don't like to get that close to someone I'm actually having sex with, much less a total stranger during my morning commute.

Meanwhile, Americans are an innately conservative lot who launch new conspiracy theories every time they contemplate changing the pictures on the money. A sizeable portion of the American economy still prefers the speed and/or anonymity of cash. Even in this world of nearly ubiquitous debit cards, look at how many people instead go through the elaborate tea ceremony of writing paper checks. I just don't see a magic wand of a cell phone replacing that.

Gun School: Post #1

It's the morning of the first day, and I'm getting ready. Shootin' Buddy will be by to pick me up in about 45 minutes.

My gear is all staged by the front door: An ammo can full of .45ACP, and my range bag.

The range bag got sorted last night. The guns that live in there, my K-22 and the 9mm Para LTC, have been pulled out, along with a couple of extraneous ammo boxes, and the magazine compartment on the front of the bag has been emptied of the dozen or so Papoose mags and the handful of 9mm 1911 mags that it normally contains and filled with .45ACP mags. Can't have enough mags at gun school; I think I've got ten or so in there.

Let's see... Spare gun? Check. I'll start out with the old Colt. If it goes tango uniform, I can switch to the Springfield and I won't be hosed.
Spare holster? Check. The Versa-Max carries pretty much identically to the Max-Con V, so if my holster blows up, I won't be changing drawstrokes midstream.
Spare mag carrier? Check. Gun oil? Check.
Bug spray? Check. Sunscreen? Check.
First aid kit and pressure dressings? Check.

I'm pretty excited...

I always thought "Army Of One" was a bad slogan.

The U.S. military requires service members to have the approval of their commanding officer for any part time jobs they do on the side. I'm having a hard time imagining a duck hunter O-3 signing off on one of his privates doing a little hitman work on the weekends.

Dissent was patriotic...

...now it's, and I quote, "Political Terrorism", at least according to Hoosier Democrat congresscritter, Baron Hill.



Dang, does this mean I need to buy a keffiyeh?

What color is the sky in their world?

Buts that’s no longer the case. These people, these pro-life, tea party, birthers, astroturfers and all the assholes stockpiling ammo, these people are our Taliban.

The NIE warning was right on. Its time to start confiscating guns NOW!

I receive email alerts from the NRA-ILA, the Second Amendment Foundation, KeepAndBearArms.com, and a couple of other organizations that your average filthy hippie like the one quoted above would describe as "Right Wing", and yet somehow I haven't yet received my astroturf marching orders concerning where to pick up my professionally-printed signs and color-coordinated tee shirt to go brownshirt some innocent congresscritter's Town Hall meeting.

No, wait, my bad... I only get the invitation, pre-printed signs, and matching tee if I'm grassroots. Since I'm all astroturf-y, I have to figure out where to go, dress myself, and make my own damn sign.

So, the gun guy in New Hamster...

I literally could not believe the attack of the vapors that the talking heads in this video clip got over the wookie-suiter with the Smitty the other day.

"I can not imagine that there aren't enough lawyers in New Hampshire that can't file some kind of emergency injunction..."

An emergency injunction? Against what, you bedwetting loser? The guy was just standing there minding his own beeswax, which is, granted, a foreign concept to you, but trust me, that's all he was doing.

To hear you people carp and bleat, you'd think the guy was standing there with a nuclear-tipped surface-to-air missile launcher or a pack of rabid cyborg velociraptors with laser beams for eyes, not a budget model 9mm pistol in a gun show commando holster. The President wasn't going to be coming within 100 yards of this guy, and that in a limo armored against rocket-propelled grenade fire. For Vishnu's sake, Barry was in more danger from birdstrikes on Air Force One than he was from this cat's pistol.

(H/T to PDB.)

I'm not sure why...

...but I suddenly have this powerful yen to go deer hunting.

What private enterprise can't do, the government must...

...like commit PR gaffes and boners so appalling that anybody in the private sector who screwed up like that would be fired, blacklisted, and probably shunned. In the full Amish sense of the word.

As Kevin Baker mentioned Sunday, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice, and let me tell you something, the EULA at the .gov's Cash For Clunkers website is stupidity so advanced that previous forms of stupidity slither in its wake like lobe-finned fish trying to catch Secretariat.

Now, do I think that the Fed.Gov deliberately set up this website to snoop the downloaded pr0n and Solitaire high scores on the computers of car dealerships across this great land? No. What likely happened is that the same boilerplate language that would be used when logging into a .mil or .gov computer for official purposes was used unmodified for Joe Cardealer, and the first guy that read the fine print (as people in their profession are wont to do) hit the ceiling. And justifiably so.

"Property of the U.S. government"? Seriously, Cletus, how did you think people were going to react when they read that? The funny part is how this is being treated in the media. Or not treated, actually. Can you imagine if this had happened while Ashcroft was AG? zomg you'd be able to hear the howls of the Kossacks across half of cyberspace...

But, hey, it's not a surveillance-happy police state when Democrats do it, right?


BONUS!: White House mulls change to Fed.Gov use of tracking cookies!

I'm not holding my breath.

Mark Alger ruminates on his stash of good old-fashioned light bulbs:

We have some CFLs, bought in an early-adopter's burst of enthusiasm. But no more will cross our threshold.

It occurs to me that the next Republican Congress is going to come into office with a long wish-list of repeals to perform. Wonder how that's gonna work out for us.

Well, considering that the GOP had over ten years to fix the frickin' toilets, I'd be getting used to florescent light if I were you.

Remember: It's not a pendulum, it's a ratchet. The Republicans will give you back your light bulbs right after the Donks repeal the USA PATRIOT Act.

An embarrassment of riches...

Hungry for breakfast in my neighborhood?

Just in case you can't get a seat at Cafe Patachou or Petite Chou, Zest, or Taste, Mama Carolla's (zomgbestitalianinindy!) is opening a new brunch joint right next door to their main restaurant called Good Morning Mama's.

Obviously the fact that there are four gourmet breakfast joints in a 1 mile radius with lines out the door every Saturday and Sunday morning means that there is still room in that market niche.

Not impossible...

...just wildly improbable.

If the guy had a million cats and a million keyboards, I'd be a lot more likely to believe that one of them accidentally stepped on the right combination of buttons to say "i can has kiddie pr0n plz? kthxbye!"

Mmmmmm... Breakfast.

Off to Cafe Patachou for breakfast. More later.

UPDATE: ...and what eccentric names they have for their omelettes! Mine, stuffed with bacon, cheddar, sour cream, and horseradish, was called "The Overachiever". Shootin' Buddy ordered something called "The Hippie With A Benz".

Not even the slightest pretense of objectivity.

Showing that they can pull the train for Barry O. just as hard now as they did in November, CNN is all in harness for health care reform.

Seriously, if you took the quotation marks out, you couldn't tell which parts of this article came from Democrat apparatchiks and which came from the "journalists" at the propaganda organs of the White House CNN.

Obama's health care battle has been compared to former President Bill Clinton's failed effort more than 15 years ago, but CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider said the climate toward health care reform was actually more negative back then.

Clinton's plan had less public support than Obama's, and Clinton himself was less popular than Obama, Schneider said. Clinton's plan also barely got off the ground when it went to Congress, and Obama's proposals have already been through a few congressional committees.

So why didn't lawmakers experience the same backlash during the Clinton years?

"Three reasons," Schneider said.

First of all, "the calendar." Clinton proposed his plan in September 1993, and by the time Congress went on recess in August of the following year, the plan was dead.

Secondly, people didn't use the Internet the way they use it today, "so you didn't have the viral communications that rally people to attend town halls."

And finally, experience. "Conservatives are emboldened by what happened to the Clinton plan. They want to relive 1994," Schneider said.

Democrats have accused conservative groups of manufacturing the outrage, while others say the uproar is a reflection of the opposition to Obama's plans.

A star is born...

...or at least someone who's got the bug bad enough to try for stardom.

Breda blogs her beau Mike's Garand experience at Camp Perry. He had an awesome coach!

The reportage was excellent; I felt as though I had been rained on and found myself craving coffee and Krispy Kremes just reading it.

NRA High Power is personally not my gig. However, like any other shooting sport, the participants are as friendly and generous as you could possibly hope. Just show up for a match in your street clothes with no gear, and folks will come up to you and ask "Do you need a spotting scope? A mat? A gun? Want some pointers?" For this to happen at Camp fricken' Perry is like showing up in the stands at Wimbledon and having Serena Williams or Andre Agassi walk up and ask "Do you want to play? Do you need a racket? I can let you borrow one..."

Wanna draw a crowd?

Hang out a sign that says "Free Grub".

"One of the GREAT privileges of life is being in a position to give food away to friends and strangers." -Frank W. James

Farmer Frank graciously brought a whole pick-'em-up full of sweet corn to the blogmeet and the results are detailed here by my roommate, who is rapidly turning into the unofficial Social Secretary for these shindigs. Linkage out to other writeups can be found there.

State Fair time.

Saturday and Sunday evening, a weird sound was heard in the neighborhood.

Having been to a drag strip a time or two, I knew exactly what it was: A big racing V-8 being run briefly up to high revs.

Huh.

We're definitely not within earshot of any racetracks. Could somebody have been tinkering with a project car? No, that much noise over two consecutive nights of wrenching would have brought the heat for sure. I can't think of anyplace around here that would suit that volume of street racing, and besides, half the kids on the street these days race rice on the bottle, which doesn't sound like that...

Watching the news this morning, I figured out what it was...

The fairgrounds are only a couple miles away by bike. I should try and get down there this year.

ka-POP!

While shooting at Eagle Creek yesterday, Shootin' Buddy brought out his AR-7 which he had just picked up from his gunsmith. The rifle was an older, Charter Arms-manufactured version, which he had bought new and just had refurbished after shooting the wheels off it for many years.

After assembling the rifle he immediately began having failure-to-fire issues with the bulk .22 he was using. I can't remember off-hand, but I believe it was Federal. He switched to some of the Remington blue-label subsonic target ammunition that he had along for his suppressed MkII and one of those managed to fire.

Boy howdy, did it fire.

There was an unusually loud report and the second round didn't chamber fully. Shootin' Buddy pulled the magazine, and it had smoke floating up out of it. That's not normal.

"Case failure?"

Sure enough, the separated case head was laying on the carpet scrap at his shooting station, while the remainder of the brass was still snug in the chamber, as seen in the accompanying cell phone photo.

Monday morning quarterbacking, I'm going to guess that the sequence of "light strike, light strike, light strike, et cetera" followed by "case head separation" points to an excessive headspace situation.

In layman's terms, this would mean that the cartridge had too much room to move forward and back in the chamber when the bolt was closed. If this was indeed the case, the light strikes were caused by the round shifting forward when struck by the firing pin. The one that actually went off would have had too much room for the brass to stretch in the chamber, and it stretched past the point of failure.

Of course everybody was wearing eye protection, and nothing bad happened to the gun, but be careful when saying "Oh, it's just a .22." While its powder charge may be small, the modern high velocity .22LR chamberings operate at higher chamber pressures than .38 Special or .45ACP. SAAMI maximum allowable pressure specification for the .22 Long Rifle is 2,500 PSI more than .380, and 3,000 psi more than .32 H&R Magnum.

Remember: The eye you save may be your own.

Countdown...

One week from now, I will be attending my first-ever class with Louis Awerbuck. To say I am stoked would be the understatement of the year...

Quote of the Day:

When I was in high school, our driver's ed teacher called cars "freedom machines". I took that phrase to heart for some reason. I sure remember it a lot better than I do any of the film Blood On The Asphalt, or the other cinematographic efforts of the valiant men and women of the Ohio State Patrol that we were forced to sit through.

I have had my own automobile (or motorcycle) my entire adult life. I get claustrophobic when it's in the shop. I have never financed any of them; in my income bracket, your car is your life. If you live in the suburbs and lose your job, and then subsequently lose your car due to not being able to make payments, you are well and truly screwed. Conversely, as long as you have your own wheels, you can nearly always find some kind of work, even if it's as humble as using those wheels to deliver pizzas.

PDB takes this theme and waxes eloquent in his scathing condemnation of the "Cash For Clunkers" program:

To own a car is to reduce your personal limits and restrictions. You no longer are limited to the mere distance you can comfortably walk to seek a job or food or entertainment. A person with a car does not have to make do with what’s next door. A person with a car has hope, real hope, because as long as he has the keys and enough money in his pocket for a tank of gas, he can go anywhere else if it’s not working out here.

It is no coincidence that America is the country of the personal automobile and thus Leftists have always hated cars. They’re too wasteful, they permit too much consumption, cars allow people to escape the miserable inner-city hellholes leftists inadvertently create as they try to mold the new Soviet man.

August Blogmeet.

Time and tide wait for no man, and neither does Farmer Frank's sweet corn harvest.

Try to remember not to forget that the August '09 Indy Blogmeet will be at the Broad Ripple Brew Pub tomorrow at three. Bring grocery sacks, because when Frank W. James says he's bringing a pickup truck full of corn, that's not an idle figure of speech.

Some of us will be storming the gates at Iggle Crick in the AM to get some trigger time in between 9AM and Blogmeet Time.

Be there or be an equilateral rectilinear two-dimensional surface.

Quote of the Day:

Well, it's not actually a quote, it's a picture. You can see it here.

Ethics matter.

When someone has access to sensitive or confidential information, and they access it outside the proper bounds of their job, they should probably be fired.

It doesn't matter whether the person they were investigating was me or President Obama or your grandmother.

Speaking of falling into teh intarw3bz...

Kowloon Walled City.

Gunkajima Odyssey.

A perfect blend of Fascinating and Awesome.

The friends of Bambi form a lynch mob...

Odocoileus virginianus, also known as the whitetail deer, is well known across most of the eastern United States as an automotive navigational hazard, a destroyer of crops and gardens, and part of a healthy and balanced diet. Affectionately termed "hoofed rats" by people who live outside city limits and aren't girls younger than eight, their ritual autumn slaughter is anticipated by a fairly sizable demographic as a good excuse to go out into the pristine wilderness, fire up the Honda generator, and get blotto around the campfire.

If you live in the city and find one in your garden, however, you should be circumspect in disposing of the critter, because your neighbors will absolutely lose their collective $h1t should they find out.

Pre-Ban Books.

Shootin' Buddy and I were reminiscing in the car about Big Little Books. I whimsically thought it might be fun to re-read a couple that I remembered from my childhood, especially the one where Lassie and her master find the frozen mammoth in Alaska, and then a tree falls and pins the man to the ground and Lassie... anyway... I thought it might be a lark to track some of these down and re-read them and see how they'd aged.

I assumed they were probably collectible, and it turns out they are.

What I didn't expect is that they'd technically be illegal. That's right: The Safety Nazis, the GreenShirts, are banning the sale of old children's books in the name of safety.

I don't think I've ever felt quite the quiver of rage I felt at that moment.

I will adapt to my cigarettes getting messed with; I will improvise and overcome if you want to take my bayonet lug away; but I am this close to saddling up and busting caps over The Wizard of Oz.

Keep your slimy, regulation-encrusted hands off my childhood, you bastards. I'm not kidding.

Let them fly coach.

So, in the middle of the biggest governmental fiscal crisis in the history of our republic, with everybody and their brother pissing and carping about the high pressure jet of red ink shooting out of the congressional fire hose, congress decides it needs three congressional Gulfstream luxo jets, to the tune of $200mil?

Guys, you're congressmen. There's, like, five-hundred-something of you interchangeable little cogs; you're barely more special than dogcatchers. You put those jets back where you found them right now, and you can darn well fly coach like the rest of us as long as you're flying on my dime.


(H/T to Sharp Stuff.)

Overheard on the phone...

*RING, RING*

Me: "Hello?"

RX: "Did you call?"

Me: "No"

RX: "Well, my cell phone just rang and rang..."

Me: "Maybe it was the cats. They've been awful quiet."

RX: "Hey, do you have a rage-filled blog?"

Me: "Rage-filled? I wouldn't call it rage-filled. I can probably fit some more rage in there. Should I?"

RX: "No, you do not want a rage-filled blog."

I take it this has something to do with yesterday.

Please stay off my side.

The joking nickname for Beech Grove Firearms in the circles in which I run is "Death Camp Guns & Gear", because it's almost literally across the street from the Amtrak rail car repair facility that some tinfoil hatter decided was a FEMA concentration camp, (much to the surprise of the people who work there, since their job is fixing choo-choo trains and not nerve-gassing patriots.)

These days the .gov can't do any construction without some loony tune on the internets raving about how it's really a secret bunker for the Illuminati. For instance, a barracks construction project at a New York ANG base was spotted for a clandestine Gnomes of Zurich hideout by one Nancy Genovese who, like a moth bumping off a porch light, kept showing up with her camera looking for damning pictures of flying saucer wreckage or whatever until they finally arrested her on some dubious charges.

When they did, it turned out she had a Benelli Nova bird gun and an Assault Weapons Ban-compliant Bushhamster M4gery in the car, along with enough ammunition to have a pretty good weekend at the range. (But only two spare mags; obviously not a Thunder Ranch grad.) Now, it's a good thing they didn't pull me over on the way to the range, because the trunk of my car on the way to Wildcat Valley would net them a junk-on-the-bunk display that'd make Genovese look like a rank amateur. However, I rarely combine range trips with scouting missions against the New World Order, so the point is kinda moot.

Of course, she has sent the lefties into spasms of "zomg right wing terrorist militia!" Nice work, Nancy.

(Oh, but Mr. Neiwert? She may be a complete wookie-suiter, but she's right about the "Molon Labe" part.)

Do Want.

Simply Rugged holsters makes a nice-looking belt holster for the Colt Pocket Hammerless. (Holster #27.) And they're having a "Buy One Get One Free!" sale.

But payday isn't for another two weeks. Le sigh.

Whose ox is being gored?

Some men just want to watch the economy burn.

Much better.

A one hour nap has me feeling a lot saner, thank you very much.

Also, I realized that the only solid food I'd eaten all day yesterday was a bag of Pirate's Booty and a heel of bread with three slices of pepperoni on it. My blood sugar was probably a little low.

This cannot be happening.

So I got a load of laundry in, because I had no summer-weight socks left, and I'm not about to wear wool socks in Indiana in August, record cool summer or no. Those things make my feet sweat when its fifty degrees outside; my little hooves would melt at 80.

Also, I am extremely low on clean black tee shirts. Understand that me being low on clean black tee shirts is like the Pope being low on clean funny hats: Nothing to wear without being gigged for being out of uniform. And I just used the last of the laundry detergent on the socks.

No laundry detergent and only one can of Vault Zero in the house. I really don't see any way around a trip to the grocery store at this point, but I'm going to take a nap first so I don't get confused and think I'm playing Gran Turismo 3 instead of Drive To Grocery Store 1. (I must be punchy, because just typing that has me laughing so hard my face hurts. Why am I babbling all this to you people, anyway?)

Spring Ahead, Fall On Your Face.

The clocks are all wonky at Roseholme Cottage this week because Roomie is covering for a vacationing coworker. Said coworker works the shift from OMG-thirty to WTF-o'clock, so this means going to bed and getting up at some pretty bizarro hours, which has thoroughly scrambled my internal chronometer.

Posting may be light. Or heavier than usual (there's not much else to do in the wee hours). It will also probably be even more incoherent than it normally is, because I've been pretty punchy for two days straight now, and I don't foresee it getting any better until I get back to my usual schedule. As a creature of habit, I fear change; it discombobulates me.


UPDATE: It's currently LOL:15 and I've already been up for three hours. Or is it four? There are words in my head, but I can't get them through my fingers and into the keyboard. Only one can of Vault Zero left in the house; I obviously seriously underplanned for this last night. I don't think driving to the store right now would be the smartest of ideas, though.

Spuds McKenzie Party Animal ProTip:

When picking out a designated driver, always pick one that:

• Is not also intoxicated.
• Is not a fugitive from justice.
• Is not imaginary.
• Is not your nine-year-old daughter.

On the other hand, she'll be able to write an awesome "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" paper.

Just not getting it.

I don't much need to know anything about duck calls, skeet guns, bird dog training collars, or who's making a new rifle rack for Yamaha ATV's, so I don't often read The Outdoor Wire.

Apparently, some "Jim" guy over there had his staff send him an internets through the series of tubes stating that the "blogosphere" was spreading nasty false rumors about the imminent demise of Daniel Defense.

This came as something of a surprise to people who were actually, you know, in the blogosphere and who hadn't read anything of the sort, specifically Bitter, who hit the ceiling. The "Jim" guy apologized, sorta, explaining that "blogosphere" is shorthand for "internet" in Jimspeak and what he meant to say was "email".

This makes sense. I mean, email is kind of like the blogosphere in much the same way that the U.S. Mail is like The American Spectator. After all, they're both full of words printed on paper, right?

Yes, we have no bananas.

Struck out on ammo at Premiere Arms; they had nothing in .45 or .32ACP, and naught in 9x19 but some Middle Eastern surplus corrosive stuff. I picked up 100 115gr .355" FMJ projectiles and 100 155gr .358" LSWC bullets for reloading.

They still have that beautifully engraved S&W .44 double-action top-break and a 4" Model 25-9 in .45 Colt. Tempting, but too rich for my blood.

Well...

I was about to head out the door to check on the ammunition situation at Premiere Arms, but it started raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock, with some lightning and hail and suchlike thrown in. I guess y'all are stuck with me here for a while longer.

Try to remember not to forget.

August Indy blogmeet info here.

Also, Larry Correia, the author of Monster Hunter International, will be the guest on Gun Nuts Radio tonight, so you can ask him "What gun for werewolf?"

Fast. Like a marsupial.

Caleb uses a post about reviewing one's shooting with a camcorder to show off.

He's right; it's a great tool, because the camera doesn't lie, and also because you can use pauses and slow-mo to isolate problems with your form. I need a better video camera.

Brilliant new health care idea!

With everyone gathered around the cannibal pot for a nice bowl of Cash For Clunkers stew, Og figures that such a scheme should work well with health care, too. Heck, the concept transposes perfectly: Cash For Codgers!

Build a stranger mouse trap...

Weird gun laws create weird workarounds. Everybody is no doubt familiar with the product of the bazaars of the Khyber Pass, the village smithies of Mindanao, and the basement machine shops of Belfast.

In places where guns are quasi legal, legitimate manufacturers will often build quasi-guns. Witness, for example, this Hungarian double-barreled, over-and-under, slide-action, breech-loading, rubber-bullet-launching shotgun-type thingummy. I'd rather have an 870, but given the legal restrictions under which it exists, it sure beats a handful of nothing, plus it practically oozes ingenuity.

The only thing that would make it better is if it had a bayonet. Or if it launched bees. (Preferably African killer bees, but regular old honeybees would do in a pinch.)

Ammo Scarcity Update.

I wasn't really looking for rifle ammo, but I did check out pistol ammunition at both Beech Grove Firearms and the Mountain of Geese this weekend.

Rimfire: No bulk rimfire at Beech Grove, but a good selection of the more upmarket CCI stuff in the 50rd boxes. 100rd plastic boxes of Mini Mags were ~$7. Gander Mountain had pretty much a normal rimfire selection out and available. If you wanted bulk, your only choices other than some Fiocchi were unplated Winchester or plated Remington Golden Bullets. I'll usually go with the occasional dud over lead fouling, but that's just me. 525rd cartons were $24.99; I splurged and bought one so I can hold off on busting out my reserve Mohawk and Thunderbolt unplated stuff for another weekend or three.

Centerfire: There was something in every caliber at Beech Grove, but you couldn't be fussy about the brand. You want .45ACP? You're getting Sellier & Bellot. You want 9x19? CCI Blazer for you. Gander Mountain had a similar situation with somewhat better selection: Most calibers had two or three choices for range ammo, usually Blazer Brass, Fiocchi, and one or another of the Big Three's budget lines. Prices ran slightly more than Beech Grove, but it looked like the going rate was ~$14/50 for 9mm and ~$24/50 for .45. Better than early Spring, but unlikely to cause anybody to stop handloading 9mm.

Even I think that's geeky...

Posting may be light this morning because I have discovered the TV Tropes website and fallen into the intarw3bz, but that's not what this post is about.

What this post is about is that somewhere on this planet there is somebody who actually cared enough to take the time to write a great big long dissertation about why the Stormtroopers' shooting wasn't really that bad.

Hey, Earth to Commander Solo: How about beaming off the bridge of the USS Mom's Basement and onto the surface of planet Fresh Air? Go for a walk. Ride your bike. See if your tricorder will let you communicate with the natives. Something like that.

Weekend Report: Shooting.

We went to Iggle Crick yesterday AM. The range was open and practically full when we got there a little after nine.

There's always been a sign there at the entrance to the range areas that says "No Loaded Concealed Weapons Beyond This Point", which I've long thought odd but, hey, IMPD uses the range all the time, so who knows what baroque gun-handling protocols they have. We'd just make it a point to uncover when entering the range area and everything would be okey-dokey, right?

Right. At least up to a point.

Yesterday we showed up to shoot, like we have better than every other weekend for the past year, and I noticed that there were two RSO's there that I'd only seen maybe once before. As Shootin' Buddy and I turned away from the registration table to go up to the line, they saw the guns on our hips and drama ensued:
"No loaded guns in holsters on the firing line!"

"Your sign says no loaded concealed guns beyond this point."

"Well the rules say..." et cetera and yadda.

While teh n00b RSO's and Shootin' Buddy played "Perry Mason and the Case of the Hazy Guidelines", I pulled aside the one RSO I knew and asked him what was up. Apparently the chief RO had usually been pretty casual about the no holstered guns rule with shooters who had demonstrated competency (...and while neither myself nor Shootin' Buddy is being actively recruited by ninjas or SEAL Team 37½, we're a breath of fresh air on a range where the average shooter gets chided for muzzle discipline by an RSO at least once per session) but, yes, technically this was supposed to be a cold range. So I unloaded and showed clear for my guy and apparently Shootin' Buddy had done likewise.

Now the pistol of mine that was so safe that morning eating breakfast at Le Peep and that afternoon at the grocery store was unloaded so it would be safe at the pistol range, too. Raise your hand if that makes sense to you.

See, this is one Lowest Common Denominator "safety" policy that is only going to lead to unnecessary bullet holes. If rigidly adhered to, it means Cletus and Jasper have to fiddle-fart around with loaded guns twice; once on arrival and again on leaving, instead of leaving them safely in their holsters and not touching them. Now, the po-po firearms training building at Iggle Crick is right off the parking lot and has a handy sand-filled clearing barrel, but how many people are going to look for that, much less use it religiously?

Remember: One handy rule for preventing negligent discharges is stop touching your damn gun so much! Think about every story of an ND you've heard: It was somebody holstering or unholstering or clearing or loading or otherwise somehow futzing with the gun, right? It's almost never "The gun was sitting in the holster and went off." Why then, in the name of safety, would you encourage the former rather than the latter?

Plans...

So, the plan is to go shooting at Iggle Crick this AM. More wheelygun shooting.

Last weekend I started working more with my round-butt 4" Model 19. I had completely forgotten how sweet of a trigger job Shannon had done on that gun; the only lighter double-action pulls I've felt were on PPC guns, and yet it was lighting off everything I ran through it just fine: 158gr LSWC-HP +P from both Remington and Winchester, Federal 147gr +P+ HydraShoks, gunshow reloads from Billybob's Big House o' Bullets, you name it. Thanks, Marko!

Maybe after shooting we'll go by the Mountain of Geese or Beech Grove Firearms to check out the ammo situation.

That's just wrong...

In the spirit of such classics of the Story Time Corner as Mommy Drinks Because You Cry and My Weekend With Uncle Badtouch, Marko offers a list of failed children's book titles.

I felt a great disturbance in the 'net...

...as if millions of scammers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Apparently the SAT-3 cable, which is Nigeria's main 'net connection to the outside world, has been cut, crippling the country's economy, which is almost entirely based on email confidence schemes.

In internet cafes all over Lagos, scammers continue to dutifully type their daily quota of emails, not realizing that the zeros and ones are running out the end of the pipe and bobbing to the surface of the Atlantic, where they are forming a scummy slick of "Hello, I am honorable secretary, to finance minister, Joseph Mbuto. You are the beneficiary of..." and fouling the feathers of unlucky seabirds.

The suspect list is a long one, consisting of everyone who has both an email account and SCUBA certification.

Bias so thick you can smell it.

Say Uncle points out that in the Knoxville News-Slantinel, when an off-duty police officer carries his gun into a gin joint, it's "an establishment that serves alcohol", while when a simple civilian does it, it's a "bar".

Obviously I need to get one of them there journalism degrees, so I can be a detached, olympian, unbiased guardian of the public weal.

Paging Dr. Freud:

They've killed Chevrolet, added the designated hitter to baseball, decried apple pie as fattening, and now they're going after hot dogs. My roomie suspects p33nophobia.

More posts about buildings and food.

So, Indianapolis is dealing with 8,000 abandoned homes. And by "abandoned", I don't mean the house around the corner that's sat vacant and for sale for a year and a half; I mean crack-house-plumbing-scavenged-boards-on-the-windows abandoned.

Now, add in the aforementioned houses that have sat vacant and unsold, and developments stalled in mid-construction (there's a particularly sad example up in Broad Ripple Village proper, right on the Monon, of a half completed condo project; one inhabited unit in the middle of a construction site) and one would seem to think that there was some kind of downturn in the economy.

Who could have predicted such a thing?

Random Thoughts...

1) Went by Premiere Arms. No .45ACP in stock. They had PMC Bronze 9mm for $19.99/box. No bulk .22LR. No .32ACP.

I bought 100rds of CCI Mini Mags because I always try to buy something when I'm in a gun store. I want them to associate my face with the jingle of the cash register so that they are happy to see me when I walk in.

He had a guy behind the counter I did not recognize. I pointed at the revolver case and said "May I see the 2" pre-Model 10 square-butt?"

He opened it and said "Now, which one?"

I successfully managed not to reply "The only 2" pre-Model 10 square-butt in the case," instead pointing with my finger and saying "That gun on the bottom with the bone grips." (See? I'm not always snarky.)

It's an early postwar with the half-moon front sight, mechanically sound with some odd wear patches right through to the bare metal and a bit of fine pitting on the topstrap and here and there on the right side. He had $249 on the tag. Were it $50 or so cheaper, it'd be neat to buy and do the whole vintage "Fitz" treatment to, just for grins. Shame, really; the trigger had a bit of cancer, and there was a tiny amount of freckling on the hammer, but the case colors on the hammer were gorgeous. Too bad the owner apparently kept it in the drawer with his damp socks.



2) Stopped at a used book store. They had a copy of the David Drake anthology Tyrannosaur. The cover blurb read "Peril In The Jurassic!" and I thought to myself "If you have a T. Rex running loose in the Jurassic, damned skippy you've got some peril; somebody's lobbing theropods across millions of years to where they don't belong."

The cover itself is intrinsically hilarious, since it's basically a repackaging of Drake's earlier (and excellent) Time Safari to catch a ride on the coattails of... well, I'll let you guess which movie.

Seen in comments at Caleb's...

On Taurus semiautos:

Caleb: I also predict that in the comments, someone will accuse me of having a soft spot for Taurus…they would be correct, I do have an affinity for Taurus’ semi-automatic pistols.

Me: I have a soft spot for mentally-disturbed homeless alcoholic vets on the side of the road, but I wouldn’t bring one home.

I've seen PT-111 Millennium 9mm's with more frequent-flier miles to Miami than a Colombian cocaine mule.

Scouting report.

*Snerk.*

Sure, baseball just ain't his game, but that throwing form worries me. An American male who went through public school throwing a ball like that spent some time with his head in the locker room toilet as sure as God made little green apples, and that can leave festering resentments in some dark rooms of the mind when the boy becomes a man. It's disquieting to realize that the Commander-In-Chief of our nation's armed forces may harbor a seething inner hatred of buzzcuts.

Plus, he's wearing an American League jersey, which is right up there with a Che Guevara tee as an indicator of incipient patchouli-wearing.


(H/T to Cold Fury.)

You know you're a gun nut when...

...you read the article that starts out...

An old gun found on an Aberdeenshire nature reserve has been identified as a French rifle from the 1800s.

The remains of the ancient weapon were discovered last year in a sea cave on the St Cyrus National Nature Reserve.

...and your first thought is "Oh, an Mle.74 Gras. I have one of those. I still need to order some ammo. Mine looks a lot prettier, though."

I didn't excavate mine from a sea cave in Scotland, though. I bought it from some dude at a gun show in Knoxville. He was kind enough to include the bayonet.


(H/T to Unc.)

Figures.

PayPal leaves wounded vets swinging in the breeze because their lawyers fill their pants every time they hear the word "gun".

(From what I can tell this morning, however, the PayPal button at Soldiers' Angels appears to be back up and running...)

Things I want, #4276

I currently own a pair of .22 rifles: A Marlin Papoose and one of their stainless 925 bolt-actions. I get to play with an assortment of others fairly frequently, too: Last trip to Wildcat Valley, there was a 10/22, a T-Bolt, and a sweet old Marlin 39A.

I need a .22 conversion for my AR (or a S&W M&P 15/22...) but I want another .22 rifle for fun.

I'm pretty sure I don't want a bolt-action. Semiauto would be okay, but I'd actually kind of prefer a manually-operated repeater. A slide-action would be awesome, but a really short-throw lever like my old Browning BL-22 would be sweet, too.

Taurus makes a shorty version of their Model 62 in stainless, which would be great for me. Not only because it's a takedown that would be very roadster-friendly, but because I shoot the whee out of .22 rifles and stainless would let me be a little slacker on the cleaning end of things (my stainless Papoose, for instance, gets the bore punched every other range session and gets really cleaned when it stops running.) Finding them used is about like finding unicorn droppings, however.

Finding a nice used Remington Fieldmaster or Speedmaster would be awesome, but people tend to want more than "trunk rifle" money for those things, and I can be awfully hard on a .22. Also I don't know anyone personally who has had one for a while that regularly shot the bejeezus out of it; I'm curious as to how they hold up under high volume shooting.

I dunno... All this wanting is probably a distraction from the fact that I need a Ruger 22/45, too. Just thinking out loud, I guess...

Waving the bloody sneakers.

"To wave the bloody shirt": To foment political strife by keeping controversies alive.

The way Tom Mauser sticks those sneakers into the camera creeps me right the hell out. It seems so measured and cynical, and that is creepy as dammit. I can't imagine that photo session... "You don't look bereaved enough. Lets try from a different angle..."


(H/T to Snowflakes In Hell)

Hubris that can be seen from orbit.

Cold Fury linked to an article at CNBC (stop snickering!) that had a quote for the ages:

Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the system of hefty bonuses does not make sense.

"You get hired for this very prestigious job and you get a salary, and now we have to give you extra money for you to do your job right?" asked Frank, a Democrat.

Now, I can actually understand his confusion. Like so many members of our Governing Caste, including our current President, Rep. Frank has never had to toil a day in the private sector. All his adult life, his jobs have paid the same no matter how badly his performance sucked. The only performance incentives in his circles are called "kickbacks" or "bribes", so it really shouldn't come as a surprise when a lifelong apparatchik like Barney is utterly clueless as to incentive-based compensation packages.

And yet he certainly feels qualified to monkey with the control levers. God help the people who find themselves in an operating theater or passenger jet cockpit with the man, because he'd probably happily kibbitz a heart valve replacement or night instrument approach the way you or I would give unwanted advice to a solitaire player. Except I can't send the solitaire player up for five-to-ten with time off for good behavior if he doesn't put the three of diamonds on the four of clubs...

New Obamacare Idea:

He needs to get garments with longer hems, allowing more people to touch them.

The dumbest man on the internet.

Yesterday my buddy Robb posted a quickly-ginned-up Photoshop spoof of the Bush "Air National Guard Memo", down to the bad font choice, proportional spacing, and faux mimeograph machine spatter and fax transmission artifacts.

He was fairly proud of his handiwork and emailed a few of us a link, and we chuckled, and linked it, and it caught on and somebody over at the big kids' table with Pajamas Media saw it and linked it and...

Oh.

My.

Gawd.

Just when I think I cannot be further amazed by the abject stupidity of the average moron who has managed to figure out how to string a cable between his modem and the back of his tower case, I am proven wrong.

Remember when your physics prof would illustrate dense gravity fields distorting space-time with the "bowling ball on the rubber sheet" analogy? Well, if the internet is the rubber sheet, the comments section of that post is the bowling ball.

Let's pick a sample cretin for a swift kick in the metaphorical junk. Commenter "Syntax" writes:

Who faxed it to you?
Who did you authenticate it with?
What the hell is it?
Memo to who?
Memo from who?

2 things:

1) It would take me all of about 10 minutes to create this "smoking gun" piece of cluelessness in Photoshop.

2) Does anybody really believe they had HMOs back in 1961?

To answer Enrico Fermi's questions one at a time:

• It's a joke, you simpleton.
• Dan Rather.
• An IQ test, and you failed.
• Your mom.
• Charles Darwin.

And as for the 2 bonus questions:

1. Stop and think about that for a second.
2. Into the Soylent Green tank with you.

I truly hope that "Syntax" has not yet managed to swim upstream and spawn, but I fear we saw his soulmate on YouTube just the other day.

It is reading comment threads like that that will make a monarchist of me yet.

Off to a slow start this morning...

The day starts at Roseholme Cottage for me sometime around six in the AM, when I feed the geriatricats and get the coffee set up in the Chemex (aka "the manual-drip coffee maker").

The next step is usually to crack a Vault Zero and start typing furiously in order to have something up the intertubes before 8AM, early enough to get picked up in the morning round of linky-love from those bloggers who post over morning coffee at work.

This morning, Shootin' Buddy had business in town and offered to take me to Taste for breakfast. So, for the sake of a delicious bacon & swiss three-egg omelette, y'all got screwzored on the morning's entertainment. Sorry 'bout that. I'm working on fixing that right now.

Score!

Shootin' Buddy claims to have actually found a source for Patio®-brand frozen burritos.

A winner is me!

Also, Fresh Market had restocked the Progresso Manhattan clam chowder. Life is pretty good right now.

Reach out and touch someone.

Matt G has a typically reflective post up on his blog on the miracles of connectivity we enjoy in this fascinating modern world in which we live.

Birthers in the news.

The official Obama press department, formerly known as CNN, reports that Robert Gibbs has "shot down" the birthers by saying, in effect, "Nuh-uh! You are!" Obviously "shot down" has a different meaning when you're inside the echo chamber.

I really wish the White House would just cough up the birth certificate and shut these people up, because having lackeys come out and issue defensive-sounding statements like that just makes you sound guilty as sin. I'm half ready to buy some Reynold's Wrap and make a yarmulke myself, especially after reading incriminating evidence like this.

Metanostalgia.

I listened to "Nightswimming" by REM for the first time in years last night. It was kind of funny, because the song was deliberately written to provoke feelings of nostalgia when it came out, lo those many years ago, and I dutifully listened to it quite a few times in various reverie-provoking, memory-laden places back then.

Last night it provoked feelings of nostalgia for those times I listened to it with a sense of nostalgia all those years ago. Would this be metanostalgia?

Just a thought...

You could probably go kick in Professor Gates' front door today and walk out with a wide-screen TV in broad daylight, because his neighbors have sure as hell learned their lesson about reporting suspicious activity at his crib. Just sayin'...

It appears to have a frickin' laser.

I'm pretty sure that this is not legal in California.

Relationship counseling...

...Ambulance Driver style.

I'm no doctor, but I'm thinking that anybody who'd beat on someone they claim to love bad enough to make the paramedics cringe needs their Trepanazine dosage upped by 460 grains or so.

It's so cute...

While hitting Google to show my roommate pics of the ultracool Toyota 2000GT this morning, I discovered the existence of the heretofore-unknown-to-me super-kewt Toyota Sports 800.

Do want.

It's like a Chibi Iso Grifo.

I'm so uncool.

Despite having known Larry Correia on teh intertubes since Clinton was still Prez, I am ashamed to admit that I am maybe the only gunblogger who has not yet read Monster Hunter International, mostly because I really don't like reading books on my computer screen.

I can fix that bit of tragic unhipness, however, because the dead-tree mass market paperback is now on sale at Amazon. Hooray!

It will be so enjoyable to read a book with guns in it that was written by a competitive Three Gun shooter and former SOT FFL, instead of some east coast insurance industry schmuck who barely knows out of which end the bullet emerges.

"Ten things I hate about you..."

Blogger tgace has a list of ten police/military Hollywood tropes that completely cheese him off. An example:

2. Oh what the hell why not?:
Every Tom, Dick and Harry stacking up with the SWAT team, I think not. If my blood pressure went up one mmHg every time I saw some “CSI”, “FBI Investigator” or “Detective” stacking up with the tactical team to go in and get the bad guy my head would F’n explode!

News Flash. If I saw some “CSI” getting in my stack on a high risk entry he would get a boot up his ass. No SWAT team leader worth is salt is going say…”OK you FBI Profiler with no tactical training I am aware of, or experience with MY team, go right ahead and get in the stack.”

The only thing that gets me more pissed off is when the SWAT team rams the door and Horatio Crane in his shades is the first guy through the door! Hello numbnuts director, the way it works is the SWAT team goes in ALONE!! and when its secure they call the eggheads and Detectives in.

You should read the whole list. It's pretty funny.