Something in the water today.

Pretend I'm a hypothetical college student. I am going to write a paper on self-defense, and my thesis is that "Most Gun Owners Consider .22 To Be Totally Ineffective For Self-Defense."

To gather support for my theory, I poll gun owners with the question "Which would you prefer for self-defense: A .22 or a big stick?"

26% respond "A .22", 44% respond "A big stick", 12% respond "A .44 Magnum Loaded With 240gr Federal HydraShoks", 10% respond "Screw you and your push polls, you Obama-votin' closet commie!", and 8% respond " Ron Paul in '12!" (This is the internet, after all...)

I change the title of my paper to "Gun Owners: Too Antisocial To Win?" and get an A+. ;)

Count - Pointercount.

The "Metrocons" discussion that started here continues here.

I find it interesting that some took it as a term that was prima facie derogatory and was referring to nominal conservatives who were anti-RKBA, whereas I took it to be merely descriptive, and to refer to conservatives who just really didn't give the whole gun issue much thought one way or the other, as it didn't often impinge on their day-to-day lives.

My parents, both Chicago born and bred and both solid GOP voters and social and fiscal conservatives as long as I can remember, have never been gun owners that I am aware of, and my mother at least has actively expressed verbal support for "common sense" gun legislation, along the line of "What does anyone need one of those for?" referring to scary-looking rifles.

Overheard in the Hallway:

RX: "I'm surprised that your banjo picture post didn't get more linkage."

Me: "Too small a target audience. You have to know about the sticker on Woody Guthrie's guitar and be aware of the zombie menace to really think it's funny and, face it, that's a pretty thin slice of the nerd pie right there."

Help a brother out...

Go take the survey at Murdoc's.

It's interesting timing, as recently I've had two conversations with people whose opinions I respect for being considered and informed, and all three of us had caught ourselves musing that in a self-defense situation at any distance much past "really close", we'd rather have a magazine-fed autoloading .22 rimfire rifle than nearly any normal pistol, simply for the fact that hitting with a rifle is so much easier than with a pistol. Incidentally, this is (or was) the reasoning behind the semiautomatic 9mm carbines sometimes still encountered in law enforcement work; it's not that they are more powerful than the duty sidearm, it's that they offer vastly improved hit potential at any range past contact distance.

Dream a little dream...

Lissa has a gun-related dream for the first time:

I very clearly remember that I had my index finger straight against the slide, safely outside the trigger guard. Four Rules, even in my SLEEP, baby!

It's cool that it wasn't one of the common panic-type ones: The gun that won't hit, or the two-zillion pound trigger, or the bullet-proof bad guy. I've only experienced a couple of those, and they were memorable enough that they're still available for playback in the Cineplex Tamarama years later.

Usually, however, I wake up from gun dreams thinking "Wow, I wish I could shoot like that in real life," because Sleep Tam is an unstoppable badass with a carbine or pistol and decisive in her actions, whereas Awake Tam is a mediocre shot with a propensity for dithering.

Fashion Statement, Part Deux.

So I'm talking to Matt on the phone yesterday and the topic of Barbecue Guns comes up. I at first aver that I don't really have one. I mean, I could slap my spare set of Arhend's cordia wood or Carbon Creations grip panels on my Springer or my Colt, but those are both beat-to-hell working guns with ugly, worn teflon finishes. "Like lipstick on a pig," is the term that came to mind.

"Oh, wait..." I recalled, "yes, I do have a Barbecue Gun." I wonder if those vintage mother-of-pearl stocks on my .44 Hand Ejector would fit on that 27?

Just riffing...

Bobbi's post about the famous sticker on Woody Guthrie's guitar gave me the idea to put a sticker on Woody Harrelson's banjo...




Somebody who's a more dab hand with the software should be able to take that ball and run with it. ;)

So true...

Go read NewJovianThunderbolt's ruminations on the phenomenon of "Metrocons".

You can read National Review Online for months without seeing a reference to the 2nd amendment. Longer if no 2A cases work their way through the court system. Only one or two contributors shoots a self-defense handgun regularly or has in the past. And it is hard to blame them. By definition they LIVE in the city. And the 2 cities they live in are NY and DC. Neither are known for having lots of places to practice with your boomstick. Or having a boomstick in your house/apartment.

Looks like he hulled Quasi-Con George Will right there. Although I'd been subliminally aware of the phenomenon, I'd never really put my thoughts to words like that before. Now I don't have to.

Open Carry Fashion Police.

Look, if you are wearing your gun out where God and everybody can see it, then your pistol and holster are as much a part of your wardrobe as your belt and shoes.

Anybody who'd open carry in a Fobus holster would wear Crocs in public, that's all I'm saying.

The Life Of Barry

Joanna sums up the current occupant of the Oval Office in one single Monty Python quote.

I LOL'ed.

Like old guns? Own a screwdriver?

Then a copy of Antique Firearms Assembly/Disassembly would be a worthwhile purchase. It originally interested me for having the instructions for taking apart top-break Smiths, but it also has pre-war Hand Ejectors, some single-action Rugers, old Colts, lots of lever-action rifles, and a few of the more common antique shotguns.

Just remember: If you break anything inside a top-break Smith, you're going to have a bear of a time finding a replacement and someone qualified to fit it. As a matter of fact, Smith top breaks are generally cheap enough that it might not be a bad idea to keep a parts gun or two to back up any one you actually use much. It's the same reason I encouraged my roommate to pick up an extra Savage .32 or two if she found them cheaply...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...

...he's right:

"It's not a matter of whether or not they perform their intended role well; it's whether or not they collude with the state in not only misinforming the public, but actively -- with malice aforethought -- disinform the public. They propagandize for affirmative evil. They willfully spread lies. They conceal information they know and can verify in order to support their favored candidates and issues and then try to deny that's what they're doing." -Mark Alger, BabyTrollBlog

Go RTWT.

The buggy whip makers just don't get it.

Among the natives...

Reading Dr. Wintemute's little anthropological tour the the darkest wilds of Gunshowia, wherein he observes the rituals of the primitive inhabitants and attempts to interpret them for his civilized audience, is simply hilarious.

It would be fun to do one of Wintemute's natural habitat...

"The tweed jacket is a sign of maturity and a request for deference from lower-ranking herd males, or "neckbeards", as the juveniles of the species are termed. Note the artfully rumpled look that signals to prospective mates that the silverback is too preoccupied with affairs of the mind to be bothered with petty things like grooming. Note also the way that the sunken chest puffs outward in the presence of junior herd females, or "undergrads" as they are referred to in the vernacular..."

Meanwhile, I apparently need to get with the progam and buy one of them there pink guns, since the Patriarchy has gone out of their way to make them extra attractive for my l'il sensibilities. (This is me, rolling my eyes...)


(H/T to RobertaX)

Caution...

Things get very surreal at this link. Maybe too surreal to be entirely work-safe.

Presented (almost) Without Comment:

Okay, so Barry wants me to refinance my nonexistent underwater mortgage and go back to school. What does Congress have to say to this profligacy?

Well, Nancy says (at least subliminally suggested by the ad on the right) that I'm supposed to get all swoon-y over some metrosexual guy who spends more on skin care products than I do.

Festive.

It's the WebAds of the Apocalypse.

I'm buying precious metals, canned goods, and ammunition...

Welcome to the Future...

When I was very young, still living behind enemy lines in Chicago, we would occasionally go visit our kinfolk in Iowa on their working farm. I remember these visits only vaguely as very bucolic idylls...

This morning, at OhMyGawdThirty AM, I emailed a question to Farmer Frank. I received a reply a few minutes later, and sent him another email in return... "Bing!" I had a response in my Inbox in not ten minutes.

I looked at my clock.

I looked at my calendar.

There was no way on God's Green Earth that a working farmer was sitting in his office at this time of day, this time of year...

Another email was sent, and I quote: "Please tell me that I am not having emails answered by a farmer out in the back forty with a Blackberry. Let me cling to my quaint 20th Century illusions."

Yup.

Welcome to the 21st Century, y'all...

A little frustrating, yet strangely addictive.

So, I've been playing first-person shooters on the PC since the days of Wolfenstein 3D, so "First-Person Shooter" and "Mouse & Keyboard" are linked pretty inextricably in my head. Also, when I think "video game controller", the first mental image to pop up on my head is a black square base with a single joystick and a solitary orange button in the top left corner, not some organic shape that looks like it was grown in a vat and is covered with more buttons, switches, and joysticks than the cockpit of the Concorde. Needless to say, Call of Duty 3 on the X-Box is taking a bit of work...

Good News, Bad News.

The gray skies are going away, and that means the thermometer will creep past sixty here on the porch for the first time in a while.

The downside is that the clouds are kinda like Baby Gaia's blanket, and when they go away it's kinds like her bare bottom is exposed to the cold vacuum of space at night. Oh well, at least a hard frost kills bugs.

Shooty Goodness Weekend Report.

Went to Iggle Crick with Shootin' Buddy bright and early yesterday morning, after a breakfast of yummy huevos con chorizo at Le Peep.

We were the first shooters there, and I got my Zombie Chuck target hung up and went to work with the .22 Combat Masterpiece and a borrowed Mark II 22/45. I shot the K-frame until the extraction got sticky and the Ruger until the raw spot on my thumb was taking the fun out of mag loading. Also, I was getting to the point where I could see the bottom in my ammo can.

I did some shooting with the Para LTC9 and ran sixty rounds of .45 through the Colt. The reason that I know that it was exactly sixty rounds is because as I was heading out the door, I grabbed the .50 cal ammo can that I thought was my .45 but was actually my roomie's spare magazine can. Oops. So I had to borrow some .45 ACP LRN from Shootin' Buddy, out of the stash he picked up at Knob Creek.

I'm still trying to work on my reloads by loading random numbers of rounds into magazines, anywhere between two and full, and mixing them up before starting a string. Also, I still have a bad tendency to pull stuff low when I start getting rushed or flustered. The A-Zone was chewed out of Zombie Chuck's noggin, but I threw a few into his teeth and neck and, more embarrassingly, gutterballed two right past his right earlobe. Dropping straight low on followups for me is largely a result of my sloppy trigger prep, but I got no excuse for the others.

Meanwhile, Shootin' Buddy noticed that his Ciener .22 conversion wasn't chambering the rounds completely. After a small amount of fiddling, the reason was determined:


Sorry for the blurry pic; cell phone closeups are tricky. Anyway, see the way that the red range rod protruding from the chamber has a gray/silver cylinder on the end of it? Yup, squib. Fortunately it barely made it into the rifling and prevented the round behind it from chambering fully. Federal Spitfire, in case anyone was wondering. Always be alert for bore obstructions, kids!

Auction...

Rare 10mm revolver for sale. All proceeds go to my favorite charity: Me.

The Greatest Movie Ever Filmed.

They need to go back in time and take all the Oscars away from Gone With The Wind and maybe Casablanca and give them all to Zombieland.

Seriously, this is the only time I've ever blurted out "Oh my gawd, this is maybe the greatest movie ever!" out loud, in the theater. Twice.

That is all...

It's pronounced "Modus Operandi"...

So the news this morning reads:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- A man wearing an explosives-laden belt blew himself up during a conference between Shia and Sunni groups in southeastern Iran on Sunday, killing at least 29 people.

The blast in Sarbaz in the province of Sistan-Baluchestan wounded 28 others, the semiofficial Fars news agency said.

Five senior officers of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed in the attack, Fars said.

Okay, that sounds about par for the course for that neck of the woods. Nothing to see here; move along... Then comes the plot twist:

While no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, Iran pointed the finger at the United States without disclosing its reasons.

"We consider this recent terrorist act to be the result of the U.S. actions and this is a sign of their enmity," said parliament Speaker Ali Larijani.

Oh, yeah, Zippy, that one's got our fingerprints all over it. What was the giveaway? The way the guy was humming snatches of "Yankee Doodle" between shrieks of "Allahu Akhbar!" right before he pulled the pin on his Semtex Underoos?

Happy Blogiversary!

Go wish a happy blogiversary to Breda and Bobbi.

Octember.

We're having the 23rd day in a row of below-average temperatures. And by "below-average", I don't mean "It was supposed to be 70 degrees and we only hit 69." Usual daily highs this time of year are in the mid sixties, and we'll be lucky to claw our way out of the low fifties by late afternoon.

On the heels of the second coldest July on record, this means that we got bupkis for tomatoes. The grape tomato plants in the backyard are still covered with stunted green things that can only be called tomatoes because of the position they occupy on the end of the stems. The neighbor's Tabasco pepper plant only half-ripened as well, and our crop of Serranos could have been bigger, with four plants yielding maybe five or six peppers worth eating.

Attention Californians:

Buy your pre-ban unregistered assault televisions now, before your state's energy commissars hand down their ruling in November and you have to smuggle them in from Nevada the way you do handgun ammunition and cigarettes.

Bleh.

Didn't sleep well. Weird dreams. Kept waking up. Woke up at normal weekday time by reflex. May give it up as a bad idea and crawl back under the covers and try this one again in a few hours.

Münchausen-by-Proxy Boy...

Holy jeebus, how did I miss this?

The father built the 20ft by 5ft silver helium balloon in his yard and it was designed as a transport vehicle of the future so "people can pull out of their garage and hover 50ft to 100ft above traffic." He also once posted a video of himself on the internet in which he describes Hillary Clinton as a "shape shifting reptilian".

Trapped in a runaway UFO or hiding in the garage, the kid is obviously in trouble: "Hello? 911? Yeah, my parents are frickin' crazy!"

Five rifles meme...

I caught the tail end of Gun Nuts Radio and heard Caleb talking with Robert of Blackfork Blog about the Five Most Significant Rifles, and I thought, hey, there's an easy idea for a post...

I'll start off with the gun made by the first guy, probably a German, who realized that putting a bit of a twist on his powder-fouling grooves made the gun shoot better. Of course, those early rifles had almost no military significance. The ball needed to be virtually hammered down the barrel from the muzzle end, and so the reloading process took forever. Contrary to the mythology, "Pennsylvania Rifles" (they weren't "Kentucky Rifles" at the time,) played virtually no significant part in the War of Independence; fast-firing smoothbores fired in mass volleys ruled the battlefields of the day.

This was changed by the introduction of expanding-base "Minie balls", which enabled a new generation of "rifle muskets" to be loaded almost as rapidly as smoothbores and fired almost as accurately as earlier rifles. The most significant, and one of the earliest, was the Pattern 1853 Enfield adopted by the British army, which combined a rifled barrel, adjustable sights, and percussion ignition into a sophisticated infantry weapon.

Its time in the sun was short, however. Unlike smoothbore muzzle loaders, which dominated the world's battlefields for centuries, the muzzle-loading percussion rifle barely lasted two decades, because a German inventor named Dreyse had perfected a system that used a rotating, sliding bolt, like one used to lock a door, to close the breech of a rifle, allowing the cartridge to be inserted from the rear of the barrel. This meant that the user could reload much faster, and do it while prone or kneeling behind cover, both of which were nearly impossible with muzzle loaders. While the British and Americans were still fumbling around with the best way to convert antique sidehammer muzzle loaders into cartridge arms, the Jerries had already won three wars with the first mass-produced standard issue bolt action rifle.

The Dreyse's main handicap was the fact that it was a single shot weapon and that, being charged with black powder, the bore fouled quickly even at the modest rates of fire of which it was capable. Various magazine-fed bolt action rifles only compounded the powder-fouling problems and it wasn't until the French released the Mle.1886 Lebel that the world was introduced to the devastating firepower of rapid-fire, smokeless powder magazine-fed rifles firing high-velocity jacketed bullets.

All that remained was to automate the loading process in a shoulder-fired infantry weapon, and while several abortive attempts were made, they all fell short in reliability or ruggedness. It wasn't until the U.S. Army adopted the M1 Rifle designed by John Garand that the infantry rifle reached its modern state. While there have been changes in construction, caliber, and rate of fire since then, it is notable that every military worth mentioning on the planet is still fielding a gas-operated, self-loading, rotating bolt rifle some seventy years later. Barring a major technological breakthrough, this basic pattern may have a longer run than the smoothbore musket...

The other impediment to my blogging time...

...this week has been in book format.

While I enjoyed John Ringo's Mack-Bolan-For-The-21st-Century Kildar series, I've never been one for his SF; I jumped into the Posleen books with both feet, but only hung on about as far as halfway through the second book.

I've also enjoyed Dave Weber's books, although the Honor Harrington series has reached a point where it can only progress if they invent new super-dreadnoughts that cost infinity dollars to build, launch entire stars at each other, and Honor herself inevitably gets promoted to God, j.g..

So when folks recommended the series co-authored by the duo that begins with the book March Upcountry, I was skeptical. But any book by two military SF authors with a Xenophon reference right in the title can't be all bad, right?

As it turns out, no. It's not bad at all. In fact, I'm about a chapter away from finishing the sequel, March to the Sea, and March to the Stars is in the on-deck circle and, barring a major cockup or totally unexpected shark-jumping somewhere in the final volume, I'll have considered this to be money and time well spent. Two powered armor thumbs up.

Is it just me...

...or is the new'n'improved Technorati well and truly fuXX0r3d?

In the few years I've been doing this blogging thing, I've seen several attempts come and go to "rate" the "relative importance" of blogs (some of which you'll find at the bottom of the page here, under the heading "All is Vanity...") and the only outfit that's ever come up with a way that works or matters is SiteMeter.

Overheard on the deck of the Titanic:

"Captain! The sea level's rising!"

High-speed digital electronic time suckage device.

If I don't get a lot written today, it's this guy's fault.

I managed to exercise epic self-control and do no more than just slice the tape on the box last night, because I knew that actually opening it would put paid to my laundry chores. However, now I've actually sat down to hook it up and slay some pixels.

More later...

Life, Liberty, and Low Latency.

(CNN) -- Finland has become the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right.

There are days that I really feel sorry for the guys at The Onion. When the real world gets this bizarre, the satire business must get downright Sisyphean.

Wanted: One Very Special Gun.

Help Nate at Wasted Electrons find a very special .22 rifle.

...and then we'll sing the "No Dysentery For Me" song!

Today is Global Handwashing Day, kids!


Today is a day when blue sperm-creatures, drunken orange rectangles, and multilobed green alien beings can all hold pseudopods in harmony.

How much American taxpayer money went into just that goofy logo?

Although the whole thing is run by a "public-private partnership", it's somehow unsurprising to find that global employment agency for idealistic hippies, cousin-in-laws of third world dictators, and Fijian peacekeeping troops, the United Nations, hip-deep in the middle.

Ups & Downs Of Daily Life...

UP: Had breakfast with Shootin' Buddy yesterday at the ever-reliable Taste. I went with the quiche of the day, which was garlic, chili flakes, mushrooms, asparagus, and cheddar. It was absolutely delicious, which it always is. I have never walked out of that place disappointed or less than full.


DOWN: I recently upgraded my desktop media machine from the decade-old graphite iMac G3/400 to an only-half-decade-old G4/1.25 eMac. The problem, of course, occurred when moving my music library. Granted, the vast majority of it was on an external FireWire hard drive, but I had started ripping my CDs on the old machine straight to the itty-bitty 13Gb internal drive. The sequence went something like this:

1. Start ripping CDs to hard drive.
2. Panic when you realize that you are going to fill the whole thing up. Only rip "favorite songs" off albums.
3. Buy external drive. Continue ripping "favorites" by reflex.
4. Realize that new external drive has ample room for entire CD collection; resume ripping complete CDs.

Now that the external drive is connected to a new machine, this has resulted in a situation where I'm not sure which CDs were left off the new drive and need to be re-ripped, and which CDs are only partially done. I thought life in the digital age was supposed to be easier?

Like SWATting a bug. An innocent citizen bug.

Few people would dispute that an armed murder suspect running loose in suburbia is a legitimate reason for a SWAT deployment; after all, "armed, barricaded suspect with hostages" is pretty much the raison d'être for the whole SWAT concept in the first place.

Deploying a perimeter and then assaulting an occupied house, all on the basis of a "He went thattaway!" is a little tenuous.

Not cleaning up your own mess is frickin' inexcusable.


(H/T to Zendo Deb.)

After a long hiatus...

...I'm going to try to get back to The Arms Room.

Look! A new Sunday Smith!

You keep using that word...

The discussion about "science != religion" is ongoing at Og's place...

Double Heh.

Like I said earlier:

We've gone from Lyndon Baines Bush to Richard Milhous Obama...

Once upon a time...

...I was working third shift at an inconvenience store. The particular neighborhood this store was located in was on the main line of travel between Atlanta's party zone and the bedroom communities north of town. It was also immediately adjacent to some seedy apartment complexes and the interstate, and all the businesses around me got robbed while I worked there; I actually watched the little kiosk of the gas station across the street get stuck up.

I was very friendly with the po-po, making sure that there was always fresh, free coffee; that and the fact that we were right at the intersection of four beats meant that there were almost always one or two cops stopping by. One of them asked me one night if I had a gun.

"I don't have a toter's permit yet," I replied.

"That's not what I asked."

"Well, it's against company policy..."

"Look," he said, "I'd rather see you alive and unemployed than a dead good employee. You have a gun, right?"


(With a hat tip to Unc.)

Gun laws Down Under will make you chunder.

Julie serves up a post on gun laws in Oz, which are worse than New Jersey's, and almost as bad as New York City's.

I was surprised to see that heavy handgun restrictions were in place as early as the 1950s, since there had actually been a serious danger of military invasion just a decade earlier.

What media bias?

The Indianapolis Red Star picked four swarthy-looking mugshots, totally at random no doubt, and plastered them under the headline Should Scary Negroes Like These Be Allowed To Carry A Gun?

Yay! Controversy!

So, the latest brouhaha is over Open Carry and who is and isn't a traitorous poopie-head:

SayUncle: Thinks Open Carry isn't the best means of gaining converts; otherwise apparently neutral.

Breda: Thinks she needs a retention holster.

Sebastian: Thinks open carry is counterproductive and should be a last resort. Like a Star Trek shirt with a hole in the armpit.

Alan: Thinks Sebastian is Zumboing himself.

Robb: Thinks he wants to Open Carry. Needs to change a bad law first.

Eseell: Thinks it's your duty to Open Carry.

Clayton Cramer: Some guy with a column. Seems to be massively against Open Carry but rambled off into a wandering rant about teh gay cooties, so I couldn't really tell.

Next on Circular Firing Squad: "Gadsden Flags: Cool, or Wookie Suit-ish?"


For the record, I've no real position on it one way or the other. I don't generally O.C., mostly to avoid excessive face time with the Po-Po and conversations with the occasional goober that can't resist a "Hey, you got a gun there! You 'spectin' trouble?" or "Did you know that your gun's cocked?"

I mean, I don't wear a cover garment around the house and yard, so I'm pretty sure all the neighbors have seen it, but I usually throw something on in the way of an overshirt or vest or whatever to perambulate about Greater Broad Ripple. On the other hand, I O.C.'ed all the time when I lived in a small town in the outer Atlanta 'burbs.

As far as one of those "Let's all strap on our heaters and go eat at Applebee's together!" demonstrations, I wouldn't because... ew, ick, Applebee's?!?

Overheard on the Internets:

Marko: I’m certainly a big fan of modern medicine, and it makes me sad to see the anti-science attitudes that are pervasive these days.

Me: You say “these days” as though humanity being composed of a seething mass of gullible retards was some kind of new phenomenon…

Caleb: It’s just now they can communicate more efficiently.

Me: The only upside to that is that hopefully we can get everybody on the internets nattering to each other about anthropogenic young earth UFO Mayan vaccine autism, and they’ll be too busy to listen to the guy up at the big podium telling them to throw Jews in ovens and machine gun everybody who wears glasses.

Audience fragmentation exploits the pettiness and short attention span of the naked chimp and makes mass movements harder to ignite and sustain.

LabRat: Dang. That’s some high-grade stuff to waste on a comment thread.

Me: Good point.

Bobbi's comment this morning was "So you see an upside to five hundred channels and nothing on?"

"Sure," I replied, "instead of ninety percent of America listening to three guys telling them what to think every night, now we've got seventy percent of America listening to five hundred guys telling them what to think, twenty percent playing video games or watching DVDs, and ten percent chatting about what they think on internet forums. You can't get a good pre-genocide Nürnberg pep rally going if half your audience is listening to shortwave rants about flouride in the water, cheering for the opposition, or playing World of Warcraft."

Beaten zone.

Here's the "Before" picture looking downrange at Knob Creek sometime around 8AM Saturday. (You can click it to embiggenate.)

They had Bobcats and front-end loaders setting up the neat-o targets. I think that pickup truck on a pedestal must have been a nearly irresistible target for the guys with the small cannons on the line.

Speaking of cannon, check out that adorable little mountain gun.

It was total candy-coated armageddon in surround-sound and full technicolor.

I'm turning into some kind of hippie.

I found myself actually missing my bicycle while I was out and about; one night I even dreamed about riding it to Fresh Market to do my grocery shopping.

If I start craving granola, somebody please kill me.

Object Of Desire.

I got my first closeup look at Lakeside Manufacturing's latest iteration of the belt-fed rimfire, the Razorback upper for the AR-15.

Oh. My. God. I haven't had a case of the Wants this bad in a long time...

What's it worth?

One question I used to hear a lot was "So, what's my gun worth?"

For some guns, that's a fairly easy answer... kind of. Used Glock 17s and Bangor Punta-era Smith Model 10s change hands often enough on the used market that "the going rate" is easy to establish; if you can find someone willing to pay it, then that's what your gun is worth.

The trick is when the weapon in question is not so common; nobody likes to hear "Well, buddy, I can't rightly tell you." It pained me to have to tell a customer that his Japanese "Type I" rifle wasn't listed in any of the standard value guides, nor could I recollect having seen one for sale in real life; in the end, the spot value of the gun was determined by finding a number for which he was willing to part with the gun, and that my boss was willing to pay. In turn, the gun was worth more to me than it was to my boss, and so I purchased it from him. And so on down the road...

Well...

...I'd say he's a shoo-in for Miss Vidalia Sweet Onion this coming April.

And don't forget the Heisman Write-In Campaign!

(I know it's a late hit, but I was on the road Friday and out for most of the weekend.)

Too punny!

Charles Hill goes on about Books Worth Reading, but gets the gold star for the day for his post title: "Canon Fodder". Wish I'd said that...

I loves me my old cars...

...but let's not forget that they were basically big sheet-metal boxes full of air. A '61 Chevy Impala weighed some 3700 pounds; the much smaller '02 Impala weighed 3600, and a lot of that weight was seat belts and air bags and padded dashboards. I loved my '67 Dodge Coronet, but I'd much rather tangle with a telegraph pole in my 'bitty '98 Bimmer...

Still and all, though, the best way for this to have come about doesn't involve the Fed.Gov. If folks want to buy cheap or nimble, they should be allowed to do so; people who prefer bubble-wrap-lined armored battlewagons should be allowed to buy them. Let the market decide, for heaven's sake.

(I once had an idea for a true luxury automobile: Build a car on a Checker cab type body-on-frame platform, with a pushrod small-block Chevy powerplant and a GM Turbo Hydromatic transmission, and overbuild all the interior components, from door hinges to seat bolsters, all of the highest-quality materials, and offer the car with a Lifetime Guarantee. For heaven's sake, it worked for Rolls Royce, and they perversely persisted in using their own engines, rather than using the common powerplant that motivates everything from Corvettes to ambulances... But there's no way a cheap throttle-body injected 350 would pass emissions these days, and a body-on-frame design doesn't stand up well in crash tests...)

Frazzled...

A week in Tennessee... back home in time to spend a week house-sitting for a friend... and then back out the door for an overnighter to Knob Creek... In that time I have spent several days hanging out back with the crew at CCA, taken in a movie or two, spent sixteen hours roadtripping, attended a Blogmeet, taken in both Knob Creek and National Gun Day in Louisville, and slept in my own bed maybe twice.

This is the stuff that makes a reclusive homebody like me want to curl up into a fetal ball under her desk and gibber softly to herself for a couple days.

I hope to be back to normal by mid-week. After I unpack the bags I packed almost three weeks ago.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda...

Everyone who's been around NFA stuff has their "Gee, I wish I'd..." stories.

Myself, I'm pretty much over the "Wish I owned a machine gun" bug; they're expensive to feed, and all the really fun ones sit on tripods and are a pain in the butt to find someplace to shoot. Much like .50 BMG rifles, I find them interesting and think it's every American's right to own one, but as a city gal who drives a two-seat roadster, there's just not really room for one in my life.

But anyhow, my machine gun story...

Back in late '01 I was pretty flush, and at the time I had the hots for the Steyr AUG in a bad way, because it was cool and foreign and therefore must be Modern and Ultimate. This was during the height of the Scary-Looking Gun Ban, and the cheapest semiauto AUGs I could find were running three grand and change (importation of new semiauto AUGs had been halted with an executive order by George Bush in '89).

At the time, a coworker was helping broker sales for a local guy with a big NFA collection, which included a couple of full-auto AUGs. There was one on the list in good shape, complete with a stack of extra mags, for an asking price of just over eight thousand. Now, when you're looking at buying what is essentially a toy, $3,500 for a semi- and $8,000 for full-auto are practically the same price: Crazy. I came thiiis close to jumping on that buzzgun, but balked at the last minute and never gave it much thought after that.

The full-auto AUGs I saw at Knob Creek were all running at about $15,000.

How's your stock portfolio done in that time?

Blogmeet...

Be there, or be square.

Hey, hey! Ho, ho!

U.S.C. 922(o) has got to go!


(H/T to Unc.)

Back from Mecca...

There is a place on this earth to which every true Gun Nut should make a pilgrimage at least once in their life:

This may seem odd, but up until this morning I had never trod the sacred soil of the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot.

From this day until the time I shuffle off my mortal coil, no gun show will ever really seem complete unless I hear the occasional BPTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHTHPPPHHHHTT! of a General Electric minigun turning cubic yards of money into metric tons of noise in the background...

Some days it doesn't pay to check the news...

Oh no they di'n't!

Written on the back of the Nobel Peace Prize was found this hastily-scrawled message

"I liek you do you liek me? Circle yes or no and tape your milk money here."

EDIT:
Quote of the Day in comments:

Late breaking news, recovered from the room where the deliberations took place was a notebook covered with hand drawn hearts and varying typeface versions of "Mrs. Nobel Prize Committee Obama". -Staghounds

Comment generator...

In lieu of having to generate content yesterday, Marko let his readers do it for him by throwing out a sure-fire chatter generator for gun nuts, asking the question "If you had to pick a rifle and a pistol in the same caliber for everything from self-defense to taking deer at 150 yards, what would they be?" and, lo! sixty-one comments appeared like magic.

Questions like this not only generate interest, they show where people's headspace is at on the whole issue. Folks who are actual hunters know how hard the "medium-sized game at 150 yards" requirement is with a handgun, and their comments reflect that. Weird caliber aficionados propose outlandish carbine or pistol choices to fit their pet caliber. Counterstrike kiddies wax lyrical about guns with which they've slain countless hostile texture-mapped polygons, while tactical types scorn the requirement for underpowered long guns or overpowered handguns.

My first thought in these "one gun"-type thought experiments is CCW. Since I carry a gun every day, the "one gun" has to be a gun I can carry every day. Throwing the hunting requirement in makes things tougher, because .45ACP is, let's face it, suboptimal on Bambi out past the other endzone. Then there's 10mm, but it has the problem that most loads in the chambering with enough sectional density to be serious choices for hunting aren't running too much over sonic, while the faster and flatter shooting ones seem a little light-for-caliber to make me really happy.

In the end, I usually pick a .357 Magnum K-frame (a medium-sized revolver; probably this one), because I can carry one every day, and pair it with a carbine in the same chambering,which can make use of the 158-180gr offerings in the caliber. Neither would be my first choice for either job, but both will do adequately if the user will.

Whoops!

Fell into the internets there for a minute. Content shortly.

Hey, how about this weather we're getting? Sure is a lot of it...

Things I want...

I need to pick up a 6.8 SPC barrel and bolt from Bison Armory.

Thanks to that MGI upper, that's all I need to swap calibers on the gun. Frank has spoken well of the performance of the 6.8 on critters, and I've still got a 6.8 mag and a few hundred rounds of ammo lying around here someplace; that should take care of any rationalizing I need to do for the purchase.

Boyz In Tha 'Hood.

For those unfamiliar with Indianapolis geography or demographics, Brownsburg is a sleepy commuter 'burb to the northwest of town, 'way out past the reservoir, where the subdivisions thin out and the cornfields thicken, and minivans and MBAs start giving way to mullets and Monte Carlos.

There are no mean streets in B'burg, not even any mildly peeved streets; just Little League and yard sales on the weekends. This makes it hard for teenagers in Brownsburg to convince their friends that they lead secret lives as hardcore gang bangers (maybe they commute downtown like their parents, but for more nefarious purposes.)

One particular teen was so intent on proving his banger bona fides to his B'burg buddies that he shot himself four times with... get this: a pellet gun, and claimed that he'd been attacked by a rival. He even had his friend's dad call 911. The police were not amused.

A pellet gun? Jeezis, Opie, when Aunt Bea finds out you shot yourself with a pellet gun and got blood on the velour upholstery of her minivan, you're going to get in trouble. She's gonna take away your PS3 and it'll be no more Grand Theft Auto for you!

Quote of the Day:

How warm is the climate? It's so warm it's impossible to fact check a story!

I get a chuckle every time I hear someone toss out the line "The science is settled!" It just proves the speaker to be unclear on their terminology, because Buddy, if it's "settled", then it ain't "science", okay? Science doesn't "settle" things; it just provides workable hypotheses that we use until we get better data.

Sweet!

A 2.2-lb. double rifle in .22 Hornet.

Some things just need no particular reason for being.



(H/T to Og.)

Nose in a book...

I spent most of yesterday curled up reading Nation, by Terry Pratchett. What a wonderful storyteller that man is.

That reminds me; I need to get the newest Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals.

Also, this two-part article on the Bronze Age Collapse, which I found linked at Western Rifle Shooters, was fascinating. It's a slice of history about which we are still learning a lot, and if you don't find the systemic collapse of civilization from the Balkans all the way to the Nile delta fascinating, then you're not much of a history buff, are you?

"Last of the V-8 Interceptors..."

With the imminent demise of the Crown Vic, longtime staple of livery fleets and cop shop parking lots, Chevy is going to try to fill the vacuum by getting back into the RWD fleet sedan game. Well, sort of.

Having basically handed the market for RWD fleet vehicles to Ford on a silver platter when they dropped the B-bodies back in '97, Chevy is going to try to get at least some of it back with a "Law Enforcement Only" Holden Chevrolet Caprice. Lord only knows how they plan on doing the "Po-Po Only" bit; I knew a couple people in the early '90s who drove Taurii with the distinctive dual exhausts, dog dish hubcaps, and transmission cooler vents of the police package, which was obtainable via any dealer's fleet guy.

You know, the one thing Detroit, and especially GM, did better than anybody else was build big, plush, rugged, body-on-frame sedans. And instead of playing to their strengths, they pissed away whatever competitive advantage they had by playing the other guy's game, and playing it badly. Rather than squandering all their corporate blood and treasure on a whole host of poorly-conceived, ill-built, me-too-mobiles like the Citation and Cimarron and Skylark, they should have just licensed the Corolla and Camry as badge-engineered entry-level Chevys and let Buick be Buick. Now we have to import our American sedans from Oz; the shame of it all...

Do you know what is just frickin' awesome?

If you have an M4gery with a collapsible stock and an MGI QCB upper, the whole thing can be stowed disassembled in a typical laptop bag and put together in about ten seconds flat, if you remember to store the lower with the pins pulled out.

I feel like Bond, Jane Bond.

Where have all the Sigmas gone?

Khyber Passing.


(H/T to Unc.)

Teaching the teachers.

Matt has a post up about Day One of his instructor's training.

Not-so-gentle Ben.

Once again somebody gets a graphic lesson that large wild animals are not cuddly pets.

I don't get this about some people: Look, you know how hard a time you have understanding cats and dogs? Well, we've spent ten thousand years and more in an effort to unscrew the inscrutability of Felis catus and Canis familiaris, and they still both communicate with us about as well as Joe Biden after a particularly rough all-nighter, and they're fairly social animals. Black bears, on the other hand, make J.D. Salinger look like a social butterfly and only have two real modes of interacting with humans: running away from us or eating us, so if you get in the cage with the bear and it doesn't start running, then that narrows the possible outcomes right on down, doesn't it?

Y'know...

Looking at the picture of the zombie target again, some of those holes from the FN 1910 look awful big and ragged for .32 FMJ.

I wonder if it actually keyholed a couple? That might also account for at least some of the ~6" scatter that I refuse to dignify with the term "group"; the trigger and sights are a handicap, and I'm not that good of a pistol shot, but I'm not that bad, either.

The bore is kinda rough, but I've seen a lot rougher, and I don't recollect there being anything weird about the muzzle crown.

I'm going to need to take it with again next weekend, I see. I want to see if I can get it to shoot.

A graphic illustration of the Death of Newspapers:

From my roomie:

It's official: the dwindling Indianapolis Star no longer keeps pace with the urinary output of my smallest cat...

This is God's Honest Truth.

When I refer to the Indy Red Star as "Our Local Cat Box Liner", I am speaking literally. Other than Bobbi sometimes reading the comics and me occasionally using a Dan Carpenter column to pressure-test my cerebral arteries for weak spots, the paper is not used for anything at Roseholme Cottage other than lining Slinky's litter box. Some months back, it was severely downsized in page count. Now rather than accumulating an excess of newsprint in the house that must be recycled every now and again, the paper doesn't have enough pages to stay ahead of the kidneys of a 3-lb geriatric house cat.

Are you listening Gannett? The only reason we are still subscribing to your local rag is to give the cat a place to pee, and you can't even do that job right. You don't deserve a bailout; you deserve to freeze in the dark.

Making a statement...

Just so people realize that he really means it.

Some very simple ethics...

There is one basic physical crime against another's person: Assault.

This can be further subdivided into two specific charges: Physical assault that causes the other person's death, which we give the high-falutin' Latin name "homicide", and physical assault that doesn't do so.

A subcategory of the second kind is assault of the type, involving the sexual organs, which we call "rape".

Now, generally speaking, we recognize some possible rationales for these kinds of physical assault. For instance, there is the "self-defense" claim, in which it is claimed that the final victim was trying to do That Thing to the perpetrator first. To wit: "He tried to kill me, so I killed him before he could do so," or "She punched me in the nose, so I punched her back."

Then there is the defense of "It was an accident." For instance, "I was driving along in my car when she ran out in front of me," and "I was going for the slam-dunk and I didn't mean to hit him in the throat with my elbow there under the net."

Lastly, there is the claim of "I was just frickin' crazy and didn't know Right from Wrong," where the perp's excuse is "I was just frickin' crazy and didn't know Right from Wrong."

In the first and second incidences, we realize that there were mitigating circumstances. In the third, we realize (or used to) that the perpetrator is as crazy as a rabid dog and warehouse them away from normal people or dispose of them dispassionately.

Rape is an unusual type of physical assault in that it is hard to claim either of the first two mitigating circumstances: Both self-defense ("The altar boy was coming right for me!") and accident ("I tripped and fell on top of her and my you-know-what accidentally landed you-know-where") ring pretty hollow as defenses, and that leaves only the third excuse, the one where we realize that the perpetrator is as crazy as a rabid dog and warehouse them away from normal people or dispose of them dispassionately.

Watching people who should damned well know better reach for one of these excuses to cover one of their own is positively sick-making.

Range notes...

• Between vacation in Tennessee, blogmeets, and other obligations, I'd missed two range weekends. Other than function-firing my little FN 1910 at Coal Creek and my regular dry-firing, I hadn't pulled a trigger in three weeks, so in addition to playing with the .32's, I had plenty of make-up work to do yesterday. I left the Marlin Papoose at home, and did nothing but pistol shooting: 9mm and .45 from the 1911's and lots and lots of double-action .22 revolver shooting.
• You know, I used to think that Smith getting rid of that knob on the end of the ejector rod on wartime & later revolvers made sense; that it was just a cosmetic frippery. Not when your .22 is starting to dirty up and extraction is getting sticky, it's not. C'mon, S&W, how much would it cost to put that thing back? $5/gun? Make it a Performance Center feature.
• Anybody who complains about the sights on a Colt Pocket Hammerless should be sentenced to an FN 1910. In fact, other than being cheaper to make, the striker-fired 1910 seems completely inferior in every way to the 1903.

It's like instant karma.

According to the media organs that pay attention to such things, Michael Moore's movie about the evils of making profits is... well... not very evil, at least if you're using profits as a gauge of malevolence.

Shop 'til they drop?

Not looking like a good year for retail... (H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

Also in fiscal news: Former Japanese finance minister found dead; German bank official makes retro comments about Turks, without actually using phrase "useless eaters".

Raccoon City, circa 1912.

Hot on the trail of papers stolen from Georges Sagnac, Inspector Pierre Mondieu of the Sûreté arrived in Raccoon City, where experiments were ongoing at the laboratories of Umbrella Patent Nostrums, Ltd., consisting of exposing germs to the emanations from purified radium while in a chamber emptied of everything but luminiferous aether.

Of course when these germs got out, they turned the first scientist they touched into a brain-eating zombie. (Like you couldn't see that coming.) Assisted by Detective Dirk Manly of the Raccoon City P.D., Pierre cornered the glow-in-the-dark shambler in the file storage room. As zombies (even slightly radioactive ones,) are wont to do, it came right for him. Aiming at the lower tip of the walking dead's sternum with his Fabrique Nationale Model 1910, the intrepid agent let fly...


Between the minuscule sights and the atrocious trigger (and the fact that the bore mysteriously showed the wear of about eighty years, despite this being 1912...) the seven rounds impacted high and scattered all over about a handspan at seven yards, and everyone knows that won't stop a zombie. "Mon Dieu!" shouted the Inspector, certain that his forebrain was about to become an hors d'œuvre, leaving him hors de combat.

Fortunately, Dirk was backing him up with his trusty Colt's Pocket Hammerless: slightly better sights, a much better trigger, and Dirk knew to aim at the zombie between the running lights with his seven rounds:


...and thus was Mondieu saved from being zombie merde.

Moral of the story: If you have to chase zombies around with a Browning-designed pocket .32, use the Colt's and aim at the grape.

Good morning, world!

Off to breakfast and then the range. :)

Tempting...

I need a $200+ video game boat anchor cabled to my TeeWee about like I need a hole in my head, but I can't help but notice that used first-gen X-Boxes are running fifty bucks and less at most prawn shops and used video game stores these days.

Fifty bucks is darn near free, and there's a literal boatload of games out there for the system. At the moment, the state of the art in my Old Video Game Console Museum is a Playstation and a Game Cube...

It's awfully tempting. And I've never even played Halo...


(Incidentally, I picked up a used copy of Call Of Duty 4 for my Nintendo DS. I remember being flabbergasted playing Quake on my rock'n'roll custom-built gaming desktop, and it didn't look that good. What a fascinating modern age we live in ...)

It's a strange world...

...and it keeps getting stranger every time I check.

Can someone explain to me why the Maximum Leader of Guinea is wearing what appears to be a Jerry fallschirmjäger badge on his red beanie?

The final frontier...

Awesome photo of a Delta 4 Heavy liftoff at Cape Canaveral.

Some photos are worth getting a lens trashed...



(H/T to Nathan Brindle.)

Parenting Fail.

1. Keep your eleven-year-old out of the liquor cabinet.
2. If he does get drunk, don't let him have the keys to the family bus.
3. Should he get behind the wheel while blotto anyway, for Vishnu's sake, make him keep it under 100mph.

Is Envy venial or mortal?

'Cause whichever it is, I am doing it right now.

That is one schweet double rifle.

(I had an order in on one of those vaporware .45-70 Baikals that Og mentions as far back as Summer of '05, too. I even had a couple co-workers and customers wanting one. None ever showed up.)

Farmer in the desert.

Frank has a run-down of his experience with the S&W M&P-15 at Gunsite.

That's two thumbs-up so far.

I got all excited for a minute there...

...but then I realized they just meant "...from Olympic contention", and not "...by flying saucers."

Don't feel bad, Chicagoans: Speaking as an ex-Atlanta gal, you really didn't want it anyway. It's a lot more hassle than it's worth.

The economy's not quite dead yet...

...but the .gov has a few ideas to finish it off.

The economy is still flopping around on the floor and they're just trying to get it to hold still long enough to shoot it between the running lights.

If these people were doctors, they'd recommend amputation to cure brain tumors.

Samson's chin spinach.

It really is the beard.

I'm just on pins and needles...

...waiting to find out which city offered the most hookers and blow to the IOC.


BREAKING: Awww! Who's the sad clown, Dickie? :D

My line in the sand.

Can we veer from our usual topics here at VFTP and chat about toilet paper for a minute? Of course we can; this is my blog, and I say so.

Anyhow, I freely admit to being something of a toilet paper snob. I don't mean to be throwing brand names around, but my toilet paper dollar has been spent on Charmin and nothing but Charmin for about as long as I've been purchasing my own TP.

Specifically, I am a loyal devotee of the Cadillac of Bathroom Tissue: Charmin Plus, With Aloe. Once you have used this queen of bog papers, never again will you want to subject your delicate netherparts to the indignities of the 320-grit tracing paper foisted on the herd by public restrooms.

Now the Enemy is after my TP. Folks, you can take my light bulbs and I'll grumble, you can make me smoke outside and I'll sulk, but listen to me now and believe me later, little pencil-necked environmentalist man: You had damned well better take my guns before you take my Charmin.


(H/T to David.)

Uncommon sense.

Les Jones has been on a roll lately:

It’s amazing how many “survival” plans don’t make any arrangements for something as common as not having a job for six months. In this wildly unlikely apocalyptic scenario a mere mortal might be expected to somehow accomplish the heroic feats of not having the power cut off, reigning victorious against the forces of not having his car repossessed - not by shooting the repo man but by not getting behind on his car payment to begin with - and defending the sanctity of the family domicile by not having the mortgage company righteously and legally foreclose on his deadbeat ass.

RTWT.

A basement full of freeze-dried beans and .308 ammo is not the solution to every potential life crisis; as a matter of fact, it's a pretty narrow-spectrum answer to a specific set of circumstances.

The end of the internet...

Sven Jonsson is still looking for it:



(It's spelled with an "a", Sven, you pervy Scandihoovian, you.)

Better a thousand Polanskis go free...

...than one LA/NYC auteur have to look in the mirror:

CHILDREN OF THE CORN LEFT frequently blather that it's better that a thousand guilty men go free than that one man be punished unjustly.

What's the reciprocal or commutative formulation for victims? That a thousand victims should suffer rather than a guilty man get his just deserts without a bend-over-backward-to-cater-to-the-criminal-bar trial and endless make-the-lawyers-rich appeals?

I mean: fair's fair.

Right?

Meanwhile, rumor has it that Michael Moore will actually be banking the profits from his new movie excoriating capitalism, (for which, oddly enough, admission will be charged.)

Could these lackwits be further disconnected from reality? "No enemies on the left", indeed...

I keep being warned by the federales that The People Who Hate Us Because Of Our Freedoms are going to use a weapon of mass destruction on New York or Los Angeles, and Really Soon Now, and my only thought is "Okay. And...?"

The Other Quote of the Day:

This sounds an awful lot like the hellish exile Roman Polanski spent in Paris. -Ace, on the "sacrifice" Michelle made by jetting to Copenhagen.

I very nearly blew soda out my nose.

Overheard in the Hallway:

Me: ...and the Olympics would be Barry's payoff to Daley. I've been in a city gearing up for the Olympics; I can only imagine the amount of graft if all those construction contracts had to get filtered past one guy. No wonder he had Barack drop everything and go shill for him.

RX: What state was Jimmy Carter from? And what year were the Atlanta Olympics?

Me: 1996. A full sixteen years after he was hounded from office... I mean, beaten in an election.

Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:

From James Rawles at SurvivalBlog:

When I last checked, my new book was ranked at #4 in Amazon.com's overall book rankings. Only the new Dan Brown novel, the upcoming Sarah Palin book, and Glenn Beck's book are ranked higher. How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It is also ranked #1 in the Survival Skills category, #1 in the Technology & Society category, #1 in the General & Reference category, and #2 in nonfiction books. Thanks again!

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and a SHTF manual? What, nobody's buying Dreams From My Father to figure out which parts were totally written by Ayers and which are actual Barry quotes?

The Dems have only about thirteen more months to pull a sword out of a stone (or their heads out of their fourth points of contact,) before the midterms. Frankly, I just don't see it happening. It feels like 1994 all over again.

Awaiting a report from Gunsite...

Caleb is beating the holy hell out of an M&P-15 with the factory low-end MagPul accessory package. (And by "low-end", I mean "de-contented"; the MOE parts I've examined seem to be just as sturdy, just with fewer features. The stock, for instance, lacks the locking feature that makes the CTR stock so solid, and the pistol grip doesn't have the modular front- and backstraps of the MIAD.)

I'm waiting to hear how the MagPul BUPS (Back-Up Plastic Sights) hold up. Do they hold zero with normal handling? Are they rugged enough to take a spill? (Not even all BUIS systems will do that.) I'm skeptical. Perhaps he could accidentally-on-purpose drop the carbine on them?

Your Thursday Morning Doom'n'Gloom:

Ten Reasons For An Imminent Stock Market Crash.

The halting climb of the last several months, seemingly disconnected from broader economic realities, has had the feeling of a game of musical chairs: Nobody wants to get caught with a bunch of worthless paper when the music stops.


(H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

A flaw in their plan...

The po-po in the Place Where Great Britain Used To Be have launched a new ad campaign, targeted at the girlfriends of gang bangers, with the tagline "Hide his gun and you help commit the crime".

The only problem here is that all the people susceptible to gentle pleas from ad agencies have already turned in their guns because they are illegal in Ol' Blighty. The only people who still pack heaters about on their nightly rounds could give a toss about finger-wagging nonsense and "help commit the crime" warnings; they're committing a crime just by having the damn thing and, well, you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, right?

It's exactly as dumb as telling someone who already has the heroin that it's illegal to use it.

Quote of the Day:

If Microsoft had been put in charge of marketing sex, the human race would have ended long ago, because no one would be caught dead doing something that uncool. -James Lileks

I am not anti-Microsoft; they're just another company as far as I'm concerned, with good products and bad ones, some good ideas and some real boners. But I'll say this: The only thing they could do with money that is more useless than giving it to their ad agency would be setting it afire.


(H/T to Bore Patch.)