The things I learn on the intertubes...

I had no idea that there was a British spinoff of Law & Order.

I went and looked at the actual Crown Prosecution Services website, and there was, indeed, a sort of FAQ section. The question I most wanted answered wasn't covered, however: "What's up with the funny wigs, anyway?"

Deep night.

Roomie is off tuning stardrives, and I find myself staring at a part of the clock which I rarely see, thanks to a poorly-timed coffee-drinking decision. Oh well, in for a penny, up 'til dawn, or something like that. Maybe I'll get some writing done...

(And this second pot of coffee I just made is positively the lamest ever. I must have undercounted the scoops or something. Blech.)

"You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you."

Larry Correia asks "Prithee, doest thou thinketh that the language changeth over time?"

Considering that whole novels have been written in the vernacular before, and that the piece of slang in question is right in the target audience's wheelhouse, I don't see why there was even a question...

Writing for an internet audience is different than writing for dead tree stuff in one crucial respect: I used to be extra-cautious with using hyperlinks to explain technical terms or obscure historical or pop-culture references, but I stopped doing that only a few months into the blog, figuring "Anybody reading this is, by definition, hooked up to the repository of the sum total of human knowledge as well as weird anime pr0n. If they don't catch a reference, they can damned well Google up an answer."

Has this been thought all the way through?

Like a hyperevolved descendant of The Clapper, the devices will let television viewers navigate menus and control volume by moving their arms in a predefined patterns.

Sit real still when your team scores that come-from-behind game-tying touchdown, or you'll suddenly find yourself watching This Old House reruns with the volume turned to eleven and you'll have to do the Macarena really quick to get back in time for the extra point.

Dog bites man again.

Apparently having gotten used to IEDs, the NYT reporter seems vaguely surprised when the Taliban actually shoots back.

The story took me a little aback. I mean, reporting shootings in a war zone is like noting that they sometimes drive a little fast at Le Mans. "People getting shot" is generally how you tell War Zones apart from Not War Zones.

Try to remember not to forget...

(Image courtesy of Old Grouch.)

The Duh-Lympics.

Nobody in their right mind would dream of holding a Winter Olympics in Seattle, but, hey, Vancouver's in Canada, and we know Canada's all cold and stuff, eh?

My favorite part thus far has been the local TeeWee weather folk chirping "...and, wow! It's colder here then it is in Vancouver!" Well, no duh, Skippy; it usually is about this time of year.

Double standards?

So a judge has ruled that the Founding Dads could envision Facebook.com.

Which is cool and all, but what I'd like to know is how many people cheering that decision also believe that the same Founding Dads couldn't envision the cheap Romanian SKS?

Screw that! We won't VAT!

So, in yet another hair-shirted NYT piece in which the writer bemoans "gridlock" in "ungovernable" America (without explaining how a federal government controlled entirely by one party is "gridlocked") we get to the meat of the issue, which is this: Europeans are cool. Europeans have a VAT. All cool Americans really wish they were European, but don't want to move there and learn a foreign language, so instead, we'll just get a VAT here, which will make us feel more European every time we look at a bloated receipt.

Yet economists, including veterans of past Republican administrations, are vocal in insisting that the debt problem is too great to be solved without increasing revenues somehow and perhaps moving to a new consumption tax system like Europe’s.

Fine. Do away with the income tax and we'll talk sales tax. And not "consumption", but one-time "point-of-sale". Go talk to Boortz; he'll explain it and explain it and explain it until you beg him to shut up.

Overheard in the Office:

RX: "Haiti's bankrupt. The quake damage was twice the value of their whole economy."

Me: "Huh. So the country's basically totalled, then. Just write it off."

RX: "What do they do then? Saw it off the Dominican Republic and tow it to the island junkyard?"

Me: "I think Haiti is the island junkyard."

Fear and Self-Loathing in Vancouver.

Jay Mariotti is apparently an American journalist who lives in Chicago. Like any good American journalist, especially one in Mordor-on-Lake-Michigan, he is vaguely embarrassed to be an American. Imagine his horror when he went to Canada for the current festivities and found them acting all... all... well, I'll let him tell you:

You've sacrificed your sound sensibilities, your lighthearted ways and your minimum-stress comfort zone to become, well, a pocket version of the United States of America...

Horrors! That's almost like being a pocket version of, well, Hitler! Or worse, George Bush!

Damn those people for not acting quaintly foreign enough to suit the reporter!

Here comes the snow again.

Understand that my adult life has been spent in Atlanta and Knoxville up until very recently. Snow is something that happens in any quantity only every other year or so, and disappears a day or two after it's fallen. Maybe once every ten years you'd see a snowfall significant enough to shut things down for two or three days, but it was a rare thing.

My first two winters in Indy didn't disabuse me of these notions I had of snow being an intermittent thing. Now comes the winter of '09-'10...

The average daily high for February in the Circle City is in the low 40s; average snowfall for the month is ~6". This year, we haven't seen the far side of freezing for more than fifteen minutes or so this month, and the airport saw enough snow last night to do us for an average February, just in one night. It's been nigh on two weeks since I last saw the lawn.

And they're calling for more tonight. And more this weekend.

This morning, I used a snow shovel to free the Zed Drei from the garage where it's been cocooned since the Friday before last so I could make it to the bank. Slithering the couple blocks to the nearest cleared road on steamroller rear tires with a summer tread pattern, I found myself wondering if a set of snow tires for my little Nazi slot car might not be a wise investment after all...

Back in Mac.

From March through November of '08, I did all my computing on old Macs as an experiment: a G4/500 tower as my main machine, a G3/466 iBook for a laptop, and a G3/400 iMac as an iTunes server. The experiment ended when I got tired of the G4 bogging down on web graphics.

As things turned out, it was cheaper to just drag my P4 Wintel box back down from the attic than it was to upgrade the G4 tower, the iBook got largely sidelined in favor of my handy little Eee for mobile use, and the only Mac I still used at all was an eMac I'd picked up to replace the iMac as an iTunes server.

So here we are, on a Mac again for the first time in well over a year. And this one doesn't have that "lived-in" feel, either. The software is just what came already loaded on the machine, with a generic desktop background and not a single icon. The only browser is Safari, which I never used much before, having preferred Camino.

Much like Vincent told Jules, it's the little differences that are weird ("You know what Mac users call a cheeseburger?" asks Bobbi.) A half-dozen times this morning, I've unconsciously gone to check the time by sliding my mouse pointer to the bottom right-hand corner of the screen in order to make my hidden menu bar pop up, only to stare stupidly for a second or two before realizing that, duh, the clock on the Mac is in the top right corner...

In what world...

...is Evan Bayh a "centrist"?

I mean, other than the weird world of journalists, the one where John McCain is a "right-winger".

Just what I needed this morning.

I'm typing this on the eMac that I use mostly for an iTunes server because I woke up to a dead power supply on my old P4 tower. Just yesterday I remarked to Bobbi that it was a minor miracle that, given its 7 years of being powered on pretty much 24/7, the old box hadn't suffered any major component failures. I was worried about the hard drive at the time I said that, but it looks like the P/S beat it to the punch.

Well, just festive. I could replace the power supply, but I'm wondering if that's even worth doing on a 7-y.o. box with a Socket 478 AGP mobo. I mean, the hard drive needs replacing, too...

The smart thing to do would be to replace the whole box, or at least all the guts. The CD and DVD drives are obviously salvageable and I can recycle the case, but we're looking at a new mobo, video card, and at least one hard drive, at a minimum, and that's an expense I just can't afford right now, at least without conducting another impromptu yard sale. 

Sigh.

So, watch this space, I guess.

Anyway, how was your morning?

(EDIT: As I am reminded in comments,  I shouldn't bitch too much. I mean, you've got to be a decadent Westerner to wake up; note "Dammit, my computer's dead"; unplug the mouse and keyboard from it and plug them into the spare computer sitting on the desk right next to it because you couldn't be bothered to go find your netbook and power it up and then whine wirelessly to all your friends on the intertubes about how much your life sucks).

I was Tea Partying when Tea Partying wasn't cool.

Remember how much cooler U2 was before The Unforgettable Fire came out and all the princesses and jocks started listening to them?

Survivor Type.

Having read Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, I was intrigued when I saw a copy of The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life at the book store. I took it home to read, and I wasn't disappointed. In amongst the anecdotes (which are unfortunately occasionally treated as the plural of "data") are such topics as:

• Why, if you have to go into cardiac arrest, a Vegas casino is a great place to do so.
• Why it's important to listen to the flight attendant's safety briefing.
• Things you shouldn't do when your conveyance leaves you floating in the ocean.
• Why "Losing Your Religion" in a crisis can actually have a deleterious effect on your chances of seeing your next birthday.

Worth reading.

Gettin' my geek on.

Borepatch touches on Percival Lowell, General Eisenhower, the Domesday Book, and John Carter of Mars, all in one fabulous post, immediately vaulting way the heck up my list of "Bloggers With Whom I'd Like To Have A Beer."

First came "MTV Unplugged"; now we have "CNN Unhinged".

So, I went to peruse the article on the latest round of snow and ice being deposited south of the Mason-Dixon and made the mistake of reading the comments. Oh boy.

All you eastern people are overreacting. here in the north like northern illinois. we get several feet of snow and everything goes smoothly after the first day. its just snow! its not acid people. really!

Well, that's because in northern Illinois, you have the infrastructure to deal with it. In Atlanta or Birmingham, it wouldn't make sense to spend money on salt trucks and plows that rust away between uses. It's cheaper to just let folks deal with it. Besides, it all melts off in a couple days, anyway.

Living here in the almost deep south, I can't help but think that a good, l-o-n-g, h-a-r-d, freeze of say 10- to 20-years might do the "deep South" some good. At least it would drive out all the crazies and bigots, and spread 'em around the country.

I know you think that you're terribly cosmopolitan compared to the rubes which surround you, but when you finally get your dream job busing tables in the Central Perk coffee house, you are going to be bitterly disappointed to find that bigots and crazies are pretty evenly geographically distributed throughout the US. (Also, if you carefully parse your comment, you'll realize that the nearest one is in the mirror.)

Ever see The Day After Tomorrow?

Please go play Kiss The Locomotive.

Mmlrph.

I appear to have overslept.

Sorry 'bout that.

Content shortly.

Overheard in the Office:

Me: " Huh. They do sell mayo packets in bulk online."

RX: "Relish, too?"

Me: "I'm sure."

RX: "So there will be tuna salad after the apocalypse. I like tuna salad. How much?"

Me: "Twenty-five bucks for, like, 200 two-ounce packets. Wow, four hundred ounces of mayo..."

RX: "How much space will that take up?"

Me: "I dunno. It only says 'Shipping Size: 0.29'."

RX: "Yeah, but 0.29 what?"

Me: "You got me; it doesn't say. Point-two-nine elephants? Point-two-nine breadboxes?"

It's not what you know, it's who you know. And how you cry.

Apparently, the crazy 'Bama prof who smoked a roomful of fellow educators recently had settled personal disagreements with a heater before. But, like most people who spark a family member and then cry a lot, it was dismissed as an accident. Allegations of string-pulling and marker-calling seem to swirl around the incident, too.

It's like two tablets of Euphoridol™.

AnotherGunChick on the effect of a sudden outbreak of sunshine in the winter gloom:

The snow is still here. The roads are not iced over and the sun is shining full and bright. The SUN is shining. The weatherman said cold, breezy and cloudy. It is cold and there is a slight breeze but the Sun is shining. Did I mention the sun is shining.

When Mr. Sun finally made his appearance here in Indy late last week, the sunlight was almost drug-strength, amplified as it was by the blanket of white on the ground.

(Oh, and now they're calling for more snow tonight and tomorrow, another 5" or so. You know, to freshen our drink, so to speak, just in case the sun had melted any off...)

Crazy, but just a little bit.

Some people are pointing out that the whacko arrested for... um... something or other in Massachusetts was, in fact, a whacko.

In fact, someone has called him a "paranoid loon". Assuming that the press has been more accurate with his paranoia than they have with his gun collection, I'll grant that this may be true. Certainly some of the statements released thus far would indicate that his Reynold's Wrap yarmulke was a bit too tight.

However, I'm sure that cherry-picking my posts here since 2005, one could no doubt come up with a pastiche of gems that made me sound like I was a pathological goober about to saddle up and bust caps, too.

And where does "being a paranoid loon" fall in the penal code, anyway? Is that state, or federal? I mean, there’s a whole web forum full of people that believe Dick Cheney blew up the WTC so he could steal Iraq’s oil, and nobody’s arresting them.

(You can check it out if you don’t believe me; the URL is… er, “something-or-otherUnderground.com”.)

All coiled up and ready to go.

Seen at Borepatch's place:



Yup. That's a working Gauss pistol. More or less.

Do want!

Not enough machine guns and dead Nazis.

Everybody's talking about the opening ceremonies in Canuckistan, which I didn't watch because I was pretty sure it didn't involve Uzis.

I think a wide variety of entertainments, from halftime marching bands to Olympic opening ceremonies to Cirque du Soleil to most any Broadway musical, would be greatly livened up by random explosions, rabid wolverines loose on the field, drunken Shriners chasing each other around the track in Miatas, and midgets in clown suits that popped out of trap doors on stage and ran up and headbutted the occasional performer right in the junk. That would be just the most awesome spectacle on television; I'd wear Depends rather than risk tearing myself away from the screen for a minute.

Midnight snack.

Chicken of the Sea sells little foil packets of pink salmon, and the local grocer frequently has them on sale at 10/$10. They keep forever (sell-by dates are usually 3 or 4 years down the road,) and so I keep plenty on hand.

When combined in a bowl with dollops of honey mustard, mayo, and relish, and then spooned onto saltines, they're perfect for a little midnight snack. I have a happy feeling in my tummy now.

I don't get it...

What's the fascination with Really Big Trucks?

Hey, you know what's really big and gets lousy gas mileage? A school bus. But do you see folks lining up to buy one of those? I mean, other than the Partridge Family?

I don't care about cargo space; the only thing I need my vehicles to haul is ass.

Winter wonderland.

There could be snow on the ground in all 50 states simultaneously by the end of the week in what would be a weather oddity.

When was the last time they had sticking snow in the Florida panhandle? I remember that St. Simon's Island in Georgia got enough to close the causeway back in... 1989?


(H/T to SondraK via Firehand.)

Watch it all burn.

Billy Beck on the Scott Brown win:

You had to hear me laughing during that Scott Brown flail over in Massachusetts. Everywhere around me, conservatives and Republicans were just about shooting guns off in the streets in celebration.

Mostly what I experienced over the Scott Brown thing was a sense of schadenfreude. I mean, if me and Ted Kennedy had both fallen off a cliff and he'd hit the ground first, I'd have cratered in laughing, know what I mean?

The sight of all the gloomy hangdog mugs in front of network cameras and the gaffed-fish backing and filling from Barry as his plans screeched to a very public, if temporary, halt was chucklesome, too. When one is going to hell in a bucket, one enjoys the ride however one can.

A regular Nostradamus...

Bill Gates is playing Technological Visionary again:

"What we're going to have to do at a global scale is create a new system," Gates said in a speech at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. "So we need energy miracles."

...he then went on to predict that no home would ever need more than 640 in² of solar panels.

If the pants fit, wet them.

I know I'm late to this story, but here's the synopsis if you are, like me, just tuning in:

Apparently some guy in Massachusetts owns fewer guns in total than I own, say, Mausers. And the po-po and media just absolutely lose their collective bladder control about it.



My favorite part of the charges is this: "Girard faces four counts of possession of an infernal device..." Infernal devices? What, the guy had three bootleg copies of The Necronomicon and a Hand of Glory?

Okay, the guy was a little loopy, and the handcuffs and stun batons are kinda mall-ninja-y, but he wasn't hurting anyone, and bad taste isn't a crime, else half of Hollywood would be in leg irons. Further, all the guns appear to have been purchased legally (although the wife is apparently going to fix that with a restraining order,) which makes all the hysteria look a little overblown. It's high-handed crap like this that makes people get their Wookie suit on.


(H/T to SurvivalBlog.)

Overheard in the Office:

Me: "It's a little known fact that there was a Welsh seaborne raid on the eastern shore of the Baltic back in the Middle Ages. The Welsh raiders were last seen piling back into their boats on the beach near Helsinki, great big sacks stuffed full of vowels over their shoulders, and bloody severed W's and Y's hanging from their belts. The Finnish language never fully recovered; it was more than two generations before they could name their children anything other than Kktt and Ppjj."

I did not know that...

Did you ever stop and wonder about the various triviata involved in launching a weather balloon? Me, neither.

Apparently, though, there is quite a bit more to it than "1) Put helium in balloon. 2) Let go of balloon."

Neat.

c u in court, kthxbye

The Florida Supreme Court has said that it's not okay for judges and lawyers to be Facebook friends. Whether they are still allowed to refer to each other as "bff" when texting is unclear.



(H/T to Unc.)

Killdozer.

You know what's cooler than a bulldozer? An armored bulldozer with a belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher, that's what.

Dog Bites Man, and other unshocking news...

Some of today's headlines at Pravda.com are real headscratchers. Here are a couple of the best:

Bound bodies found in Afghanistan

"Bodies found in Afghanistan"? Isn't that kind of like "Corn found in Nebraska" or "Eminem fans found in suburban high school parking lot"?

Iran resumes nuclear weapon work, U.S. report expected to say

Okay, c'mon, raise your hand if you really believe they stopped. Pull the other one, Mahmoud; it's got bells on it.

Positively 54th Street...

I went for a walk yesterday. I figured I'd use the Monon Trail, since it usually gets cleared pretty quickly after a snowfall, in case anybody wants to risk pneumonia jogging through the arctic wastes. Surprisingly, it hadn't been touched. I took my camera along with me and snapped some pictures down near 54th Street.

54th Street is sort of a demarcation line. North of 54th, the Monon Trail is sheltered by trees and runs through gentrified neighborhoods to the shops and bars and parks of Broad Ripple proper.

South of 54th, there are alternating patches of half-abandoned light industrial zones and run-down residential districts.

Between 54th and 52nd, there is a stretch of wall that has been brightened by an officially sanctioned mural...

...although some walls show traces of where, er... "unofficial" murals have been recently removed.

It can look pretty bleak in the wintertime, with the leaves off the trees.

Still, there is interesting wildlife if you know where to look.

Along the north side of 54th are some of my favorite little shops in Broad Ripple. On the left you can see Locally Grown Gardens. The bright yellow storefront is Nicole-Talyor's Pasta & Market. Down at the right end is the fabulous eatery, Zest.

It was as cold as it looks. Even though I was bundled up nicely and warmed by the exercise, it still felt good to get home.


(EDIT: Contrast the photos above with the photos from the May '09 Blogmeet, held at Locally Grown Gardens...)

Okay, that is pretty cool...

...and the 3D effect is neat, too.

Thankfully, this is not a need-based economy.

What’s “need” got to do, got to do with it?
What’s “need” but a fig leaf for desire?

Embarrassing admissions:

There has been discussion around the gunblogosphere on the topic of the "Call of Duty Effect". Herewith are some of my own embarrassing admissions, from before First Person Shooters had even been invented:

• When I was 18 or 19, I thought the coolest pistol in the world was the VP70z, because it had an "18 shot clip".
• Since there wasn't much difference in Top Secret between 9mm and .45, I knew that the Luger was obviously a much better pistol than the 1911, because it had a "bigger clip". Plus, it looked tough.
• One time, back when I still knew everything, I was standing in the gun store on whose showcases I routinely left noseprints, and I interrupted a conversation between a customer and the counter guy to correct the customer on some trivial datum or terminology regarding SMG's and "silencers", only to be coldly informed that the customer in question worked down the road at Sionics and I should shut my piehole.

In retrospect, it would have been nice to have something as cool as Counterstrike to blame for my damnfoolishness.

A new level of highbrow political discourse:

Roland Martin says:

Obama's critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. So, fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes.

To which I can only reply:

Stupid Kills.

There was a fratricidal shooting in the northern Indy 'burbs the other day. Apparently 14 year-old Cain slew 16 year-old Abel with a 20 gauge scattergun in the family garage. Allegedly the older brother was pelting the younger with snowballs when the kid picked up the fowling piece, "jokingly" pointed it at his older brother, and... well, I'll let the local cops, since everyone know that the police are gun experts, say it:

Police say the gun went off when the boy jokingly pointed it at his older brother, hitting him in the chest. Carson later died at an Indianapolis hospital.

Bowen says the shooting "was clearly an accident" and he doesn't expect any charges to be filed against the boy.

I'm sorry, officer, but that's wrong; well meant, but wrong. I know you want to spare the parents and, for some reason, the shooter, but you know and I know and, sure as God made little green apples, the shooter knows that his finger pulled that trigger. Guns don't just "go off" by themselves.

According to neighbors, the young men were familiar with guns and firearm safety.

"The boys hunt all the time. They've always used guns. They know how to handle guns," said Wiles.

If the boys were familiar with the firearms safety, then why did the younger one act like he was a contestant in a "How Many Of The Four Rules Can You Break At Once" shoot-off?

Let's review the Four Rules:

1. All guns are always loaded.
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your $%^&@#$ booger hook off the &*%$#@& bang switch.
4. Be sure of your target and what's beyond it.

Sounds like Junior managed to break all four, with the usual consequences.

You know you're on teh intarw3bz too much when...

...every time you see this "Godwin Roofing" sign, you think "They're the Shingle Nazis!"

The Green Police want me to drive an Audi?

Sure!

I'll take this one, please. I even promise to sing their little commercial jingle while doing great big smoky burnouts with all four tires.

(If you're low on those, I'll settle for one of these. kthxbye!)

Misleading titles.

Broad Ripple has a little local freebie weekly paper, named The Broad Ripple Gazette. (You'd think a place with this many art galleries, hair salons, and chi-chi eateries could scare up a better title, but anyway...)

It has a column titled "Gettin' Ripped In Ripple".

Given the reputation of our fair burg, it might surprise you to know that the column is about Biff and Muffy working out at Cardinal Fitness on weekday mornings, not Seth and Jared blowing chunks in the back seat of a squad car in the alley behind Chumley's at 2AM on Sunday.

Food, Fun, and Fabulous Prizes:

The Indiana Trappers Association and Furbearers Unlimited are having their annual fund-raising banquet in Lafayette this month.

Who: Furbearers Unlimited in conjunction with the Indiana Trappers Association, Inc.

When: Saturday, February 27, 2010, doors open at 5PM

Where: Outpost Banquet Hall, 2501 U.S. 231 South, Lafayette, Indiana

Contact: Mr. Stu Grell, Attica, Indiana
(765) 572-2207
(765) 363-2207
sgrell@tds.net

Tickets: Contact Stu, $25 a piece

What: Meal, silent auction, live auction, 20 firearms, knives, artwork.

Attention, Alanis Morissette:

In case you were wondering, this is "ironic".

A "black fly in your chardonnay" is just gross.

Were I Sarah Palin...

...I'd doodle a little teleprompter in the palm of my hand before my next speech.

Just sayin'...

When the only tool you have is legislation...

...every problem apparently requires a law.

Jim at The Travis McGee Reader notes:

There is some logic to not feeding wild animals, but I object to imprisoning barefoot boy with cheek of tan for the heinous crime of fishing with an angleworm.

I'm going to have to take a firm stand and say that any crime that can be committed with a string, a bent pin, and a worm, and without touching a single other person or their property, is no crime at all.

The bill says feeding and baiting wildlife would be unlawful in Iowa, except in a few specific situations. The aim is to keep animals from gathering in large numbers, which increases the likelihood that a diseased animal will infect others.

[snip]

The bill would allow for exceptions, such as if Iowans want to place feed within 50 yards of their home for the purpose of observing wildlife.

Perhaps another exception could be made for feeding or baiting the wildlife with state legislators.

This is turning into a regular feature...

The Indianapolis Red Star has engaged in (quelle surprise!) a bit of selective "Letters to the Editor" publishing in continued pursuit of the zomg guns! bedwettery it has by way of an editorial agenda. RobertaX takes them to task.

Triumph of the will...

If you want a gun bad enough (and have access to a few simple machine tools,) you'll find a way to get one.

Me and my shovel are getting to be close friends.

I'll be clearing a path from the back door to the garage again this morning and sweeping the roomie's car clear of snow, but I'll do this with a smile on my face every day from now 'til the Fourth of July if it keeps all those bloodsucking midgets in DC from doing any more legislatin'.

Meantime, this is the longest the Bimmer has been garage-bound since I moved here. I've no doubt I could slither to the nearest cleared main artery if I had to, but why risk it when I can walk where I need to go?

Pick a weather pattern and stick with it!

So far, the zomg snow! that they were predicting last night and this morning has not happened. Instead we got snow this morning followed by more snow this afternoon. And before, they were saying no snow tomorrow. Now they're saying yes snow tomorrow. And maybe more snow this weekend, too.

I'm not deaf, I'm ignoring you.

Well, actually, I'm not ignoring you; I'm just learning about Savage pistols. I've got the great big book of Savage Pistols open, as well as the NRA's Firearms Assembly: Pistols and Revolvers, and both of my roomie's Savages to poke and prod at.

I'm hoping to get an Arms Room piece on them in detail, including some of the cool advertisements they ran back then. I mean, dig this ad copy from the Saturday Evening Post, circa 1910:

Woman's Turn Has Come

Ten women of Noroton, Conn., on April 15th, tried shooting a Savage Automatic. Eight of them had never handled a fire arm before. They shot at a man-shaped target thirty feet away. Eight women made vital hits, each with her first shot. The other two made vital hits with their second shots. Thus, with the first trigger pull, those women novices found that they were dead shots.

First shots are the shots that count.

Next they tried a common revolver, one of the finest built. Not one made a hit with her first shot; only one scored on the second.

Could there be any better proof that the Savage does not require practice? Anyone can shoot this wonderful arm accurately, because it points instinctively, as you point your forefinger.

This was a full page ad in a national, mainstream general-interest magazine. Interested readers could put $15 in cash or cheque in an envelope and receive a brand-new Savage 10-shot .32 caliber semiautomatic pistol in the mail. It was a different world.

Tonight on Gun Nuts Radio:

Michael from The Holster Site (aka EvylRobot) will be the guest to talk about skinning that smokewagon. Be there!

This makes my head hurt...

If you look on ahead of us down the identity politics turnpike, you can see Sweden, currently pulled over to the side of the road with its hood up...

STOCKHOLM (AP) - Sweden's unemployment agency has been found guilty of discrimination for expelling a Muslim man from a job training program because he refused to shake hands with a woman.

So, apparently in largely atheist, egalitarian Sweden, religious discrimination is worserer than sex discrimination. Check.

I am all out of shape for the Oppression Olympics, too; I'd better get my "Oh, my rights are being trampled!" game face on before next season.

All you White Christian Hetero Males are playing with a slight handicap differently-abled score modifier, but you shouldn't let that stop you! Anybody can find their inner Identity and go get someone to Oppress it! Judging from the comments I've seen elsewhere on the internets, some of you have already figured out how to sound like stands-to-pee versions of Germaine Greer. Sack up, already.


(H/T to The Shekel.)

A functioning perpetual motion machine!

From the department of "WTF are they thinking?" comes this tidbit:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employers are getting hit with a massive tax hike at a time when they can least afford it.

Companies in at least 35 states will have to fork over more in unemployment insurance taxes this year, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies.

The median increase will be 27.5%. And employers in places such as Hawaii and Florida could see levies skyrocket more than ten-fold.

Gosh, what could higher taxes on employers lead to? Class? Anyone? Bueller?

"We have too many people drawing unemployment! The system is drained! We need to raise taxes on employers that are already laying people off!" Jesus wept, Skippy, are you trying to get everybody on the dole? No, wait... Don't answer that.

Thank goodness I remembered...

...to fetch the snow shovel back in from the garage last night. It will make tunneling out this morning ever so much easier.

The Legionary's Guide: FM VII-XXI.XIII

Just finishing up a fascinating little read: Legionary: The Roman Soldier's (Unofficial) Manual.

Written like a Field Manual for someone intent on joining the army circa 99AD, it's a clever little grunt's-eye view of the imperial war machine, with sections on selecting the best gear, preparing for arduous training, how to get a coveted immunis slot so as to get out of shovel work, and proper salary management to ensure a good pension.

A novel addition to the library of any Roman military buff.

It's spinal reflex now.

Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

I know that it's blatant argumentum ad MCMLXXXIV to go here, but after eight years of going after the previous Maximum Leader by describing him as a cunning, buffoonish, Machiavellian, moronic, imperious puppet of a loose cannon who was out of control and carefully steered by various éminences grise, there are some who can now engage in effortless doublethink even faster than their eyes can focus.

QotD: At least waste my money on something cool.

As a conservative, I feel outraged enough that the government profligately wasted Chinese bondholder money on an ad in the Superbowl. -Brian J. Noggle

It's like finding out that not only have you been robbed, but the burglar used your money to buy a baggie of oregano and lawn clippings

Today In History: A little off the top, please.

On this day in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was barbered to the collarbone for getting cross-threaded with her relative, Elizabeth.

The Parable of the Stick:

Once upon a time, the chief caveman of the Ug tribe decided that his guys didn't have effective enough sticks. They just didn't have that authoritative *thwack!* he was looking for when whopped over the head of neighboring Thog warriors, and some of their womenfolk even struggled while they were being dragged off by the hair.

So Chief Ug put out a contract for a million new sticks for his guys. His chief stick contractor put his head together with his chief R&D guy, and announced they could deliver the new Fifth Generation sticks, made of superstickium and guaranteed to have 50% greater *thwack!* than any forseeable enemy stick, for fifty-one clams each. Chief Ug was delighted, and the program got underway.

Unfortunately, the clam harvest was bad that year, plus a new peace treaty and trade agreement was signed with the Thog tribe, and suddenly the chief realized that maybe he didn't need a million shiny new sticks, and so he cut the order to 100.

"Sorry, Chief," said the guys at Stick Dynamics, "But a lot of this program is sunk costs already: engineering the superstickium, planting the superstickium orchards, training guys to whittle superstickium, cleaning up the superstickium waste in a way that won't piss off the Cave Protection Agency... Those are gonna be some mighty expensive sticks."

The Stick Dynamics accountant started counting on his toes, always a bad sign. "For a hundred-stick production run, you're looking at... um... carry the little toe... About five hundred thousand and one clams per stick."

The chief was apoplectic. "You promised me fifty-one clams a stick! The shamans are going to go ballistic when they hear this; they'll be joking about gold-plated sticks and hundred-thousand clam stick whittlers from now 'til when the moon is eaten by the night dragon!"

"That was based on a million stick contract, Chief. Actual production costs are only about a clam per stick, the rest is amortizing the R&D and developm..."

Nobody heard the rest because the chief whacked him over the noggin with the sole prototype stick and stalked off. It did *thwack!* just as promised.

The Chief never used the stick in war again, though: A stick that cost fifty-million-and-one clams is just too valuable to risk in combat. If it broke, the bad press would be horrible.

Annoyance.

I haven't been much of a football fan for years. I think the last time I followed a football team with any sort of ardor, Steve Bartkowski was the quarterback.

It is therefore mildly annoying to be dwelling someplace where you can't fricking escape the stuff; TeeWee news covers The Colts, politics, business, The Colts, weather, traffic, The Colts, and sports. The local catbox liner is much the same, with a slightly heavier emphasis on the Colts.

I am given to understand that the Colts lost the Super Bowl last evening.

I am given to understand this because I had to wait for them to interview everybody down to the water boy's third cousin's dog about how they felt about the game before they got around to the trivial news items, like the blizzard that's coming this way or the apartment building that burned to the ground nearby. (Which explains the helicopters orbiting overhead last night.)

Down the memory hole.

Anti-gun New York liberal Democrat Harold Ford Jr. (aka "the politician formerly known as pro-gun Tennessee conservative Democrat Harold Ford Jr.") once gave a speech for the NRA extolling the virtues of Guns, Mom, and Apple Pie. Except now it has apparently unhappened.

My new retirement plan...

Given the state of the economy, my new retirement plan is to buy shares of the jackass that claims to represent my best interests in Congress for what he's worth, and then sell them for what he thinks he's worth.

Given the fact that his P/E ratio makes the business model of the Underpants Gnomes look sensible and well thought-out, I can't lose.

Simplicity by design.

In writing yesterday's post about pocket autos, I spent some time examining the actual pistols as well as exploded drawings. I also looked at the drawings of the two early American autos of which I don't yet have representative examples on hand, the Remington 51 and the Smith & Wesson .35. Most pocket pistols on the market after World War Two sprang from one of three evolutionary families: The 1903/1908 Colt/Brownings, the Walther PP, or the Beretta. That's what makes a look at the pistols from the Cambrian Explosion of self-loader design so fascinating: All manner of solutions to the problem of constructing a reasonably powerful, pocketable, self-loading pistol were tried before the market was thinned to the few that survive today.

The Colt is easily the most familiar, and not only because Colt's made more than half a million of the things over forty-something years. The basic structure of the John Browning design is elegant in its simplicity and several basic features have been copied down through the years by numerous handgun manufacturers.

The Savage is probably the second best known, and it should be, with a production run of several hundred thousand guns in a little over twenty years. The brainchild of one Elbert Searle, it's another simple and elegant design, if a little odd to our eyes, being somewhat of an evolutionary dead-end. Blowback-operated with a slight mechanical delay, its double-stack magazine was futuristic for the time and it contained even fewer parts than the Colt, but a combination of constant redesigns, overproduction, and a slumping market put paid to Savage's pistol efforts.

The H&R took a fairly simple, if odd-looking, Webley & Scott Police Pistol design and, through conversion to striker-firing and addition of a magazine safety, managed to up the parts count to 49; over a dozen more than the Browning design and almost two-thirds more parts than Searle's little pistol. They can't have been making money on those, and the fact that they disappeared from the market so fast suggests that they weren't.

Smith & Wesson, like H&R a revolver company, shopped for an outside design as well, finally settling on the Belgian Clement. With controls that were counter intuitive (the manual safety was a thumbwheel on the backstrap that pretty much could not be operated with the hand in a firing grip), baroque mechanicals (a parts count that far outstripped even the H&R), and extremely complex construction, S&W hammered the last nail in the coffin by arrogantly designing their own pocket pistol cartridge in 1913, when the rest of the market had already settled on Colt's .32ACP. Smith's .35 cartridge got Betamaxed, and the gun itself sank without a ripple; 8,000 were made in an eight year run at a time when Colt and Savage were selling tens of thousands a year.

Remington was the last player to arrive, showing up in 1917 with a graceful, futuristic-looking pistol designed by the great John D. Pedersen: The Remington 51. But its graceful, futuristic-looking lines concealed a funky, floating breech/indirect blowback mechanism and complex innards; Browning's pocket pistol contained five springs while Pedersen's had seven (S&W's Clement clone had nine!) Despite the greater complexity, Remington attempted to undercut Colt's on price, selling its offering for less than sixteen bucks when Colts catalogued for just over twenty. Late to the market, the Remington autos didn't survive the Depression.

And if you think there were some weird ones on the domestic market, well, that's just the start...

Snowmageddon, Round Two:

The TeeWee weather gnomes are saying that if I liked Friday, I'm gonna love Monday night and Tuesday, because it'll be more of the same only maybe more so.

Since we ate all the sled dogs, we'll have to catch the neighbors and harness them to the sled to run to town for provisions before a fresh blanket of white death lands on us.

An afternoon's work...

I should get snowbound more often: Pocket Autos, Part One at The Arms Room.

Contact your Congressman.

Our Representative in Congress asked for his constituents' opinions. Bobbi sent him hers.

I did not know that...

Frank Chadwick, the game designer indirectly responsible for so much wasted time in my adolescence, has a blog.

Also indirectly, it was exposure to the '80s-era U.S. military through his games that caused me to predict, when a couple of older friends tried to tell me that the Gulf War was going to be a stalemated bloodbath and I didn't understand because I didn't remember Vietnam, that the whole thing would be over in "a week, tops, once the first tanks roll. It's going to be the most one-sided ass whuppin' in the history of modern warfare. Care to bet?" As you know, the Army beat the point spread and I won twenty bucks.

Trapped beneath the Great Broad Ripple Glacier...

Supplies gone. Ate last of sled dogs early this A.M. For God's sake, send help. I hope this signal makes it out.


Actually, we got just over six inches of snow, and now we have some wind coming in behind it; out of Mordor to the northwest and gusting 25-35mph. It was a fluffy, wet snow, too, and when you combined that with the breezes that kicked up last night, you could hear the occasional branch letting go in the greenbelt along the Monon Trail.

On a related note, does anyone know why one is supposed to run to the grocery store and buy French Toast fixins when snow is in the forecast?

Only the lonely, Part Deux.

After you've successfully scored with Roxxxy, now you can celebrate with congratulations from your good buddy, U.S. Patent Number 5,356,330!

The Loophole Loophole.

“Loophole” = “People Doing Legal $#!t I Don’t Like”.

Later on, I will exploit the Carbon Footprint Loophole to take my Mass Transit Loophole to the Starving The Poor People Loophole and get some Unhealthy Food Loophole for dinner.

Because we don't like it, that's why.

More whining from the Indianapolis Parakeet Primer, this time on the issue of letting anybody other than muggers carry guns on the Monon Trail:

We have made these points before, and that has not stopped government from permitting firearms in Indiana state parks or national parks. So Coleman has a precedent, albeit an unfortunate one.

"Unfortunate"? I must have missed all those stories about CCW permit holders flipping out and shooting up state parks...

Why the sudden sloppy wet kisses for Ballard, anyway? The "No Enemies On The Left" editorial board at the Star hates his Republican guts, so the public hand-holding here is more than a little unusual.

Speak, Clippy! Speak! Now roll over!

One of the more interesting jobs I've had was working as the dispatcher-in-all-but-name for a corporate flight department operating a fleet of Cessna twins out of a suburban Atlanta airport.

I'd sit in my office off the hangar and do my paperwork and coordinate couriers and suchlike until my second-to-last flight had landed at around 0100. (My last guy would already be homeward-bound from MSY by then, but even with a tailwind he wouldn't be on the ground at LZU 'til 0migod30...) Then I'd roll my motorcycle out of the hangar, lock the place up, and head home. Good times, good times...

But it'd get pretty lonely late nights at the airport, waiting for my last flight to get in on the far side of the Witching Hour. The FBO was all closed for the night and there wasn't a soul for a quarter mile in any direction except for the coyotes who lived out between the taxiways. And we had just had MS Office installed on the new PC.

As a consequence, I am probably the only person on the planet who has fond memories of Clippy the Annoying Anthropomorphic Paperclip. It was either him to keep me company, or the droids on the Weather Channel, and they weren't as lifelike...

Next round in the magazine.

Leafing through this month's issue of SWAT Magazine, I notice that next month there will be a review of the Awerbuck course I attended last summer. I hope there are no pics of me looking old and fat in the background.

(Erick Gelhaus reviewed the Guncrafter Industries .50 GI Glock conversion and, without coming out and saying "it sucks", basically said it sucks. This joins Denny Hansen's Nighthawk Custom review and Louis Awerbuck's Benelli M4 review as some of my favorite moments in gun review journalism...)

Snowpocalypse Now?

So last weekend they were saying that this weekend would be nice, but cold. Then, early in the week they started making noises about rain. Or maybe some of that "wintry mix" stuff. By Wednesday, they had changed their predictions to "zomg it's teh snowmageddon!!!eleven!"

We are up early here at Roseholme Cottage because roomie has to go tend starship engines at some ungodly hour of the morning and when one person is awake in a tiny little house like this, well, then both people might as well be. And I'm watching the weather to see if Bobbi is headed off into howling white death or not.

The Full Color 360-Degree Ultra Doppler Weather Radar says it's busy wintry mixing already. My trusty Mark 1 Mod 0 Window says differently. I'm skeptical; we'll see.

Stay away from the brown acid.

Courtesy of Snowflakes In Hell, I have seen the most incredibly dadaist political advertisement ever:
I was mildly disappointed that a flaming midget clown on a tricycle never pedaled furiously through the meadow yelling "Verboten!". Other than that, it was very nearly perfect.

Oh, what the heck.

Since it won't go away, more on DADT from Abby and ASM826, who bring interesting (and well-written) thoughts to the table.

Overheard in the Kitchen:

Me: "Wow, Rannie made good time running across the house as soon as my back was turned. Quiet, too; I didn't even hear her."

RX: "That's what they were made to do."

Me: "Run silently across hardwood floors?"

RX: "Run silently in general."

Me: "Still, that's bothersome. I'm normally pretty solid at hearing the pitter patter of running cat feet up to no good. I must be getting old."

RX: "Well, Tamara, you know what it means if you stop getting old."

Me: "Yeah, you become a vampire and have to feast on the blood of the living."

RX: "Uh, that's not where I was going with that."

Today In History: ...by the fiends you leave behind.

On this date in 211AD, Septimius Severus choked on his last cookie, leaving the empire to his two sons, the brothers Geta and Caracalla.

Severus had been, on balance, a mediocre emperor. Suspicious to the point of paranoia, he had job lots of senators whacked for conspiracies both real and imaginary, and elevated fawning toadies to replace them. Similarly, he had no head for finance, and could be talked by his buddies into doing all manner of silly things, like appointing them Praetorian Prefect.

On the other hand, he knew which end of the spear got stuck in the barbarian, and he kept the heathens on the right side of their rivers, and when the woad-wearing savages north of the wall got uppity, he administered them a stomping, too. And he was popular with the plebs and those aristocrats he didn't decapitate because he possessed the charming quality of Not Being Commodus, a trait that was very much appreciated in Rome at the time.

History will judge him harshly, though, because he either had some demons lurking in his Y chromosome or he was a lousy parent. His younger son, Geta, was merely petulant and greedy, but that's to be expected from one raised to the purple. Geta's elder sibling, Caracalla, however, was a poisonous toad as psychotic as a Julio-Claudian on a bad hair day. He barely waited for dad's corpse to cool before having his brother iced by soldiers while in their mother's arms, and his conduct got worse from there to the point where he was finally shivved in the liver by one of his own bodyguards while answering nature's call along the roadside.


EDIT: After writing this, I discovered that I had discussed it last year as well. I can't help it; it's just such a colorful bit of history. Especially the "having your brother whacked in your mom's condo" part. That demonstrates some serious issues, you know?

I'll bet if we subpoenaed Maxis' warranty cards from 1989...

...we'd find one filled out by a certain young Harvard law student...

Seen in comments at pdb's:

"Buh-buh-but, SimCity taught us all that we don’t build public transportation, then the pixels get unhappy and start a riot or something. We also learned that if you put in the right cheat code, you get unlimited tax money!" -kbiel

HK: Because you suck and we hate you...

There are HK fanboys who paid well over a grand for a warmed-over Armalite AR-180 with an awkward plastic thumbhole stock, mediocre optics as an extra-cost option, and a single-stack magazine made of compressed unicorn tears, so this thing should sell well to that demographic.

Like a fish needs a bicycle.

Outside of the downtown area and some older streetcar suburbs, most American cities just really aren't laid out to use mass transit, bicycles, or electric cars with the performance of golf carts and the range of a hard-thrown paper airplane.

I live in an old "streetcar suburb" that, fortunately, allows me to do most of my necessary shopping and suchlike by foot or bike if I choose. The times I use the car are because either the weather is miserable or I am going to be making the kind of shopping trip that doesn't lend itself to lugging my purchases on a bike rack and in either of those cases, why would I want to use a bus? I'd still wind up standing in the freezing rain waiting for IndyGo or having to schlep the 24-roll-pack of TP and a case of soda on and off the bus and a couple of blocks back to Roseholme Cottage...

Mayor Ballard gets his Anti-Gun on.

First Frank Straub, now this...

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard vows to veto guns-in-parks. Apparently he likes folks getting mugged on the Monon Trail, or something.

If he has the sack to pay for his usual table at the next Indy 1500 gun show, trying to schmooze his GOP base, make sure you tell him you remember. And that you'll remember at the ballot box, too.

QotD: LabRat wins teh intarw3bz!

Los Alamos weapons-grade snark:

If Tiffani Amber the eighteen year old who happened to be blessed with the genes for a great rack can manage to not crack under such pressure, I think soldiers we expect to send into combat can probably find it within themselves.

Now that's funny, right there.

Ritual de lo Habitual.

Some years back, when we were deer hunting out on Byron's old family land, it was observed that MattG used his turn signals so habitually that he was signaling turns on rutted sandy single-tracks, on private property, with not another moving vehicle for over a mile in any given direction. We all agreed, however, that it was a good habit to have.

I was reminded of this when people commented on the video from our little Blackwater field trip last summer; a lot of folks described Todd Jarrett's gun-handling as borderline OCD, with his chamber checks every time he juiced up the gun, and they said it as though it was a bad thing.

When I juice up the gun administratively, I check the chamber. When I pick up a pistol that has been out of my control or observation, such as when I get dressed in the morning, I check the chamber. Now, does that mean that I think that gremlins have sneaked in and unloaded my heater overnight? No it means I check because I always check; this is the purpose behind things like safety checklists for everything from pistols to Piper Cubs to pebble-bed nuclear reactors, you are removing the question of "Do I or don't I?" from the loop. You do. Period.

This is tied in to another thing I often read on the internet "You carry a gun to the (grocery store/restaurant/nice neighborhood/sewing circle/whatever)?" No, I don't. As Kathy Jackson phrased it so well, I don't carry a gun "to" anyplace; I just carry a gun. I put the gun on in the morning with no more emotional freighting or special foresight than my shoes. In fact, probably less, because I may wear different shoes, but I always carry the same gun.

When I put my shoes on, I did not run though a complex internal calculus of "Well, there's a 'No shirt, No shoes, No service' sign at the bank, and I think I have to wear them at the grocery store, too. On the other hand, it's warm out, and I could put those errands off and not wear shoes today..." I just put my shoes on. It's the default state, just like putting the pistol in the holster on my belt. As I go through the day, I don't constantly think about my shoes, and whether I might "need" them at my next stop. Ditto, the gun.

What makes this hard for some people to understand is that, to them, a gun is an object of heavy totemic significance. They have not been exposed to firearms except via the entertainment industry or the six o'clock news, where they are constantly being used to deal death and mayhem, whereas I've been around them more or less constantly for my entire adult life and they've mostly just sat there. An object that to many people contains heavy emotional freighting is about as significant or shocking to me as an ashtray or a steak knife (to name a couple of other frequently-used murder weapons,) and I think this is the source of the massive disconnect between viewpoints. What to do about it? You got me, there; I haven't a clue.

New martial arts style:

Aussie cops trained in Line-Dancing-Fu.

Iranian astronauts declared haraam.

(CNN) -- Iran said Wednesday it had launched a rocket carrying a rat, two turtles and some worms into orbit...

All of which were wearing teeny, tiny explosive vests, no doubt, making it the first Persian MIRV.

Old business...

I've had a tab open to remind me to write a post for almost a month now, and the need for the post to be written has evaporated.

However, the post I was going to link to still deserves the props. If you haven't read Mulliga's "Administrative Gun Handling For The CCW", you should. He has some good points there. The other tab I had open went to Kathy Jackson's answer to the question "Would You Carry a Gun to ______ ?"

I was going to tie these two together in a masterpiece of rhetoric as a rebuttal to... a rebuttal to... well, I can't really remember who I was going to rebut. I think it had something to do with the numbnuts that dropped his gat and drilled a bagboy, but I can't be sure.

Sometimes the jokes write themselves...

Referring to his new $7,000 sexbot:

"There's a tremendous need for this kind of product," said Hines, a computer scientist and former Bell Labs engineer.

Well, alrighty, then.

Now we find out if they've learned their lesson:

With the S.S. Economy listing forty degrees to port and the holds awash in red ink, let's see if the GOP and their talk radio mouthpieces get all wrapped around the axle making sure that the Don't Ask, Don't Tell deck chairs are in a neat little row.

"Look over here! Look over here! Look at the widdle Gay Cootie brouhaha! Oopsie! Zinged that health care right past you, didn't I?"

Given the role that independent voters played in the Scott Brown upset, it'll be disappointing to see the GOP fall for this obvious distraction, clearly intended as a wedge issue to split the libertarian wing of the party from the God squad.

By the numbers:

A breakdown of Chicago's arguments in the McDonald case.

Breaking news...

Breda leaving Gun Nuts Radio.

Rumors that she is to be replaced with Caleb's rascally nephew, Scrappy, are as yet unconfirmed.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

So with the American public incensed over bailouts of big auto and various financial companies, a chastened Barry O. figured that the answer must lie in spending even more money we don't have on something for which there is no constitutional authority:

Obama calls for $30 billion small business lending fund

Apparently, if you're in a hole, the solution is to switch your shovel to "Turbo".

The money quote in the piece is this one, however:

"What we're trying to do is to encourage [banks] to get that happy medium where they're not taking such exorbitant risks that they threaten the entire system, but they're also open to enough risk that America's dynamic free enterprise system is actually able to work."

Yeah, Barry, because .gov loans of damp-off-the-presses fiat money are the heart and soul of laissez faire free enterprise. Skipped that day in class, did we?


EDIT: Coyote Blog offers the take of an actual small business owner.

Try not to set yourself on fire.

A couple of Christmases ago, Shootin' Buddy gave me a nice Waller range bag. When I opened it, it already had a couple of Israeli trauma dressings inside. This is because when there are loaded guns about, sometimes bad things can happen, and Shootin' Buddy is a thoughtful and prepared kind of guy.

ToddG was giving his Aim Fast, Hit Fast course in Memphis this past weekend and a student had an ND right into their lower leg. Fortunately, all ended well and everybody reacted properly. Todd sums things up in an AAR:

• Accidents can happen to anyone at any time. This was not the student’s first formal training class and he had also participated in IDPA matches. He had drawn and reholstered his pistol probably a hundred times so far during AFHF this weekend alone. But a moment of inattention was all it took for a bullet to make two new holes in his body.
• Make a plan before an accident occurs and communicate that plan to everyone. Literally less than 30 seconds passed between when the student shot himself and two trained people were attending to the wounds. There was no panic, there was no standing around trying to figure out who was going to do what. We had a plan, everyone knew the plan, everyone followed the plan.
• If you are on the range, you should have a GSW kit with you. Even if you do not know how to use it — in which case you should learn — at least have the kit in case someone else has the know-how but not the supplies. An IFAK should be part of every shooter’s range kit.
• Never be in a rush to holster your pistol. We all know it, we say it, we teach it. Not all of us do it.

Plan A is for nobody to get shot. Have a Plan B.

Magic sights.

Every so often a new magic handgun sighting system comes out that promises all kinds of gee-whiz benefits:

• Faster!
• More Accurate!
• More Natural! (...and what the heck is that one supposed to mean? It uses the special "pistol sighting" lobe of my visual cortex evolved by my primate ancestors to shoot bananas out of trees?)

Most of these fall by the wayside pretty quickly, some retain bands of rabid adherents, but the fact is that the vast majority of pistols being shot for blood or money continue to use square notch-and-post sights (if they can't use optics.) Why is this? Way of the Multigun offers some thoughts.

Does this make me a bad person?

So, any sane American would realize that sneaking into North Korea is a dumb way to spend a vacation, but we have plenty of insane Americans. Well, we currently have two less, but that's not what's funny. What's funny is the way the Norks phrased their announcement:

North Korea announced December 29 that it was holding an American who had entered the country illegally from China on Christmas Eve. The news agency did not identify the man, who it said was "now under investigation by a relevant organ."

Which made me start giggling as I thought of "He's so ronery!" jokes. I feel bad about this, but only a little.