Everybody else is doing it...

Since I've seen this in various places on my daily rounds, I figured I'd play, too. (The list, for the two of you that didn't know, is the "100 Best SF/Fantasy Books" based on a poll of NPR listeners. The meme that's going about its to bold the ones you've read.)

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
23. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King (Only the first two.)
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
26. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
28. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
32. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

It's obvious that this was a poll of NPR listeners. I mean, The Handmaid's Tale? Really? (And was The Road actually SF or Fantasy?)

Ain't that how it always goes?

Farmer Frank's latest hunting trip illustrates the timeless adage that "Two is one and one is none":

I had more equipment failures this trip than I ever have had in my entire life. I lost a brand new thermal imagining scope. (It went 'white' screen and wouldn't come back.) Then, my military grade Aimpoint puked, which was followed shortly by my ITT PVS-14 night vision monocular when it went dead. That's D-E-A-D as in "Nothing". I got by after 'borrowing' a PVS-14 from the rancher (I originally sold it to him anyway) as well as another Aimpoint from a friend of his.

I know that Frank James doesn't use crap gear, and some of his stuff picked a dark night halfway 'cross the country to go toes up on him.

This maxim goes double for guns: Ol' Betsy may have never broken or malfunctioned on you at the range but...

• Travel far from home, or
  
• Spend a bunch of money for a hunt or class, or
  
• Enter the big match or go on the hunt of a lifetime

...and don't bring a spare, and sure as God made little green apples, it'll choke like the Atlanta Braves in the postseason.
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A ≠ B

In the comments section of a post about Rick Perry at Snowflakes In Hell, someone wrote

"Rick Perry is a a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Unfortunately, many will look at his involvement in the recent prayer service as a sign that he is a true friend of liberty."

That made me blink for a second. Huh? What?

I had to reply:

That statement is as non-sequiturish as saying “…his involvement in the recent Little League game as a sign that he is a true friend of stamp collecting.”

Attendance at a prayer service is no more a marker of being a friend of liberty than attendance at a square dance is of being a friend of Chinese food. The two are completely orthogonal.

Attending a prayer service does not preclude being a friend of liberty, nor either is it an indicator of same. The two have not a thing to do with each other at all. It is as possible to pray for liberty as it is to pray people into cattle cars.

As it says in the Good Book: By their fruits shall ye know the friends of liberty, not by what they mouth while standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets and on the Sunday morning political talk shows, that they may be seen of men.

Tab Clearing...

• Silicon Graybeard points out that, even though fantasies of running around in the woods, yelling "Wolverines!" and shooting at foreign-speaking invaders are a lot more appealing to some people than another Monday morning in the cubicle farm, you might want to make sure that your colander is dress-code compliant.


• Our buddy Keads gets a moment on the magic talking picture box! In a favorable story about firearms and self-defense, no less!


• Look, I am foursquare against helmet laws. But don't try and justify* not wearing one by buying into bogus theories that they're somehow more dangerous or something. They're not. (A well-designed, properly-fitting full-face helmet will not restrict your vision, will let you hear better at freeway speeds by eliminating the turbulence around your ears, and is more aerodynamic than your own natural grape, so don't give me that "caught in a gust of wind" crap.) Nut up and be a grownup and say "I'm a big girl and can take the added risk to feel the wind in my hair if I want to, so piss off, Nanny State."

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*Incidentally, this is one of my biggest gripes about wading into fact- and data-laden poo-flinging arguments with anti-gunners about crime rates and murders-per-100k and so forth. The correct answer is "Where the hell do you get off thinking you can tell me I can't own a gun? I don't care if every other gun owner on the planet went out and murdered somebody last night. I didn't. So piss off."

*whine*

Three needles to the lower right jaw followed by a below-the-gums cleaning. I feel like I took a shot to the jaw from Tyson. Seriously, it's about as sore as it was after I had my wisdom teef pulled.

I'm going to take some Vitamin I and have a little lie-down.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

Remember six months ago, when France, Italy, and England dragged a reluctant Obama into agreeing to participate in a "no-fly" zone to ground the Libyan Air Force, so that Qa... Kha... Gadhafi wouldn't be able to use it to massacre unarmed civilians? And Obama said stuff about "time-limited, scope-limited" and "days, not weeks" and how we'd just be providing logistical and reconnaisance support for other NATO forces?

And how we then spent the next six months handling the brunt of the sorties, making sure Qa... Kha... Gadhafi's planes didn't fly, nor his helicopters, or his tanks or cannons or armored personnel carriers or guys with rifles?

Because I remember it happening pretty much that way, but MiniTru is telling me I'm wrong:

President Obama added a victory to his record on Monday as Libyan rebels moved closer to seizing control from Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi...

Wait, what? A quick scan around the usual sources and you'd think that Barry was preparing to storm Qa... Kha... Gadhafi's compound single-handedly, with a knife in his teeth, and gas prices will recede like the oceans did at his election.

(Seriously: the local news had a reporter and camera crew out staring at the digital price sign at a local Speedway gas station in the pre-dawn darkness, waiting for the numbers to fall on the news from Tripoli, like a Roman augur taking the auspices from a flock of pigeons crapping on the Forum.)

If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.

Shootin' Buddy called the other day. His friend with whom he normally goes to gun school had taken a spill and hurt his shoulder and was listed as day-to-day. Just in case, would I want to step into the on-deck circle for an upcoming three-day Awerbuck Shotgun I class? I mean, since it was already paid for and everything?

Duh. "Hey, kid! Want some free ice cream?" Uh, yes.

Phone rings this morning. It's official, his friend is out and said he'd be cool with me taking his slot. Awesome!

When's the class?

Tomorrow.

Uh...

I call down to the dental school, but because of the way the students are scheduled, it's not like they can just bump me back to Friday or Monday. Oh, no; the next morning opening for my almost-a-dentist is two weeks out and there's an afternoon slot (which I hate) a week and a half away. And I can tell from the tone that re-scheduling would be viewed as a little uncool, because my case is my student's competency exam and tomorrow's appointment is one more than we'd initially planned on anyway.

I am missing a free trip to gun school because of a dentist appointment. I am going to be sitting in that chair tomorrow, with my face numb and my teeth getting poked and scraped down below the gum line and thinking "Right now I could be at a shooting range, using somebody else's pimped 870, shooting somebody else's ammo, on a free trip to gun school." I am typing this through actual tears of frustration.

I swear, some days it's not worth getting out of bed.
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Well that's disorientating...

Normally the alarms go off at Roseholme at 0600. I'll saunter into roomie's room and make sure she's heard them, and then flop down on her bed to watch the little man and woman in the magic talking picture box tell me if it's going to rain today and whether or not the city burned down last night. I'll then meander into the kitchen at about 0630 and scrounge up something breakfast-like, and then go try and be creative on the computer until about 1000 or so.

Not this morning. Woke up on the fly this morning, prepared to gulp down some coffee, cram for my plaque test, leave a one-paragraph placeholder post and head out the door to see Almost-A-Doctor Katie at 0900...

...only to double-check the appointment card and see that the dentist's appointment is for tomorrow morning, not today.

D'oh!

That'll mess up your scheduling, right there.


EDIT: If only I'd known how prophetic that last sentence was.

Overheard in the Kitchen:

Coffee preparation is underway. I start singing, to the tune of the old Folger's jingle...

Me: "The best part of waking up..."

RX: "...is getting rid of the thundermug."

Me: *uncontrollable fit of giggling*

RX: "I had no idea that 'thundermug' was a triggering word for you."

Me: "It's just one of those funny words. And it's almost as fun to say as 'boomslang'!"

RX: "You really don't want to find a boomslang in your thundermug!"

Can he balance a ball of C4 on his nose?

Okay, he's pretty big and fast, and he's got sharp teeth, so I can totally see how he could take down Osama Bin Laden, but getting a dozen of those things into an MH-60 Black Hawk has got to be like trying to get the worms back into the can...

Big kitty!

Fred at Guns & Coffee also went to the zoo on Saturday, albeit the one in Madison, Wisconsin.

While he was there, he totally schooled me in the Taking Pictures Of Tigers department.

I really oughtta get a DSLR...

More zoo photos...

A not-very-good picture of a Gaboon viper. I include it for two reasons (other than the fact that it just looks cool and it's almost as fun to say "Gaboon viper" as it is to say "boomslang"...)

1. The reason that it is not a very good pic is because I was taking my photos with available light, unlike the self-centered jackass in front of us who stopped in front of each tank in the darkened half ot the snake exhibit and lit off his flash. I was ready to grab his DSLR by the zoom lens and beat him to his knees with the camera body. I checked the news this morning in the hope that he had died in a crotch fire on the drive home, but no such luck...


2. Also, the sign on the tank proclaimed that the scientific name of this subspecies of Gaboon viper is Bitis rhinoceros, which, as Bobbi pointed out, is Huck the Cat's life's ambition.

On the list of "Things That Creep Tamara Right The Heck Out", go 'head and pencil in "The Legs Of A Marabou Stork" at the bottom. (Although if I remember correctly, you could get Marabou Barbie's knees to bend like this, too, which made for very authentic pink Corvette wrecks.)


Obviously these two white rhinos are tired out after a tough day of rhinocerosin'. Either that, or someone just told them that the nickname of their species is "square-lipped rhinoceros", and they're sulking.

Two by two, tongues of blue...

One of the more popular attractions at the Indy Zoo is the twice-daily opportunity to feed the giraffles.

(For those who didn't know, giraffles have tongues a foot long or so. And they're blue like a chow dog.)

BONUS!: Meta-giraffles!
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We've got lions and tigers only in Kenya...

There is no zoom-lens trickery involved here. Thanks to Indy Zoo's new tiger exhibit, which has a 1.5" pane of glass separating you from Shere Khan, you can get right up close. I waited for a hole in the wall of kiddies and dropped to my knee to get eye-to-eye with P. tigris.

Of course, there are little pink hairless monkeys lining the walls of the viewing area, and el tigre's pacing the glass like Huck presented with a bell jar full of squirrels, hence the difficulty in getting a crisply-focused pic...

I'm going back on a weekday when I can spend more time trying to get a good shot. (Er, with the camera, not the .405 Win T/C Encore...)

*yawn*

Went to the Indianapolis Zoo with roomie today. Had a great time and took lots of pics, but I am just whupped right now; it's been a long day in the hot sun. Bobbi is already napping and I'm thinking about doing likewise. More later...
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Overheard in the Office:

Me: "...and when I was little, we'd go downtown and ride the monorail on the roof of the big Rich's department store! It'd go right along the edge of the roof, six stories up, and it was shaped like a pink pig, and you rode inside the pig..."

RX: "No, Tam, I'm afraid those were the drugs they gave you."

Me: "No, really!"

EDITED TO ADD: Apparently, back in the '50s, before liability lawyers were invented and it was discovered that fun was actually hazardous to children, there was a fad for these miniature monorails in the toy departments of big city department stores. (Although it took an especially inspired madness to make it look like a pig and put it on the roof...) Sadly, it looks like none are actually operating anymore.

Wouldn't it have been have been fun to be a salesman for the Louden Machinery Company, traveling from city to city, going into department store boardrooms and singing...

Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
What'd I say?

MONORAIL!

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Tab Clearing...

• From deep inside the reality distortion field: Steve Jobs destroys entire computer industry with kung-fu punch! "Within a couple a years Windows will be the niche OS."


• "Oh, Dave Weber, no!"


• Months, not days: "Kinetic" Operations would seem to imply that things are actually moving. Thankfully you need to have boots on the ground or a Republican in the White House for the press to use the "Q" word.


• Licensed coffin makers? Next thing you know, you'll be telling me you need a government permission slip to cut hair. Where do think you are? East Germany?

Always scouting for talent...

via reader BGMiller in email:

A Secret Service agent on assignment in Iowa to help with presidential security has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

City Police Chief Bill Nixon says 40-year-old Daniel L. Valencia was off duty when he was arrested Saturday in Decorah.

Well, Agent Valencia, I'm sorry to hear that your fed career has probably crossed the double yellow of life.

Look on the bright side of things, though! Should the USSS ash-can you, you've obviously got just the résumé for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. They're always looking for a few good men who can conn a Crown Vic while they're half in the bag.

Timewaster...

Waiting for the dishwasher to finish up before going to run some errands, I'm reloading Alan's blog over and over to see the different pictures he uses for the header. (Even though he has them all on one page linked in his sidebar...)

I think the one with the torpedo tubes is my favorite.

I am such a dork.
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Well, actually maybe that wasn't so funny.

So Robb Allen posted the other day about Project X-Ray, the World War 2 plan to make primitive guided incendiary cluster munitions by strapping timed pyrotechnic devices to bats and stuffing them into bomb casings so that, when dropped over Japan from USAAF B-29s, they would scatter and roost under the eaves of houses come the dawn.

As it turned out, we were incinerating entire Japanese cities just fine without chiropterid assistance, and so the project was shelved without burning down anything but test targets and the occasional non-target building on the base.

I was going to make a joke in his comments section that we were going to burn Japanese cities with bats in revenge for them trying to burn our forests with balloons.

I seemed to recollect that the Japanese balloon bombs caused the only civilian fatalities in the continental US due to enemy fire during WWII, and so I went to research...

And indeed they did. Not just any casualties, either: A young minister, his pregnant wife, and five Sunday school children went out for a picnic. While the pastor was laying out the picnic goods his wife and the children ran over to investigate what looked like a crashed balloon. It exploded, killing all six right before the reverend's eyes. There's a memorial on the spot today.

Pastor Mitchell, the widower of almost 20% of US Home Front KIA in the Second World War, eventually remarried and traveled to French Indochina to minister to lepers. While there he was taken prisoner by Viet Cong guerrillas and marched into the jungle in 1962, and was never seen again.

And for some reason, I had completely forgotten what I was going to joke about.

"Over __ Days Since Our Last Gaffe!"

An IMPD officer was arrested the other day. Was it for:

A. Streaking
B. Filling In A Wetland Without An EPA Permit
C. Operating A Vehicle While Intoxicated

If you guessed "C", you're absolutely right! Once again, it is proven that the letters stand for "I Must Patrol Drunk". (And while we're on the subject of drunken Indianapolis cops, there's still a stick through the spokes of the wheels of justice in the matter of IMPD Officer David "Bottles" Bisard.)

Ah, IMPD! As long as you keep doing this, I'll never lack for blogfodder.

Overheard in the Office:

I'm reading through LabRat's post on manatees, chatting over my shoulder with Bobbi, who is standing behind me and notices something flash by on the screen...

RX: "What? 'All over Table Mountain'?"

Me: "Oh, yes, they go flopping up the sheer slopes to their traditional breeding grounds at the summit."

RX: "Wait..."

Me: "It's where they lay their eggs!"

RX: "I don't think these are the kind of manatees I'm familiar with."

Public Relations Protip:

When touring the shuttered factories and idled industrial plants of the heartland to bring hope and change to people whom you would like to vote for you, you shouldn't do it in a foreign-made RV. I cannot believe that this gaffe slipped right by all the 20lb brains on Barry's PR staff.

Mr. President, if you had a scheduled stop in Elkhart, IN, you may want to just go 'head and cancel it now that this story has got out.

What're you gonna do? Vote Republican?

In response to Rep. Maxine Waters' public gripefest about the Dear Leader, Bill Quick retorts:

You have no clout. You gave it away. I mean, what are you gonna do? Call him a racist for ignoring you?

Ouch.

(Incidentally, is it just me, or is Maxine actually getting crazier?)

This is what happens...

...when you let the kind of people who worry about shoulder things that go up to write firearms law:

So I bought the book a few months ago, from Parow Arms & Ammo. Completed the open book exam, made an appointment, was handed a closed book exam asking the easy half of the questions from the open book exam, exchanged that for a competency certificate they had printed the week before, and then had to put ten shots into an A5 paper target at 10m with a Norinco LM4 (I think).

I’ve heard that one can fail the competency but if you do you should probably have someone help you with the shoelaces thing in the morning as well.

The above quote is from a post in which Wouter is describing his travails in getting rubber-stamped to buy a semiauto rifle in South Africa.

It's a pretty fine kettle of fish gun owners seem to have found themselves in down there: The Great Big Firearms Law they passed was apparently as convoluted as a bucket of earthworms and has only gotten more Through-The-Looking-Glass with successive attempts to "fix" it.

Overheard in the Office, Part Deux:

Me: "RWC just said 'Wait until next week when they offer the board bender package'..."

RX: "What's a board bender?"

Me: "I dunno... hang on..." *clickity-click* "Here you are."

RX: "Oh, one of those! Those are neat! You use those when you're building decks and..."

Me: "Wow, you could really f#@$ somebody up with one of those things!"

RX: "You say that about everything: tools, flashlights, shoes, wine bottles..."

Overheard in the Office:

While we were at the State Fair, Bobbi picked up a couple of neat-o garden auger bits that could be chucked up in a drill motor and used for planting bulbs and suchlike in the clay soil of the raised bed in the back yard.

This morning I was messing around on Amazon and saw one of their Dealio-of-the-Day things.

Me: "Hey, Amazon is having a sale on this "Milwaukee Fork Meter & Cordless Drill" thing. I don't have a drill motor and I don't know what a 'fork meter' is..."

RX: "[arcane explanation involving amps and volts and things that can electrocute me and which I therefore avoid like the plague]"

Me: "So that's something you could find a use for, then?"

RX: "It could come in handy."

Me: "Is $99 a good deal?"

RX: "What do they normally sell the meter for by itself?"

Me: "Almost that."

RX: "So, free drill."

Me: "Right. On the way."

Tools are neat things. I'm glad that some people know what the heck they do. Me? I'm mostly an idea person; execution is generally somebody else's department.

Ouch.

Three more hours of Almost-A-Doctor Mandy all up in my grille with a drill yesterday. I feel like I got socked in the mouth by Mike Tyson.

The worst part about afternoon appointments down there is that they frequently drag on perilously close to 5PM, and then turn you loose on in the middle of a large urban university/medical campus to do the bumper-to-bumper shuffle with a faceful of Novocaine.

On the plus side, it was a great day to drop the top for the drive home, and all the better for having "Die Young Stay Pretty" cranked on the stereo.

I $ New York.

Checking the news this morning, I glanced over something about New York City and bridges and money. "Nope," I muttered to myself, "I wouldn't do it for four bucks and I won't for fourteen bucks. You're going to need to offer me more than that."

And then I realized that that was how much they were going to charge me to drive across the bridges into their wretched hive of scum and villainy, not how much they were going to pay me to do so.

You have got to be out of your ever-loving mind.
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Tab Clearing...

• Jim at the Travis McGee Reader attended the Iowa Straw poll and has a series of posts on the topic written in his inimitable style. I was somewhat disappointed to see no photographs of actual straws.


• Santa Rosa, CA PD SWAT sets up a little display for the kiddies at a neighborhood festival, including a couple of firearms on the junk-on-the-bunk table. Said kiddies are allowed (under supervision) to touch. The Eloi at the local newspaper issue a Code Brown PSH Alert. Good thing the Army recruiters didn't set up a booth; those guys bring 240 Bravos and grenade launchers.

Blogmeet.

Okay:

What: Blogmeet-type thing.

Who: You and whoever else feels like showing up.

Where: The Broad Ripple Brew Pub.

When: Sunday, August 28th, starting at 3PM and running 'til whenever we get bored or they start putting chairs on tables and making expectant throat-clearing noises.

Why: Well, duh. Because we can.

Formative experiences...

You want to know why I'm a little OCD when it comes to chamber checks on firearms? Allow me to share a story:

At the first gun shop at which I worked, which was also a pawn shop, we had a relationship with a pawn shop owner down in the city. Every few months, he'd drive out to see us with a briefcase containing a few old Colt Police Positives and Smith .38/.32 Terriers and Browning Vest Pockets and suchlike and we would swap him a big box of Lorcins and Hi-Points and Jennings and cash to make up the difference.

One time he came up, the sticking point in the negotiations was a PPK, an early Interarms-marked stainless example. Initially he was thinking about keeping it. Then he wanted too much for it. Then he relented and we added it to our side of the pile.

He handed the Walther to me, and I locked the slide back and checked the chamber, and passed it to a coworker over at the computer. She printed a trigger tag out for it and handed it, slide still locked back, to one of the other salespeople, who put it in the showcase.

Then our buddy the pawn shop owner crawfished. I sighed and pulled the gun from the showcase, removed the trigger tag, and laid it on the counter between him and my boss. About the time pawn shop guy was leaving, I was walking out of the store to cross the street and get lunch for everybody.

When I came back, there was the PPK, sitting on the counter by the computer. "Arthur changed his mind again?" I asked, and was told that, indeed, he had sat in his car for a moment and then came back in and threw the Walther in on the deal at the last minute. Sweet! I still had the trigger tag handy, so I put it back on the gun and passed it to the salesman who put it back in the showcase with one hand while eating his hamburger with the other.

I wandered off to a far corner of the showroom where I could eat my burger in peace, back turned to the sales floor, when *KA-BAM!*

A customer is standing there with the PPK in his hand and an appalled look on his face, smoke wisping theatrically from the barrel and a divot in the linoleum at his feet containing a flattened Winchester Silvertip.

That's right, Arthur had loaded the PPK back up in his car, and then brought it back in to add to the trade, and not one person who handled it from the time I picked it up and put the trigger tag on it to the time the customer made the loud noise had bothered to inspect the chamber because, hey, we had already done that when he brought it in the first time, right?

Lesson learned: I don't care if I set the gun down and just look away for a second; that gun gets checked again when I pick it up. Period. Unless it has been in my field of vision the whole time, I don't know what might have happened to it while I wasn't paying attention.

QotD: American-Occupied America Edition

"By every account the response by every responsible entity - Mayor Ballard's outstanding police and fire forces - our own Indiana State Police, the security force of the State Fair itself, emergency management personnel, was instantaneous and highly professional. It's equally important to say what I heard over and over and over again last night - that individual Hoosiers ran to the trouble, not from the trouble, by the hundreds, offering in many cases their own professional skills. I've heard it from everybody I've debriefed this morning. People rushing up, 'I'm a nurse, I'm a doctor, I'm a trained EMS responder.' But also people who simply pitched in," -Gov. Daniels

You are your own First Responder.
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Books 'n' Tunes:

Driving around with the top down on the Zed Drei the other day, running errands. After the sauna that was July, the weather felt wonderful. Temps in the high seventies, low humidity, and nothing even remotely cloudlike marring the sky.

The iPod in the Zed Drei served up "Fly Me Courageous" by Drivin' 'N' Cryin', Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll", and Van Halen doing "Panama", all of which are perfectly cromulent convertible-piloting songs. I was going to drive around the block again just to see what else would come up, but decided not to push my luck.

Then yesterday I sat on the porch finishing up Mark Steyn's After America (Thank you, Masked Reader!) before starting in on American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Do you know, I've never read a solo Gaiman novel before? Roomie says I'm in for a treat.

Stumped.

While talking on the phone yesterday, I idly field-stripped a Colt 1903 that happened to be at hand. You know, the way you'd twirl a pencil or something to keep your hands busy.

Now I've got a pile of Colt on my mouse pad (it's a big mouse pad: one of those Glock armorer's pads, so there's room for both the mouse and the pony.)

I'm just not motivated to put it back together right this second. Plus, I really should oil it before I do. And maybe I should take a picture while it's still apart, for an eventual Arms Room post.

Whatever. Anyway, now I have a pile of gun taking up half my mouse pad...
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When everybody's a millionaire...

At the Indiana state fair, the International Hall was hosting a "Willkommen to Germany!" exhibit (last year was Japan; I'm betting next year will be Italy...)

The owner of Heidelberg Haus had lent the exhibit his framed collection of old German banknotes. Because they were behind glass, I was unable to see if they were as soft and absorbent as they looked, but I have a sort of sinking feeling that we'll get a chance to find out for ourselves before long.


Check out the five billion Mark note there in the middle. Just think how quick we could pay off the national debt if everybody had a few of those in their pocket, eh? I know Bernanke and Geithner have.

Hey, is that smoke coming off those printing presses?

Death and taxes and books and buses and potholes and Peyton Manning.

When Franklin Township in Indianapolis discontinued free school bus service due to budget shortfalls, from the reaction in the media you'd have thought that the lights of civilisation were going out. Never mind that a private company picked up the busing contract and would be happy to tote your spawn to and from the schoolhouse in exchange for cash; obviously right after we stop the school buses comes the part where we're huddled in the ruins, cooking rats over bonfires made of English Lit textbooks.

Instead, many parents (who had already voted down a tax increase to keep the buses running) decided to drive their kids to school. Chaos was predicted! Children would be ground to paste under the unfeeling tires of Gaia-raping SUVs in the Parking Lots of Academe! It would be like Somalia! If only all those private schools would share the magic teleporter technology that they use to get their kids to Mrs. Grundy's 1st period English class safely and on time...

Also on the municipal tax front, Adaptive Curmudgeon weighs in on his opinion of government-funded sports arenæ:

Profitability doesn’t make wrong into right. Popularity does not make wrong into right. Using the force of government to build a toy for a private franchise owner is immoral, it’s wrong, and it’s not the proper role of the government.

tl;dr version: He's agin' it.

Meanwhile, the pavement on Indy's streets is so bad that all four wheels on the Zed Drei have now lost their little glued-on plastic BMW roundels from the center. But we've got a swell new $720 million retractable-roof china cabinet in which to store our Peyton Manning.
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Trained and qualified.

Stephen at Standing Outside Looking In writes of an encounter with a dude with a bad case of Only One-itis. If I hadn't once had a similar conversation, I'd accuse him of fictionalizing, but they are indeed out there. It's rare to run into one of those types at a gun shop or range, however; apparently they get pumped full of all the knowledge of firearms and shooting they'll ever need at the academy and somehow retain it 'til their dying day, and therefore have no need to take any particular extracurricular interest in the subject.

When I was still living in Tennessee, Knox County Sheriff's Dept. had a particularly embarrassing little incident involving a few deputies, a dude who was trying so hard to commit Blue Suicide that he'd helpfully drawn a bullseye on his chest, and the better part of a box of ammunition. The score at the end of l'affair du nutcase was one grazing wound to the shoulder at about 15 yards, and a few dozen gutterballs perforating the landscape of suburban Knoxville.

The next morning, one of our regular customers, also a deputy, came into the shop while on break. Shannon and I looked up from behind the counter.

"Hey," he held up his hands, palms out, "I wasn't there last night. If I was, did you think I'd be in here today without a bag over my head?"

"I didn't think you were," I replied, "I know you can shoot better than that. But who all was there?"

He sighed. "Let's put it this way: Nobody you'd know from a gun show or a shootin' range."

Ah. That kind.
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Do The Right Thing.

Via The Silicon Graybeard comes this morning's Morality Play.

(It's okay if you get a little lump-in-the-throaty towards the end. I know I did.)
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Big Boy Rules.

Meet the men and women of American Defense Enterprises:



(EDIT: Tired of being mocked by everybody on the internets with more functioning neurons than a banana slug, A.D.E. apparently pulled their YouTube video lest it cut into their lucrative market of bilking Angelenos of their hard-earned currency. Luckily, the internets are forever!)

If you read their promotional material, you'll find that the Department of Homeland Security rated them the number one trainers in the world*! And have you seen their "American Warrior Test"? It's the ultimate test of skills. Forget a sub-5 second FAST or a 280+ on the Hackathorn Standards, it takes seven hours just to take the American Warrior Test, which is apparently almost as expensive grueling as earning a Four Weapons Combat Master ticket!

The firearms training industry has grown from a handful of guys in the desert thirty years ago into a behemoth, surfing the wave of the ongoing Global War On a Noun and the popularity of shows like 24, Top Shot and The Best Defense and movies like... well... every summer movie out there. Every idiot with access to a berm and a shirt with epaulets is hanging out their Flat Dark Earth shingle these days, it seems.

It is only a matter of time until some chiropodist at a weekend SWAT fantasy camp gets his kidneys blown out his navel by the Bushhamster of the stranger behind him in the stack preparing to practice breaching and clearing, and somebody like 20/20 or 60 Minutes is going to have a frickin' field day with it. (Quick: Name five big-name trainers you'd leave alone in a room for five minutes with Chris Cuomo and a cameraman, knowing that a hostile hand would be driving the editing controls...)

The complete lack of a self-regulating accrediting body is going to bite the training industry in the ass sooner or later, and the irony is that even having one wouldn't do much good, since there is always a certain subset of trainers who would market themselves as outlaws, teaching SPECOPS SEAL Contractor Dynamic 360° Combat tactics too extreme!! for the other guys, who are a bunch of nancy milquetoasts.


BONUS!: PDB gives an excellent point-by-point breakdown of the suckage, as well as general tips on how to identify and avoid being taken in by the hucksterism and flash of a Mall Ninjas 'Я' Us sales pitch.
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*Which claim came as a surprise to the DHS, who issues no such rankings. Incidentally, I know I have some SOCOM types in the readership. Anybody able to vet ADE owner Bill Beasley's claims of being ex-SF?

Overheard at the State Fair...

RX: "Oh, look! The Department of Homeland Security has a booth at the fair! 'Fink on your neighbors...'"

Me: "'...and win a kewpie doll!'"

Tab Clearing...

• "Hey Boo-Boo! We can't find a pic-a-nic basket! Why don't you go get that bird feeder?"


• New Charter Arms .40 cal revolver doesn't need moon clips. I guess that Smith's patents from the Model 547 have expired, then.


• iPhone 4 vs. My Roomie's Ultimate Luddite Cell Phone.


• What color is the sky in this guy's world? Seriously, other than British Malaya and Hong Kong, what Japanese-held territory had the Brits not retaken by August of '45? (via Kevin.)


• Wild Weasel Moth: Their fur absorbs sound waves and they chirp on a frequency designed to jam bat echolocation. If they launched chaff and flares, they would be the coolest creature on the planet.

I've solved the dependence on foreign oil thing...

On learning the news that a second grandiose FDR Memorial is going up (apparently the one in DC isn't enough for our beloved Benito from Hyde Park) I propose that we grab a bunch of copper wire and wrap up my grandmother's coffin in the stuff. Her grave will be easy to find, since I'd imagine that 15,000 r.p.m. emits a fairly piercing whine.

I never heard her refer to him as anything but "that liar Roosevelt" with a venomous tone that made the one used for people who tracked mud on her nice carpets sound like a conversational chirp by comparison.

It's a poor craftsman that blames the tools.

The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be, having already confiscated the guns and invented the anti-stab knife, still has a problem with howling mobs of angry yobs torching city blocks for recreation. What to do?

What do you mean "what to do"? They know what to do. This is Jolly Olde England, where (just like Jolly New England) the knee-jerk response to problems these days is "Ban Something!"

[Prime Minister David Cameron] said the government, police and intelligence services were looking at whether there should be limits on the use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to spread disorder. Authorities are considering "whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," he said.

Looking at limits on Twitter and Facebook? That's your answer? Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but they almost burned Los Angeles down back in the '90s, when cell phones were the size of bricks and didn't even have custom ring-tones, let alone 3G internet connections. Hell, the Watts Riots of the '60s happened half a decade before you could play Space War over ARPANET, let alone Farmville on Facebook.

If this simpering twit had been running things during the Blitz, he would have formed a committee to study the feasibility of outlawing Nazi bombers. (The Department of Transport would have grounded the Spitfires and Hurricanes as being too dangerous and insufficiently bulletproof.)

I mean, look at Cameron's résumé: He's a blandly handsome guy who went to all the right schools and has never had a productive non-government job in his life... No wonder Obama hates him; they both wore the same dress to the prom.

England used to be a cool place. It used to rule the world. Now it's like an island of California, except without the nice weather and food.

Thoughts on "fit"...

Brigid has a great post on the importance of being able to make sure that you have room to wriggle your toes when you buy that new handgun. Very clearly written. If you can't reach the trigger or the other controls, that pistol isn't going to be as useful as it could be.

About the same time, ToddG put up an excellent post on how the way a handgun "feels" can sometimes be illusory.

Read both.
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I have an idea, formin' in me head...

Who all is planning on being in town for the Indy 1500 fun show the weekend of the 26^th-28^th? Perhaps we could do something blogmeetish?

It would be fun! You'd like it! (And if you haven't been to the Indy 1500, you really should. It's one of the biggest gun shows in the country. Plus, like the machine gun shoot at Knob Creek, it makes an appearance in Unintended Consequences, which kind of makes it a Station of the Cross for good wookie-suiters. You get a merit badge for your bowcaster bandoleer for attending.)

The Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-a!

Feelin' good and apocalyptical this morning, no?

The stock market has shit the bed again, there's Anarchy In The UK, we've got family gangs of bank robbers motoring across the US like something out of a James Cagney talkie...

I don't know about you, but I'm buffing out my colander and mink-oiling the straps. Just in case.

How quickly it can happen.

Wouter's blog documents, among other things, his shooting and firearms collecting hobbies in South Africa. He recently got permits through for several more pistols, including an assortment of Spanish iron that looks like it would be right up my roomie's alley.

Reading through his back posts on the drama involved in getting your hands on a firearm in South Africa today can be instructive, all the more so because, just twenty or thirty years ago, South Africa had some pretty decent gun laws. Then again, so did California.

For most of the US, the nadir of gun rights happened in 1994 or so, and things have been on a generally positive trend ever since, we're still not back to where we were post-FOPA and pre-Bush'n'Bennett's "Imported Assault Weapon Ban". In 1987, you could walk into the sporting goods store at the mall and buy a genuine German HK91 without any background checks or anything. (Of course, in the living memory of someone of my parents' generation, you could just mail-order the thing instead...)

Oh, Bastet...

They're dealing with a sick kitty at the Nerd Ranch. Our very best thoughts here at Roseholme Cottage go out to them; we've been there way too often, way too recently. :(

Owie. Hurtie.

Despite the fact that Almost-A-Doctor Katie is like a frickin' ninja with that Novocaine syringe, it is well and truly wearing off.

My gums feel like they're coming to after a barfight, face down on asphalt and in a pile of broken glass. They're not going to be happy in a few minutes, once they figure out what happened...

It's a good thing I already finished lunch. French onion soup in a bread bowl from Panera was about as challenging a meal as I was up to.

(Speaking of which, what's up with everything they stick in your mouth at the dentist tasting awful? And the awfullest stuff is the stuff they try to make taste good. Take that tooth polish stuff, f'rinstance...

Me: "Ew. Grape? Isn't there, like, a grownup flavor?"

A-A-Dr. K: "Um, I think that is the grownup flavor. The kid's stuff is bubble gum."

Me: "Oh, ick! Couldn't they do, say, ahi tuna flavor? Or French onion soup? Ooh! Soy-and-wasabi flavor fluoride rinse!"

I try and have a good time while I'm there, at any rate.)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #56: Three Pocket Pistols.

Since I still haven't gotten around to finishing that Arms Room post, here's another photo I took for it.

From top to bottom you have a Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless in .32ACP, a Pieper Bayard 1908 in .380ACP, and a Colt 1908 Vest Pocket .25ACP.

Drill, baby, drill.

Three hours in the chair with Almost-A-Doctor Mandy yesterday. Lots of smoke. And lots more where that came from.

That was my first time with the drill. At one point, Mandy noticed my tummy trembling and pulled the drill out of my mouth "Are you okay?"

"I'm sorry," I gasped between giggles "It sounded like a bad robot sound effect from a B-grade sci-fi movie, with all that chirping and squeaking. I was trying to hold still."

"You were laughing? I saw you shaking and thought I was killing you!"

Heading back in this AM so that Almost-A-Doctor Katie can continue with the deep-cleaning. Looking forward to that face-full-of-Novocaine feeling. Not so much the "just-flossed-with-barbed-wire" sensation after the Novocaine wears off.

Wow. Just wow.

So some entertainment blogger wants to put me in a camp, and even muses on how good a second civil war would feel. To quote Robb Allen:

Go ahead buttercup. I don’t think you’ve thought your cunning plan all the way through.

But that flaw in his logic wasn't what set me to laughing. No, what really got me going about the guy's little screed was the part where he insinuated that the people with whom he disagreed were, and I quote, "contemptible morons... being played by the rich".

Let me get this straight, Jeffrey: Your job, your career, your entire raison d'être, as it were, is to read the tea leaves about the talkie motion picture shows at the Bijou and then explain to me why it's important or relevant or matters two farts in a windstorm that Avatar wins an Oscar for Best Visual Effects and why I should give a damn about anything that comes out of James Cameron's piehole other than the words "Action" and "Cut", and I'm the moron being played by the rich?

Buddy, I am rubber and you are glue, okay?
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Branching out...

It was an idea that was kicked around a lot when I worked there, and now it looks like it's happening: Coal Creek Armory is opening another storefront and range.
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Now that's austerity we can believe in!

To show how serious they are about slashing costs, Congress has eliminated the congressional page program, claiming that it cost $5,000,000 a year (that's almost one mile of interstate highway!) to do something that had been effectively rendered obsolete with the invention of text messaging and email.

From now on, if congresscritters want underage minors to sexually harass, they'll have to ring out for them and have them delivered on their own dime just like everybody else; they'll no longer be considered a perk of the office to abuse like the free postage.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #55: KRISS Super V

From the LuckyGunner blogger shoot: A KRISS Super V with EOTech and Da Switch.

Summertime in SoBro, Part IX...

One evening last week, when Bobbi's nephew finished up his paint-scrapery on the house for the day, Bobbi offered to feed him, and so off we went to sample a revered Broad Ripple institution: Boogie Burgers!

Boogie Burger used to be located in a dinky little hole-in-the-wall at the mystical corner of Westfield Blvd & Westfield Blvd in the heart of Broad Ripple. The fact that the place could only seat about ten people, tops, added to the ambiance. (Except, of course, when you really wanted a Boogie Burger and the place was packed to the gills.)


Now they've moved on out Broad Ripple Avenue, almost to Keystone, and are in the building most recently occupied by the Red Eye Diner. Unlike the Red Eye, the parking lot at the new Boogie Burger is almost full every time I drive by. Yes, their burgers are that good.


The Boogiemobile is always parked out front. The dinky strip center in the background, by the way, is the home of H₂O Sushi, one of the best sushi joints I've ever tried. Almost immediately on the other side of Boogie Burger is Khoury's Mediterranean Grill & Market & Hookah Bar, which is yummy, too.

"He did it!" "Nuh-uh, she did it!" "He did it first!"

So, watch any of the political shows over the weekend?

Boy, that was a nasty little round of accusations over the credit downgrade, wasn't it? I haven't seen so much finger-pointing, blame-shifting, and responsibility-shirking since I was babysitting the Carlson kids and found the kitchen floor half-an-inch deep in grape Kool-Aid and smooshed Captain Crunch.

I found it an especially entertaining response considering the nature of the accusation...

Video intermission...

Under this video of Travis Haley at S.W.A.T. Magazine's Facebook page, somebody commented "Sharks have Travis week." I LOL'ed.

Insider trading...

Just in case you like messing with corn futures with your pocket change...

And things might get a little interesting in the live cattle market, too, since a lot of them are apparently being converted into dead cattle.

Also, smaller cans.
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Consider the source...

Well, it was an online poll. I'd imagine that if they had mailed out the poll on postage-paid cards in American Rifleman that the numbers would have been different...

...but I think the intertubes still would have been in the lead.

Of course, that's just oriented towards gun purchasing information. When it comes to news and current political issues, the monthly news magazine is practically dead.

Seriously, since we're talking about the NRA, how many of y'all used to get America's First Freedom rather than "Ducks & Muskets Monthly"? Yeah, me too. At least, I did until the rise of the new media meant that it had effectively become News I Read On Teh Intarw3bz A Month Ago. Compared to that, even a magazine that heaps praise on the Taurus Judge and spends more time talking about shooting at feathered things in one issue than I have in my entire life is useful.

Another day at the office...

Apparently the helicopter that went down was carrying some guys from DEVGRU. No word if they were the same guys who pulled off the Abbottabad raid (and we may never know, at least officially.)

If so, it's a reminder of the ops tempo that SOCOM has been dealing with for ten+ years now. The media only notices them once in a blue moon, when something big like taking down Bin Laden happens, as though they'd been sitting around waiting for something to do, twiddling their thumbs since the Battle of Takur Ghar.

UPDATE: Latest RUMINT is that none of the operators on board were the guys from Neptune Spear... (...who are probably busy elsewhere already.)

Fundamentally Unserious.

A Chinook helicopter went down in Afghanistan last night, killing all aboard. I know this because the TeeWee newsreader this morning said "A US helicopter was brought down in Afghanistan, killing 31 US troops, mostly from the Special Forces. We'll be back after these messages with who claimed responsibility..."

"Claimed responsibility"? Are you kidding me?

Did Edward R. Murrow ever say "An Army Air Force B-17 was shot down over Düsseldorf today. We'll be back after these messages with who claimed responsibility"? No, he didn't. And do you know why? Because he wasn't a microcephalic hairspray-headed cretin whose entire world outside of Manhattan cocktail parties consisted of nothing but an endless globe-spanning daisy chain of identical luxury hotel rooms joined by a pressurized tube of first-class airliner cabins and the back seats of Cadillacs, that's why, you plush-bottomed yahoo.

We know who shot the helicopter down in Afghanistan: That would be the people we are fighting in Afghanistan. My cat knows who shot the helicopter down, and she has a brain the size of a chickpea. Did you think I was going to sit breathlessly on the edge of the couch through the commercial break, wondering who had claimed responsibility? "Gosh, who could have brought down a Chinook in Wardak Province? The IRA? The Cubans? Oh, I hope they tell me who claimed responsibility."

We need to take a cue from the old Roman republic and fling murderers, traitors, perjurors, and idiotic bubbleheaded moron newsreaders to their deaths from atop the 30 Rock*.

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*L'esprit de l'escalier note from Sunday afternoon: The punchline would have been a hundred times better if I had them hurled to their deaths from the Trigenta Rock. Ah, well...

Save A Soybean, Eat A Vegan.

Driving through Broad Ripple the other day, I ran up behind an elderly Volvo with a faded "HOPE" sticker and one that said "Vegetarians Taste Better" and I thought to myself, "Well, duh! Carnivores tend to be kinda greasy and stringy..."

The other bumper sticker asked "You wouldn't hook a puppy, so why would you hook a fish?" with a picture of what must be the world's dumbest Beagle lunging for a hook of a size normally used to land hard-fighting Great Whites. I thought this was a particularly ignorant bumper sticker, since any fool knows that the reason you hook fish is because they're too hard to shoot and the Fish & Game people tend to get bent out of shape when you use dynamite. ("Dynamite! The One Bait Fish Always Rise To!")

Tab Clearing...

• Phlegmmie linked to this awesome Google Earth view of the cloud of satellites orbiting Earth. If you had asked me to guess how many there were, I'd have been off by a factor of ten.


• The "terrifying arsenal" bar is set pretty low in The Place Where Great Britain Used To Be these days. I especially like the way they clutch their pearls over the "lethal hollow-point and soft-tip" ammo, two ammo cans full of which I have riding around in the trunk of my car because I was too lazy to lug it into the house after my last range trip. (I rationalized the decision by thinking, "Well, it'll just be going back to the range anyway, so I might as well just leave it in the trunk.")


• Scary Quote Of The Week: "I recently had a reliable source tell me the EPA, OSHA, and other regulatory agencies have been told to explore how they can supply their own revenue such that they become self supporting. “Run like a business” and even potentially make a profit. My source explicitly called out the EPA and OSHA but one can easily imagine how this mandate will be extended to the ATF and hundreds of other government organizations.
  
  If the color didn’t just drain out of your face and you nearly fainted you either don’t have a very good imagination or you have a government job." -Joe Huffman

Everybody just lie on the floor and stay calm. You too, Contessa.

Some kids at the Virginia Tech campus called the cops and said they saw a guy sort of carrying something that might be a gun, maybe. New York City network newsrooms immediately went into lockdown, with the kind of wall-to-wall coverage you normally only get when we're invading Iraq again. I half expected MSNBC to whip up special "Gunman On Campus" theme music.

Big Bang Theory.

A new gun blog, Rational Gun, has an informative post up on the development of the Knight's SR-25 EM, a shorty .308 AR-type carbine.

There was a guy shooting a 16" .308 at the carbine class I attended last year; I can't remember off the top of my head if it was an Armalite or a Bushhamster. I do remember that I wished he'd been using a can. (I mostly tried to shoot in the other string.)

I need to clean my brain out with a wire brush...

With all the Media fawning over their Pharaoh's birthday today, for some reason I can't shake this mental picture of Chris Matthews singing a breathy rendition of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President".
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I feel safer already.

Interesting view of an interesting place over at Roomie's blog, if you haven't seen it yet.
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The big chill.

The other night, the thermostat at Roseholme Cottage cut the air conditioner off at 0mygod30 and the silence woke me up, so steady a presence has its background drone been these past couple weeks. The little a/c unit would gradually fall behind during the day and then spend the whole night trying to catch back up, and it finally did at 0400...

The worst of the heat wave is over in Indy. It may reach 90 today, but that's not a certainty, and daily highs will be progressively lower in the 80s through the next week. It's 66 out there right now, which feels positively chilly, especially since it was 83 at this time yesterday morning.

Now if it would just rain...
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...like flowers and butterflies, particle accelerators need no excuse.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man:

In trying to determine exactly how the universe came into existence, scientists have been recreating sub-atomic explosions - like the one that may have happened around the time of the big bang - using atom-sized particles of lead.

They shoot the particles through a 16-mile long accelerator at the speed of light and when the particles collide in a vacuum colder than -271 Celsius, they put on a spectacular show.

[snip]

'So by studying these we can learn more about what the universe is made from and perhaps one day how it all began.'

Dude, it's cool. You don't need to make any excuses for crashing things into each other at the speed of light in an underground tunnel longer than Manhattan that's had the air pumped out and been chilled to a couple degrees above absolute zero. That doesn't need a reason. You can just say "We're crashing stuff into things and junk at the speed of light because it's frickin' awesome and you're just jealous. Nyah, nyah, nyah!"

QotD: There's A Mr. Odoacer To See You Edition

From Mark Steyn at NRO:

The Libyan War never caught the imagination of the American public, even though you’re paying for most of it. But in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing they’re following it. And they regard it as a useful preview of the post-American world. Absent American will, even a tinpot desert drag queen can stand up to the great powers and survive. The lesson of Obama’s half-hearted little war isn’t lost in the chancelleries of America’s enemies.

"I will beat your ass for the Prince of Peace!"

There is a certain variety of atheist that can get on people's last nerve. I'm talking about the ones who can't go thirty-seven seconds in a conversation without bringing up their status as a happy heathen and the joys of godlessness. You know the type: They come up with clever replacements for any religion-based oaths in their vocabulary such as "goddammit" or "Jesus H. Christ", supplanting them with deity-free versions that sound as forced as a gender studies undergrad using "herstory" and "womon", without realizing that they are coming across like the Spock-with-a-goatee version of the proselytizing Southern Baptists they loathe so much. I tend to start shifting nervously from foot to foot and wondering whether I should run if they try and press a copy of whatever the antiJehovah's unWitness equivalent of The Watchtower is into my hands.

Anyhow, sometimes these types get together in a pack and get a little sue-happy, most recently over the inclusion of a cross in a 9/11 memorial, which is obviously the banana peel at the top of a slope that will dump us right into the middle of a Margaret Atwood nightmare if we don't nip it in the bud. In. The. Bud!

It's the reaction of a certain variety of Christian to stories like this that has me baffled. I must have been playing hooky on the day they covered "praying for the rape of the unbelievers" in Sunday school, but I confess that I have a hard time picturing kindly Mrs. Smith covering that, so maybe she just skipped that lesson.

Prayers for Rain.

So a big storm front moved through Indiana last night. I awoke to a thunderboomer in the wee hours and drifted back to sleep thinking that it may be bad for the house, which is almost completely scraped and ready for priming at this point, but good for the vegetable garden.

When I woke to the morning news on the TeeWee, it turned out to be another cruel hoax. The southwestern corner of the storm front just clipped us. Carmel, a few miles north, caught sixteen hundredths of an inch of rain (more than they'd recorded for the entire month of July at that site) while downtown Indy, a like distance to the south, recorded five hundredths. I guess we got somewhere between those totals, but the end result is that the pavement is hardly damp this morning.

I'm keeping the plants alive with constant applications of the watering can, but growing 'maters and melons and peppers takes water. Ma Nature's cooperation would surely be appreciated.

Little boxes all made out of ticky-tacky.

So the conversation in the lawyer/engineer post about the new CAFE standards turned, as it always does, to people's fond reminiscences of high-mileage cars of days gone by.

The most recent time that America really had mileage on the brain was in the wake of the '79 Energy Crisis. If you go up to my attic and look at car magazines from the era and I can talk you out of offing yourself, you will notice that nowhere in any of the auto ads of the period are things like horsepower or acceleration touted at all. Everything is Em-Pee-Gee: Even the ads for the brand-new Camaro touted the mileage you could get from the base Iron Duke four-cylinder powerplant (and I use the term loosely) and conveniently forgot to mention that a four-banger Camaro wouldn't accelerate hard enough to pull a greased string out of a cat's ass and would get sand kicked in its face at traffic lights by any passing Beetle.

The early '80s saw plenty of cars that would be considered efficient even by today's standards enjoy sales success in America, from the Toyota Starlet to the Honda CRX HF, which sometimes leads people to ask "Well why don't they just sell those cars again?"

Because they wouldn't be legal to sell. They lack airbags. They'd fail side-impact and offset crash tests. And, more importantly, have you looked inside a small car lately? All but the most wretched clean-it-out-with-hose loss leaders on your neighborhood dealer's lots are stuffed full of things that used to be considered amenities: power windows, remote adjustable mirrors, power door locks with remote. Automatic transmissions outnumber manuals in passenger cars by a staggering margin, and even performance-oriented cars are like as not to have some paddle-shifted clutchless setup rather than the classic three-pedal row-your-own.

The aforementioned Toyota Starlet, one of which was my dad's commuter vehicle for many years, was a two-door hatchback on a tiny sub-92" wheelbase that weighed in at under 1700lbs; by comparison, a current Prius stretches over 106" between the axles and weighs in at over 3,000 pounds. (And lest you think that's all batteries, even the current Mini outweighs a Starlet by better than 700 pounds despite being a good ten inches shorter.)

I don't mind austere cars that crumple like beer cans in a wreck, but the rest of the market seems to think differently...

(Eurodiesels get good mileage these days even in lardy modern autos, but try telling that to the EPA.)

Meanwhile, in Bizarroland...

No REVENUE HIKES, only spending CUTS, CUTS, and CUTS—initially about $1 trillion will be cut from U.S. spending, and then another big cuts in government spending, phased in over a decade. Thousands of programs will be cut, Park Service, IRS, Labor Department, none will be spared.

Wow. I wonder what color the sky is in his world?

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Technorati:


I'll take "What Is A Push Poll?" for $100, Alex.
.

I'm gonna burn in hell...

...for laughing at this (very NSFW) video:



I can only hope that, should the unthinkable happen and I drill one through my hoof, I have enough aplomb that a gag video can be made of the event, because I'm pretty sure that it will be hard to make a musical YouTube clip of me rolling around and clutching my leg while whimpering like a little girl...


(H/T to Kristopher in comments here.)

"Do This." "Don't Do That." Can't You Read The Signs?

So in the wee hours of Sunday morning, we trailed the ambulance carrying Mom X to St. Nearby hospital.

It went roaring down a tunnel and we parked in the little lot right near the Emergency Room entrance. Walking briskly up to the doors we started passing signs...

St. Nearby is a Tobacco-Free Campus!

"Like hell it is," I thought, "There's some right here in my pocket."

This Is A Knozone Area! No Idling!

Because when some parent comes screaming up to these doors in the family bus with their kid horking up blood on the passenger seat, air quality alerts are the first thing on their mind. But I jerked up short at the one on the door. Under the familiar circle-slash around a gun and a knife was the legend

No Weapons Allowed Except For Law Enforcement Personnel. Packages May Be Searched At Any Time.

Now, in Indiana, this sign has about the legal weight of a Doonesbury strip. However, if the deputy inside had an IQ greater than a turnip, he'd surely divine the purpose of the oversized unbuttoned chambray shirt on a muggy July night, and I didn't feel like getting banished from the Woolworth's and further screwing up Bobbi's night... "I'll wait out here." (Because, really, what bad things have ever happened in a big city ER at 0230 on a Sunday morning?)

No guns. No tobacco (and that's not No Smoking, kids; that's No Tobacco.) No idling your car. I'm sure the hospital's HR department's Workplace Diversity policies were very up-to-date and that the cafeteria had a selection to suit any vegan, gluten-free, heart-healthy, halal palate...

I started to break out in hives.

I felt like an extra in Demolition Man; I was afraid to use the bathrooms because I didn't know what the three seashells were for. It was as if, since I refused to go to California, the world was bringing California to me. That's what this place, and all those other places just like it: Schools, government buildings, Fortune 500 campuses, were... little inkblots of California, slowly spreading their plague of signs across flyover country.

It was 80 degrees and muggy, but I goosebumped up anyway.

Found in my email inbox this morning...

...and presented without comment:

a blog is an online journal. The word "blog" is even shorthand for "weblog." The main point of blogs is to WRITE about stuff. You can have links to friends and sometimes they make comments, but the whole point of a blog is to write thoughts down -- whether it be viewpoints or what you did that day, etc.

Facebook is about keeping in touch with friends. You post pictures, write comments, play games with apps... it's a social networking tool. Facebook is built to be more interactive than a blog. You visit Facebook for the people while you visit blogs for what people have written. Plus, you can put a blog into your Facebook, but you can't put your Facebook profile into a blog.

I've never seen an engineer pretend to be a lawyer...

...so how come lawyers keep trying to be engineers?

...Obama confirmed that automakers would be required to deliver an average fuel efficiency for their US fleets of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Hey, Barry, while you're legislatin' physics, how 'bout ramming a bill through Congress to get sea-level air density reduced to 1.20521 kg/m³ or so; it'll make cars more aerodynamic. Maybe sign an executive order slashing g₀ to a nice, round 9.0m/s² to help with rolling resistance. Come to think of it, that last one would help make your "private jet" more efficient, too.

Is there any other profession that kibitzes so much in the affairs of others? You don't see doctors telling lawyers how to do their jobs, but any doctor paying malpractice insurance will tell you that lawyers sure think they know a lot about doctorin'.

Lawyers know more about how many doors and staircases and elevators a building needs than any architect, they can tell a gourmet chef the right amount of salt to put in his dishes, and pity the poor McDonald's counter jockey who thinks they know more about the proper temperature of coffee than a lawyer. No wonder they tend to wax a little pharaonic after they pupate and turn into politicians.