One in the "W" column.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is one of those egregious "there oughtta be a law!" pieces of legislation so common in modern Washington. Written on a highly technical topic by people who can't turn on their own Blackberries without paging the IT Department, it came out sufficiently garbled that it was more of a federal prison sentence with a universal adapter attached than anything you'd describe as a "law". (There's always, of course, the possibility that this was a feature, not a bug.)

Whatever we're paying that Kozinski guy, it's not enough.

I wonder where the shoulder thing that goes up can be found on a computer?
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RINO hunting.

So Dick Lugar's face is all over my TeeWee screen this morning, including a memorable shot in this video, at about the 1:20 mark, where he's toddling toward the camera with his single fastened jacket button giving him a sort of Baby Huey air, and his rolling gait and happy, open-mouthed grin combine to remind me of my baby-sitting days, as I think "Oh. my. gawd. Our senator has filled his drawers."

Meanwhile, in a post at Bobbi's blog, she points out that even the Democrat challenger has a better grade from the NRA than F-rated Lugar.

Immediately, the "No, no, I walked into a door, and besides, the Republicans really love me" contingent speaks up, implying that better a vote for Republican Richard than a filthy Democrat, even if the Republican in question has crossed the line more times than a Tijuana coyote, including breaking ranks faster than a marching band member with the trots on the Sotomayor and Kagan nominations, but, hey, he's wearing the right color jersey for the Single Party Voters.

"We're in some real pretty $#!+ now, man!"

So, realistically speaking, the best likely outcome for gun owners in the upcoming presidential election is we get the ex-governor of the state with some of the worst, most restrictive gun laws in the nation as president. That would be the good outcome... well, okay, the less bad outcome. The even worse outcome is a Barry O. with no re-election worries; sure, he'd have a Congress with oppositional-defiant disorder, but all our regulatory agencies are belong to him.

Thus begins what appears to now be a quadrennial event, much like the Olympics: The Election Year Hoarding Festival! Fearing that a re-elected Obama is going to sign an executive order repealing the Second Amendment on November 7th, people who slept through civics class are snapping up guns and ammo like it's 1999.

Folks, I'm disappointed. If you're doing this and you've just turned 18, you get a pass. If you just got into guns in the last year or two, you're excused, too. Go on. Y'all can go on; go get a Coke or something. Just shut the door behind you, because this is for people who've been into guns and shooting for four years or more.

Okay, is it just those of us who've been shooting since '08 or earlier? Yeah? Good...

Then why in the name of Mars Pater did you wait 'til now to stock up?!?

You were around during the circus that was gun shows after Election '08 and you're just now waiting to stock up on magazines and buy that extra AR? You experienced the Big Ammo Drought and you've allowed your reserves to drop so low that you feel compelled to go make a panic purchase? We all know what this does to prices and availability. We've been here before.

The stuff does not go bad. It's like canned goods: It keeps for a long time, so when it's on sale, buy it cheap and stack it deep and use it on a First-In, First-Out basis. (Usually the best time to buy it cheap is a few car payments after one of these hoarding binges, when people get eager to unload a few cases of 7.62x39 that they splurged on, in order to pay bills.)

BONUS!: S&W adds another production shift at the plant. But, you know, Americans are turning away from guns. The Antis told me so.
.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

The chairwoman of the Democrat National Committee has come out and accused Republicans of being unpatriotic scoundrels, putting politics before country and talking down the economy in hopes of spurring their election chances:

Republicans looking to defeat President Barack Obama in November’s general election are rooting for the American economy to fail, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said in an interview Sunday.

You're new here, Ms. Wassermann Schultz, aren't you? No, no, wait... I'm pretty sure you were around for the '04 election and Kerry's "Misery Index"...

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

EDIT: In other news, it looks like Rick Santorum may have pulled his face curtain. That's okay, I couldn't and wouldn't have voted for him in May's IN primary, anyway, because his campaign was too grabasstic and disorganized to get onto the ballot. I'll be voting for the wookie in the primary.
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Overheard in the Office:

RX: "Dinosaurs didn't have a space program."

Me: "How do you know they didn't?"

RX: "Because they aren't still around. Bill Clinton had a space program, and he's still around. Barack Obama has... uh... a space program that somehow involves reaching out to the Muslim world..."

Me: "I can think of a program of outreach to the Muslim world involving rocket ships."

I'm always cranky and xenophobic on Tuesdays.
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Things I Don't Get, #355,401

Remember at the end of Python's Holy Grail, when the cops show up and arrest Arthur and a bunch of his knights, and one of the bobbies yanks a guy's shield away with a brusque "'Ere, that's an offensive weapon, that is"? Remember that?

Well, Canada's got some sweeping body armor ban coming down the pike, which is one of those things I just don't get. Think about it: Why would a loving and benevolent government want the people it claims to be protecting to be easier to kill?

Every time I hear of some jurisdiction banning body armor, I want to grab my copy of the criminal code and run into the street waving it around and yelling "IT'S A COOKBOOK!"

Elite Team Fighter.

Somebody in a forum asked which "elite" outfits were still using 1911s. There was a little discussion, and I realized that this is a line of thinking that I have gotten very out of touch with over the last several years.

I mean, it used to be a Very Big Deal to me that I was carrying zomg teh exact same pistol as FBI HRT! Now I'm carrying a gun just like the one issued by... by... um... I don't know. Or care, really.

Seriously, when I was carrying a Glock 29, you better cool believe that I could inform you that the Kentucky State Police issued 10mm Glocks, and it was a constant point of contention on gun forums to debate which brand of pistol was used by more militaries or police forces.

Maybe the Mall of America's elite Food Court Team 6 issues the M&P 9? Whatever; it's all good.

Locavore-ive Breath

Elsewhere on the intertubes, I find myself explaining the seeming dichotomy of me being willing to hoof over to Locally Grown Gardens on foot to get eggs from the local hippie commune, and yet still make fun of the patrons of the organic whole breakfast food shelf at the supermarket:

I pay double grocery store cost for local free-range eggs from Locally Grown Gardens, not because they're local or because I care about what the chickens were fed or whether giving them aromatherapy every day reduced their carbon footprint, but because a chicken that runs loose and eats bugs lays eggs with thick shells, orange yolks and a white with more flavor than tapwater.

On the other hand, "the rich flavor of natural whole grains" in 90% of Nature's Whole Organic Goodness Breakfast Gruel reminds me of why baked goods always involve salt and/or sugar, and we don't just crop the stuff off the stems in the field with our mouths like ruminants.

The fact that most of those eggs are usually only a couple days out of the chicken is just a bonus.

That's, like, a lot in people years.

"I'm doing this cool new thing called 'blogging'. It's really obscure; you've probably never heard of it."

Charles G. Hill at dustbury.com celebrates sixteen years of logging his travels on the Web.
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All mimsy were the borogroves...

Having had the word verification turned on for so long, I'd actually kinda missed the 'bot-generated word salad they use to try and spoof their way past the Turing screens in the spam filter. Check out this fragment of Vogon poetry I dug out of the spam comment trap this morning:

When traveling, it's not without exception important to prevention together. Let Mom imbibe the kids unified heyday while Dad enjoys a by a circular of golf. The next time Mom should remit in the spa while Dad and the kids relish in some pool time. Splitting up allows each progenitrix to utilize a much needed destroy b decompose during journeys time.

Planning is anyone of the most leading aspects that you whim lack to consider when you are traveling. Score steadfast that you without exception make it at least an hour and a half up front your take a run-out powder so that you cause sufficient time to manage yourself situated. This will eschew to convey you cordial of mind.

...

Instant that you've gotten a hardly tips on making your excursion affair a achievement, you can go flip with confidence. Apply these time-honored tricks of the calling and pass them on to those who may be accompanying you on the journey. One wish better from being more aware of and aware.

[link excised]Cheap Ray Ban glasses[/link excised]

I'm envisioning tanks of Cylon Hybrids in Shanghai, murmuring endlessly...

FTL system check diagnostic functions within parameters repeats the harlequin the agony exquisite the colors run the path of ashes fifty-two percent of heat exchanger cross-collateralized with hyper-dimensional matrix upper senses repair ordered relay to zero, zero, zero, zero, Christian Louboutin Replica...

Overheard in the Office:

I'm reading a post at Popehat about a legal setback suffered by the food nazis of the CSPI via the dismissal of the anti-Happy Meal lawsuit of their willing cat's paw, Monet Parnham-Lee. Any time those Gladys Kravitzes take one in the "L" column, it's a win for freedom.

Out of curiosity, I went and looked up the Center for Science in the Public Interest at Wikipedia. The article contained a picture of a medium-sized office building rather grandiosely captioned as "CSPI Headquarters in Washington, D.C." By this, of course, they mean that the fourth window from the left on the third floor is CSPI headquarters.

Clicking on the picture takes you to the page containing the photo, where the caption is a little less disingenuous. I started reading off some of the tenants out loud...

Me: "Wow, look who all has offices in this building! CSPI, Environmental Defense Fund, National Bank of Pakistan, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Population Reference Bureau, the Rendon Group... Luddites, Malthusians, and provocateurs... it's like bipartisan supervillain headquarters!"

*I lean over until my mouth is right over my turned-off cell phone, laying there on the desk...*

Me: "That's where the truck bomb needs to go."

RX: "Great, now you can never buy diesel fuel again."

Fuzzy...

Still can't brain.

Have the dumbs.

Smart people talking at roomie's blog.

Go there.

Happy Whatever Spring Festival You Celebrate!

So we're right around the weekend where Jews are celebrating Passover, neo-Pagans are no doubt engaging in some (carefully re-created/long-held in secret folk custom) affair or other that most likely involves being naked in the woods, Christians are commemorating the day when Christ rose from the grave and walked the Earth in search of human souls, and all of America builds elaborate shines to sugar-crusted marshmallow baby chickens.

Whichever of these applies to you, may it be enjoyable.

(Sorry for the feeble amount of content, my brain's not been working right this weekend. I blame my relatively low-carb diet and sleeping in the last two mornings; I think that by the time I dragged myself out of bed and sat in front of the computer, my blood sugar was through the floor.)

But I don't care about the kind with racquets, either.

Unc asks, apparently in regard to the Masters' kerfuffle:

I’m guessing most women (as in an overwhelming percentage of) don’t care about golf one way or the other.

I don’t personally know anybody, setter or pointer, who gives much of a damn about pasture pool one way or another.

They could spice it up by incorporating some of my ideas:

• Let golfers try to disrupt other golfers' swings by assaulting them with their clubs. Your caddy would be allowed to try to ward them off with your own clubs.


• There should be a par time from tee to hole that requires at least a mild jog to avoid going over. You can attempt to trip other golfers along the way with your club.


• The obstacles as they exist are too lame and easily avoided. I'm thinking a ditch and abatis clear across the fairway, and perhaps some barbed wire around the green. Rattlers would liven up the sand traps.

If this catches on, you should hear my ideas to liven up curling.

QotD: Rite of Spring Edition

All the signs of spring are in the air: Flowers blooming, grass growing, birds singing, Congress bloviating over the need to Do Something About Gas Prices.

The Adaptive Curmudgeon noted that, like Christmas decorations, it seems to start earlier every year lately.

Looks like a dozen years of generally earlier onset of “gasoline psychosis”, albeit with a brief remission in 2011. Only time will tell what will happen in 2013 but if trends continue it’ll be somewhere between early April or mid/early March.

Of course, Congress could learn that gasoline, like everything, is subject to market forces. Ha ha ha…I’m just kidding. Bet on an outbreak of cluelessness in April 2013 and you’ll probably have called it a year in advance.

(Italics and implied facepalming in original.)

...not even a mother could love.

I had no idea that the Indy Red Star had actually penned a "Leave Brittney Lugar alone!" editorial. I wish one of their three remaining subscribers had pointed it out to me when it was still fresh so that I could have fisked it.

I mean, I don't want to come across all Pauline Kael, here, but I've yet to hear anybody, of any political persuasion, have a nice word to say about the man in my presence. How Lugar continues to get reelected is one of the more baffling mysteries of my adopted home state.


(h/t to Shermlock.)

Mother Gaia's gone all Sibyl.

I would like to apologize to all the gardeners of central Indiana for the freeze warnings last night and tonight.

I cannot tell a lie: I put all my fleece pullovers and long-sleeved tee shirts away on Tuesday, figuring that after a week or two of highs in the 70s and 80s that it was safe to do so. Sorry 'bout that. My bad all 'round.

Tab Clearing...

• While I doubt the sky is the same color in Mr. Granderson's world as it is in mine, I have to admit that some of his suggestions in this column made me go "Hmmmm..."


• I do not like malingerers, nor either do I like frauds. Neither does friend Ambulance Driver, as this post will so richly attest. Slip'n'fall thespians like the one in his tale are what made my dealings with insurance companies such a pain when I actually had bones hanging out of my leg. Negotiate settlements for too many "soft tissue injuries" and even multiple compound fractures become suspect, I guess.


• To those of you who hit the tip jar recently, many thanks. It would have been a Ramen-flavored month after my excessive exuberance with the Smith. I'm going to take a group portrait of it with the other domestic pocket pistols today if it gets warm enough. There's an interesting story in there if I can figure the right angle, about how all the US gun companies got into self-loaders and all save Colt got out again by the end of the twenties and America was revolverville for another thirty-plus years.


• Since Jay G didn't turn into a pillar of salt, I'm going to toy with turning off the verdammt word verification as well. If I'm not buried under waves of spambots, it will be good riddance. (ETA: It took less than twenty minutes for the first Cyrillic bot-generated spam to hit the filter...)
  

It's not about the Benjamins.

Humans are not rational animals. Oh, sure, we pay a lot of lip service to logic and reason, but we're suckers for ceremony and symbolism. Ultimately, it's about all about feelings.

Every time gas jumps ten cents, somebody trades in their perfectly functional Accord and goes thirty long into hock on a Prius that, even were gas to double in cost, would not have a prayer of paying for itself in fuel savings before it, too, gets traded in.

People browse the organic breakfast food shelves for the muesli that tastes most like authentic sawmill floor sweepings, because that's how you know it's good for you. It's not food, it's a hair shirt you eat. When you're doing penance for not going jogging this morning or for having that extra martini last night, it's not supposed to taste good.

Likewise, wind turbines are not meant to actually be an efficient way to supply the power grid, rather they're prayer wheels for New Age iBuddhists, their whirring blades drawing white guilt from the atmosphere and pumping it safely underground. This is why they put them out in farm fields in the country and not, say, off Martha's Vinyard or out on the back nine, in view of the clubhouse: What good is a shrine if you don't have to make a pilgrimage to get to it?

QotD: Probulation Edition

Because it's my blog and I can have as many Quotes of the Day as I want:

If they can’t keep a cell phone out of a septuagenarian’s high-security prison cell, they can’t keep anything out of anywhere.

Point this out to your seatmate on your next flight if they're one of those drooling nitwits constantly opening their piehole about being glad for all the security that's supposedly keeping them safe from the guys with the Semtex Underoos.

And as for Charlie's guards? They should just be glad he was more interested in dialing 1-900 numbers then he was in getting his hands on a Kel-Tec.

QotD: You Can't Crowd-Source Smarts Edition

Michael Z. Williamson and Cory Doctorow were on the same discussion panel at a convention. Oddly, they were not instantly annihilated and every atom of their beings converted to pure energy, which caused the scrapping of several current theories at CERN. Anyhow, the discussion turned to "crowd-sourcing", which is awesome for lots of things, but, um...

Doctorow, however, said, and I closely paraphrase, "Maybe we can reach the day when someone says, 'You bring those rivets, and I have some girders, and we can build a skyscraper.'"

Really. A crowd-sourced skyscraper.

I verified that he wasn't talking about funding for said edifice, but actually building it as a crowd-sourced project.

I said I'd even let him have the corner office in the top floor. I don't intend to be within a trigonometric ratio of it, and will add a safe distance for rebounding debris.

He tried to compare the internet and web infrastructure. This fails, in my opinion, because that started as a government, in fact, Defense, project, and has numerous very well-heeled players. I have a website hosted on a friend's bandwidth but neither of us would be able to do so, even with the help of a million geeks, without someone to provide a combination of capital and knowledge. I asked, "And how often does your browser crash?"

He actually said, "My browser doesn’t crash because I use Firefox."

I don't know where to start with this, other than to observe that not only does Cory Doctorow imagine futuristic fantasy castles in the sky, he gets his mail delivered to them.

I'll also note the irony of wookie-suited anarcho-libertarian Mad Mike Williamson being considered the conservative voice on the panel. Maybe they were afraid that if they invited Kratman, he would show up in Hitler drag and start goose-stepping around the stage or something?

Lastly, am I imagining that Mr. Doctorow implied that someone of Mr. Williamson's political views was obviously an Explorer user? I could just be inserting that subtext myself, because, you know, only squares would use IE or vote to invade Iraq.

News from the dark side of the moon...

Any of y'all ever watched Current TV? That's Al Gore's network for people who are fed up with the pervasive right-wing bias of MSNBC, for those of you who weren't aware of its existence.

If you weren't aware of it, don't feel bad, because according to the ratings, neither was anybody else. I mean, it's been on the air since 2005, and I never even noticed it 'til a year ago or so. The star poodle of their prime-time act, the recently-fired Keith Olbermann, had viewership numbers that could easily be equalled if every man, woman, and child in Salem, Oregon watched their local public-access channel to see the Cherry Queen crowned at the State Fair.

More people were listening to late-night entertainer George Noory warning them about reptiloid aliens than were listening to prime-time Authorized Journalist Olbermann warning them about Republican congressmen. That's gotta suck. If he wasn't such a thoroughly unlikeable person, you'd almost feel sorry for him.

Speaking of thoroughly unlikeable douchebags, have you heard about what happened when Keith was actually expected to ride in the same car as one of the 99%? This guy was such a colossal douchebag that the only guy they could find to fill his spot in the lineup was Eliot frickin' Spitzer.

Think about that: If the only person on the planet douchier than you was a politician who had been hounded from office, basically for excessive douchiness, it'd be time to sit in the garage with the car running and the door closed and have a long talk with yourself. Of course, Olbermann probably owns a frickin' Nissan Leaf or something, so he won't be able to do the right thing.

Ah, Spring in Broad Ripple, when a young man's fancy...

...turns to strolling nekkid along the Monon Trail apparently.

Also: Dead guy in the canal!

What gets me is that my first thought on hearing that there was a stiff bobbing around in the canal was "Ew! Citizens' Water runs the canal; there was a corpse in what could be my future drinking water!" That's a pretty silly thing to get all squicked about, because anybody who's looked at that canal knows that, depending on how you feel about waterfowl feces, a dead body is probably among the more appetizing things to be found bobbing in it.

QotD: A Series of Annoying Tubes Edition

Regarding the Arizona legislature's contribution to the inane fad of "cyberbullying" legislation, Ken at Popehat writes:

You've been swept up in the moronic and thoughtless anti-bullying craze and consequently passed a bill that is ridiculous on its face, a bill that criminalizes annoying and offending people on the internet. That's like criminalizing driving on the road.

Man, if insulting people on the internet is against the law, this whole blog is nothing but evidence to be used against me in court. "Annoying and offending people on the internet" is pretty much my raison d'être.

This man obviously has an internet connection.

If somebody else bought a different gun than you, it might mean that you bought the wrong one. But you wouldn't waste your hard-earned cash on the wrong gun, so that obviously means that the other guy bought the wrong one. And is a (stuck-up gun snob/idiot cheapskate), to boot!

In a discussion elsewhere, someone pointed out that it was the same on camera forums and bicycle forums and...

Think about it: Joe Schmoe wants to get a bicycle. He does his research, determines how much he can afford, heads down to the bike shop, chats with the sales clerk, sits on a few bikes... and then invests $800+ dollars of his identity into a chunk of aluminum, steel, and rubber.

So when he gets on the bike forum and someone tells him his Crankrailleur 2000 is garbage and he should have bought a ShockStumper 750, what's he supposed to think?

• He was too dumb to do his research right?


• He's not rich enough to buy a decent enough bike to get into the club?


• He was so gullible that he let the salesman talk him into a bad purchase?


• The other guys on this forum are just stupid snobs who don't know a good bike when they see one and spent too much on their worthless crap?

When people are arguing guns, it's not the guns that they're defending, but their own self-worth as demonstrated through the quality of the decisions that they've made.

(h/t to ToddG)

Tab Clearing...

• Oh. Emm. Gee. I have seen my dream house. Thanks to AngelaG.


• So I'm watching the Dallas tornado footage in slack-jawed amazement at the sight of semi-trailers getting blown around like leaves and then it hits me: "Holy crap, that was shot from a helicopter!" That dude was earning his danger pay. (EDIT: In comments, Zendo Deb points out that it's likely from a tower cam.)(EDIT AGAIN: Nope. It's a crazy pilot, alright.)
  


• I need to get one of those special face colanders for girls.

I have apparently been assimilated.

The other morning, one of the talking heads on the television set referred to 96th Street in Indianapolis as the "Near North Side".

Like a true Broad Riparian, I blurted "'Near North Side'? 96th street is 'way out in the country. Heck, 96th Street is, like, halfway to Fort Wayne!"*

Anything north of 86th Street is "Northern Indiana" and anything south of 38th Street is "Southern Indiana".
________________________________
*96th Street roughly parallels the northern leg of Indianapolis's perimeter highway, I-465, and is the boundary between Indy proper and the first 'burb to the north, Carmel.

Off the shelf...

I finished rereading The Hunger Games trilogy preparatory to maybe catching the flick at a matinee this week sometime. The middle book is a little weak, relative to the other two, but I'd forgotten what a satisfying ending Mockingjay had. Of course, given the setting of the books, I wasn't demanding "and they all lived happily ever after." I was willing to settle for "and they all lived."

Now I'm learning new things, like about the geodetic survey of India in The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named. This was, like, a moon shot undertaking in the early 19th Century, and it has malaria and tigers and monsoons and eccentric Britishers and smashing expensive surveying equipment against the domes of old temples to Shiva. Among things I did not know: It's "Eve-rest", not "Ever-est", and "Jungle" is a loan word from Sanskrit that simply means uncultivated or unimproved land. (But now I'm left wondering what the British called jungles before they took over India and stole all their words.)

Things I Don't Get, #352,719

Via Unc comes a link to this post where some mocking is going on of a list of "Britain's most unconventional degrees".

For some reason, everybody is focusing on "Viking Studies" as the target of their derision. Me, I’m trying to figure out what’s so kooky about a specialized history degree. I mean “history” is a pretty broad major, and most folks do tend to focus on one period or culture. Considering the impact of the Viking era in England, I’d be kinda shocked if they didn’t have some strong programs covering it in their universities.

Betcha you can major in Plains Indian (or bison-following Casino-Owning American, as I believe is currently correct,) cultural studies at Nebraska. Granted, unless you plan to be a history teacher, a history degree of any type is not the most remunerative, but the world needs historians and archaeologists and history teachers just like it needs derivatives traders and assistant marketing managers and the third assistant headlight bezel engineer at Buick.

What concerns me more is that a British paper, specifically the "Torygraph", finds degrees in "Enterprise and Entrepreneurship" and "Estate Agency" (that's "Real Estate Sales" in English) to be as risible as bachelor's programs in "Adventure Media" and "Bon Jovi Studies".

Tab Clearing...

• As municipal budgets shrink, I would not be surprised to see downsized police departments focus on "guarding the flagpole" and more revenue-positive law enforcement (crimes involving fines and/or asset forfeiture.) In that environment, Mall Ninja-ing will be a growth industry.


• Pursuing a nuclear bomb to threaten the world? Check. Armies of female ninjas? Check. Ahmadinejad is only a secret island volcano fortress and a white Persian cat away from being a Bond villain, and since he lives in Persia, the cat shouldn't be a problem.


• "I'll take 'Cool Blog Titles' for $500, Alex."

A request:

Can we retire the term "execution-style" from the lexicon in regard to non-state-sanctioned murder?

When I hear "the murder victims were killed execution-style", it takes me a second to realize that the reporter didn't mean they were strapped to a gurney with an IV in their arm or done up extra crispy in an electric chair, but rather that they were lined up against a wall blindfolded and given a last cigarette. (Actually, I don't think they give them real cigarettes anymore, because those things cause cancer...)

For it to be "execution-style", there should at least be an attempt to make a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham of justice, like a signed confession or a kangaroo court, otherwise it's just plain ol' murder.

Watch a pro at work:

Watch Corrine start out at Trayvon Martin, segue smoothly through being caught out in a bald-faced lie on camera, and wind up blaming dead kids on Bush's tax cuts for the rich. Unbelievable.

Part of being a party politician is being able to reflexively tie any random question to partisan politics faster than your eyes can focus.

Tab Clearing...

• Apparently, if you're under the age of 25 and an SF film buff with absolutely no knowledge of history, the modern world as we know it sprang fully formed from the forehead of Luc Besson in 1997.


• Coolest. Science Fair Project. Ever.


• ...and on that day, he will be named the Lord of the Four Winds and Master of the Elements, and will be given the remote control panel for his father's giant robot armies. North Korea may need to import absolutely everything else, but their reserves of hyperboleum appear to be well-nigh infinite.

Overheard in the Hallway:

Bobbi is doing her usual free-association monologue from the shower. I am walking past the bathroom door on the way to a coffee refill.

RX: (Tells joke.)

Me: "..."

RX: "I guess it wasn't funny."

Me: "I'm laughing on the inside."

RX: "No you're not. I just wanted to see how it played out loud."

Me: "You should put it on the internet anyway. Just because I didn't think it was funny doesn't mean nobody else will."

RX: "You didn't think it was funny. I didn't think it was funny, either..." *pause* "I don't get it; government-approved torture is usually good for a laugh."

Clutch the pearls!

I'd like to think that somewhere in Pittsfield, New Hamster, an iPad screen was just covered in a fine mist of whole wheat bagel, organic soy cream cheese, and half-caff latte.
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All Trayvon, All The Time

Over at P-F.com, a 30-year LE firearms instructor made a good post, but I couldn't help but notice that even he had internalized the whole "the dispatcher TOLD Zimmerman not to follow" meme, which is dismaying.

The dispatcher never "told him to back off and let the cops handle it"; that is entirely a construct of the media, based on the brief snippet of the 911 tape where the dispatcher asked Zimmerman if he was following Martin. When Zimmerman answered in the affirmative, the dispatcher said "we don't need you to do that."

That's a pretty ambiguous line. I've used it in situations ranging from "I'd really rather you didn't do that" to "I wish you would do that, but I don't want to be so forward as to straight-up ask you to." From that thin thread, the media has spun the legend of the dispatcher "ordering" Zimmerman not to follow, and Zimmerman "disobeying", and the legend has obviously stuck.

That legend was repeated by the pastor in Indianapolis who marched his congregation into the middle of the street for thirty minutes yesterday, blocking Naptown traffic in an attempt to get justice for Trayvon. I'm not sure who he thought might be driving around Indy on Palm Sunday with some pull in the Florida State Attorney's office, or how blocking their drive might get them to see things his way, but then a lot of things people do leave me baffled.

One of those baffling things is how any incident where the shootee is of a darker hue than the shooter is going to be cast in a Trayvon light now, such as the recent incident in Pasadena, which is just like the Trayvon Martin case, except for the fact that the dead guy was the suspect in an armed robbery call from a victim who had just falsely claimed that the guys who boosted his stuff had guns in hopes of a speedier response from the po-po.

At this rate, anybody shooting anybody will be painted as another Martin/Zimmerman incident, no matter the level of guilt or innocence of either party, as long as the pigmentation differential slope between the participants runs in the right direction.

Like dookie.

Is how I've felt all day.

I've made a half-dozen runs at the keyboard and gave them all up as a bad thing. Maybe better luck in the AM. :(

Sunday morning stuff...

The dream about escaping from the subterranean Nazi prison camp in the Himalayas with Iman's character from Star Trek VI as a guide was really cool up until the part where the tunnel came to an end at an opening over a precipitous drop that would make Jeb Corliss gulp in discomfort, straight down a cliff face to a rocky river partially hidden by clouds. Apparently we were expected to knot a rope from discarded sandwich baggies, secure it to a rusty bolt in the passage floor, and then lower ourselves about twelve feet to another cave mouth below, which opened onto a finished, florescent-lit tunnel with a tiled floor like on the cover of the Moby album, Destroyed.

Oh, and the sound of approaching guards in the distance meant that an OSHA-approved prison-escape climbing rope was not going to be cobbled together out of materials at hand. I was seriously debating which was worse: Getting caught by the Nazis or lowering myself over the void for twelve feet...

Lying in bed this morning, half-awake, I was suddenly gripped with a nagging concern over how to denote the title of a blog in writing? What does the style guide say? I haven't checked yet, but are we supposed to italicize them, like an album or periodical (Instapundit, National Review,) or do we put them in quotes, like a song or essay ("The Daily Kos", "The Uplifters Try It Again")?

The dream, incidentally, was no doubt triggered by the sighting of a 50 Reichspfennig Lagergeld bill from the Orianenburg concentration camp while at the antique mall. I have no idea how Iman or the Himalayas got in there.

Also while at the mall, I picked up a 500,000 Reichsmark note from 1923, when Germany tried to print their way out of their war debt. It was printed in May of '23 and was still a pretty big bill when it came off the press, but by July of the same year, just two months later, you could use it to make small change if someone gave you a 50,000,000 Reichsmark bill for their bar tab. I figured it was time to get into practice handling bills with lots of zeros, because this stuff tends to come on fast. He that hath ears, let him hear.

These are the thoughts that float through my pre-dawn mind.

Overheard in the Parking Lot at the Columbus Hamfest:

Me: "Make sure when we stop at the Antiques Mall on the way back that you lock the car, or someone will put more old radio crap in the back seat while we're in there."

Minitru.

Brian J. Noggle offers a rumination on The Official Narrative.

Orwellian, indeed.
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Overheard in the Office:

RX: "I have an idea for curbing the production of paper money: Every bill must be printed with ink containing a certain legally-prescribed percentage of the President's blood."

Me: "Or some equally-appropriate official... That's brilliant!"

RX: "'I don't think we can print more; it's bleeding me dry!'"

Me: "'Beltway insiders warn of another impending bout of inflation, citing Timothy Geithner's drawn and pale appearance at a recent press conference.'"

This legislation would have bonus side-effects, too, by requiring every dollar to actually exist as a paper entity someplace:

1) Another TARP couldn't happen even if you put the president, his cabinet, Congress, and the entire federal bureaucracy above GS-11 on blood expanders because there aren't that many trees or printing presses.

2) Tying the value of the dollar to something as worthless and ephemeral as wood pulp would make it harder money than anything we've seen in this country in the last forty years.

Quick! To the Wikipedia!

So I killed two birds with one stone the other day.

The chimenea on the back patio had suffered enough freeze/thaw cycles that the spalling on the bottom had gone all the way through.

At the same time, there was a persistent bit of bare dirt in the southeast corner of the privacy fence that is obviously not getting enough sunlight for grass.

A plan is hatched!

I schlepped the chimenea over and plopped it on the ground, nestled in the corner. I will now fill it with potting soil and try to encourage something to grow out of it.

I need to find a subspecies of Hygrangeum* that is shade-tolerant and likes to spread all vine-like along the ground, but won't try and climb the fence and vault into the neighbor's yard like the mutated tendrils from a bad Fifties SF flick in an attempt to strangle their little yappy dog. (Although if it could do that all subtle-like and then vault back into our yard without leaving evidence, I'd take that as a plus.)
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*If you don't mow it, can't eat it, and can't stand in its shade, it's a Hygrangeum.

Wow, what a difference twenty-odd years makes.

Wandering the back corridors of YouTube, I ran across this fan video tribute to the Colonial Marines.

It's been years since I've watched Aliens, probably at least since '03 or '04, and I don't remember the gun handling and tactics stuff being that bad. I mean, yeah, I remember that there was a lot of shooting from the hip, but seriously, seeing the footage again last night of the marines unassing the APC and moving up to the doorway of the complex had me laughing out loud with all the skipping and pirouetting up to the abandoned complex, muzzles pointing every which way, and then just standing in the middle of the doorway when it opened, (the area known as the "fatal funnel") pointing their weapons menacingly from the hip like a Tropic Thunder movie poster.

In the intervening years, it's become the norm for movies to retain consultants to try and add verisimilitude, to the point that the only place you see the old traditions of Hollywood gun-handling are in comedies deliberately parodying the skipping-and-pirouetting-and-standing-in-the-open-spraying-from-the-hip traditions of Hollywood Tactical Movement, and seeing it in Aliens felt awkward for me. The movie has such a place in my memory that suddenly seeing the string holding up the rocket or the zipper on the back of the Godzilla suit was both funny and kinda sad at the the same time.

In fact, I'd wager that, given the way Hollywood influences the evolution of pop culture, Hollywood Tactical Movement may soon be gone from our cultural DNA. Hand some random 21-year-old waiting-tables-until-his-big-break actor an airsoft M16 and tell him "Act like some special operations dude going down a hallway and through a door," and he'll do it differently if he's grown up watching Black Hawk Down and 24 than if he'd grown up watching Rambo and The A-Team.

Iron sights like it's 1985 up in this place or something.

EDIT 2022: In 2017 I revisited the M41 pulse rifle in a piece for Breach, Bang, Clear.

.

...and now it's time for the main event.

2.5 hours in the dentist's chair today, and that wraps everything up except for the main event: The whole root canal/crown thing. I am told that, now that I have reached the zenlike state of being able to fall asleep while they're drilling my teeth, the root canals should be a breeze. We'll see.

Now for an aspirin and some saganaki & a gyro salad; my special treat for being good and not squirming around too much in the chair.

Overheard in the Office:

Me: "Wait, what? Roseanne Barr tweeted the address of Zimmerman's parents? That's... that's just..."

RX: "No, Spike Lee tweeted..."

Me: "Spike Lee tweeted what he thought was Zimmerman's address. Roseanne tweeted Zimmerman's parents' address."

RX: "You stay classy, Roseanne."

Me: "Y'know, fine. F%$# it. Let's just have that civil war they obviously want so bad. Let's just go 'head and have it right now and get it over with. They don't..."

RX: "You just want a chance to beat Roseanne in the head with a rifle butt."

Me: "No, I..."

RX: "What you don't understand it that the line to do that would be so long that by the time you got there, there'd just be a red smear on the pavement."

Off the shelf...

Just wrapped up The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 yesterday. The subject matter is off the beaten path, in that there have been a blue million books written on the final military battles in Europe, and ten times that number done about zomg teh last days of Hitler!!1!, but this book focuses on the people and the bureaucracy behind the lines, and how and why the country had to be ground into paste rather than surrendering before it was utterly destroyed. This is, after all, the same country that threw in the towel while it was still on French territory in the previous war, in hopes of averting exactly what happened in 1945.

If you're in an eschatalogical mood, there'll even be the occasional resonant scene, such as the German Finance Minister, dutifully rearranging deck chairs up 'til the end, being criticized by Goebbels, Reichsminister of Crazy, in March of '45 for relying too heavily on regressive consumer taxes instead of progressive income taxes; trying to balance the budget on the backs of the 99%, as it were. (No word on how tax return forms were to get from Allied occupied zones and through Zhukov's lines to Berlin...)

Raking digital leaves...

Remember all the mess I talked about cleaning up in the front yard yesterday?

Well, I'm trying to do that in my email inbox this morning. It's like the Augean stables in there.
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That was weird.

I don't remember eating anything unusual last night that would have caused me to dream about my former roommate filming a cooking show in the middle of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I mean, there was a studio set with lights and cameras and a complete kitchen and everything just out in the open in the middle of this rubble field that stretched like a chopped-pecan-covered pancake to the horizon in all directions. The show was on doing good, tasty meals with attractive presentation using the food from rusty salvaged canned goods.

My subconscious, as it so often does in dreams, neglected to add important technical details like "Where are they getting the electricity for the lights and cameras?" and "Do rats and cockroaches know how to work a TV set? Who's the intended audience here?"

AR Bleg.

I need an AR upper. I know I want a 16" flat-top with a midlength handguard and a fixed front sight, and I want something that's not going to puke if I stuff a case of ammo through it in one weekend. But other than that, I don't have many hard-and-fast specs in mind.

I'd love me a DD or BCM, but I'm torn between that and screwing one together using good parts on my own. Thoughts? Suggestions? Sources for good deals?

Also, I'm debating a .300BLK or 6.8SPC carbine barrel assembly (or barrel & BCG in the case of the latter) for my MGA switch-barrel upper, but that could be another thread.


(In accordance with all requests for firearms input on the intertubes, somebody please remember to say "Get a Glock" within the first eight posts.)

That feels good.

After running errands and getting a bite of lunch this morning, I decided to make myself productive. During the winter doldrums, I fell into a bad habit of not doing diddlysquat in the afternoons, which made me more depressed, which made me less productive, which... lather, rinse, repeat.

It felt good to drag the rake and leaf-vac into the front yard this afternoon and dredge all the winter leaves out of the raised beds along the front of the house and gather up all the twigs and pine cones from the last windstorms. It was in the mid-70s and sunny; perfect outdoor weather. I worked up a sweat dragging brooms and bags and extension cords and other lawn impedimentia around, and I feel like I did something productive. I ought to mark out a regular block of time to mess in the yard every day.

The First Rule of Heathers Club is...

So, a pack of preteen girls in Rhode Island buddied up to a classmate to get her to attend a party, and while she was there, they lulled her into a false sense of security and then launched a gang beatdown on her.

But, wait! It gets better!

The neighbor guy didn't call the cops because he was too busy using his cell phone to video the whole sordid event. He claims that he thought the girls were just staging it, since some of them were apparently filming it, too.

Here's the dilemma: What do you do in his shoes?

With a cry of "Remember Kitty Genovese!", you vault the privacy fence and yell at them to stop. Suppose they don't? Suppose they ignore that carefully practiced command voice of yours? Do you start grabbing 'em and flinging 'em off the victim?

Suppose, their blood up from a few minutes of putting the boot in on a Group Monkey Dance, one or two of 'em even come at you?

Phhhttth! Who's afraid of a couple of twelve-year-olds? You'd just...

Just what, Batman? Deck 'em? Use your Krav Maga on a couple-three teenyboppers? Wait, no, you'd pepper spray them!

The very act of me typing these words is causing a third-year journalism major to toss in his sleep with a smile on his face and a strange tingly feeling in his naughty place over the very thought of being able to slap a headline like "38 y.o. Gun Nut Pepper Sprays Preteen Birthday Party" over his byline.

Hey, you weren't by any chance open carrying when you went over the fence, were you?

Maybe in perfect Wookietopia or back on Walton Mountain we wouldn't have to worry about this kind of stuff, but here in 21st Century America, I don't know. What do you do in a situation like this? (I mean, beyond hoping you never find yourself facing a wilding pack of preteens singing "Happy Birthday to you! Kobayashi Maru!")

I do know that they take money out of your paycheck for 911 services, and dialing that number will cause a guy dripping with qualified immunity to show up and pepper spray the preteen birthday party, so us bloggers can rake him over the coals for it.

Wild Thing

Word.

Tab Clearing...

• Six Seconds.


• The top t-shirt here explains why Clint may be immortal.


• Who to blame for the miss: The shooter or the gun?


• Serious Gun Blog has moved to a new intertubes address: You can find it at seriousgun.com.


• Course review of 2-Day Practical Carbine with F2S.
  

Overheard in the Office:

So I can hear the TeeWee in the other room and there's a couple of talking heads discussing the whole "zomg some employers are asking for Facebook passwords as part of the interview process!" thing, which is the current backup distraction from the economy in the unlikely occasion of the zeitgeist suddenly going amnesiac on the Zimmerman/Martin thing.

The woman being interviewed said "What's next? Your medical records?"

I blew up.

"Dammit, your employer can make you take a physical. They can run a credit check. They can make you urinate in a Dixie cup. They can make you wear orange spandex short shorts and a crop top, and you're worried that they might see those pictures of you naked at that pool party with a lampshade on your head and shotgunning Ernest & Julio's best straight from the spigot on the box?

Honey, thirty seconds after you put those pictures on the internet, some teenager in Latvia was wanking to them and /b/tards were using them to make lolcats. The privacy horse is out of the barn, down the road, over the horizon, and the Visigoths have burned the barn, and NOW you're worried about it? Just for that, you ought to get a groping AND a porn-o-scan the next time you're at the airport!"

How does she even remember which end of the spoon goes in her mouth?

Of course the solution with this, like everything from the guy in the next car texting to the airlines charging you for an extra suitcase is to run to daddy government and tug on his sleeve 'til he passes another law. And people wonder why I'm a misanthrope...

Nobody's skin sparkles, either.

I have not seen the movie The Hunger Games yet. I will probably be waiting for a matinee.

That said, I have read the books, and found them quite enjoyable, despite their labeling as "young adult" fiction.

Further, I'd rather have today's teens reading about the dangers of oppressive governments and needing arms to revolt against them than daydreaming about being date-raped by the undead.

Obama rocks the mic like a vandal...

"This is my last election," Obama told Medvedev. "After my election I have more flexibility."

While Obama put his hand on Medvedev's arm, the Russian president responded saying he would transmit the information to the incoming president, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Oh, Barry, we all know it's true. First-term presidents worry more about getting re-elected, and lame ducks are more free to show their true colors, but we don't like to have our noses rubbed in it. You're not supposed to remind everybody.

If you were going to have an open-mic gaffe, you should have been caught telling Medvedev that you'd just signed legislation outlawing Russia and the bombing would commence in five minutes. Not only is that one a proven vote getter, but the look on his face would have been a highlight of future documentaries looking back on your administration.

Fetch me my time travel trousers.

Over at P-F.com, one poster indicated that he was looking for a carbine for his wife, preferably a Colt 6920 (basically a semiautomatic M4 carbine.) Another poster replied:

Have her take a look at Wal-mart if you can’t fine one anywhere else. I saw a 6920 today for just under $1100.

Imagine, if you will, using a magic browser plug-in that would let you copy and paste that whole thread on TheFiringLine.com or GlockTalk.com back in, say, 2003. Or even better, 1999. Back in those days:

1. Wal-Mart was definitely not in the business of selling scary-looking rifles.
2. Colt only sold the 6920 model through law enforcement distributors.
3. The rifle was unsalable anyway, since it was slathered with a full menu of Evil Features prohibited by the so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" of '94.

If you told the folks on an internet gun board back in '99 that in the year 2012, you could walk into Wally World and buy an honest-to-Stoner Colt®-brand "pre-ban"* M4gery, they would look at you like you were John Titor, only less plausible.

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*Now there's a word I haven't used in a while. Ask your parents, kids.

Overheard in the Hallway:

Roomie is getting ready for work. I notice she is wearing a shirt with what, to my uneducated eye, looks like the result of the unholy coupling of a pinout and a circuit diagram. I am informed it is a tube base diagram. And then some.

RX: "*Lots of electronical terms and assorted wharrrgarbl.*"

Me: "And the cathode is called the cathode because it was discovered growing on bushes in the land of Cathay!"

RX: "No."

How the electrons flow through the teeny copper pipes is a topic on which I am a Subject Matter Moron. I mean, I understand it in the sense that I know that there aren't actually tiny people in my televisions and that closing the switch in the wall does not summon the magic Light Demons, but rather causes electric current to flow through the bulb filament, heating it up and making it glow, but much past that and I'm on pretty unsteady ground.

File Under: "What media bias?"

Do not get me wrong: I think SSG Robert Bales should be given a fair and speedy court martial and, if found guilty, should be Danny Deevered promptly, pour encourager les autres.

That being said, I have to wonder how many of the pack of talking heads howling for justice in the Bales case are the same ones who tut-tutted at me about the paper-cut PTSD that should be considered a mitigating factor in the case of poor MAJ Hasan, who buckled under the horrific stress of four months of stateside desk-jockeying and Allahu Akhbared a platoon's worth of his fellow soldiers.

I don't care how many "Support Our Troops" mouth noises they make; it's pretty clear who these blowdried Manhattanites think are the bad guys.

ETA: Apparently I am not the only one engaged in a bit of head-scratching over this oddity.

Where are they getting these crystal balls?

The television coverage of the Zimmerman case, of which I've caught a few soundbites too many, is infuriating. An honest assessment would say that this is what we know:

1. Zimmerman was out doing his neighborhood watch thing and saw Martin.
2. He called 911 and followed Martin in his vehicle.
3. When Martin walked someplace that Zimmerman couldn't follow in his vehicle, he got out of his vehicle and followed on foot.
4. ???
5. In the process of getting his ass beaten, Zimmerman busts a cap in Martin.

The entire case turns on what happened in the ???, but don't tell that to the media, the folks playing poker with a deck full of race cards, the victim disarmament crowd, or apparently the frickin' President of the United States of America.

Did Zimmerman follow Martin because he was "walking while black"? Doesn't matter. Was Zimmerman being a Mall Ninja by patrolling the neighborhood and following Martin? Doesn't matter. Zimmerman had as much right to follow Martin as Martin had to walk through any public thoroughfare.

All that matters is what happened during the mysterious "???" of Step 4. And that's the whole of the case right there: Did Martin turn around and launch the ass-beating on Zimmerman out of the blue? Or did Zimmerman grab Martin in an attempt to detain him and get his ass beaten for doing so, because Martin had no duty to retreat, either? Half everybody seems to think they know the answer, but they're all talking about other things.

I wish the media would find another ball to chase soon. I have never hoped for some random celebrity to choke on their last cookie so hard in my life. Elton John would probably do. He'd wipe the whole Zimmerman/Martin thing right off the front page, and he's kinda past his Sell-By date, anyway. I mean, all he's done in the last twenty years is release more re-recordings of songs about dead blondes, right? Come on, Elton, how about leaning in over the plate and taking one for the team?

Overheard in Brigid's Truck:

Brigid dropped by and she and Bobbi and I went out for lunch and shopping and suchlike...

RX: "...and there under that dome is where they rule the world!"

B: "What's that place called? 'Café du...'"

RX: "The signage looks like they want to be Starbucks."

B: "'Café du... du M-something'. I can't quite make it out."

Me: "Café du Merde?"

Measure twice, cut once.

There's always that one person who gets a toter's permit and seems a little, well, Barney Fife about it. Now they're a sheepdog! They run scenarios past you:

"What if you're in a convenience store, and you see a guy in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets, looking around at the security cameras?"

"I leave."

"But what if he's, like, between you and the door? And you can see the butt of the gun in his hand?"

"I try and keep as many aisles of shelves between me and him as possible and be a good witness."

"But suppose he's threatening the clerk?"

"Well, I..."

"...and the shelves are set up so there's no cover between you and him, and the clerk is pregnant?"

For many, if not most, people, this is a process of trying to understand what they may and may not do with the pistol they are licensed to carry. With a small minority, however, it does kinda come across as asking "Can I shoot him now? How 'bout now? Now?" as though the CCW permit were a kind of Junior G-Man badge or something.

One of the staff members at Pistol-Forum.com, who goes by the nom de screen "TCinVA", wrote an extremely thoughtful post that summed up a lot of my feelings on the matter so well that, with his permission, I'm just going to reproduce it here:

Mr. Zimmerman's predicament here brings up some pretty important lessons for those inclined to learn from the circumstances of others.

Let's stipulate for the sake of illustration that Mr. Zimmerman's actions were 100% justifiable, and that at the moment he pulled the trigger he was in reasonable fear for his life.

Was it worth it?

Look at what he's facing now. He's been branded a murderer. Worse, he's been branded a racist murderer. Where a rap artist or NBA star who kills somebody will be forgiven in the public consciousness as long as their new album is critically acclaimed or their stats are good, Mr. Zimmerman's life from now on will come to be defined by this moment when he killed what a huge chunk of the population will only ever believe was an innocent young black boy who was doing nothing wrong. Mr. Zimmerman is looking down the pointy end of criminal and civil liability out the wazoo. His physical and financial freedom are both now at stake. There's enormous pressure in some communities to basically lynch the man because some communities won't care about the facts, only that the outcome wasn't desirable in their view. Hell, even among self defense enthusiasts this guy's getting raked over the coals. (Perhaps deservedly...we don't know all the facts yet) If a guy who claims he acts in self defense isn't getting a whole lot of sympathy from people who are all about self defense, what hope does he have with a jury?

All of this...for what?

This is the bit about self defense that lots of people on the internet don't get. In all their "be a man!" and "sheepdog!" chest thumping, they never seem to get around to the question of what it's like to live with the aftermath of using lethal force. It's not pretty. It's expensive. It's time consuming. It is life-changing...and not in the Oprah self help guru sort of way. It introduces unbelievable levels of stress into the mix that you can hardly appreciate if you haven't been at the center of it before. It can ruin marriages. It can break apart families. It can scatter friends to the four winds.

I know some people who have had to use lethal force to defend themselves and have had to face long drawn out investigations and litigation over the incidents. It put unbelievable stress on their lives. I asked one police officer how he managed to hold it together after having gone through a post-shooting horror story that makes the blood run cold. His answer?

"Because I know with absolute certainty that I did the right thing."

If you deal with something you had to deal with because it was thrust upon you, leaving you with no choice in the matter...well...it's probably a lot easier to live with the aftermath if it goes to Zimmerman levels. So we would do well to ask ourselves if whatever it is we are about to do is worth living a Zimmerman.

I'd gladly risk a Zimmerman situation if it meant saving the life of a friend or a loved one. Over petty theft, though? Not so much.

Yeah. What he said.

I'll ask the questions around here.

I'm sitting here, minding my own beeswax, despite how dangerous an activity that is in the city, when my cellie out on the dining room table starts ringing, so I ran to get it:

Phone: *ring, ring*

Me: "Hello?"

Caller: "..."

Me: "Hello?"

Caller: "Who is this?"

This is who is answering the phone, is who this is. Perhaps if you told me who you thought this would be, I could help you out.

Why is it so difficult to find a person with better manners than your average barnyard animal these days? Not only are these yayhoos apparently unable to practice or even spell "etiquette", they couldn't even tell you what it was.

On a more upbeat note, it seems to have stopped raining for the nonce and the friendly kid manning the RoboCheckout at the local grocery store commented on my INGO hat, saying "Wow, I've never met another INGO member in here before!" so that was kinda cool.

I've got good news and bad news...

Good News: Tactical Firearms Training, LLC has gotten things squared away with the city and contracted to run the public pistol range at Eagle Creek Park in 2012 and beyond. They'll be opening for the season this weekend. Hooray!

Bad News: It's supposed to be raining this weekend.

Good News: There's a covered firing line. And less chance of a wait, since Cletus doesn't like to get wet, plus he'll probably be sleeping off his hangover from tonight's IU/Kentucky squeaky round ball game and the gunfire would only amplify the soundtrack to Zulu Dawn that will no doubt be throbbing behind his temples. So come on out, unless you're made of salt or sugar or some other water-soluble substance.

Childhood dreams come true.

For a while when I was a teen, I thought I would be a coroner, albeit a slacker coroner, and not do autopsies. Instead, I'd just announce that every stiff that metaphorically crossed my desk was caused by "lack of oxygen to the brain" since, you know, that's pretty much what causes dead people.

It appears that the LA County coroner and I are on the same page, here, with his announcement in Whitney Houston's death...

Whitney Houston died from an accidental drowning in a hotel bathtub, but the "effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use" were contributing factors in her death

This could be fun! Here, let me try that:

Rummy McSotted died from the catastrophic impact of his head against the tree trunk. "effects of a .29% BAC and the empty Jack Daniels bottle wedged behind the brake pedal" were listed as contributing factors.

Okay, now it's y'all's turn! Go wild!

Dog bites man.

So about that shooting that happened down on the canal in Hoosieropolis last weekend... You remember, the one where a group of teens were hanging out downtown, just minding their own business* and no doubt on the way to or from choir practice, when all of a sudden and for no reason at all, another teen hops out of a car and guns five of 'em down with a .40, and startles the rest so badly that they nearly dropped their hymnals?

Well, an arrest has been made and... wait, you're probably going to want to sit down for this surprising plot twist... the youth in custody was "involved in gang activity" and the shooting was gang- and revenge-related.

Well, this is my shocked face.

ProTip: You could cut the chances of you getting a cap busted in your ass dramatically by the simple expedient of Not Being Involved In Gang-Related Activity In The Inner City Between The Hours Of 10PM And 4AM. Or hanging around people who are, because those folks are frickin' bullet-magnets. Seriously, standing next to Ice Dog or Ray-Ray after dark on a weekend is like running under the only tree on the back nine during a lightning storm and holding your seven iron over your head for good measure.

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*As any cop or EMT can tell you, "standing around, just minding your own business" after dark is statistically the single most dangerous thing you can do and almost a guarantee that you will require their services before the night's out.

Thank you, Marc Randazza.

Remember the big Righthaven, LLC stink? The copyright trolls whose business model for making millions was to squeeze it out of bloggers, one dinky settlement at a time?

Turns out Marc Randazza, a guy I'd only known on the internets as a First Amendment fanatic with a wicked funny sense of humor, was a big player in the courtroom stompings that have left Righthaven without a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of.

I did not know that, nor did I realize how thoroughly Righthaven was being ground into paste. Thank you, Mr. Randazza.

(H/T to Popehat.)

Instant Karma! (We All Flame On)

All those times I've seen people expressing their little emotional hissy fits through sudden outbursts of crappy driving, and I've never seen anything like this.

It's nice to know it happened someplace, though. I'd like to think she learned a lesson from it, but I doubt it. Someone that self-absorbed is probably infuriated at the gas station for putting the pump in her way.

More Gun Content:

This video sets me off down two trains of thought.

First, that's one of the unintended consequences of modular, easy to detail-strip pistols supported by a huge and burgeoning aftermarket: The democratization of f***-ups.

It used to be that you needed a file, an Arkansas stone, maybe a Dremel, and a fair amount of mechanical ineptitude to mess up your heater. Now any yob with a punch, a YouTube video, and enough manual dexterity to tie his own shoes can shoot himself in the grape with a runaway gun. You can buy drop-in mistakes; no gunsmith fitting required!

Second, how come so many gun schools feel like I'm watching remakes of Top Gun, but with Glocks instead of Tomcats? Call signs? Seriously? "Hollywood, this is Maverick. We are low on Gatorade and target pasters. I say again, we are low on Gatorade and target pasters. Over." And all the jargon, oy veh!

No longer is it good enough to run the slide on your pistol; these guys want you to powerstroke your weapons system. (Which sounds like something you'd do while watching the DVDs I mentioned in the previous post, but that's neither here nor there.)

I'm a forty-something freelance writer/internet dork. I am paying you to learn how to shoot, not to soak up some of that "jumping-out-of-a-helicopter-with-a-knife-in-my-teeth" ambiance. The whole GI Joe schtick just feels a little silly at my age.

The sad part is that word through the grapevine is that these guys are actually good instructors. I guess they're just aiming for a different target demographic. Maybe 23-year-old Call of Duty players eat that "fantasy basic training" stuff up, I don't know.

Scattered morning thoughts...

Glucosamine pills, which are apparently largely composed of smooshed-up shrimp shells, will make your morning Spicy Hot V-8 taste like Spicy Hot Clamato Juice, no matter how fast you swallow them.

Hey, I just heard the TV talking head in the next room say that the French guy who shot up the Jewish school and just got sent to collect his 72 raisins was named Mohammed Something-or-Other, and not, as initial media reports surmised, Guillaume Smith. This is my shocked face. Call off the search for the middle-aged white guy in the white van. I would remind the Muslims in France that in all of Europe, only the Germans have a quicker Zero-to-Jackboots time than the Frogs. You don't want to get those people feeling all riled up and pogrommy.

The local news this morning was saying something about how people had been really generous with sending the folks in the tornado zones stuff, but there were certain items they still really needed. In my dazed, half asleep state, I had a picture of some guy in Carhartts pleading into the camera, saying "My DSL's out and my power line's been down two weeks. Folks, I really appreciate the thought behind these DVDs, but can you just send some magazines?"

Tab Clearing...

• Joe Biden, the walking punchline generator. Seriously, we haven't had a Veep this good for the joke-writing business since the Bush Sr. administration, and yet most big-name comedians seem content to leave this vein of comedy gold unmined. Wonder why that is?


• Ohio has been putting up oral history from survivors of the Great Depression. Given current events, it might be worth taking notes. (H/T to Commander Zero.)


• Via Sitemeter, somebody apparently came here from a sigline link in an eleven-year-old caliber war, back when I had a favorite caliber and righteously defended its honor in vigorous arguments on the internet. Man, I was such a dork.


• "I go in tonight to see how I did on my Homeland Security test in grad school. I'm not enthusiastic. Then again, I'm not really enthusiastic about the state of our nation's homeland security, either." -MattG

The Book of Numbers

Mike W. has a post up on the decline of QC at SIG and immediately in comments, Bob S. steps up and (rightly) offers the data point that his SIGPro has been 100% since he bought it.

This is my bugbear, my bête noire, my personal cross to bear on the internets. It's how I got my reputation as a mean-hearted gun snob:

Reader 1: "Hey, what do you think of the Blastomatic, Tam?"

Me: "I wouldn't buy one. They're wretched pulsating balls of suck and fail."

Reader 2: "You're just a (gun snob/Brand Z fangirl)! I've owned two Blastomatics and both have been flawless!"

There could be two reasons for the difference between Reader 2's experiences and mine. The first one is a simple matter of statistics. Say that, in my long, bitter years of exile behind the gun store counters, I sold 500 Blastomatics.

Say that one in four of them had some issue or another: The customer field-stripped the pistol when he got home and found it was all rusty inside. It wouldn't light primers reliably in double-action. The framinator wouldn't wollygaggle right and so the gun didn't run worth a damn until we had the gunsmith look at it. The Super Blasto X model had a reputation for not feeding anything other than round-nosed FMJ that had been carefully lubricated with Vaseline. The rifling looked like it had been chewed by angry beavers and the gun patterned like a cylinder bore at fifteen yards.

This means that Reader 2 has had two happy ownership experiences, which the odds state should be the case. If one in four is defective and bad, you have a three in four chance of getting a gun that at least functions properly and isn't messed up out of the box. Meanwhile, every time I hear "Blastomatic", all I remember is 125 pissed-off customers and the defective crappy guns I couldn't prevent them from buying because I was just a lowly clerk and couldn't keep the boss from stocking that garbage.

The other option is that Reader 2 is the typical American gun owner who gets to the range every three or six months, pops off a box or two of ammo from five yards into a ragged, two-foot pattern stringing low and left from the center of a B-27 target, and goes home. His Blastomatic Match Master might have been engineered to crumble into dust after 500 rounds, but he'll never find out, because by the time he's owned it for a year, it's been superseded in his affections by his new Blastomatic Match Master Plus in the likewise new .401Blasto caliber. (His dealer threw in a Blastomatic hat with that purchase.)

Anyhow, odds are that if you buy a current production SIG, you will have a happy and satisfying ownership exeperience. But once upon a time, it was nearly guaranteed, since before they left the factory, they test fired them to make sure they, you know, worked. But that costs money. You can't charge extra for test-firing a gun, but you can for a rainbow titanium finish.

Off the shelf...

Just finished reading Absinthe & Flamethrowers because, duh, Absinthe & Flamethrowers! Also finished The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America, because I may find myself in New England again before too long, and this is the bomb-diggity-shizznit of books I've read on the topic thus far. It's easy, readable, and runs from Kennewick man through Greenlanders killing skraelings and all the way up through the aftermath of the Seven Years' War that led more or less directly to the Revolution. Recommend.

Now I'm re-reading The Gift of Fear. And then I'm going to bed.

QotD: I Laughed, Then I Cried Edition

Graumagus in comments at Sebastian's:

I’d vote for the guy who runs my local Pizza Hut franchise over Obama: at least that person can form a budget.

Gun-related content...

At the Fun Show this past weekend I found myself wishing that I had bought a Russkie M38 carbine back when they were practically giving them away. I think the wholesale price was thirty or forty bucks there, back in the late Nineties/early Aughties; some wholesalers had to be actively discouraged from throwing a couple in the box with every order.

Instead I picked up a Hungarian-made M44 with the fruity folding bayonet, which turns an otherwise light and handy carbine into something with all the grace and balance of a 3-foot length of 4x4 lumber. And now the M38s are bringing around two bills.

As an aside, Joel over at TUATK had an interesting post on the term "the gun culture", contrasting it with the lack of a corresponding term for owners and users of other tools or possessions, such as an "axe culture" or a "milk crate culture". It's a reasonable objection, I suppose.

When I rode a motorcycle for my daily transportation, the bike was a vehicle. It got me to and from work, fetched the groceries, and was an ordinary, everyday part of my life. It also meant I had something in common with other motorcycle owners and, more specifically, the very distinctive subculture of motorcycle commuters. We had a lot of shared experiences: Having to to dress in such a way as to arrive looking presentable at work no matter the weather, and hauling groceries on two wheels (A gallon of milk is no big deal in a Civic; it's a very big deal bungee-netted on the pillion of a 600cc sportbike.)

I read motorcycle magazines and hung out with other motorcycle riders and yes, there was a motorcycle culture, and I didn't feel that it made me a worse person for being part of it. Conversely, I knew other people who owned motorcycles who only used them for transportation and never went riding for pleasure or hung out with other riders, and that was cool, too.

What gets my hackles up are comments like the one left by commenter Johnathan at Joel's place, who says it's quite one thing to own guns for the necessity of protecting one's home and hearth but "[i]t is quite another thing, however, to glorify the use of weapons, to associate one's image with them, to devote so much mental energy to thinking about them and discussing them with reverence."

Nothing personal, Johnathan, but get bent. Unlike Professor Tolkien's character, I do love the bright sword for its sharpness and the arrow for its swiftness, and I am not ashamed of it one damned bit. I'm sorry that you have been bullied by the society around you into thinking that owning weapons is some slightly shameful necessity, to be borne only until the lion lies down by the lamb and we can beat our swords into plowshares in the sweet by-and-by, but I've got news for you: Your heaven is not mine. If I can't take my pistol, I don't want to go.

There is nothing wrong or shameful about appreciating finely crafted machinery simply for what it is, studying the history behind it, or enjoying the mastery of its use. And guess what? That motorcycle can even do useful stuff, like taking you to work, too.

Convertible weather.

It's the first day of spring, but it's felt like summer for the last week or so here in Hoosieropolis. The monster ridge of high pressure over the heartland has had century-old record temperatures* toppling like tenpins. Today it's supposed to hit 84°F, besting the old record of 80°F set back in 1894, and it's currently 65 degrees outside in the pre-dawn darkness. The average high temp for March 20th is, like, 52°F.

I haven't had the top up on the Zed Drei since Friday, except when I had it parked on the street at the blogmeet. I feel sorry for you folks shivering and turning blue in the cold down in Phoenix and San Diego. (I realize that, now that I've jinxed us real good, there'll either be a blizzard in May or a month-long 100-degree drought in June. Or both.)

____________________________
*Attention Local TV Newspeople: There are two r's in both "Tempacher" and "Febyooary". Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Tab Clearing...

• It's good to know that Indianapolis isn't the only place you can't turn the television on without hearing Peyton Manning's name every thirty-seven seconds. (And despite us being in the middle of the annual Festival of Squeaky Round Ball, too. Could its days as the state religion be numbered?)


• Whether it's getting out of town ahead of a hurricane or getting into the basement ahead of a tornado, owners of miniature humans should train them to help in these situations. Unlike those of us with, say, cats, your tiny people can actually assist by carrying flashlights and stuff. Get them in on the plan!


• I have seen the future, brother; it is murder.