What media bias?

Here's a guy who injured himself with his Remington Model 11-48. The forensics lab that tested it said it would discharge when dropped on the butt with the safety on or off. They also measured the trigger pull at ~39 ounces, which is awfully light for a factory trigger; so light, in fact, that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that was not the factory trigger pull weight and that somebody had gone to "lighten it up" with an Arkansas stone.

Speaking to gun safety in general, there's a reason that hunter safety courses since the days of yore have cautioned against things like climbing up to the deer stand with a loaded weapon: A lot of mechanical safeties are fairly recent inventions. S&W revolvers didn't get hammer blocks until WWII. Colt 1911s didn't have firing pin safeties until the Series 80.

Complaining that a 1920s firearm may not have been drop safe when you were actively ignoring two or more of the Four Rules of firearm safety is like complaining that you drove your Ford Model A head-on into a brick wall and the airbags didn't deploy.

Paw-paw's treasured heirloom shotgun may have been built before the first product liability lawyers slithered onto dry land and, as a consequence, might not be as insensitive to rough handling as GI hardware or newer commercial firearms. Remember that the most important piece of safety gear is the trigger nut, and it should always be torqued to proper specifications.

...and, like clockwork:

Oh, CNN, we can always count on you for the stupid!

Seriously, have you people looked at the sales numbers of First-Person Shooters? If these things turned people into killers, you would need hip waders to keep the hemoglobin out of your hightops while perambulating the streets of America .

Plus, this meme is tired. Really, really tired. So tired it's narcoleptic.

Relax, you kooky squares; the kids are alright.
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Brace for the stupid, gamers.

The headline article at CNN.com reads

Anders Behring Breivik, who admits killing 77 people in Norway last summer, used a video game as training for his shooting spree, he testified Thursday at his trial for homicide and terrorism.

He played the game "Modern Warfare 2" for practice, he said.

Breivik, who boasts of being an ultranationalist who killed his victims to fight multiculturalism in Norway, also went through a period of playing the game "World of Warcraft" up to 16 hours a day, he testified.

World of Warcraft? Seriously? I mean, he certainly generated plenty of aggro, but there was a distinct lack of fireball-casting going on, so maybe that portion of his alleged digital boot camp didn't quite pay off.
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A very Epicurean sort of day.

A trip to McKay's and lunch at Calhoun's yesterday with friend staghounds. Always a pleasure; a couple hours browsing the stacks, yummy BBQ, and conversation that leaves my brain feeling all stretched out and relaxed, like it's been doing T'ai chi.

Dinner last night at Brazeiros or, as Gunsmith Bob calls it, "The Meatening". It's like a movie title: Highlander VII: The Meatening. I can see Sean Connery and Clancy Brown dueling atop some ruined tower in a thunderstorm with big skewers of picanha, pausing only to bite off chunks of delicious sea-salt-crusted top sirloin. I know better than to be decoyed by the salad bar and sides: The objective at a churrascaria is to pack yourself with enough rare beef that you have to be rolled to the car.

Sexism isn't cute, even with floral trim.

Writes one Kiri Blakely:

As the prostitute scandal continues to rock the Secret Service, one thought has been running around my brain like a mouthy schoolgirl: Why aren't there more (or any?!) female Secret Service agents? The reason there should be more is simple: Women don’t get into trouble the way men do.

Well, Ms. Blakeley, as it happens, there are female Secret Service agents, and have been for decades. Considering that there were women on Reagan's detail, it's probably safe to say that there have been women guarding the president longer than you've been alive. A woman was named deputy director of the agency in 2004, during the administration of that horrible macho cowboy, George W. Bush.

But it's your assertion that screwing up on the job is somehow a uniquely male trait that leaves me agog. Did you think before you typed that? Of course you didn't. Apparently you live in such a bubble that you couldn't even imagine who'd find such a statement objectionable.

Please, stay off my side.
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Jan folds.

Arizona's Republican Governor Jan Brewer, who dismayed Democrats by never meeting a gun law she didn't like, finally met a gun law she didn't like.

She vetoed a measure that would have allowed Arizonans to pack their heaters in publicly-owned buildings, such as city halls and libraries, on the grounds that the only way the bill allowed these buildings to remain posted as no-toting-zones was to install metal detectors and secure lockers so that legally-armed patrons would have a safe place to park their gat while they went in to check out their books. (Because handling loaded guns for safety in the lobby is always a good idea!)

Portland Tea Party.

Apparently only TSA screeners are allowed to look at nekkid folks at the airport, because when an Oregon man attempted to give the entire crowd waiting in line the same view that the blue-gloved security minions had in the Porn-O-Scan booth, he got arrested for disorderly conduct and indecent exposure, rather than being given an award for being a patriotic citizen who was just trying to prove that he wasn't carrying anything on board except a few extra pounds and a Not-Gonna-Take-It-Anymore attitude.

Mr. Bare It All For Safety, we salute you with today's Real Men Of Genius award.

On the road again... very briefly.

Yesterday I pulled off the Interstate in Bowling Green, KY, grabbed a burger at the Hardee's drive-thru, filled the tank at the gas station across the street, and then wolfed down the burger in the driver's seat of my effete little German rollerskate with its tiny, ridiculous watch-winder of a "motor", parked almost right under this sign:

That's right, my bitty car, all six of whose cylinders displace less than one bank of a proper small-block V-8, was parked at the corner of Corvette Drive and Duntov Way, right across the street from the throbbing epicenter of American horsepower: the Corvette Assembly Plant. I slunk back onto the highway before the Zed Drei was crushed under a falling lug nut.

No, really?

Just in case you were deaf, illiterate, and in a coma for the last couple of months, a Chicago lawyer and a Minneapolis law prof writing for CNN would like you to know that the "Trayvon Martin case [is] also about guns."

Gosh, thanks, guys. I'm not sure I would have picked up on that from the hundred thousand other media talking heads trying to tell me the same thing.

EDIT: In comments, Sean points out that the gun stuff is just collateral damage; the actual target looks to be ALEC, a conservative lobbying organization.

Do want.

So I'm over at Days of our Trailers, reading the NRA Convention recap, and he mentions an ATI StG-44 copy in .22LR. How had I missed this?

Now, I've been pretty good about divesting myself of everything other than working guns and the investment stuff in my collection, and this manifestly falls into neither category, but I have a completely irrational wantsies for it. And I mean badly. I couldn't want it any harder unless it had a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.

Our long dark night is over.

Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives

'Nukyular'; it's pronounced 'nukyular'.

I wonder if he can see the Falklands from his front porch in Hyde Park?
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Wanna bet?

So, when I mentioned that I had re-read Tom Kratman's novel, Caliphate, the other day, a couple of people asked what I thought of it.

I find it an enjoyable read. I mean, it's an SF/Mil/Espionage thriller, not Tolstoy; you're in it for the pew!pew!pew!, not the transcendental insights. It's probably the most polished and tightly-written Kratman novel I've read thus far (I have not read his A Desert Called Peace series or his latter two collaborations with OhJohnRingoNo,) but it's unlikely to transcend the genre-fiction ghetto and become assigned reading in your college lit class, unlike a certain novel by Famous Science Fiction Writer Margaret Atwood*.

I will note, however, that the story, which takes place in a dystopian future, mostly in a Europe under sharia law, has been decried as exaggerated, far-fetched, ham-handed, and demeaning to Muslims. Would anyone care to bet the amount of overlap of those critics on a Venn diagram with people who found The Handmaid's Tale to be prophetic, direly accurate, "a powerful, frightening warning - a must read"? Yeah, thought not.
_____________________________
*In case you didn't get the joke, Atwood used to about stroke out when described as a "science fiction writer". Apparently she doesn't anymore, but one can hope.

The needle on the record of history keeps skipping.

Chris Ex Machina offers thoughts on Argentina's renewed bluster on the Islas Malvinas Falkland Islands.

The Argentines have probably noticed that the Brits no longer have the long-range Vulcan bombers that hit the islands in the Black Buck raids or the Victor tankers that refueled them on the way. Similarly, all but one of the HMS Invincible-class STOVL carriers in the Royal Navy have been mothballed or scrapped, and the remaining one has been de-clawed, since the Fleet Air Arm is utterly bereft of the stars of what may soon be referred to as the "First Falklands War", Sea Harriers.

To put it bluntly, the British no longer have the ability to project power across a hostile shore over transoceanic distances.

And does anybody think that Obama would back Cameron over the issue the way Reagan did Thatcher? Yeah, me neither. As a matter of fact, a shooting war on British soil, (even if it is British colonial soil,) to which the US responds tepidly to its treaty obligations would make NATO look pretty toothless.

Thank you, one and all...

...even you, little Lithuanian SpamBot!


At some point this morning while I wasn't paying attention, the odometer here at VFTP rolled over the 5 million visitor mark.

Thank you one and all for stopping by and reading this stuff. I hope you laugh as much reading it as I do writing it. :)
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Historic Firsts.

Scandal erupts as, for the first time in history, the United States Secret Service's Presidential security detail is busted procuring hookers for themselves.

"Uh, Blue Three, this is Blue Six. Bareback requests two blondes and a redhead. Uh, and pick up some more Nembutol for Pixie while you're out."
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Lost me.

Indiana RINO Senator-for-Life Dick Lugar is going all out with the attack ads against Richard Mourdock in the primary. This guy's got an ad budget the size of the Big Three automakers', Budweiser's, and PepsiCo's combined, and so my ears are full of the steady drone of all the muck getting raked.

It's not working.

The attacks are weaksauce: His attendance was spotty! (Good! This country could use more gone-fishin' and less governin'!) He claimed too many deductions on his taxes a couple times! (Sounds like a patriotic American to me.) His investments as state treasurer lost the state pension fund $7 million! (I don't know if you've been keeping up with current events, pal, but everybody's 401k took it in the shorts a couple years ago. It's part of the reason you're about to be out of a job, sport.)

Look, you can run ads claiming he was spotted buggering dead boys at high noon down on Monument Circle, and I wouldn't care. You don't seem to grasp that Richard Mourdock possesses what is, in my opinion, the single most important qualification for Senator from Indiana: Not Being Richard Green Lugar. You're fired, Dick; hit the showers.

At this point I would vote for the mouldering corpse of Saddam Hussein over Lugar; heaven knows that he comes about as close to meeting the residency requirements.

Overheard in the Office:

RX: "Who scrubs the toilets in Galt's Gulch?"

Me: "I dunno, I guess you scrub your own toilet. Or pay somebody to do it for you."

RX: "You mean there wasn't a genius toilet scrubber who turned his back on the world?"

Me: "That's going on the internets."

Tab Clearing...

• A very insightful and much-needed reminder that everyone is not Just Exactly Like Me. That's part of the reason I make myself watch one or two MSNBC talk shows on weekend mornings as well as reading web stuff from SoCons and foreign policy hawks.


• The downside of being a firearms hobbyist is that firearms are a very mature technology. Real, honest novelty is a rare thing in this business. I've seen only a handful of truly novel guns in the last thirty years. It can be argued that, other than advances in materials and manufacturing techniques, there has been nothing new under the metallic cartridge sun since the '30s.


• Perhaps the driest bit of humor I've seen all month. A line so dry that I didn't melt into laughter, I sublimated.

Because we're scaredy cats, that's why.

So, the other morning I'm hearing Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, and Ed Rendell, career tax leech on the Body Politic, going at it over gun control, and Ed asks Alan "why would any law-abiding citizen need a magazine with thirty-three bullets in it?" with the sort of smug smile that usually gets wiped off faces by the butt end of a pool cue in any blue-collar Philadelphia bar. Alan blinks and stammers back something about... um... maybe, like, when we're target shooting at the range, we don't like to reload a lot?

Why do we never close the deal on this one? Why do we never respond "Well, Ed, I need a magazine with thirty-three rounds in it because when smug, officious, overreaching petty tyrants and their tame enforcement thugs come trampling up my herbaceous borders, they rarely do it in onesies and twosies"?

Or, better yet, give him the real reason: "Well, I need a magazine with thirty-three rounds in it because f&#$ you, Ed." Seriously, where does he get off thinking how many "bullets" are in my magazines is any business of his? Vobis non me dux, Ed; you ain't the boss of me.

That's why I own guns in the first place: To make sure nobody, from the mugger on the corner to the King of England to some washed-up political has-been from the Keystone State can come force me to do things against my will without me at least having a chance to shoot back.

QotD: Wipe That Smile Off Your Face Edition.

In a you-need-to-go-read-it überpost, Kevin sighs

I don't think "our best days are still ahead of us." I'm in very good company. I'm aware that Cassandras have been proclaiming the downfall of civilizations since time immemorial, but as Billy Beck once observed, "Sometimes they're right."

Kevin doesn't seem very sanguine about the near-term future, and neither am I, truthfully.

What disturbs me is how many of the "I bought a Century Arms AK and a case of ammo; let's get it on!" crowd talk like they're looking forward to this because, I don't know, it means no more mortgage payments, or they won't have to go in to work on Monday. ("Yeah, boss? I'm not going to be able to make it in. I'm kinda pinned down by enemy fire and... WOLVERINES!")

Hey, Sparky, go do a Google image search for "Civilian taking a dump in a frozen shell crater in Sarajevo, 1995." Does he look like he's having fun? 'Cause that was frickin' Yugoslavia; they had to go steal guns from the army to get their civil war on. If the lid ever comes off this pressure cooker for realz, it's gonna make Yugoslavia look like a Sunday school picnic.

Today In History: The _th Battle of ______.

On this day in history, a bunch of guys were wiped out by another bunch of guys in Adrianople...

Which isn't much of a distinction because "Battle of Adrianople" has a disambiguation page at Wikipedia. The battle in question is the one where a bunch of Hungarians handed a good old-fashioned Hun stomping to some EU crusaders under Baldwin I, the latter having ridden out from the then-NATO fortress of Byzantium Constantinople Istanbul, not the other half-dozen historically significant battles that took place on the same godforsaken pied-à-terre.

Real Estate ProTip for residents of Edirne, Thermopylae, Megiddo, et al: If your town has to be referenced in history as the "__th Battle of ___________" with a Roman numeral involving "V" or higher, then maybe it's time to sell out and find a new place to lay your head, Hurricane Annie.

First principles.

In comments at Marko's asset forfeiture post, somehow things have drifted into the known unreliability of drug dogs. They are vulnerable to alerting on their handler's suspicions instead of what they smell; they can be deliberately caused to alert; they don't speak a word of English and so people's lives and fortunes hang by how well a guy claims he can tell the difference between "Yup, that's cocaine, boss," and "I'm bored, can I have a biscuit? Squirrel!"

Suppose the handler was pure as the driven snow, had a Dolittle-like ability to talk with the animals, and Rover's senses performed exactly as advertised: It is still a statistical impossibility for $12,000 in American paper money to not contain traces of dope. Dope-residue-as-probable-cause is just a license to confiscate.

Forget the dog. The dog is a Red Herringhound.

Suppose instead of the dog, they’d used one of dozens of chemical dye tests and found dope residue on the money. Does taking Fluffy the Crotch-Sniffing Four-Legged Fourth Amendment expert out of the picture make it any more right?

(HINT: No.)

Overheard in the Office:

Bobbi is playing a video clip while researching a post...

Talking Head: "Allen West accused 80 Democratic members of Congress of being members of the Communist party. Is this the direction the Republican party wants to go?"

RX & Me (simultaneously): "Well, are they?"

When you have Congresswomen from your party go to help out with the sugarcane harvest in Cuba, you're gonna get accusations like this.

Glrrgg...

Slow start this morning. Hard to brain. Here's a joke in the interim:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: The Republicans hate women!

Sorry, been watching MSNBC this morning. It seeps in.
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Tab Clearing...

• Breaking News: RMS Titanic is still sunk! I love how even a computer 'zine managed to find an angle for a Titanic column.


• He's a divider, not a uniter. At least, it appears that's going to be the de facto campaign strategy.


• Robb sells out for a pretty sweet rifle case.


• Off the shelf: Just finished re-reading Caliphate, now reading What Remains to Be Discovered.


• My LOL of the morning.

Overheard in the Office:

So I'm over at ForgottenWeapons.com, looking at a video of 19th Century French military revolvers (Hey! I have one of those!) when I see a link to Allegheny Arsenal, and I'm down a rabbit hole of wondrous things I had no idea I needed until this morning.

I mean, seriously, I'm not sure I can go on without a couple rounds of British WWII incendiary .303 ammo, and I'm showing Bobbi some other gadgets they have listed...

Me: "Huh. A British military galvanometer."

RX: "Oh, one of those ones in the wooden box? Those are neat."

Me: "And a British military voltmeter. This looks newer, maybe WWII. Thirty bucks."

RX: "Did they say what the meter scale or range is?"

Me: "It's probably calibrated in Imperial Volts anyway."

QotD: Worst Come To Worst Edition

And if all that fails? Screw it, we can cross the streams.

Robb Allen, on coming to terms with his inner political Ray Stantz.
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The meme that wouldn't die.

All over the TeeWee and internet, people are still talking about Zimmerman "disobeying" the 911 operator. Zimmerman did not "disobey a 911 operator", even if such a thing were possible.

The 911 operator asked Zimmerman if he was following Martin. Zimmerman replied in the affirmative. The 911 operator said, and I quote: "We don't need you to do that".

My roommate says "I'm going to the kitchen, I'll bring you a Coke."

I reply "I don't need you to do that."

She brings me a Coke anyway. Has she "Disobeyed My Orders"? According to every talking head on my television screen she has, and the meme is penetrating my frickin' computer now.

Besides, the whole concept of "disobeying the orders of a 911 operator" is ludicrous on its surface. Last I checked, the 911 operator is not in my chain of command. That's like "disobeying the orders" of your plumber. (Similarly, if your plumber suggests that it might not be a good idea to flush the toilet right this second, you'd be well-advised to take his suggestion under consideration. I'll bet George wishes he had.)

Who thought this was a good idea? Seriously, who?

Asset forfeiture, I mean? Especially when it was decided that the department conducting the bust got to keep a measure of the dough.

Look, it is a precept in Loss Prevention that, out of any ten employees, one or two are never going to steal from you because they don't steal, and one or two are going to steal because they're just crooks, and, of that six or eight in the middle, the way to keep them from stealing is to do two things:

1. Make it difficult for them to do so.


2. Make it hard for them to rationalize that it's not really stealing, because you owe them.

Most people, most employees, most everybody is neither scrupulously ethical nor inherently unethical. Man isn't the rational animal, he's the rationalizing animal, and if he can rationalize that it's okay for him to do wrong because the people he's doing wrong to are in the wrong themselves, he'll do it.

Combine asset forfeiture laws, the War on (Some) Drugs, and the fact that the paper money in circulation is practically all tainted with traces of dope because Americans obey drug laws the way they do speed limits, and you've basically legitimized and incentivized corruption. Good job, Mr. Tough-On-Crime.

(Oh, and as municipal budgets shrink, look for more and more financially-strapped departments to be too busy engaged in fiscally remunerative narcotics enforcement to do much about that guy that broke into your house. I seem to recollect a potential rewriting of forfeiture rules in, I think it was Washington, that caused a police chief to protest that a huge chunk of his department budget came from dope-related seizures. Chief, if we only want X dollars of policing in a given year, that's not your cue to give us X+1 by seizing the difference.)

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.
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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.
.

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.)
___________________________________
*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.