Overheard in the Dining Room...

I glance at a stack of books and note the one on top...

Me: "'Ada's Algorithm'... That was one of your birthday books, right?"

RX: "Yes."

Me: "I was pretty sure one of the books I'd got for you was about Ada Lovelace."

RX: "So much more interesting than Linda."

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I ask you...

What good is being a grownup if you can't have pistachio ice cream for breakfast?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 14, 2015

(Actually, it's gelato, because Broad Ripple.)

"Ralphie boy!" redux...

Nikon FM2n, Fujicolor 200

The test roll is back from The Darkroom, and it looks like the Nikon FM2n is cleared for takeoff.

True Confession Time: While I've been on a film jag of late, the cameras I've been using have pretty much all had some form of training wheels. I mean, the Canon EOS-1N and Nikon F5 are auto-everything beasts hardly different from a DSLR in the handling department, and even the Canon A-1, Leica R4, or Olympus OM-4 have various automated modes, be it a full-on program setting or just aperture priority.

But this Nikon FM2n and the Olympus OM-1? They're manual everything. The only reason these cameras have batteries at all is to run their on-board light meters, but if the battery dies or falls out, the camera will still run fine, you'll just have to use an external meter. Or shoot from the hip.

I'm looking forward to working with them.
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Dream Cars 3

Sometimes credited as "the world's first minivan", the Stout Scarab was designed by William Bushnell Stout after he'd met and interviewed Buckminster Fuller at an auto show and written an article for the Society of Automotive Engineers newsletter about Fuller's Dymaxion car.

Envisioned by its designer as a sort of "mobile office", the second-row seating in the spacious Scarab could swivel and face the rear, and there was a stowable table between the rows.

Thanks to unibody construction and a rear-mounted Ford V-8, the floor of the Scarab's  passenger compartment was low and flat. Check out the stylized Egyptian scarab motif on the snout.

Stout's vehicle never saw series production, with only a handful of examples built. Five are alleged to survive today.
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Dream Cars 2

Voisin was originally an aeroplane company founded by Gabriel Voisin and his younger brother Charles by buying out fellow aviation pioneer Louis Blériot. After the death of Charles in an auto accident in 1912, his brother carried on in the business, and the company made aircraft for the Aéronautique Militaire during the Great War.

Following the war, Gabriel quit the plane biz and made cars for a couple decades under the name Avions Voisin.

The C25 Aérodyne cost more than the contemporary Bugatti Type 57.

Of the twenty-eight examples of the C25 that were produced, only eight featured the dramatic Aérodyne styling, with its disc wheels and retractable sunroof.
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Dream Cars 1

Spent the afternoon at the Indianapolis Museum of Art with Bobbi, taking in the Dream Cars exhibit...

 1948 Tasco Prototype. The front fenders steer with the wheels.

 Tasco stood for "The American Sportscar Comany" The car was designed by Gordon Buehrig, creator of classics like the Duesenberg Model J, Auburn 851 Boattail Speedster, Cord 812, and the Lincoln Continental Mark II...

The idea of the Tasco was pitched as a way for Beech to get into the booming automobile market in the postwar years. Buehrig patented the T-top with this car and sued GM in 1968 over the T-tops on the Corvette.

Magic Bullets?

So there are several varieties of high-speed ultra-light bullets on the market today that make some pretty amazing claims about their ballistic capabilities, both exterior and terminal. I plunked down some of my own money over a couple gun shows on a few of the better-known ones with the intention of trying them out, first over the chrono, and then into ballistic gelatin to see if they held up to the claims in the ad copy.

The three loads, all in the ubiquitous 9x19mm, are Polycase's 74gr Inceptor ARX, Dynamic Research Technologies' 85gr Terminal Shock frangible hollowpoint, and Liberty Ammunition's 50gr Lead-Free +P hollowpoint. Since all the rounds tested made pretty bold velocity claims, I used the Sig P230 for chrono testing, since its 4.75" barrel was the longest 9mm tube I had handy.

First is the Inceptor ARX. This oddly-shaped bullet is designed not to fragment in tissue. Instead, its designers claim, the shape of the bullet causes it to yaw and the fluted ogive uses "lateral force dispersion" for "rapid energy transfer" to the target. The box claims 1475fps at the muzzle for the injection-molded polymer/copper bullet. The chrono results for a ten-shot string were as follows:

HI: 1525
LO: 1458
AV: 1490
ES: 67.07
SD: 20.95

So that's pretty much spot-on, and likely would have averaged exactly at the box-flap numbers out of a 4.5" gun like a Glock 17.

The 85gr Terminal Shock frangible HP from Dynamic Research Technologies (DRT. Get it? Huh? Do ya? DRT?) runs at a claimed 1350fps out of a 4" test barrel. Out of the 4.75" P32, the test numbers went thusly:

HI: 1348
LO: 1280
AV: 1306
ES: 68.59
SD: 22.75

As you can see, despite having three quarters of an inch more barrel length, the average velocity was still 50fps shy of what was measured at the box flap. Further, the somewhat erratic velocities common to hot-loaded, light-for-caliber pistol bullets were even more noticeable here than in the Inceptor.

Finally comes the Liberty Ammunition 50gr +P Civil Defense HP, with its claimed 2000fps muzzle velocity. From the Sig, the actual numbers for the ten-round string were:

HI: 2090
LO: 1994
AV: 2037
ES: 95.42
SD: 28.35

Well, no reason to doubt that it would have matched the velocity claims when fired from the typical 4"-4.5" service pistol. It was loud, but recoil was minimal. Check out that Extreme Spread, though... The fastest and slowest rounds varied by almost 100fps in the same magazine!

Further, none of the thirty rounds chronoe'd rounds caused any malfunctions in the test pistol, despite their exotic shapes, weights, and velocities.

Tune in for the next segment, where they'll get shot at, into, and through things, to see how well the claims of terminal effectiveness match reality.
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Malfunction.

So, yesterday at the range I used the P320 for some chrono testing (more on which later) and then ran another fifty rounds of Federal 115gr +P+ 9BPLE jacketed hollowpoint and fifty rounds of Wolf steel-cased 115gr ball through the gun. This brings the round count to 1050 rounds without cleaning or lubing, 950 to go before bath time, and nothing in the way of preparation done to the gun other than taking it out of the box.

On the fifty-eighth round of the day, number 978 through the gun, it experienced the first malfunction of the test other than that dud round of Wolf.

Yeah, I don't get that one either, but it looks mag-related? I noted which magazine it occurred with and we'll drive on and see what we will see.
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And we're off to an abstruse start for the day.

Much mercantile. Very littoral. Such Arsenal. Wow.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 11, 2015

It was probably funnier in my head.

lolwut?

Now that she's asked the tough questions of #BernieSanders, will #DianeRehm ask #HillaryClinton if she's truly from Zeta Reticuli?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 10, 2015

Fortunately this must have occurred before I got in the car. I'm in danger of driving into a ditch often enough from yelling "No, you soft-pated herbivore, that's not how it works!" at the radio during the Diane Rehm show, which I listen to on the way to the range, as one does.
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Automotif XCIV...

Bobbi was working the early morning shift last weekend and I benefited from her weird work schedule, as she was eager to get something to eat after clocking out just before noon. She offered to spring for lunch three days in a row, an offer I gladly accepted. Because chow in Broad Ripple, amirite?

Saturday we pedaled to Petit Chou Bistro down on the canal, home of the best onion soup gratinee in town, so far as I've found. (If I have a lunchtime mojo for French onion soup, my neighborhood choices are the Aristocrat pub, Marco's, or Petit Chou, with the latter's standing head and shoulders above the other two.)

On the way there, I spotted this:

A 1993 Cadillac Allanté, the final year of production and identifiable by the presence of "32V Northstar" badges and the absence of the vent windows. A DOHC V-8 with 295bhp was rather a big deal in 1993, especially in a domestic car, but it wasn't enough to save the Frequent Flier Caddy. (The Allanté's body was assembled in Turin, Italy and flown by cargo 747s in batches of 56 to Detroit for final assembly.)

Tab Clearing...

• Chevrolet Series BA Confederate (see above)


• Lebanese Civil War


• Sd.Kfz.9

Working on it...

Internet Sloth is too cute for words.

Typin' as fast as I can, here...
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Sorry...

I'll get the free ice cream machine turned back on after I finish generating some more of the for-pay kind.
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QotD: You're Locked In Here With Me Edition

From a RTWT post by LabRat:

"[T]he Establishment clause exists as much if *not actually more* to protect churches than it does to protect the state. The state is a lumbering patchwork beast that subsumes what it touches much more readily than the other way around. There’s a Church of England, but no one would argue the UK offers a primarily God-based education in the public schools.The thing about putting faith to a vote is that the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of something you not only don’t believe in, but find personally anathema being voted in."

Lack of Smoke Means Progress.

In light of one of the most famous images of the late 20th Century, this is a very interesting photo essay if you roll it around in your head long enough.

Mao wouldn't have let those houses get in the way of a Great Leap Forward.
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Automotif XCIII...

There aren't many cars that would have me pull a u-turn on the way to the grocery store, park in the first available spot, and un-ass the Zed Drei with both film and digital cameras to grab a few shots. This is one of them...

A super straight and clean 1973 Porsche 911T 2.4 Targa, just sitting there out in front of Good Morning Mama's the Friday before last. Those are just some timeless lines...

After the early '90s styling refresh, Porsche ran an ad that was a two-page spread of a car cover draped over the unmistakeable silhouette of a 911 with the caption "We're pretty confident in our identity, how about you?"

From elsewhere...

When liberal democracies collapse, someone comes along who promises to make the trains run on time if we load the right people into them.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 6, 2015

June 6th

An 18-year-old who waded through the bloody surf at Omaha Beach in 1944 is now 89 years old.
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Automotif XCII...

Is that a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air Nomad wagon I see, rolling down College Avenue on a sunny Friday afternoon in June?

Why, yes. Yes, it is.
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The Edmund Fitzskidoo...

"The White River, it's said, never gives up her dead, when the floods of the summer come early..."

Well, actually, it's not the White River proper, just the little overflow channel that cuts off the big oxbow of the main channel in Broad Ripple. The Monon Trail crosses it with a bridge and just upstream is the much larger bridge that carries Westfield Boulevard. Upstream from that is a weir dam.

The recent heavy rains had left a big logjam spanning two piers of the Monon Trail bridge, and something bright red and white was lodged in one end of it.

It looked like... a jet ski of some sort?

It sure enough was. There was a SeaDoo wedged up under the north end of the logjam. There was also a life vest in with the other detritus, but the two aren't necessarily related.

There are waterfront homes with backyard docks all along the White River between here and Keystone, and it's far more likely that a badly-moored SeaDoo got washed off somebody's dock in the recent flooding and swept down and over the weir than it is anybody got liquored up and rode it over the weir. Besides, if there had been something like that to happen, you'd think it'd make the news, right?

Automotif XCI...

1969 Hurst/Olds

With only 913 cars produced, there's a fair chance that this '69 Hurst/Olds seen rumbling down 54th Street is a plain vanilla Cutlass coupe dolled up via the Year One catalog... Or maybe it's a for-real, no-kiddin' 1969 Hurst/Olds. Either way, it's a hella cool-looking ride.

It's a shame that Detroit designers weren't allowed to use curves anymore after 1974. Compare the car above with the baroque lines of the mid-'70s GM A-bodies.
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Tab Clearing...

• Checking carbon mics


• Running from the po-po


• More ISIS stuff

Time flies like an arrow.

I've been a fan of Car and Driver magazine for years and years. I think I started buying them on the regular in the mid-'80s and even then I was reading every old back issue I could find at garage sales and suchlike. Even though my interest in cars has waned somewhat from its peak, I've continued to buy the magazine because I still like cars and driving them but, more importantly, it's just really a good magazine. (It's on the pages of C/D that I first encountered Jean Shepherd and P.J. O'Rourke, for instance.)

Anyhow, I'm on one of my occasional subscribing jags, and the latest issue just hit my mailbox: Car and Driver's sixtieth anniversary issue.

After the usual front-of the-magazine stuff, what we call "Columns" and "Features" at S.W.A.T., the bulk of the magazine is a chronological retrospective, divided by decade. Each decade features a period vehicle in a "comparison test" against its modern equivalent and then a bunch of period nostalgia: old covers, road test data, pictures, et cetera.

What caught me off guard is that, while the Fifties and Sixties have always been "way back in the Before Times" for me, and the Seventies and Eighties have been the subject of nostalgia for most of my adult life, I found myself not quite ready for a reminiscent look back at the distant past of the Nineties and Aughties.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #125...

Sig P320 with the "Full/Medium" frame and slide setup compared to a full-size Flat Dark Earth Tactical Dirt Colored Smith & Wesson M&P 9 with the small backstrap installed. The extra half-inch of barrel length on the Sig is readily apparent when the two guns are seen together.
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If you've got a few minutes...

...here's a short interactive documentary that really helps put the casualties of WWII into perspective.
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For what we are about to receive...

Look what Bobbi and I stumbled across, within easy bicycling distance of Roseholme Cottage.

I didn't check the odometer, but this is maybe a mile and a half from my front door...

Still gettin' Siggy wit' it.

To the range again today with the P320. Between the EAG carbine class (which I still owe you guys a write-up on) a couple weeks ago and the holiday week last week, pistol shooting has been mostly dry-fire. Today was back to the range to make sure I still remembered how to shoot them.

Ninety-six rounds through the M&P22. Two dud rounds of Remington.

Ran 50 rounds of Fiocchi 115gr FMJ and 50 rounds of the polymer-coated Wolf stuff through the gun. On the 83rd round of the day, round number 903 through the gun, the trigger press caused a *click* instead of a *BANG!*.

Cycling the slide ejected a loaded round from the chamber, and the cartridge in question had been hit a pretty good lick by the firing pin. I loaded it into an M&P to see if it would go on the second try, but there was no joy to be found there, either. The primer was indeed a dud.

The remaining seventeen rounds fired without incident, bringing the total to 920 rounds, with 1080 left until cleaning and lubing.
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Mmmm...

Breakfast at Taste yesterday before the fun show.

Shootin' Buddy opted for the cheesy biscuits and gravy, while I had a bowl of fruit and a side of bacon...

Bobbi ordered a thing innocently called a "bacon chop" only to discover she had inadvertently gotten herself into the "never try and eat anything bigger than your own head" dilemma...

Crossing the 1st and 2nd Amendment streams...

We've got a new Nazi at the local fun shows. And I don't mean one of those slightly overenthusiastic "I'm not saying they were right, or anything, but their tanks sure were cool!" militaria collectors, but an honest-to-Turner-Diaries frickin' Nazi.

Oy, vey, please let him move on to other pastures before a local reporter can stick a camera in his face at the fall show.

We used to be graced with the presence of Hitler Mouse Pad Guy, but he eventually stopped setting up his booth, perhaps because I don't think I ever saw someone actually purchasing his wares or even loitering in front of his stall, save perhaps to point and laugh.

This dude is ostensibly selling fireworks and flares and smoke "grenades" and suchlike. The smoke grenades come in such festive colors as "Mustard Gas Green", "Volkssturm Purple"(?) and "Zyclon[sic] Blue". Hand to God. There was also a 55-lb bag of ammonium nitrate surrounded with so much "LOOK! HERE!" signage that one wondered how many federal agencies the dude was stooling for.

He additionally had milk crates out with the full troika of red-covered Illinois Nazi wank-fic: The Turner Diaries and that other one by Pierce, plus the one with the gay SS bondage astronauts on the cover, Serpent's Walk, that (if one is to judge books by covers) is about S&M parties on the moon.

This dude has a lot more tables than Hitler Mouse Pad Guy did, so one can hope he gets pimp-slapped by the Invisible Hand that much sooner. Evil alone is bad enough; evil and tacky puts me right off my feed.
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Automotif XC...

1988...

After the long, dark years of Mustang IIs, wheezy Corvettes, performance packages on the Chevy Citation, and lardy 301c.i.d smog motor Trans Ams that couldn't pull a greased string out of a cat's ass, the mid-1980s saw a renaissance of Detroit performance.

The C4 'Vette was strong. Tuned-port IROCs and H.O. Mustangs were incredible bang for the buck. The Chrysler guys were bolting intercooled turbos on everything in the company lineup. And Buick... once-stodgy Buick ...was showing its taillights to most everybody in the mid-'80s with a mid-size two-door stuffed full of turbocharged 3.8L V-6 cranking out *mumblesomethingbutlessthanaCorvettehonest* horsepower.

Alas, the two-door G-body on which the Regal was based made the go-aways after the '87 model year. But surely there was still hope, right? Because Buick wouldn't let all that performance experience go to waste, yeah? And there were rumors of a two-seater car coming...

Double alas, the Reatta turned out to be a plush-bottomed front-wheel-drive boulevardier plagued by QC issues and with dull-as-dishwater driving characteristics. And they wanted a mint for the things, too. They sank without a ripple after three model years; not even the last minute introduction of a convertible model like the one in the picture could help. I guess everybody should have been suspicious of a GM car allegedly built at a "craft center".
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QotD: Stop Touching It Edition

Go RTWT...

"When I first started writing this post, I had in mind talking about lockboxes for securing pistols in cars, which I still think is a necessary idea. But, as I began writing, I realized I was on the wrong track. In this case, trying to secure the pistol in a lockbox would most likely have entailed repeated instances during the trip of gunhandling in the car to secure the pistol. That’s dangerous and unrealistic. The less we handle guns in vehicles, the better. It’s a target rich environment with too much potential for a Negative Outcome."

Sometimes you can't avoid it, but anything you can do to minimize the amount of unnecessary administrative gun handling is a good thing. There's a reason the bullet holes at cop shops are in the bathrooms, locker rooms, and sally ports.
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Ralphie boy!

Norton!

It's true.

The first thing I noticed...

One point for the Nikon F5 over the EOS-1N: I was pedaling through Broad Ripple yesterday after lunch, getting a workout with the big Canon on a strap around my neck, shooting a test roll through the camera. The test roll was some FujiFilm 200 that Amazon sells cheap in 4-packs of 24-exposure rolls.

Out in front of Broad Ripple Vintage, I snapped a photo of some interesting colored neon and *WHIRRRRRR*. That was it. That was exposure number 24. You're done with this roll, kiddo.

The Canon reads the DX code on DX coded film and, if it says it's a 24-exposure roll, then 24 exposures is what you're gonna get. There might be some way to override this in the camera's profusion of custom submenus, but I haven't checked in the camera's 120-page instruction manual to see. I think there was a hack we used to do with tape, too, but it was so long ago that I used to do this stuff...

The F5, on the other hand, will let the starving artist eke out those extra couple frames you can usually get on any film roll. Further, at the end of a roll, it merely flashes "End", and gives you the choice of either initiating the motorized rewind by pushing the right combination of buttons, or saving the electrons and noise and using the classic manual rewind crank atop the camera.

Because the Canon cut me off at shot number twenty-four, when I pedaled around the corner, I had to paw my Nikon P7000 out of my pocket, stab the "ON" button, listen as it warbled its musical bootup chime and whirred its little servo-powered lens out and opened its little lens cover, in time for...

Drove right out of frame as the camera sluggishly responded to my frantic "YOU TAKE PICTURE NOW!" commands.

Which is not a slam on the little P7000; it comes to life pretty quickly for a digicam; if I'd had it in hand instead of starting with it in the pocket, I'd have gotten the shot. But if I'd still had that couple of bonus frames in the camera around my neck...

IT HAS BEGUN!

MORTAL COMBAT!

I look at this picture and can't help but see the price tag from 1995, which was decent new car money back then. Now the total value of everything in the frame is hardly even a good weekend vacation for two, unless your car gets good highway mileage and  you're willing to book a twin at the Bedbug Suites.

The penultimate film bodies from Canon and Nikon. In Nikon's case, it's the last one marketed directly at the globetrotting pro photog. Canon had one more evolution with the EOS-1v. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the edges of every sports field or fashion runway would have been crowded with these things, blazing away.

For casual snapshooting around the neighborhood, these are like getting your groceries in an M1 Abrams, or taking a Group B rally car to the post office. Only a fool would do that... and I am that fool.

Oops, fell into the internet...

Googling something up on the Nikon D1x, I stumbled across this blog and have fallen into the archives. Love his writing and his eye.

I'll have the free ice cream machine turned on soon, I swear.
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Ugh, pollen.

Spent yesterday with the bones in my skull creaking and squeaking like the hull of the sub near the end of Das Boot, when it was sitting on the bottom.

Spent most of my life in Atlanta and Knoxville, two of the most pollen-y cities around, and not a problem at all, but there's something around here that's got my number. Looking back over older posts, it's sometime in April or May that my throat closes up and my head fills with mucus and I start coughing up lungs.

I need to go re-stock on Claritin. Whatever it is, it seems to have hit later this year, but it's worse than usual, as if to make up for its tardiness.
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I need to save this as a text-file...

...so I can copypasta it every time Indiana's weird deer regs get brought up in conversation:

Here's an interesting .pdf of a PowerPoint presentation on deer overpopulation and its impact, on page five of which is a map showing the estimated deer range in the US in 1947.

Note that in the crosshatched "scarce or extinct" area, you can see the borders in Michigan and Minnesota that are currently the demarcation lines of where rifle hunting is legal and where in those states it's shotgun-only to this day. Ask any Bubba in MN or MI why the south half of his state is shotgun-only, and $5 says he'll give you something about how its "flat and densely populated".
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"Stop Touching It!", Part the Whateverth.

Don’t take the gun out of the holster. Problem solved; problem staying solved.

Also… Stop Touching It!

(Seriously, the single most dangerous thing most people ever do with a loaded handgun is put it in a holster. Why would you not want to cut down on the times you have to do that?)
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Tab Clearing, Iraq Edition...

Some links I had open for a post that's just not gelling yet...

• The Ruins of Empire in the Middle East


• The ISIS March Continues: From Ramadi on to Baghdad?


• Retired generals: Be afraid of ISIS

Automotif LXXXIX...

Does that look like the vehicle of a person with any f***s to give? No. No it does not.
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UnMemorable Day...

Here you go, @iowahawkblog @ezraklein: It's a Reset Button! (Courtesy of @HillaryClinton.) Image: @ItsRobbAllen pic.twitter.com/wahb2YrxoU

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 26, 2015

Go read...

Right here.
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