Time Measurement...

I was doing some research on the Canon EOS-1N film camera, and ran across some photos taken during the invasion of Iraq.

Not the Gulf War, but OIF.

"Surely," I thought, "this is some sort of anachronism. That was 2003..."

Nope. The Global War on a Noun has been going on for so long that we were a couple years into it and working photojournalists were still using film cameras.

I went and double-checked my timelines and, sure enough, in 2003 we were still in the very first generation of commercial purpose-built DSLRs: The Canon EOS-1D and Nikon D1X would have been the pro-grade models then.

At the same time, the 35mm Canon EOS 1V and Nikon F5 were probably the ultimate iterations of the pro film camera. They were bomb-proof, mature technology, and the infrastructure to handle 35mm film was still ubiquitous.

On the other hand, the 1D and D1X were developed from the same bodies, should be just as tough, and should simplify getting images home from the field.

Obviously, many were still sticking with film and that makes it feel like a long time ago, in a more real way than just looking at the dates on a calendar does.

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The Retail Apocalypse continues in '19...

"There's roughly 52 square feet of retail space per person in the US, compared to 19 square feet of retail space in the UK, according to CoStar.

This market oversaturation suggests the US is still in the "early innings" of mass store closures, according to a report last October by the advisory firm Cowen and Company."

The Macy's that anchors what's left of what used to be an indoor mall just up the road is making the go-aways, probably finally killed off by the super Target across the parking lot. (And the super Target is likely feeling the pinch from the new Meijer.)

Unlucky ship...

The battle of Lissa in 1866, which saw Rear Admiral Tegethoff's Austrian fleet defeat a numerically superior Italian force, had an affect on ship design for the latter half of the 19th Century. (Possibly because Austria was such a naval underdog.)

What was unusual about the battle is that Tegethoff formed his main squadron into a rough wedge and charged the Italian battle line, seeking ramming attacks and close engagement. This was outside the rather staid "line of battle" tactics that had been most common for the last couple hundred years.

For this reason, late pre-dreadnought ironclads tended to all feature rams and have an emphasis on main armament that could fire directly forward. Everyone wants to copy a winner. And while Tegethoff was shooting from the hip in an attempt to neutralize his opponent's advantages, taking ships outside their designed envelope, now ships would be built from the ground up with situations like Lissa in mind.

In a race to keep up with the local squadrons of European colonial powers, China ordered some state of the art ironclads from Germany. They were scheduled to be delivered in 1884, but France was in the middle of a war with China and asked if the Germans would please hold off on delivering the ironclads until France had finished beating China. The Germans obliged and it was another year before the ships were delivered.

When they arrived, the Dingyuan and her sister ship, Zhenyuan, seriously altered the balance of power in the China Seas.

Following the fashion of the time, they had ram prows and a pair of staggered wing turrets, each with a brace of 12" Krupp breech-loaders. These turrets were arranged so that all four guns could fire fore or aft, as well as having a limited arc to each side where a four-gun broadside was possible.

I'd say that the effects of firing a 12" naval gun right across your own decks is best left to the imagination, but we don't have to use our imaginations. During the First Sino-Japanese War, at the Battle of the Yalu, Admiral Ding Ruchang was using the Dingyuan as his flagship. Worried about the superior gunnery prowess of the Chrysanthemum Fleet, he tried to pull a Tegethoff, ordering his ship to close with the Japanese and open fire at a closer range.

The ship's captain, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with closing with the Japanese line and ordered the crew to open fire at extreme range. This happened while the Admiral's staff and some Royal Navy advisors were still on the flying bridge, and one of the advisors recollected being catapulted by the blast in his memoirs. (It didn't actually destroy the flying bridge, that happened later by Japanese shellfire.)

When I found a book focusing on the battle, I had to order it. It's such an interesting period in naval history.
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You're doing it wrong.

Some dude up the road in Marion was walking about with an unholstered pistol stuffed down the front of his trousers. He says he felt the gun starting to slip down into his pants and grabbed to catch it, causing it to discharge... right into his junk.

Dude didn't have a toter's permit, either, so there's every chance he's getting charged for it, too.

And to rub extra bonus salt into the wound, if you will, dude has made news as far away as Sacramento and DC.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, it was a Hi Point.

If only they made a device designed to securely attach the gun to your waist and cover the trigger.
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Changing my mind, at least a little...

Initially when I stuck my toe back into the film photography world, I was pretty down on late-model Canon EOS cameras with auto everything. I wanted knobs and dials and the full retro experience.

I've since softened on that, at least to an extent. At least for the higher-end stuff. Having used the digital full-frame EOS 1Ds Mark II and fallen in love with it, I'm looking at the EOS 1N in a new light.

It helps that I've got a few good EF-mount lenses to go with it.

Hopefully once the weather turns I'll be able to get out in the neighborhood with it some more.

Instamatic...

So, cameras that used roll film (as opposed to sheet film, like that used in large format cameras) generally required the user to thread the end of the roll onto a takeup spool. In an attempt to make a more user-friendly volkscamera sort of experience, Kodak launched the 126 film format in the early Sixties.

Dubbed the "Instamatic", a name obviously intended to signify ease of use, the film was all spooled up in a little plastic cartridge which you could just drop into the camera and then remove when you'd shot up all the exposures. The film itself was about the same size as 35mm film, but the camera exposed square images on it.

About a decade later, Kodak followed up with a second Instamatic film format, the 110. This used film that was as wide as the 16mm film used in subminiature cameras, but with only one row of indexing holes. The frames were half the size of a 35mm negative (the same size as a current Micro Four Thirds camera sensor, coincidentally.)

To combat worries that the film would be too grainy if enlarged to a useful size, Kodak even came up with new emulsions that would permit decent sharpness with 5x7s, maybe even 8x10s with good glass.

Unfortunately the vast majority of 110 cameras were cheap, plastic-lensed abominations, and the reputation for taking poor pictures has stuck with the format. Most customers' 110 photos I printed at the lab were garbage.

What the 110 format allowed, though, was the first advent of the take-anywhere, truly pocketable camera. There were some decent ones on the market, too; built well, with quality glass.

Pentax made an entire interchangeable-lens SLR camera system in the 110. The lens that's on there is the standard prime, a 24mm f/2.8. (Since the negative is half the size of 35mm, that gives the same field of view as a 48mm lens on a regular full-frame camera.)

Interestingly, the shutter also functions as the aperture, so all lenses have the same maximum aperture of f/2.8. It's a real SLR, with a pentaprism, TTL light metering, the works. Pentax sold a suite of lenses, a flash, a motor-drive/grip, and other accessories. They made them from '78 until '85.
 

Rollei's A110 is a little metal brick of a camera that is slid closed and then open again to advance the film, like a Minox spy camera. The 23mm f/2.8 lens has a reputation for being one of the better 110 lenses made.

Fujifilm discontinued 110 film production in 2009, but you'll find some in cold storage on eBay and elsewhere, and Lomography started producing it in 2011. I just got a roll from Amazon that I'm going to use to test the little A110 and see if it works!
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When art & photojournalism meet...

I hadn't seen this amazing spread of photos, titled "Afghanistan: Chronotopia", before. It's definitely worth a look.
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Spectacle

Yesterday was a mental health day (I think this is now called 'self care'), spent indoors... in pyjamas, in fact ...and the morning was in front of the televisor watching the federal government make a gigantic ass of itself.

Yesterday, of course, being the public circus part of Michael Cohen's Capitol Hill round robin of committee hearings.

Fittingly, on the local NBC affiliate, it preempted Days of Our Lives. I gotta say that, while the average congressperson is a better actor than the average soap star, the plot wasn't near as coherent and nowhere near as intellectually rigorous. It was every bit as entertaining, though. On a day when I'm lolligagging or sick in bed, I'm a lot more likely to doze off to the goings-on in the fictional town of Salem than I was to the ones in the Rayburn House Office Building yesterday.

Nobody did a very good job accomplishing what were their purported goals, as Popehat blogger Ken White noted in his piece for The Atlantic last night. A quick survey of Facebook and Twitter tells me that precisely zero people had their opinions changed, as this Wired piece notes.

The actual goals of a congressional committee hearing, which is to grandstand for soundbites for the constituents back home, were about all that was accomplished. That nice, beleaguered Mr. Trump was defended and that stubby-fingered Cheetoh Jesus was savaged and everyone got some sentences they can use in the ad copy for their 2020 primary runs.
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Very Broad Ripple...

This is about the most Broad Ripple way to fetch the groceries I've yet seen.

Pocket Six Shooter

Chris gets right to the reason I switched from a .38 Special Model 442 to a .32 H&R Magnum Model 432 back in 2005 and haven't ever thought about switching back.

.38 Special does not expand reliably from a 2" barrel in any loading. The only way you'll see expansion from a J-frame is to step up to .357, but .357 Magnum out of an Airweight is punishing. Followup shots are slow, and that's the sort of recoil that adversely affects accuracy.

Look at Chris's posted times in the 5x5x5 drill for the different calibers. There's something like a full second's difference between .32 H&R and .357 Mag. I know the guy reading this who carries one of those flyweight Smith .357's with a frame made out of Riboflavin alloy or whatever is like "Well, I shoot magnums just as good as regular .38's." No. No you don't. Video with a timer or GTFO.

Since all pistol bullets do is poke holes, we need the holes to go as deep as necessary to poke holes in important stuff inside the bad guy, without poking holes in important stuff on the far side of the bad guy.

This is why I have Federal 95gr LSWC in my 432PD; it's reliably found in the denim on the far side of the jello block, just like 148gr .38 Special wadcutters are, and it recoils about the same in an Airweight snubbie, and I get six of them instead of five; a 20% capacity advantage.

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What if I only point them out in my head?

"People Who Constantly Point Out Grammar Mistakes Are Pretty Much Jerks, Scientists Find"

Feeling personally attacked here, tbh fam.
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It gets me out of the house...

View this post on Instagram

Picture taking today! #canoneos7d #peakdesignslide #ef24105f4l

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Feb 23, 2019 at 7:55am PST

Automotif CXLXX...

Ferrari California parked out front of Cafe Patachou this morning at 49th & Penn...

Amusingly, Patachou has made t-shirts featuring Yelp! reviews...

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Aw yiss...

I guess I have to get Netflix. (Back when Band of Brothers hit, Marko and I got HBO so we could watch, so it's not without precedent.)
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Blech.

Ever have one of those days where you just want to pull the covers over your head and try again tomorrow?
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Big camera, little camera...

To take these pictures, the cameras were put in Program mode with ISO set to Auto, just to see how each one would meter the scene. All of them were wearing lenses that are the closest approximation I have to a 50mm f/1.8 full-frame lens, for that respective sensor size.

This picture was taken using a Pentax Q-S1 and the 01 8.5mm f/1.9 lens. Lens corrections were applied in Photoshop, but no lighting correction. With the 12mp 1/1.7" sensor, the less attention drawn to the noise in the shadows, the better. (The camera selected 1/60th @ f/1.9, ISO 1000 for the shot.)

This was the Nikon 1 J1 and the 1 Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.7 lens. The Nikon, with its slightly-larger-than-the-Pentax 10mp 1" sensor had the hardest time with the image. The camera went for 1/60th @ f/1.8, ISO 900. Trying to save the highlights using the auto function in photoshop left the shadows noisy. I could go in and tweak, I suppose.

Lastly, a Fujifilm X-E1 and Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8, which the camera shot at 1/55th @ f/1.8, ISO 800. The 16mp APS-C has plenty of dynamic range for the picture, but now we run into depth-of-field issues. The longer 32mm lens (still roughly a 50mm FF equivalent) has such a shallow DoF at this range with an f/1.8 aperture that the book spines are nicely in focus, but the cameras in front of them are starting to blur, and the boot toes and lens fronts are noticeably blurry.

Now my OCD self wants to repeat the scene with the EF 50mm f/1.8 on the 5D Mark II, but I'll have to wait for tonight.

Creating Jobs...

Who says technology doesn't create jobs? In addition to learning to code, here are a couple other jobs in our current bleak cyberpunk dystopia that only William Gibson could have foreseen:

• Amazon Arbitrageur: Apparently there are people who make a living driving around to big box stores, emptying out the deep discount clearance shelves, and then re-selling the stuff at a markup as Amazon sellers.


• Instagram Influencer: In the world of Count Zero, Tally Isham was a Sense/Net star who traveled the world, having soap opera adventures in exciting places that her followers could experience through her Zeiss Ikon eye implants. In the world of This Current Year, Meghan Young travels the world and climbs mountains in exotic locations, which her followers can experience through her Canon DSLR and her iPhone.

From conversation elsewhere...

OOCQOTD: “I forget that Europeans prefer their firearms homicide wholesale and industrialized, rather than artisanal and retail.”

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 18, 2019

Dammit, Jussie...

I kept silent on social media regarding the Jussie Smollett incident up until now, mostly because I saw how some of the folks who expressed skepticism on the matter got handled. Chris Hernandez posted on his author page on Facebook, and had people losing their fecal matter in the comments almost immediately.

"Yes, there is an *allegation* of a racist, anti-gay attack by Trump supporters. No, there is no evidence supporting the allegation. No video thus far shows an attack, or attackers matching the suspect description, despite numerous cameras in the area. No container for the bleach allegedly poured on Smollett has been located. No witnesses corroborate Smollett’s allegation.

Not only that, but the attackers tied a rope around Smollett’s neck and he left it on as he walked home after the attack, then left it on for forty more minutes after arriving home, then still had it on when the police arrived however many minutes later? Really?
...
If some conservative icon like Ann Coulter claimed Antifa had attacked her in a heavily-surveilled area but no video or witnesses supported her claim, and parts of her story didn’t add up, I’d call shenanigans and demand evidence before I believed her."

As a matter of fact, several friends with actual police detective experience independently used some variation of the line "If you take a report and the events sound implausible, it's probably because it didn't happen that way."

What pisses me off about this whole thing is that yes, there are still plenty of overtly hateful, racist assholes. There are even ones bold enough to curb-stomp a gay black man if they thought they could get away with it. But the number of those lurking inside the Chicago Loop on a freezing January night, waiting to tie a symbolic noose and cackle "THIS IS MAGA COUNTRY!" cartoonishly as they run off is statistically zero.

Even leave off the part about Jussie never mentioning the attack to the doorman/security at his building, never dropping his Subway sandwich, still having the "noose" around his neck when the police arrive... the attack scenario itself doesn't pass the smell test, let alone the irregularities in the aftermath.

The whole thing reads like some "ripped from the headlines" Law & Order episode, which is unsurprising since Jussie's been an actor since he was in elementary school, went to a $10,000/yr Catholic High School in suburban New Jersey, and has probably never seen an actual bedsheet-wearing Klansman in his life.

I don't know what drives a dude to feel like he has to generate some drama like this in his life, and it saddens me, in that it just makes it harder for the guy who isn't an actor, who didn't go to an expensive private school, and who actually does get curb-stomped by a couple of racist, homophobic assholes to be believed.

The lesson of The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!" isn't that there aren't any wolves, after all.
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Overheard in the Kitchen:
Me: "I'm hungry. I think I'll order some Taco Bell from Door Dash."
RX: "Wow, the official food of self-loathing!"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 18, 2019

Oh no, there could be two...

It already seems to be taken for granted that Bloomberg's gonna make a try for the Democrat nomination in 2020, but listening to De Blasio on Meet the Press this morning, I got a real "hat tossing in ring" vibe from him, too.

Also, that guy has an ego that can be seen from orbit with the naked eye.
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Background Checks Stop Nothing

So, a dude with a previous conviction for a violent felony managed to pass a background check for an Illinois Firearm Owner ID card, and managed to pass a NICS check to purchase a handgun, and it wasn't until they ran his prints when he was applying for an Illinois toter's permit that the previous conviction turned up.

So they denied him the permit and sent him a letter asking him to pretty please hand the gun over.

Instead, he took the gun to his job and shot up the meeting where they were firing him, and then ran around shooting up the place in general. What stopped his rampage? Someone shot his ass. That's what stops murderous jerkwads: Getting shot. Not background checks, not fingerprints, not purchase permits or ID cards.

The only problem is that nobody there had a gun with which to shoot said jerkwad, so he pretty much had the run of the place while they waited for people with guns to show up.

That's what these incidents tend to have in common: A serious lack of shooting back.
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It's true...

For good or ill, revolvers are on the wane. They were replaced as duty/service guns wholesale in the 1980s, and their strongest holdout niche, the 5-shot concealable snubby, is being eclipsed by the tiny pocket .380 pistol.

And it's not like Millennials are going to develop a sudden affection for revolvers (or 1911s) when they turn 40, either, any more than they're likely to suddenly develop an interest in Harleys with their first gray hair.

Elsewhere I predicted that in ten years the shrunken revolver market would be mostly big hunting magnums, weirdo .410 shot pistols, cowboy repros for SASS, and maybe a tiny niche holdout remnant of small and medium frame wheelguns.

Photo editing...

Squirrel shot with EOS 40D and EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

Homicide

Last night before bed, I finished reading Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.

I cannot recommend the book highly enough if you're interested in the mechanics and root causes of the freakishly high homicide rates in America's inner cities. The author spent most of a decade practically embedded with LAPD homicide detectives in South LA and obviously cares about the subject.
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Cats & Dogs

Me, from discussion elsewhere on the topic of cats & dogs: "I mean, I like dogs and all, but that's a lot of commitment. At that point you're basically only 'saving for college' away from having kids."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 12, 2019

Photography is not a crime...

...except when it is.

One such case would be if you are a foreign student found wandering around snapping pictures of the antenna farms of an interagency intelligence facility located on a Naval Air Station. Especially if you'd walked past a bunch of fences and "KEEP OUT: THIS MEANS YOU" signs to get there.

That's the sort of behavior that tends to get teh feds a little bit spun up.

Obligatory "Reefer Madness"-grade video about the facility's main gig, supporting the War on (Some) Drugs, below. Presumably they're also making sure those tricksy Cubans aren't fixin' to invade or anything.


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Spoiler Alert: It's the latter...

It amazes me how many people responded to my @ShootingIllustr column on WMLs with "Well, they don't substitute for a handheld!" or "Only with training in proper use!"

It's like I wrote the 4th & 5th paragraphs in vain. Or maybe they didn't actually read it.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 11, 2019

Icy Night

Rebel T1i

Bobbi got home from her writing class just before seven last night, which meant we just had time to duck over to Next Door American Eatery for dinner.

Having had a pretty substantial brunch with Shootin' Buddy, I just had the Buffalo chicken bites appetizer and a gin gimlet for dessert.

iPhone 7 Plus

The night was thinking about icing up as we left...

Rebel T1i

Yesterday was the last day of spending a week with the Rebel T1i. Starting today, it's a week with the EOS 40D.

The 40D is actually older than the T1i, with a 10.1mp APS-C sensor using the DIGIC III processor versus the Rebel's 15mp/DIGIC 4 setup. However it's also a prosumer body, which is more rugged and weather-resistant and features a number of other features, like a top-panel LCD and the distinctive Canon control wheel on the rear of the body.

They're available used from Amazon sellers as cheap as $99 right now, and I actually got this one for $79 shipped from KEH back in November with a Black Friday sales code.
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It's true.

People downloaded ASCII porn unironically. https://t.co/68eDJUQeDI

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 10, 2019

Battleground State

Illinois gun owners had fought hard for years and made hellacious headway in the battle to get CCW and at least a measure of preemption passed, so it's especially painful to see all that hard work threatened by their new Future License Plate Craftsman in Springfield, J.B. Pritzker.

The war never ends.
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I feel like this was a William Gibson plot...

Just think: You lived to see the era where supermarket tabloids pick fights with dudes who have their own space programs!#BezosBlackmail #CyberpunkisNow

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 9, 2019

"Publish and be damned!"

The post title is the famous retort of the Duke of Wellington when a publisher offered to leave him out of the salacious memoirs of a courtesan in exchange for a healthy sum of cash.

Similarly, Jeff Bezos seems to have correctly divined that the average American in 2018 has a lot less of a problem with the idea of consenting adults texting each other dick pics or bobs and vagene than they do about a tabloid surreptitiously getting ahold of said communications and attempting to use them for blackmail purposes.
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Serious Blasphemy

"Through the grapevine has come a hint that the designated hitter may become a universal reality in Major League Baseball in the not-too-distant future.

Hurry up. Oh, for the love of David Ortiz, Edgar Martinez and Frank Thomas, please hurry up."

As of right now, the National League is the only remaining holdout of Real Baseball, which clearly states in Rule 1.01 that "Baseball is a game between two teams of nine players each", not "nine players plus a designated hitter".

Once the Designated Hitter appears in the National League, can the final gasps of the republic be far behind?
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19°F on the banks of Eagle Creek...

Cold enough at the range that I was loading a mag in the car, hopping out & shooting a 10rd chrono string, recording data, and hopping back in car to reload the mag for the next string.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 8, 2019

Trying different glass...

While inexpensive for a full frame zoom lens with that range, the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6 USM was disappointing. Not very sharp, lots of chromatic aberration.

Yesterday I swapped another old lens onto the T1i, the EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM. While nominally the same aperture range, the better glass and Image Stabilization make a big difference in sharpness.

Straw Gun Training

From an older post at Gun Culture 2.0:

"...Keller argues for a combat proven approach to training that focuses on the constants of gunfighting. The post-9/11 essence of gun training is spending time on a square range mastering the basic techniques that apply in every gunfight: getting the gun up, getting sight picture, and pulling the trigger.
...
[Y]et, he observes, many of his peers who have the same operational experience do not train in this manner. Instead, they are “getting wrapped up in the whole wooing the customer thing, with the fancy drills and the running around doing the GI Joe stuff. Some of the guys that do have experience are teaching that stuff but it’s because they know that’s what sells.”"

Now, I'll readily admit that I've avoided a couple of the more... notorious? internet famous? ...trainers, but at this point my training resume is pretty varied. Since this stuff is usually for work (and could quite possibly come up if I ever actually have to defend myself), I keep a spreadsheet documenting my training hours.

Looking over that list and discarding all the various legal and medical and other classroom stuff and limiting it to only life-fire range classes, I count fifteen different trainers/schools since 2008. And those fifteen come from a wide variety of backgrounds: LE, .mil, private citizens...

I have yet to encounter anything I'd describe as "fancy drills" or "running around doing GI Joe stuff". I've certainly never attended a class where the basics of marksmanship were not stressed. In fact, in most classes I've taken, marksmanship was not just stressed but scored and graded and the best shooters were usually recognized in some way.

Maybe I'm attending the wrong classes?
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You know what they say about opinions...

From the WML column, Marlon Rando has an opinion!

Well, I believe I will consider the opinions of dudes like Darryl Bolke and Chuck Haggard over Rando Calrissian and his fifty-year-old shoes.
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Tab Clearing...

• Gun Curious


• The Newspaper Death Spiral

For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on. Though that is part of that. Here’s a cliffs notes version - not exhaustive but it hits the highlights:

— Jeremy Littau (@JeremyLittau) January 24, 2019

Meanwhile, in American-Occupied America...

Via the NRA-ILA, Indiana pro-RKBA bills advance out of committee...

House Bill 1284, sponsored by Representative Jim Lucas (R-69), passed from the House Committee on Judiciary by a vote of 9-2. It would provide immunity for a justified use of force in certain instances to help prevent frivolous lawsuits. Victims of violent crime shouldn’t be subjected to unnecessary civil suits, therefore being victimized twice. This bill would also require a court to award, in certain instances, reasonable attorney's fees if it determines a suit was brought unjustly, helping to prevent financial ruin for individuals protecting themselves and others. 

House Bill 1643, sponsored by Representative Ben Smaltz (R-52), passed from the House Committee on Public Policy by a vote of 12-0. It would increase the duration of a 4-year License to Carry a Handgun (LTCH) to five years and also eliminate the fee. In addition, it would allow gun owners greater ability to carry a firearm for self-defense in houses of worship, while respecting private property owner rights.

Contact your state legiscritters, Hoosiers.
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A systemic failure...

I thought regressive taxes that made it harder for low income people to exercise civil rights were a bad thing?

I’ve introduced HB 5700, a 50% tax increase on ammunition. It doesn’t apply to military or law enforcement. I’m hearing push back about the need to protect one's home... but how much ammunition does someone really need to do that? #gunsense #enough pic.twitter.com/NZjkWBrpjC

— Jillian Gilchrest (@Jilchrest) February 4, 2019

There is a systemic failure to get folks to understand that the Second Amendment is enshrining a basic civil right, the right to defense... defense of self, community, and nation ...by ensuring that the people have adequate access to the proper tools for that defense.

You'd never see someone putting an op-ed in a national outlet asking if we love the right to a trial by jury or the right to be protected against cruel and unusual punishment more than we love our kids.

"Oh, but people misuse their right to keep and bear arms!"

Hey, I'm pretty sure a lot of people on the Left think that a significant portion of the electorate misused their right to vote in 2016, and I don't see hair-shirted op-eds talking about reasonable restrictions on that.
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Rebel on the Canal

Got lunch up in Broad Ripple proper today. I'd had a hankering for cheese enchiladas, but La Piedad is closed until Monday while they redo the flooring in the place. I fell back on Public Greens, where I had their delicious buttermilk-dredged fried chicken tenders and curried cauliflower salad.

The rain still hadn't resumed after I'd finished eating, so I strolled down the Monon toward the canal. River House, a big "mixed use" development overlooking where the canal comes off the White River, has just opened up, and joins The Coil, down where the canal is bridged by College Avenue as looming new bookends on Broad Ripple Village. Several more developments of this sort are going in, making me wistful for the days when we used to joke that the tiny three-story office building across the Monon from the Brewpub was "Broad Ripple's skyscraper".

I had the Rebel T1i with me, still wearing the 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6 USM zoom. The overcast day was presenting a challenge.

It's not a good lens for pixel peepers at all. It's soft wide open and often ate up with chromatic aberration. And "wide open" isn't terribly wide...

Used thoughtfully, however, it's still capable of reasonably adequate results.

I'll put slightly better glass on it for tomorrow's adventures and see how that works out.
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Weapon-Mounted Lights and You!

"First, seek out some training in the proper use of a weapon-mounted light. This is important in learning how to use it to illuminate your surroundings while moving with the gun in either a high or low muzzle-aversion carry position, using the “spill” from the beam as well as the “bounce,” or reflected light, off the ceiling or walls to light a room. (Hollywood tends to have everyone running around with WMLs held horizontally at eye-level, in a “what-not-to-do” fashion.)"

Pedocracy: Government by Children

No, I'm not referring to our constant yearning to be lectured by the Youth of America on a host of social topics.

Rather I'm referring to the spectacle into which the State of the Union address has apparently devolved.

The presumptive leader of the party that regularly calls out the president for his cartoonishly exaggerated antics spent the entirety of the evening posturing and emoting over his shoulder like the love child of Marcel Marceau and a professional wrestling villain.

By this rate, the factions'll be throwing things at each other during the 2025 State of What's Left of the Union.
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Dinosaur!

Walking back from lunch, the gate was open on the dinosaur's yard. Hooray!
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DSLRing on the cheap...

Canon's naming conventions for its consumer-grade DSLR cameras in the US are a hot mess, ranking  on the indecipherable mystery scale somewhere between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the colored lines on a hockey rink.

They rationalized it a little by using "i" as the suffix for the nicer models, but the simple numeric system they use for the Euro market is more easily sussed out.

The Rebel T1i seen here is the 500D in Europe. It's easy to understand that three digits is the nicer consumer model, and that the 500D succeeded the 450D and was in turn replaced by the 550D. That it was more upscale than the entry-level 1000D was indicated by its fewer digits, and it was in turn more downmarket than the contemporaneous 50D prosumer camera.

Available used for a couple hundred bucks with a kit zoom lens on Amazon, it can be found even cheaper as a body only. Paired with an inexpensive zoom lens, it's a cheap toe in the water of DSLRs.

It's got a 15-megapixel sensor, which is plenty of resolution for most any chore, and it's the first entry-level Canon DSLR to offer video and live view.

I'll shoot a bunch of pics with it this week and see how it holds up these days.
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In the Record Books... Again?

Yesterday was beautiful here in Indy. The air smelled like springtime and melting snow as the temps got up to 62°F, a hundred degrees warmer than Wednesday's wind chill.

This tied the record high for February 2nd, and while it might be hell on the pavement for the temperature to swing that much, it sure was a welcome change from last week's deep freeze.
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#PopMorePopcorn

So, basically #GovNortham is retreating to the classic "These aren't my pants" defense so familiar to street cops.https://t.co/PuaU9T3MMB

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 2, 2019

Gear Ho'

This McSweeney's piece, the lamenting monologue of a tactical backpack being dragged through the mundane life of the office worker is absolutely hilarious:

"Last week my grandfather found out a backpack my age was part of the Osama bin Laden raid, and his words still echo in my ears. Now that’s a real backpack. Why can’t you be more like that? When David carried me onto Omaha Beach, it certainly wasn’t to carry his Juul. The most perilous adventure Trevor has taken me on was that $4,500 luxury whitewater rafting trip, and he kept complaining that the guides were cooking meals that exacerbated his acid reflux.

Oh no, Trevor is unzipping me. What fresh humiliation will this bring? Ah, he is getting another Lara Bar from one of my pouches — one of six designed to hold extra 40mm grenades. I hope he chokes."

I know that, could a lot of my stuff talk, it'd be right there with the backpack, because when it comes to gear, I believe there's no kill like overkill.

Cold weather clothing? I don't buy the mittens from the gas station, I'm buying stuff that's designed to keep someone's hands warm while they assault the north face of the Eiger with an ice axe. I figure that if long johns are designed to keep someone warm sitting around Camp III on the South Face of Everest, then they'll definitely be up to keeping me warm while shoveling the walk or strolling to Twenty Tap.

I love the webbing on the Maxpedition Fliegerduffel that I've been using for near a decade now, because I've used it to attach a blowout kit to the outside of my bag. (I put one on the outside of my Hazard 4 camera bag, too.) This has the added side benefit of having trauma shears ready to hand so I can cut the goofy zip tie off my Pelican right there in front of the baggage office in the airport. I figure if bags are designed for jumping out of a helicopter with a knife in your teeth, they should definitely be up to the rigors of baggage handlers or the bin above my seat in Comfort Plus.

It's probably why I like pro-grade camera bodies from Canon and Nikon so much. Sure, they're crazy stupid heavy, but you could use my D1x or 1DS Mark II to beat a dude to death and then take pictures of the body. Any camera up to taking war correspondent photos in a snowstorm in the Hindu Kush is well capable of taking pictures of squirrels in Broad Ripple.

Still chuckling...

The best #GovNortham joke so far has been whichever pundit called him "Governor Partial Birth of a Nation". I'm just mad I didn't come up with that one.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 2, 2019

Pet Peeve...

You know what's a pet peeve of mine? People who use "smooth" to describe the way a handgun shoots. "I love my Beretta nine! It shoots so smooth!"

Dude, an explosion just went off in your hand. If you were to hand me a list of all the adjectives in the English language and ask me to put them in order from "Most describing a gunshot" to "Least describing a gunshot", then "smooth" would be way down there somewhere between "turgid" and "moist".
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Paranoia strikes deep...

So the Military Arms Channel guy has apparently decided that there's some deep NRA conspiracy to take him down.

The meme backlash has been savage. Share and enjoy!

I only wish that the NRA had that level of skill at skullduggery and manipulation!
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In the record books!

Today's low temperature (-11°F) is officially as cold as it's ever been on January 30th in Indianapolis. It's only been colder than this twice since I've moved here. We saw twelve below back on 1/16/09 and fifteen below on January 6th, 2014.

It's still a ways off the overall record low, which was set on January 19th of 1994: -27°F.

The noteworthy thing about today is that the daily high is still predicted by some sources to top out at -2°F. If the high temperature doesn't make it to zero degrees Fahrenheit, that'll only be the seventeenth time since they started keeping track in 1880. The last was on that January day in '94.

At least there's no snow to speak of, because I'd hate to be out shoveling in this.

A lot of the Boomers on social media are griping about all the weather talk. "Bah! It barely got above zero in July when we were kids, and we didn't call it any kinda 'polar vortex'! We called it 'winter' and went skinny dipping in the old liquid methane swimming hole!"

I'm just tickled to see people talking about something other than politics...although a surprising number of people can turn even idle chatter about the weather into political tribal signaling.
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Shot Caller

Environmental effects...

The office here at Roseholme Cottage has two exterior walls, and my desk is over in the cold corner. The overhead light fixture, which used to hold incandescent bulbs, now has LEDs. The corner of my desk that used to have a bigass tower PC, with its bigass video card and bigass power supply, now has a Mac mini.

There used to be a lot of waste heat in this room that could make it unpleasant in the summer. Its absence is noticed in an extended period of subzero outside temperatures.
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Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night will stop the mail

But apparently -30°F will do the trick, at least in areas where that's not a common temperature.

Apparently the USPS has canceled deliveries in Iowa, Minnesota, and western portions of Wisconsin and Illinois tomorrow.
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MFT here to stay?

I don't necessarily disagree with his points, even though between October when he recorded this, and today, Olympus announced the OM-D E-M1X. The M1X is the first pro-grade MFT body to ape the CaNikon 1D/Dx style. with a built-in vertical grip & dual batteries, and has feature sets that tilt it heavily toward sports/action photographers and nature photogs.

Derp Tier Gear Reviews...

Something I just don't get...

CrapCo: "Here's this useless piece of complete garbage that you'd throw away if it fell right at your feet out of a vending machine you hadn't put any money in. We'll let you keep it for free if you say nice things about it!" 

Social Media Influencer: "Okay!"

Leaving Las Vegas

So, my trip home started by leaving The Mirage in an Uber on Saturday at about 6:30AM local. (If you're considering buying a Nissan Altima, they have cavernous trunks. We fit two large suitcases and several smaller bags.)

Got to LAS plenty early and nursed a Bloody Mary until my 0930 flight, a short hop to John Wayne Airport in Orange County.

Once there, I had a three-hour layover, which I whiled away at California Pizza Kitchen, reading Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.

Boarding was a snafu. Of course the gate lice all piled around the boarding area the minute it seemed like were were near boarding, so even if you had paid for early boarding and extra legroom, you got to elbow your way through the steerage passengers to get there.

There was about a fifteen minute delay in starting the process, no doubt because the plane was waiting on lemon-scented moistened towelettes, and then once in the plane, the winds shifted and they had to turn the airport around.

Well, they don't actually turn the airport around, they just switch which direction is the active runway. We were in a 757, however, and for eldritch reasons involving size, weight, and noise abatement, we could only take off in the one direction, so we went from being first in line for takeoff to fourth.

The end result of all this was that we pulled up to Gate A19 in ATL at 9:48PM local. My boarding time for my connecting flight to IND was 9:42PM. According to the Delta app on my phone, I'd already been rebooked on a 9AM flight, but I was damned if I was gonna be spending the night roaming the halls of Harstfield-Jackson.

I checked the monitor and the IND flight was departing from Gate B13, so I hefted my bigger camera bag, not even bothering to deploy the handle, stumbled down the escalator and lurched through the already-closing doors of the tram.

Back up the escalator at B Concourse... I think I hurt my shoulder lugging the bag like I did ...I  jog shuffled the last few gates to B13, which was just finishing the boarding process.

At the time I was uncertain if my bag was going to try to make the flight, too, or if it was going to be sent home in the morning on the flight on which I'd been re-booked, but that was a chance I was willing to take. After a week on the road, I was more than ready for my own bed.

Fortunately, my checked bag made the connection, too. By half-past midnight, I was dragging my baggage through the snowy front yard and home to Roseholme Cottage.

Now if you'll pardon me, I have a week's worth of laundry to do.
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SHOT Show stuff...

• Bond Arms 2019 products...


• Black Rain Ordnance Ion 9 9mm pistol/PCC...


• CompMag Cali-legal mag hack...

View this post on Instagram

LOL

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Jan 25, 2019 at 8:51am PST

SHOT Show stuff...

• Professional-grade gun security


• New stuff from VZ Grips


• Mossberg MC1sc

SHOT Show stuff...

I'm covering SHOT for RECOIL Magazine again this year.

• PTR 9mm MP5 clone


• Seismic Ammo 185gr 9mm


• Sig Sauer P229 SAO & Grayguns 10mm P220

Day Whatever of the Shutdown...

It has finally affected me, in that a gun I'm supposed to be reviewing for a magazine is pending approval for importation by the BATFE. Apparently there's only the one copy in the country right now, the one that had been sent for review by the feds.
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Well, that was exciting...

I turned on the AFC Championship game at halftime yesterday, more out of curiosity than anything else. Mahomes had been so impressive against the Colts that I wanted to see how he'd do against our nemesis.

Ho-hum. Pats up 14-0. The Cinderella Chiefs and their rookie phenom were getting demolished by the Belichick Machine... and then came the second half, and specifically the fourth quarter, featuring something like four or five lead changes. That was some edge-of-the-seat football, and I'm not even much of a fan.
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Good shooters...

Whenever I post a target and mention that I wasn't happy with my performance, I get a bunch of people telling me that I shouldn't be so hard on myself, that it was *good enough*.

Good enough isn't good enough; I want to be better than good enough.

I doubt Lena Miculek goes to the range and thinks "Eh, that was good enough. I don't need to get better."
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Last night...

Fresh home from the vet, having been x-rayed, palpated, had blood and urine samples taken with needles, given subcutaneous fluids, and otherwise had her dignity disrespected, Miss Random Numbers J. Wu got home and hopped into Roberta's desk chair for a well-earned nap...

X-rays showed that she didn't have impacted stool, but she did have a hard, dried ball of poop she was probably having extreme difficulty with. Rehydration and stool softeners were indicated.

I don't look forward to being her age. I imagine I'll have the same method of dealing with doctor's visits:

"This isn't happening. This isn't happening. This isn't happening."

Sick Kitty

Rannie, who turned seventeen in September, has been dealing with kidney issues that sometimes make it difficult for her to keep food down.

This morning she showed no interest in her breakfast and has been throwing up bile. Unsuccessful litter box attempts make us think it's an intestinal blockage. I'm taking her to the vet and hopefully it's something they can clear up with a kitty enema.