Does Not Work That Way

Another kid who is an expert on firearms policy by virtue of attending a school that was in the same state as one where a school shooting took place has had an op-ed published at CNN.com. He wants to know which of the two remaining serious contenders for the Democratic nomination is willing to screw Second Amendment rights harder. He has some specific concerns:

"While a few laws have been passed, gun enthusiasts have found more creative ways to obtain their guns: getting them from older friends/family, borrowing guns from someone licensed or even purchasing guns online (a loophole to background check laws)."

Andrew Tuohy would like to rebut:

"Here at Omaha Outdoors, we’ve been inundated with inquiries from out-of-state folks – many from California – asking if we can ship them a gun directly. The answer is, of course, no. Despite what politicians and many in popular media claim, you can’t buy a gun online and have it shipped to your house. Well, you could, if you were a federally licensed firearm dealer (or federally licensed curio and relic collector) and your home was your place of business. Other than that, no, you can’t buy a gun online and have it shipped, especially across state lines, to your home."

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My kind of national emergency!

Never before in my life has lounging around the house, still in my pyjamas, well into Sunday afternoon felt like doing the responsible thing.

Turns out I was way ahead of the curve on this one!
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There's a word for that...

If we get nothing else out of this, I will at least have learned that the Germans have a word for panic-hoarding. "Hamsterkauf" joins "schadenfreude" and "backpfeifengesicht" as useful additions to my lexicon.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 15, 2020

Making the Gauge Better

True story: I've been an unabashed Magpul fangirl since back when all they made were...well, Magpuls. Every product they released seemed super clever, well-engineered, and was obviously designed by end-users. (It didn't hurt that their design aesthetic, both industrial- and graphic- was just tight.)

When the SGA first dropped, my heart sank a little. "Well, that's it. They've jumped the shark. A plastic shotgun stock? Well, I guess everyone's entitled to make one goofy product..."

Then I tried one. Now I won't use an 870 without it. I was wronger than dammit. It's got all the favorable attributes of a pistol grip stock and none of the drawbacks of one.

Toilet Paper Status: Protected.

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I mean, he's not wrong...

The USA is currently running a fascinating experiment to determine if nationwide social media driven panic can be as an effective tool for virus control as an authoritarian communist dictatorship's government mandated quarantines.

It might actually work.

— Handwaving Freakoutery (@Freakoutery) March 13, 2020

It's the free-market solution!
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Uncommon Denominator

Redfield said there has been "a surveillance system of deaths from pneumonia, that the CDC has; it’s not in every city, every state, every hospital.”

Rouda followed up and asked, “So we could have some people in the United States dying for what appears to be influenza when in fact it could be the coronavirus?”

The doctor replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed that way in the United States today.”

The reason that all the talk about how dangerous this actually is, versus the regular flu or whatever, is specious is that we have no idea how many cases there actually have been.

How many people who died of the flu or pneumonia in the US earlier in the year had actually died of covid-19? How many people who just thought they had the cold or the flu and got better, have already recovered from a bout of coronavirus and don't realize it because they never felt sick enough to get themselves tested? Who knows? It's a lot of guesswork and handwaving right now.

All the numbers are based on diagnosed cases and, given the status of testing in the US...and the fact that prior to this month only a hypochondriac or a medical professional was likely to get themselves tested unless they were sick as a dog...it wouldn't be a stretch to say that the majority of cases in this country, at least up until extremely recently, likely went untested.

I've pointed this out before: People were dying in Wuhan in the first week of January. SHOT Show coincided with the lunar new year, as usual, and Vegas was awash in crowds of tourists from China, as usual. (To say nothing of various parts and accessories manufacturers exhibiting at SHOT.) Were any of them from Wuhan? How many cases of "SHOT crud" would have tested positive for novel coronavirus?

We have no idea what the actual denominator for this looks like, so even the most scientific pronouncements are still real sketchy.

All that being said, there's a bad sick going around. Take the kind of precautions being suggested and don't be Typhoid Mary for the elderly and infirm, okay?
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I Bless the Raids Down in Africa

Apparently you can get a lot more racial discord sown from your ruble if you spend it in Ghana:

"On February 6, Ghanaian security services raided the EBLA compound. On that same day the group stopped posting on the social media accounts it had created. One of the workers told CNN they were told to lie on the ground and had guns pointed at them. They were interrogated by police and the phones used to post on the fake accounts were confiscated.

When CNN visited the compound two weeks later, it appeared to have been abandoned.

In a statement to CNN, the Ghanaian security services said their Cyber Security Unit had become suspicious of EBLA's activities and believed it was engaged in "organized radicalism with links to a foreign body." They added that they had determined that "EBLA receives its funding from an anonymous source in a European country."

Ghanaian security sources subsequently told CNN that all of EBLA's funding had come from Russia."

Intelligence agencies exploiting discord and fracture points in the societies of rival or hostile powers is likely as old as the existence of nation states themselves, but the internet and social media make it a squillion times more effective. And it's a lot more effective against democracies than autocracies.
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_____phobia!

Coronavirus is triggering rampant #germophobia in backwards red state America! https://t.co/ifE0z8Y5Dg

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 13, 2020

Always good for a chuckle...

“Drunken octopus wants to fight you” never fails to crack me up. pic.twitter.com/yLIY8Pz6ix

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 12, 2020

Second thoughts on some blasters...

Very positive experiences with, first the Gen5 Glock 26 and then the FN 509C have caused me to reevaluate my previous mild disdain for widebody subcompacts in the era of the slim nine...

I'd like to add that the TLR-7 they let us use in the Aaron Cowan class at the FN launch event was useful enough that I went ahead and ordered the one in the picture from Amazon when I got home. Bitty little lights have come a long way, and this one's held up to use on the test gun so far.

Also, yay for Thyrm CLENS on a pistol with a WML that gets shot a lot. There wasn't a size specifically for the TLR-7 on the CLENS sheets I got, but the Inforce APL ones are close enough for government work.
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Overheard in the Office...

Holden is in the advanced stages of attention-seeking behavior in Bobbi's lap, which results in being scolded and unceremoniously set on the floor.

RX: (to cat) "No, no! No chewing on the arm! That is not how we get attention." 

RX: (to me) "Does he chew on your arm?" 

Me: "No. For that matter, Huck has never bitten me, either." 

RX: "Why do cats bite me and not you?" 

Me: "I dunno. You look biteable?"

Relentless Strike

Finished up an interesting book the other day.

Sean Naylor set out to write a history of Joint Special Operations Command in the GWOT, from the start of things in the immediate wake of 9/11 up to the Abbotabad raid. He found he couldn't do that without going back to the start of JSOC itself, which came out of the failed Iranian hostage rescue mission, Operation Eagle Claw.

The end result is the book Relentless Strike, which details how the machine that was doing multiple raids a night in Iraq was built up over the years.

Experience gained by SFOD-Delta in Columbia and the former Yugoslavia (helping hunt narcoterrorists in the former and war criminals in the latter) was put to use going after al Qaeda and other targets in Iraq.

There's a lot of fascinating stuff in the book about how targets were found and tracked and their networks exposed. Overhead surveillance by drones and manned aircraft turned into games of cat and mouse as targets would change cars and go afoot to throw off tails. Cell phone calls were routinely monitored, and a captured cell phone was a gold mine of intel.

One network of HVT's attempted to avoid surveillance by the expedient of all using a single email address: Write an email, save as draft, and then an ally can log on to the same address halfway around the world and read the message without it ever having been sent and possibly intercepted. Which is great until Task Force Orange hacks the account and is reading the drafts...and watching where people sign into the account from.

It's a pretty good look into the whole history of the organization during the time period*. Recommend.


*And I have to say "history of the time period" since the days of hunting Zarqawi and Bin Laden are now as far in the past as MACV-SOG was when I was in high school, hard as that is to wrap my head around.
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Bargain lens...

View this post on Instagram

For the #Nikon shooter on a budget, the bang for the buck ratio for this thing is off the chain. (As long as your camera can focus it.) #nikon80200mm #d700

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Mar 10, 2020 at 10:05am PDT

I've linked before to an older Ken Rockwell piece on not buying older digital cameras, and he had a point when he wrote it...back in 2005.

"Likewise, why would I want to bother using my three year old huge, heavy and cumbersome $4,000 Nikon D1H DSLR when a D70 is better, lighter, sharper, runs longer on batteries and is even easier to use for only $800?"

The D1H bordered on experimental, basically v1.5 of Nikon's first in-house DSLR, and it used big and fiddly NiCad batteries (which it drained at a prodigious clip). Five year old digital cameras were pretty well outclassed in every way in 2005.

Nowadays, though, I have no real problem using a Nikon D700, a camera that was discontinued in 2012. It lacks conveniences like an articulating touchscreen or wifi, but those are things I've never used enough to miss on a camera. I offload my pictures via SD or CF card and sneakernet anyway. This older camera is a screaming deal for a rugged prosumer full-frame body.

Heck, for several years after the D700 was discontinued, some people contended that Nikon hadn't offered a real replacement; the D800 & 810 were high-MP studio/landscape cameras and the D600/610 lacked ruggedness and weather sealing and shared the control layout of the consumer-tier Nikons. It wasn't till the 750 was released that there was a "true D700 successor".

But a new D780, the just-released second generation D700 successor, is a twenty five hundred dollar proposition, and even a refurbed D750 is still over a grand. Meanwhile, this fairly low shutter count D700 cost the same or less as the lower tier D5600 you'd get at a big box store, and unlike that D5600 it has the focus motor in the body so you can shoot lenses like that push-pull 80-200mm f/2.8 lens in the picture.

Since Canon's EF-mount 70-200mm f/2.8 L lenses have integral focusing motors, like all EF lenses, and will work on any EF or EF-S body, even used examples of the first, non-IS versions tend to go for more than six bills online. The 80-200 in the picture is the equivalent Nikon pro lens from the era and has great optics and that fast constant 2.8 max aperture like the premium glass it is, but its inability to be used on less expensive bodies keeps its price more reasonable.

Robin sitting very still in a little tree as I walked past with the D700 & 80-200/2.8

100% crop

Feeding The Binary

In New Partisan America, where every issue is divided on party lines, it even effects our reaction to disease.

If you're not absolutely flipping out about COVID-19, it's because you're one of those undereducated Trump-loving Chick-fil-A Americans. If you bought an extra pack of toilet paper and decided not to attend a convention in the middle of flu season, it's because you're one of those SJW librul snowflakes. It's an easy way to signal tribal affiliation to a stranger now, without having to bring up guns or abortion in a conversation.

"Say, what about this coronavirus?" 

"I am very concerned about it." 

"Really? Me, too! Trump needs to go! He's just botching this whole thing."

And media, both social and traditional, lives off this stuff. It's like life fuel for Facebook and CNN.

Like and share!
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Perspective.

ZCQOTD: "I hate it when 'empowerment and self-confidence' runs amok."

People like her need #Shivworks Jesus."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 9, 2020

Mirrorless Musing...

For the last couple years now, I'd been shooting Sony full-frame mirrorless for work and had Canon DSLRs as fun cameras. However, I got sick of the terrible battery life on the original gangsta Sony a7 and the a7 II that required me to wander the floor at SHOT or NRAAM with a battery grip on the camera and a pocket full of spares.

So I sold the a7 & a7 II, and pressed the EOS 5DS into service as my work camera, intending to buy a used a7 III, with its greatly-improved battery life, when the launch of the a7 IV this spring flooded the market with trade-in III's.

But coronavirus has delayed the launch of the IV and, further, the spec sheet doesn't seem to have folks salivating at the thought of the upgrade with the usual level of fervor.

Meanwhile, everyone's gaga over the soon-to-drop Canon R5, which seems to indicate that Canon's finally getting serious about full-frame mirrorless. This is the body that all those amazeballs RF lenses have been waiting for.

What this is telling me is that I should just go ahead and keep shooting Canon until the R5 Mk. II drops and slide back into full-frame mirrorless on those trade-ins. Especially since all my EF L glass will work on an R flawlessly with an adaptor.

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I have brought this upon myself...

Any time one of us comes through the door from the front of the house with something in our hands, Holden assumes it is food being brought to him. So he wails piteously while weaving around your ankles or "following you in front" as slowly as possible and refusing to be chivvied along any faster, all while looking up expectantly.

This is annoying when what he thinks is a scoop full of kibble is actually a mug full of coffee.
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*waves hand in front of nose*

I had forgotten how pungent un-neutered tomcat pee was. Fortunately Holden is relaxed enough to confine his urinating to the litter box. There was the worry that the presence of another large, older tom elsewhere the house might make him anxious enough to want to scent mark stuff, but so far so good.
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Caturday...

Holden has been out of the katzenbunker only since lunchtime today, but he is acclimating well.

He's currently restricted to the office/hallway/bathroom, while Huck is in the front of the house.

Holden is actually physically larger than Huck, and there may well be a Maine Coon in his family tree somewhere, but he's about a pound lighter than the Miniature Broad Ripple Biting Tiger. He's not yet two.

He has to get his head cold cleared up before they can give him the snip on Sunday, so he's on antibiotics. Roberta Ecks has been medicating him after mealtimes and he's not been violently resisting.
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Automotif CLX...

If I had this late W126 SEL (I choose to imagine it's a 560 and not some plebeian 300 turbodiesel or watch-winder 4.2L V-8; it had been de-badged), I would get a shoulder holster for my vz. 61 and spend my days LARPing as a Cold War assassin.

The W126, with only one facelift, was the top-of-the-line Benzo for over a decade, from the 1980 model year to the 1992 one. That pretty much coincided with the formative years of my car nerdery. And when they dropped the 338cid OHC V8 in it for the '87 model year, it pretty much became the apex predator of the sedan world.
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Peeping Tom

Nikon D700 & 80-200mm f/2.8 at the Hamilton County Humane Society today...
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Getting down to the basics.

My friend John Johnston wrote a piece for Shooting Illustrated Online regarding some basic items that can go with you most every day, often in places where firearms can't...

"Let's start with the caveat that everyone should carry a firearm free of restriction, infringement or government interference whenever possible. There are, however, plenty of reasons why someone may either choose--or be required by law--to leave their firearm at home, though. Finding yourself devoid of a firearm does not mean that you are devoid of options. Let’s take a look at some things that are imminently useful in a wide number of scenarios, and can be carried almost anywhere. We’ll start with what you can carry everywhere, and end with a useful tool that you may not be able to bring into certain areas depending on the security screening you need to go through."

It ain't all churched-up Glocks and Langdon Berettas

View this post on Instagram

Back to work with the @taurususa G3 and @federalpremium #9mm ammunition for an upcoming @shooting_illustrated piece. #pewpewlife #indyarmsco #igmilitia

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Mar 5, 2020 at 9:19am PST

I guess the guys at Car and Driver have to test Corollas and Civics in between the Quattroportes and Quadrifoglios, too. So far, this one's running more like a Corolla than a Quadrifoglio anyway.
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Safety First, Accidents Last...

My local gun store/indoor range has started offering a 1-hour, low-cost firearms safety class that doesn't involve any live fire or actual gun-handling.

I think that's a great idea for the "gun curious" as well as people genuinely interested in safety. Looks like they have special arrangements for Sunday school classes or neighborhood associations or whatever.

This is a great idea.
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Bloomberg Bails

This morning's funniest tweet on the topic:

Of course, Bloomberg's war chest has already pre-paid for a bunch of media time, leased office space, contracted professional electioneering consultants. Whatever will become of that investment?

Bloomberg will put his resources “in the broadest way possible behind Joe Biden’s candidacy,” Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to the Bloomberg campaign, said Wednesday. “We have long-term leases and long-term contracts with the team and the intention was always to put this big machine we have built behind whoever the nominee is.”

My shocked face, let me show you it.

Why, if I were of a more conspiratorial bent, I'd say that Mike's whole run was as much about finding an end run around individual campaign contribution limits as anything else.

Meanwhile, in a stunning and no doubt totally unrelated coincidence, Biden seems to have suddenly found religion on the topic of gun control and made it a much bigger talking point in his campaign. Even going so far as to offer Beto a position as AR Grabber-in-Chief in a Biden administration.
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Freakout!

If you want a chuckle, go look at the Amazon search results for "hand sanitizer". It's like trying to find bolt carrier groups in December of 2012.

I'm afraid the top'll get slashed on the Zed Drei from someone trying to get at the Purell bottle in the passenger door pocket. It's actually worth more right now than the ancient incandescent Surefire sitting in there next to it.

Meanwhile, Mountain Home foods is so slammed with orders that they're apparently all just hiding under their desks and not answering the phones.

Jesus wept, people, calm the hell down, will you?
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Nikon's weird offshoot

Although it was intended as a replacement for Disc and 110 film in little point-'n'-shoot cameras, there were some SLRs made for APS. The Pronea 600i (sold in the US as the 6i) was the higher end of the two Nikon offered. While it could use any of the company's F-mount lenses, it shipped with its own APS-specific kit zooms that were not backwards-compatible with other Nikon F-mount bodies.

The dual control wheels for adjusting settings would be familiar to Nikon shooters today, but at the time it was a feature shared only with the top-of-the-line F5. (Another trait shared with the F5 was that both bodies were used by Kodak to build out into early DSLRs.)

The busy display on the back, however, was very similar to the quirky setup on the then-current N70. To use it, one would hold down the "Mode" or "Func(tion)" button while twirling the wheel until the setting you wished to change blinked, then toggle through the available choices in that setting.  In fact, in its feature set, the Pronea 600i could be looked at almost as an APS N70, which was a pretty competent prosumer-tier camera of the time.

The little hatch on the back where you dropped the film cartridge in is simplicity itself. No leader to worry about, just insert the cartridge, click the door shut, and the camera will whir the film out to the first frame...or the first unused frame, if you'd previously used the mid-roll rewind feature.

Pro photographers stayed away in droves and derided the format due to the negatives being smaller than 35mm, but that's like deriding 35mm for not being as big as 120 rollfilm. APS was intended to be more convenient for non-photographers to deal with, like 110 and Disc before it, while being big enough for casual snapshotters to still be able to print reasonably decent 5x7 or 8x10 vacation photos. (Which, actually, was basically 35mm's market position relative to medium format.)

Overheard in the Office...

RX: *makes self-deprecating remark* 

Me: *spins chair around* "Hey, why don't we take an idea from my sister and give up negative self-talk for Lent?" 

RX: "I couldn't stand the ringing silence."

Quirky!

Micro Four Thirds has a sensor that is about the same size as the old 110 film format. This is why I have an adaptor for the Pentax 110 lenses...



The Pentax 110 Auto SLR lenses are all f/2.8, because the lenses themselves have no built-in iris. The aperture blades in the camera are the same as the shutter; two L-shaped metal leaves that retract to make a diamond-shaped opening. If you use an adaptor to shoot these lenses on a MFT camera, you're always going to be shooting wide open.

Calm your pants...

No, you and your neighborhood militia are not going to be getting into running gun battles with Mexican cartel sicarios in the suburbs of Des Moines.
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Unexpected flops...

"How do you manage to fuck up a show about shooting literal Nazis in the face?

'Machine guns and dead Nazis' is like the simplest screenplay idea ever. It's the off tackle left on three of cinema."#HuntersAmazon

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 3, 2020

Speaking of Mustang photos...

I stopped by Roberts Camera this morning and picked up my processed film. Not just the roll of B&W (which I'd actually forgotten about) but also the test rolls from the Nikon Pronea 600i and the Minolta Vectis S-1.

This was Fujifilm Nexia D100 that had been sold as cold stored and it apparently really was. It's massively expired, of course, so I set the ISO manually in the two cameras to 64. This made things a bit challenging with the super slow zoom on the Vectis.

These are unaltered scans from the negatives without any retouching in Photoshop yet. First up is the Nikon.

This one was shot using the Pronea-specific 24-70mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom, in Program mode. I'd have to check the manual, but I'm pretty sure that shooting in Basic wouldn't allow overriding the camera's automated ISO selection.

It's a little soft, but could probably get fixed nicely in P-shop. I would like to try this camera with some B&W film and my trusty old Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF-D lens. I have a few frozen rolls of the Kodak 400 ISO C-41 process B&W film, so just set the ISO to 200 and go to town.

And this one is with the Vectis S-1 and the 25-150mm f/4.5-6.3. It was only partly cloudy out, but between the slow zoom and the 64 ISO setting hand-holding this thing was a challenge.
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David Burge is a national treasure...

Sadly for Mayor Pete, the winds of voter tastes have shifted from youthfully optimistic yet empty platitudes to angry gibberish from elderly East Coast dementia patients

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 2, 2020

Automotif CLIX...

The Mustang on film, again. This time it was Ilford HP5 Plus in a Nikon N80. The N80 was the last prosumer-grade film camera offered by Nikon, launched in 2000 and officially discontinued in 2009. Shooting it is hardly different from shooting a Nikon DSLR, other than needing to open the back and drop in film.

You can compare the grain of the 400 ISO Ilford B&W film to the Ektar 100 color negative film from the last posted film shot of the Mustang here.
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Overheard in the Hallway...

Me: "Well, the Pronea and the Vectis both work." 

RX: "The what? What are you saying?" 

Me: "The Pronea and Vectis." 

RX: "Oh no, I've had a stroke..." 

Me: "Now you know how I feel when you talk about fixing the framminatzer at work!"

Because people's taste is all in their mouths...

...Jaguar was only able to sell 200 of their svelte little XF "Sportbrake" station wagon here in the US the previous year.

Maybe if they gave it a lift kit and a chrome cliff for a prow and called it a "crossover SUV", the 'Murrican motorist might show interest.
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Ugh.

The weather today, as if trying to cheer me up, was glorious.

It was gloriously sunny and north of sixty degrees by the time I trekked over to Fat Dan's for lunch. After my customary weekend ribs, I came home and prepared to drive over to the little local supermarket for some needed supplies; Kleenex, trash bags, that sort of thing.

I went and dropped the top on the Zed Drei to feel the warm breezes of pseudo-spring on my face...

...without stopping to think that it might be 63°F outside, but in the free-standing unheated garage sitting on its concrete slab, it was probably still closer to 37°F.

Now I've got a good 4" crack in the rear window.

It's not really worth replacing the rear window with the top as worn as it is. I'll tape it for now, and then, with the warm months approaching, just put the top down and leave it down* and use the Mustang on rainy days until I've rolled enough pennies to replace the entire top.

*Heck, the tonneau cover is up in the attic someplace...
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Overheard in the Office...

Me: "Oh, man... This is just my jam." 

RX: "What is?" 

Me: "This. 'Parked Cars Under Streetlamps in 1970s New York City'. This is cool. I'd love to do this." 

RX: "You could do this. You'd just have to go to New York City..." 

Me: "And come up with a time machine!" 

RX: "Oh, it's New York City; surely somebody there has a time machine!"

Some people's kids, I swear...

What kind of nasty-ass sonofabitch does this? I'm normally not in favor of starting unnecessary confrontations in public, but it turns out I have a line, and this dude's on the wrong side of it. https://t.co/o7PiAYCqpS

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 1, 2020

Do you want to get pepper sprayed in Fresh Thyme? Because this is how you get pepper sprayed in Fresh Thyme.
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Random Numbers "Rannie" Wu, 9/11/2001-2/29/2020

Originally, Marko and I were just stopping at Pet Smart to pick up supplies for Mittens, but we stopped and looked at the little play pens full of adoptable kittens, and one little calico with a collar around her neck that read "Mary" decided that my hand would be a great thing to fight.

She came home with me that day.

She buzzed around that apartment like a calico tennis ball with a slightly bent pipe cleaner sticking straight up in the air. She never really befriended Mittens, but they tolerated each other.

At first she resented being dragged from The Only Home in Knoxville to Indianapolis, but she came to terms with it. She went from being standoffish toward Bobbi to sitting next to her on the futon and cuddling a little to, here in the last year or so, preferring to sleep nights curled up in the crook of her arm.

Over the last year, the progression of chronic kidney disease, bane of elderly cats, started catching up with her. She'd get dehydrated, nauseous, and stop eating. She'd be taken to the vet and be given subcutaneous fluids and a vitamin shot and it would perk her up to where she'd be acting like her normal self again, but the episodes kept coming closer together. First in January of last year, then again in July, then again in October, January again, and finally this month. She was always a good patient and the vet techs fussed over her and praised her for being a trooper.

This time around she couldn't shake it off and I just couldn't bring myself to force her to fight anymore. She stopped eating days ago, and started refusing water yesterday morning. It was time.

Good bye, little Miss Rannie. You were a very good cat for a very long time. I choose to believe that there's some place for good little cats with plenty of slow mice, lots of toys to sing to, and no annoying bigger cats to pester them.

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Huit Chevaux

Citroen announced a cute little almost-a-car electric runabout, a sort of 21st Century 2CV successor. Supposedly it's going to retail for under seven grand, and because of its low horsepower and maximum speed, it'll be treated like a scooter in several Euro countries.

It's unbearably twee and would make an awesome around-Broad Ripple inclement weather grocery fetcher.
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Not feeling it today.

Normally, subcutaneous fluids, a vitamin B shot, and antibiotics perk Rannie back up, but that hasn't happened this time, and I'm afraid I'm not dealing with it very well.

Posting will likely be light for a bit.
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If you like your alternate history, you can keep your alternate history!

Blah blah, universal healthcare but if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance blah something end the divisiveness yadda yadda move forward...

*record scratch noise*

What did he just say? That he led NYFC through 9/11?

Dude, you can't even remember when you got elected mayor and you want to be president?

If you like your alternate history, you can keep your alternate history!
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That word again...

loophole

loop·​hole | \ ˈlüp-ˌhōl \
plural loopholes
n.
1 : Something legal and normal that the speaker doesn’t like.
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Sniper no sniping!

Stayed up too late watching the first third or so of Battle for Sevastopal last night. It's modern propaganda (intended to generate good feelings between Russia and Ukraine because "Hey, tovarisch, remember when we shot all those Nazis together? Good times, eh? Why do we fight now?") and it's based on a star of WWII Soviet propaganda, but it's a good enough movie that I don't mind.

Overheard in the Dining Room...

I'm not wearing a seatbelt because when Western Civilization crashes, I'm hoping to be thrown clear.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 26, 2020

Jraphical Image Format

Although Jif is obviously pronounced with a "soft G," people often mispronounce the word "GIF," which is short for Graphics Interchange Format. It's said with a "soft G like the peanut butter and not a "hard G." That's according to creator Steve Wilhite, who made the declaration in 2013 while accepting a Webby Award.

Poor guy. Imagine being wrong about the pronunciation of your own creation.
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Watching the Wu

View this post on Instagram

Miss Rannie Wu got subcutaneous fluids, a vitamin B shot, and was sent home with a fresh antibiotics scrip and an appointment for next week. 🤞🏻🐱 #poorkitty #catsofinstagram

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Feb 25, 2020 at 8:16am PST

Poor Miss Random Numbers J. Wu is, according to the chart the vet had taped inside a cabinet door in the exam room this morning, the equivalent of 92 years old in people years. Here at Roseholme Cottage, the practice is to assign birthdays to cats that both fit the rough time when they were born (if unknown) and which match their personality. Huck, for example, gets his birthday feted on Independence Day, because he moved in in December/January as an already large and rangy kitten.

Miss Wu came home in November of 2001, a buzzing calico tennis ball with a vertical pipe cleaner of a tail. She only ever reached the most casual of detentes with Mittens (and the war was back on if Mittens left the house for an hour to go to the vet).

Because Rannie was adopted in November of 2001 as a very young kitten and we needed an "anchor date" for her birthday, the feted date is on 9/11, which is not inappropriate for a cat who is sometimes the four-legged equivalent of Wednesday Addams...

Just a Shoplifter

I'll occasionally run into people who think that carrying a gun somehow empowers them to be...I don't know, society's hall monitor or something. Like they feel that, now that they have this ability to defend themselves if need be, they're free to go inserting themselves into situations that are none of their business.

This occasionally manifests in the toter deciding to get involved in a shoplifting incident, which rarely turns out well for the gun carrier. You don't get to skin your smokewagon on fleeing shoplifters.

What those folks don't seem to be considering is that sometimes a shoplifter is more than ready to shoot back.
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Lost in the Woods

A Steller sea lion was found wandering in the woods, miles away from the nearest body of water big enough for it to swim in. Apparently it had gone for a bit of a flopabout on the beach and taken several wrong turns, each one getting it farther and farther away from the river.



You can tell it was a sea lion and not a sea lioness because it never stopped and asked for directions.
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This guy gets it...

Chris over at Lucky Gunner groks the purpose of gel testing, and what it does and doesn't tell us:

"I’ve said it before, but keep in mind that 12 to 18 inches of penetration in gelatin is not the equivalent of 12 to 18 inches in living tissue. The gel is a consistent test medium that lets us compare one bullet to another. Historically, bullets that penetrate at least 12 inches in gel have a higher success rate in the real world than those that don’t. Service caliber bullets that go past 18 inches might over penetrate. With a .32 ACP, that’s not as likely."

I will add only that the correlation is higher in regular 10% ordnance gelatin than it is in synthetic gelatin; in synthetic gel, bullets don't expand quite as well and therefore tend to penetrate more*, and this effect increases with the velocity of the bullet to the point that with rifle bullets there's next thing to zero correlation. This is a gross rule of thumb and you can get answers as to the why of it in the math-y posts of a thread at p-f, like this one.

(This is why I personally like to see something more like thirteen to slightly greater than sixteen inches in synthetic gel. My idea of an ideal synthetic gel performance, going off the bullets with good real world and ordnance gel performance, would be getting found, fully mushroomed, in the denim layer on the far side of a 16" block, or maybe an inch or so into the catch block if there's no denim on the far side.)


*Also, this difference between synthetic and ordnance gel is why trying to interpret yaw cycles or temporary cavities from synthetic stuff is bordering on tea leaf reading.

"Paradise"

It's basically Denmark with palm trees and life rafts made out of 1958 Edselshttps://t.co/abbcaf7Fra

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 24, 2020

When people risk their lives in shark-infested waters to leave your "paradise", it doesn't make it sound very paradisical.
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And So It Goes

Twenty years ago on internet gun forums, before 9/11 and the GWOT, before Bravo Company and Daniel Defense and Noveske, before everybody and their brother made an entry-level AR for six bills or less...well, most of us knew nothing about AR-15s.

You think it's derpy out there now with "jUsT aS gOoD aS" and "wOrKs fOr mE"? Well, it was like that pretty much everywhere in the Before Times. Even the smart people who knew a lot about the AR family of weapons didn't know as much back then as they do now because, frankly, we've learned a lot over nearly two decades of endless war.

Anyway, back then when J. Random Newb showed up on a gun forum asking about AR-15s, the advice he'd be given, in between AK shooters saying dumb stuff about "poops where it eats" and he-man M1A fans crowing about "poodleshooters", would be to "stick to the ABC's". In this case "ABC" meant Armalite, Bushmaster, and Colt. Sometimes a "D" was added for DPMS.

The middle one was mine, early '03. Derpeste. ("Derpeste" is like "namaste". It means "The derp in me recognizes and acknowledges the derp in you.")

I guess Armalite's still in business, or at least their website is up this morning, but I haven't really checked in a few years. Colt is still thrashing around, stubbornly refusing to let the bubbles stop. Bushmaster and DPMS got swallowed by Cerbe...Freedom Gro...Remington Outdoors and were quietly shuttered recently, and I'm not surprised. I literally can't remember the last time someone I personally know bought a "Bushhamster" or a "DerPMS", as they're sometimes derisively referred to by AR snobs.

They suffered from being priced almost as high as an actual Colt while having a rep for occasionally indifferent QC that made the extra cost over an entry-level Smith or Ruger hard to justify. That, and half everybody builds rather than buying whole these days. If I'm going to shell out for a complete gun, it's going to be the aforementioned Colt, or a Bravo Company or DD. ("But Tam!" says the informed consumer, "The AR business is so incestuous that most of those manufacturers are drawing parts from the same pool!" This is true, but the BC or DD rifle will be properly assembled and checked. If I wanted to roll the dice on needing to finish the assembly at home, I'd buy PSA and be happy. I've done it before.)

Although there's one side effect of Remington closing down some of their tacticool labels that I hadn't anticipated. Tapco is one of the brands that made the go-aways, and apparently they are...or, were, I guess...one of the only sources of reliable aftermarket Mini-14 magazines. Not doing a lot of A-Team cosplay, I was unaware of this fact. But if it means never having to see an SKS in a janky pinned "folding" stock or hear Cletus talk about how he made his WASR into a "Dragon-off", it's a small price to pay.


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Did you know there's no entry in the dictionary for "credulous"?

New Jovian Thunderbolt almost got me with this one. I actually commented, but part of my comment was to go see if Maxine Waters had been elected to congress before I started working in gun stores (she had, by two years. One of us has been working one gig for too long.) Then I wondered why the tweet was just a copied screencap image, a .jpeg rather than a link to the actual tweet or, even better, an archive.is link. (ARCHIVE EVERYTHING, PEOPLE! Embarrassed people delete embarrassing things.)

Then came a hot minute of more checking ("Why doesn't Maxine have a blue checkmark?") which showed that quote is bullshit.

You've been weaponized.

But doesn't it make you feel good to know your foes are so dumb and prove you so right? Give you that little dopamine hit? Mm-mmm... that feels good.


ETA: If you just want to get your dander up at Maxine, you could go straight to the horse's mouth and get plenty of idiotic quotes.
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Ugly Duckling

Watching that episode of Danger Man with Bobbi the other night, I had my belief reinforced that the English only make two kinds of aircraft: gorgeous ones and ones that should only fly under a brown paper bag.

Toward the end of the episode there was a smallish, twin-engine, tricycle gear aircraft that featured the same trim, vertically-oriented engine nacelles as the Dragon Rapide (one of the most attractive airliners ever).

That was all it shared with the Dragon Rapide, though, because the slab-sided hydrocephalic fuselage looked like it had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Guessing from the engine nacelles that it, too, was a de Havilland, I looked on Wikipedia and sure enough, it was a de Havilland Dove, the more modern, and uglier, replacement for the Dragon Rapide.
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From an Away Game...

"Incidentally, the prevalence of portajohns at ranges is the biggest argument against carrying baller custom 1911s.

If I drop a Glock or an M&P in the shitter, then f$&k it. I'm pulling a fresh one out of the range bag and the honey wagon driver can have himself a new gun if he wants it. I'm not dyeing my hands blue for $400.

If I drop a $3500+ custom blaster in there, however, I gotta glove up."

Space Oddity

If Nikon's Pronea 6i looked like a prototype of the future consumer-grade DSLR and Canon's EOS IX looked like a Nineties sci-fi movie prop, Minolta's Vectis S-1 looked like...well, it looks normal now. If I'm walking around with the Hasselblad Lunar or the Fuji X-E1, someone inevitably asks "Oh, is that a film camera?" Despite it actually being a film camera, it's unlikely anyone will ask that about the Vectis.

It looks pretty much like a generic digital MILC or Bridge Camera from about ten years ago, not a film camera from 1996.

The lens this one shipped with was Minolta's V-mount "travel zoom". At first blush 25-150mm sounds like a super useful focal length range, but remember that shooting in "H" mode with APS film results in a crop factor of approximately 1.25X, so you have a field of view equivalent to about a 31-180ish lens.

It's a slow lens, too. Maximum aperture at the wide end is only f/4.5, and that falls off pretty quickly as you dial in the zoom and past about 55mm you're looking at a maximum aperture of f/6. The lens is also unusual in having no provision for manual focusing. Shooting the Vectis S-1 is a reminder that autofocus was still fairly new in 1996. It hunts a bit and is slow to focus; the 25-150mm is no sports lens, but that's okay, considering the camera's motor drive might deliver a single frame every second. It may look more modern than the EOS IX or the Pronea, but shooting it is a trip back in time.

The test roll, which is at Roberts now, was Fuji 100 that came in a sleeve of five, and the seller claimed had been cold stored. I manually set the ISO to 64 to compensate for the age of the film and, combined with the pig-slow apertures, exposure times on a sunny day were getting slower than 1/90th any time a small cloud crossed the sun. This camera, of course, predates any kind of stabilization in the lens...

Despite the off-center viewfinder, this is an actual single lens reflex camera, it just uses a rather more exotic arrangement of mirrors than the usual pentaprism or pentamirror. Despite that, the finder is crazy bright and features about 98% coverage, at a time when a Canon EOS Rebel gave you a dim 90% finder.

The film loads in that little trap door on the side of the camera. You press the blue "eject" button and the camera sort of whirs and chortles to itself for a second and then pops the hatch open to receive film. (It came with a manual so I need to read what you do if the two CR2 batteries give up the ghost while you have film in the camera...)

The thumb wheel will alter the aperture if you're shooting in aperture priority, shutter speed if you're shooting in shutter priority, and if you want to shoot in full stick-shift mode, the thumb wheel controls shutter speed unless you hold down the exposure compensation button while spinning it, and then it changes the aperture and leaves you longing for the dual control wheels on Nikon's Pronea 6i.

Minolta rated the camera as "splashproof" but I have yet to risk my $20 investment by splashing anything on it.

When it launched, it was not $20, but closer to $300. This was half the price of the Nikon and a third the cost of Canon's stainless EOS IX, which was so expensive it was only on the market for two years before being yanked in favor of something dumber and plastickier.

Minolta's V-series lenses are currently completely useless without a Vectis. There's no point in making adaptors for them because even the ones with "manual" focus use a focus-by-wire ring and the lens needs to be communicating with the camera for this to function. (Minolta and Nikon were the only ones to make APS-specific lenses, although Nikon's used the company's standard F-mount. Minolta engineered an entirely new mount for the Vectis...and collapsed and was absorbed by Sony in seven years. "Vectis wrecked us.")
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Trigger Control

The Race to the Boxcars

When I see people unironically use the term "Weimar America", I reach for my Browning, because I know who comes along to try and fix Weimars.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 21, 2020

Is it still hip to be square?

Hasn't the "refrigerator box on wheels" fad kind of faded out?

This looks like a Pontiac TranSport that got saved from the crusher about a third of the way through the process. https://t.co/kw6Ml0MEWD

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 21, 2020

Overheard in the Office...

Huck is looking out the window on the south side of the house with an air of agitated confusion. Where the silver maple full of birds and squirrels that provided hours of great cat TV once stood, there's nothing but a pile of stump shreddings; mulch to be carted away.

RX: (narrating for her cat) "You've changed things and I don't like it!" 

Me: "I'd like that on my tombstone, please."

BTW, if anyone needs a pickup truck load (at least) of wood mulch in the Indy area, we can hook you right up.
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Picking up film today...

While it's expired APS, I don't think it'll be this bad. It was cold-stored.

I also have to drop off the test roll from the Pronea 600i.
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