Frozen Fingers

Behold the Kodak S1100 XL, a repackaged Chinon 3001. I had one of these back in the early Nineties when they were still shiny and new and fairly expensive.

Unlike cheaper point and shoots, the S1100XL has a fast 35mm f/2.8 lens and relatively sophisticated autofocus for the era. The way the flash pops up puts it far enough off the centerline of the lens to avoid the worst of red-eye and I used to put a piece of frosted Scotch tape over the flash itself to serve as a diffuser.

This one came off eBay for next to nothing early last year and it's sat on a shelf waiting for me to throw a roll of film in it and check it for light leaks. Earlier this week I had a couple other rolls to drop off, so I put a roll of Kodak Gold in the S1100XL and drove downtown. Parking on Vermont Street out in front of the World War Memorial was free, since MLK Day is a city holiday. 

The park across Vermont to the south of the World War Memorial has a lovely fountain in it, but the fountain is down for renovations...

On opposite sides of the fountain are sculptures of Pan and Syrinx...

By this time, the snow flurries had picked up and my fingers were getting numb. I went back to the car and drove over to Roberts to drop off the test rolls and headed home.

Looking over the finished product, it seems the Kodak is functioning properly. No signs of light leaks and the focus and exposure look good. I reckon it's good to go.

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How things work.

At this link, you can find a neat site that explains how camera sensors and lens optics work together to make pictures. It's very informative, starting from first principles, and there are lots of sliders to manipulate for a very hands-on learning experience. Like a quality children's museum except for grownups and you don't have to worry about snotty little fingers having been all over everything.

Definitely some first rate edutainment.

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Multiple Presidentiality Disorder...

In what looks to be evolving into a tradition, the period following the inauguration of a new president is turning into a festival of wish fulfillment via Executive Order. International agreements will be left or re-entered, massive projects canceled or inaugurated, via Oval Office fiat.

Any group of foreign powers who thinks they can count on the US to stay the course for more than four-eight years is looking increasingly delusional. Any large corporation that wants to engage in a big infrastructure project that can't be finished inside a single presidential term is going to have an ever more difficult time attracting investors.

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Tribal Media

Nothing says "well-adjusted"...or is more emblematic of Twitter in general...than jumping into a debate between two total strangers (one that fizzled out four days ago at that) with a bunch of vitriol, straw-manning, and snarl words.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 21, 2021

Street Machine?

The cool kid street photography cameras all seem to be super compact things with APS-C sensors (big for a pocket camera; the same as in DSLR's) and fixed wide-ish angle lenses in the 28-35mm range. This guy is using a Nikon Coolpix A, this dude used a Ricoh GR II, and this cat's a fan of Fuji's X100 series.

Thing is, those are all pretty spendy entrance ramps into a type of photography I don't know if I'm any good at or not. A used Coolpix A is gonna be at least $400 and the Ricoh GR series or one of the various Fuji X100 variants is going to be at least half again that for a tatty older one. They do tickle the wantsies but...a fixed lens?

Luckily I can simulate this with gear I have on hand! The original Canon EOS M body (available used for less than two bills) is small and smooth like a bar of soap and easily goes in a coat pocket while wearing Canon's well-regarded 22mm f/2 EF-M pancake, which gives an equivalent focal length of 35mm and can be found used for well under $200 as well.

So my EF-M, which had been gathering dust on a shelf as something of a failed experiment on my way to buying the M6, has a new lease on life for the nonce.

Overheard in Front of the TV...

RX: "Does the Vice President have their own theme music?"

Me: "Yeah, the 'Bucket of Warm Piss Fanfare'."

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Dinosaur Poopers

That's not a metaphor for politicians. We're talking actual fossilized dinosaur poopers.

"The world’s oldest known all-purpose orifice sits in a fossil display case in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, so close to the glass that enshrines it that you can “put your face up to it, like this,” said Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, holding his hand a couple inches from his nose."

I saw All-Purpose Orifice open for Public Image Limited back in '94.

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Tangentially related...

I've always been low-key fascinated by Albania. Any place with Roman ruins, centuries-old hillbilly feuds, and the Accursed Mountains can't help but hold my interest.

There's the distinctive-looking Albanian SKS which is, second only to the East German one, the crown jewel of the insular and lowbrow world of SKS collecting.

In fiction, young Lieutenant Otto Prohaska stumbles into a plot by Serbian anarchists and has to flee homeward across Albania on foot to warn the Archduke. It's one of the most memorable parts of the entire series of books.

For a more factual view, albeit just as darkly humorous, P.J. O'Rourke spends a chapter of Eat the Rich looking at the Albania of the early 21st Century, recovering from a 1997 civil war triggered by an economy that collapsed under a tottering pile of pyramid schemes.

Finally, the Wikipedia entry on "Hoxha's Mushrooms" is a heck of a jumping-off point for a wikiwander in its own right.

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The Tale of the Vanishing Air Force

Albania's story during the Cold War era is an interesting one. Occupied by Italy immediately before World War Two, it spent the war like the rest of the Balkans, a swirl of guerrilla warfare where bands of partisans, both communist and anti-communist, chased each other and the fascist occupiers up and down hill and dale.

After the war, the Albanian communists came out on top and the country was effectively a satellite of the Soviet Union. Or at least they were until after Stalin died and Hoxha gradually decided he was more communist than the Soviets. After the breakup with the USSR, Albania was cozy with the Chinese for a while until that relationship, too, boarded the last train for Splitsville in the Seventies when Mao kicked off.

Albanian J-7 (Chinese MiG-21 clone)

This left Albania, a lightly industrialized country, smaller geographically than Maryland and with fewer people than Kansas, to try and support a fleet of over a hundred jet fighters on its own. The results were sadly predictable...

Due to the collapse of relations between Albania and the Chinese, maintenance became extremely difficult and the number of deadly incidents involving Mikoyan fighters increased. Despite Albanian efforts and some initial success in repairing the engines of the MiGs, the lack of specific jet fuel forced authorities to start production locally, resulting in low-quality production (the first attempt was in 1961, when the Kuçova factory produced the special jet kerosene called TSI). The fuel shortened the lifespan of the jet engines and was often blamed as the main reason for several deadly incidents. 35 Albanian pilots lost their lives from 1955 to 2005, mainly due to MiG mechanical failures.

I discovered this when I happened to chance across the Wikipedia page for the Albanian air force and noted it currently consisted of nothing but a handful of helicopters these days. A few years ago they basically took all their remaining high performance jet fighters (the ones that hadn't made like Texas lawn darts or been left on blocks after being stripped by black marketeers during the civil war) and put them on eBay.

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But what color are the elephants?

The constant media drumbeat against cocaine hippos is to distract you from the real danger: meth elephants

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 18, 2021

"Pablo Escobar’s hippos are taking over the marshlands of Colombia — and need to face the same fate as their late owner before they become impossible to control, scientists have warned."

As an aside, I saw Pablo Escobar's Hippos open for Nine Inch Nails back in '95.

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Space Cam

I thought it would be fun to finish out the winter doing a bunch of work with the Nikon 1 system, just for fun. Even though it's officially dead, gone, and buried by Nikon, who would probably prefer people forget its oddball initial misstep into the world of mirrorless cameras, I find they have a certain quirky charm.

The 1" sensor, which is the same size as the one in my usual RX100 shirt-pocket camera, means that not only are even quality lenses extremely compact, but the camera bodies are, too. The J4 in the picture above is wearing the 1 Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.8 which is, given the crop factor of the small sensor, the equivalent of a 50mm/1.8 on this thing. It gets good reviews and takes sharp photos, especially with the aperture set in the f/2.8 to f/4 range.

The 18.4MP J4's body (at least the front, top, and bottom) is aluminum and the whole thing is noticeable smaller than the original plastic-hulled 10.1 megapickle J1 pictured below. It's less than 2.5" high and not quite 4" wide; about the size of a deck of cards. I really dig the white aesthetic, too. It looks like something the crew of the Discovery would have brought along in Kubrik's 2001.

The cool thing is that the body and a full panoply of lenses will go in a small camera bag that would normally hold a DSLR and a single lens.

The first warm-ish week, I'm taking it to the zoo. Also, I'm thinking about trying to shoot some magazine photos with it. I'll bet it's more than capable!

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Now Screening...

At the suggestion of a blog reader, the next item on the binge viewing list here at Roseholme Cottage is Matt Groening's latest effort, Disenchantment. We watched the first two episodes over dinner tonight and it did not disappoint.

Automotif CXCVIII...

Behold the nadir of the Ford Thunderbird, the Eighth-Generation version from the 1980-1982 model years.

This was the second round of downsizing for Ford's personal luxury coupe, which entered the '72 model year as a nearly five thousand pound boulevard barge built on the same platform as its sister ship, the Lincoln Continental Mark IV. The first round of downsizing saw the '77 T-bird moved to the Panther platform shared with the Torino, Cougar, and LTD II. That downsizing shaved nearly ten inches of length and a thousand pounds of weight off the '72-'76 cars.

For the Eight Generation, the Thunderbird was moved to the Fox platform, also used by the Fairmont and Mustang. This whacked another foot and 700 pounds off the bill of lading.

Styling-wise, the car kept a lot of the baroque cues from the bigger Seventh Generation version, which looked weird all crammed together on the smaller body.

Under the hood, the base motor was a 255 cubic inch version of the Windsor V8 making a weaksauce 115bhp, with an upgrade to a 131 horsepower 302 available on the option sheet. Performance was...less than stellar.

Sic Transit Discourse

Oh boy, I made the mistake of using Twitter for something other than telling dumb jokes and got a glimpse into the minds of normies and it was scary. People are absolutely *obsessed* with the idea of a Living Wage. Putting aside the point that the real minimum wage is zero, I was interested to take the pulse of the Living Wage crowd, so I replied to a discussion...

"Even grocery baggers?" 

"Do you know what grocery baggers do?!?!?" 

"Uh, yeah. It was my first W2 job. But the steady rise in wages and regulation means that I'm my own grocery bagger now, and so are you. Pretty soon we'll get to greet ourselves at Walmart, too." 

I've been called names, been told I was brow-beaten by the system, sneered at. I'm like "Uh, I'm open to having my mind changed here, but not by insults. I was just curious if you don't see any jobs that might be performed by someone who did not need to make a living wage, like a dependent teen who might need work experience and pocket money, or a pensioner who just wants some socialization and routine." 

"Just pay them fairly and cut their hours!" 

"So instead of hiring 10 teens at $8/hr, I hire 20 at $16/hr and give each half as many hours? HR is gonna love you. And have you ever had to make a schedule?"

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #196...

Click to Embiggenate. Dramatically.

A Smith & Wesson Performance Center M&P 9 Shield with the Trijicon RMRcc. Putting it on the Shield gives a good idea of its size. Also, unlike previous red dots intended for subcompacts and single stacks, the RMRcc isn't any less rugged or resistant to the elements than the full-size RMR.

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At loose (video) ends...

Bobbi and I tend to watch something over dinner and, for most of the past couple years at least, it's been binge-watching various shows or miniseries (miniserieses?). Anyway, we're done with The Queen's Gambit and, unfortunately, we're caught up with the current season of The Expanse, which means it will be trickling out on Wednesdays for us now.

I'm currently nosing through shows with 30-min or 1-hr episodes and at least two or three seasons in the can, looking for the next bit of dinner theater while we wait for the next seasons of Stranger Things, The Boys, and The Umbrella Academy to drop*.

*For whatever reason, the old Roku on the living room televisor will not find Disney+, so that's only viewable on the TV in Bobbi's room or the computer monitor in my office. Sure, my desktop monitor is only a 25" screen, but I was in high school before the living room TV was that big. It's true, kids! Ask your parents. The living room TV can do Prime Video and Netflix.

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As the ship continues to spring new leaks...

...the new leaks keep getting funnier.

You know, if I'm counting on you to protect me from assassins, not only can you use my loo, you can come hang out with me while I'm on the throne, too.

Don't worry, there's a magazine rack if the conversation gets dull. https://t.co/nKbfscMWWH

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 15, 2021

New Year's Resolution

From a "year in review, year in preview" piece at Luminous Landscape came this interesting digression on the rumored imminent ultra high resolution sensors: 

"It is difficult to tell a really good 24-26 MP print from a 45-60 MP print at 16×24” – it’s possible, but under close inspection – even an experienced observer would have a hard time on the wall. A 24×36” print from a really good 24-26 MP sensor and lens looks good on the wall, even in a gallery – but put it next to a 45-60 MP version and the difference is obvious from close up. I’ll happily print 40×60” from a Z7 or an A7r IV, which I won’t from a good 24-26 MP sensor – like a 24×36” from 24-26 MP, the print works very well, but if you put your nose right up to it, you might wish you’d used a GFX 100 or stitched. A 90-100 MP sensor will really show its stuff at a print size of 40×60” or above – the native print size of the GFX 100 sensor is 29×39” at 300 dpi, and a beautiful print that big can be made from a 200 dpi or even 150 dpi file with careful resizing. How much of your work ends up that size? Do you have room for a printer the size of a piano? If you are thinking about digital display, what 12K display device are you planning on using? Even at 8K, it has no advantage over a 45-60 MP camera, since both will outresolve the display. 

What lenses do you own that will resolve 100 MP? What will even look different between 60 MP and 100 MP? An Otus, sure… Some of the best Sigma Art lenses, like the newish 85mm f1.4, are likely to. A few other excellent lenses – think the best of the Sony G-Master, Canon L and Nikon S lines, mostly primes. Any exotic long telephoto prime from Canon, Nikon, Sony or Sigma. If any zoom that good exists at all, there are VERY few of them. The closest possibility I’ve handled is Nikon’s 24-70mm f2.8 for the Z bodies – it resolves right up to the limits of the Z7 and seems to be begging for more. I’m pretty sure it has at least something more to give on a higher-resolution sensor. I haven’t used the latest Canon or Sony zooms at the top of their lines, nor have I used either of the $10,000 telephoto zooms – but they all seem to be good candidates as well. That’s about it – a bunch of $1000+ primes, mostly $2000+ other than the Sigma Art lenses, and a very tiny list of $2000+ zooms. 

How good is your technique for 100 MP? Even the best lens is only that good at optimum aperture – diffraction is going to set in quickly with pixels that small. Handholding will require faster shutter speeds than you’re used to, even with image stabilization, and any subject motion at all is going to show up. Depth of field? What depth of field? The 45-60 MP cameras are already difficult to focus correctly, since any tiny focus error eliminates their resolution advantage. If you’re doing huge prints of architecture or motionless landscape, using a Series 3 or larger tripod (think 6-7 lbs of tripod and head, even in carbon fiber) or have enough light for very high shutter speeds (any noise at all will kill the resolution advantage, so a very high resolution camera will be best at ISO 64-200, maybe ISO 400 at most to see the difference), you might see a gain. " 

Speaking as someone who sold her 5D Mark II to partly fund a mega-super-high-res 5DS and then wound up buying another used 5D Mark II to supplement it, all I can say is...ouch. 

Sure, the 5D Mark II is about a dozen years old now and sports a 21MP sensor, less than half the resolution of the 5DS, but it'll turn out a photo that can be splashed across a full two-page spread eleven inches high and eighteen inches wide, with plenty of room for the art director to crop...

Shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and an old EF 28-70mm f/2.8L lens

The 50MP sensor on the 5DS will let you know a lot of things: If your lens sucks, if you missed focus, if you should have used a stabilized lens or a faster shutter speed or more light. Cramming that many photosites on a full-frame sensor is noisy at higher ISOs, at least in Canon's 2015 effort.

From a gee-whiz point of view, I get the attraction of a squillion megapickle camera. But from a gearhead point of view, I have to acknowledge that its downsides currently outweigh its upsides for the kind of shooting I do.

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Yesterday...

I needed to get that film dropped off at Roberts, and I also needed to get out of the house and get some exercise. It was an unseasonably balmy forty-something degrees, so I slung my Leica R4 around my neck, grabbed the pre-packed bag with my Nikon D700, and headed out.

I fed a few quarters to the meter on North Street by the Scottish Rite Cathedral and started walking south on Illinois, heading generally toward the state capitol building.

Foot & vehicle traffic was light. Some store windows, like on the CVS and the Thai restaurant on Market by the Capitol, were still boarded up from the summer's events. I walked over to the east steps of the Capitol, shot some film, and headed back east up Market toward the Circle. On the Circle, workmen were busy boarding up windows. It was about this point that I'd used up the roll of Ilford XP2 in the Leica, so I bagged it and pulled out the Nikon for the remainder of my stroll.

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument was right there where I'd left it...

The bottom photo is, I believe, why bears generally stay away from Indiana.

From the Circle, I strolled back up Meridian to where I'd parked the car and drove over to Roberts to drop off film. I think I need to do this more often.

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Five by Five

Just finishing up a piece for RECOIL...

Granted, it's only five yards, but I was shooting offhand at a reasonable pace and those sights aren't the easiest to use. That trigger's no basket of kittens and rainbows, either...

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Random Updates:

• Finished the last episode of The Queen's Gambit last night. This series was nearly perfectly-executed television in my book: very well-acted and shot, and the sets and soundtrack both helped set the mood and tell the story. It was also another excellent demonstration that the only real way to do justice to a novel-length presentation is in a miniseries.


• Took the Leicaflex SL for a walk yesterday afternoon. I was shooting from the hip, exposure-wise, but double-checking my guesses with the myLightMeter Pro app on my phone. Everything was going swimmingly until I took a shot at 1/125th at f/5.6 and the mirror hung in the up position. I'd shot about eight frames at that point, so I rewound the film and I'll take it to Roberts today. Went home and dry-fired the camera fifty or sixty times, both with the lens off and on, at 1/2000th to see if it loosens anything up. Lesson learned: Go back to using a 24 exposure roll of the absolute cheapest Fuji or Kodak from the drug store for test rolls, rather than a 36-exposure roll of Ilford.

Below, see a video about the light meter app I use!

*hot take*

/rails at man for attacking our constitutional government
/rails at government for following constitution

Will you make up your mind, Jim? https://t.co/wMtwjDaXpw

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 13, 2021

*spit take*

"There is no room for violence of any kind in our nation. If any violence shows up, I'll kick it in the face so hard it will fly right out of our nation." https://t.co/wzYlTrHkxh

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 13, 2021

Standards

My first digital camera was a 1.3MP Mavica FD88 that I hung on to for a year or two after it was obsolete (I mean, cameras got obsoleted every three months back then) because memory stick/card standards were totally non-standardized but every computer would always have a 3.5" floppy for emergency booting, right? 

Memory card standards in DSLRs more or less shook out in the early Aughties. Compact Flash was the initial winner, although it gradually started getting supplanted by SD cards about ten years ago, starting in smaller consumer-level bodies.

In fact, many pro bodies, up until last week or so, still had CF slots simply because photojournalists had so much CF infrastructure. It's only been in the last year or so that I've had a hard time finding CF cards small enough for older cameras like my D1x and D200 to use. 

Interestingly, you can still get really big CF cards easily, and there are a lot of companies still selling the tiny sub-1GB CF cards that are needed by old CNC machinery on Amazon...but cards in the 2-8GB range that are usable by older cameras are getting scarcer by the year. If I walk into Roberts camera right now, I can buy film for my 80-y.o. Leica, but I might not be able to get a CF card small enough for my 18-y.o. Nikon D1x to recognize.

Future Imperfect, Tense

This is gonna be the future with the three seashells, then? Not the one with the razor boomerang kid or the one with President Mountain Dew Camacho?

I'm asking so I can make better long term plans. https://t.co/esSVE83Y6X

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 12, 2021

Let's see if it works...

Behold the "Diesel Leica", so called because of its bulk, Brutalist styling, and baroque mechanicals. It's the camera that almost bankrupted Leitz!

I have it loaded with Ilford XP2, an ISO 400 black & white film that's developed using the C-41 color process. This means I can have it done on-site at Roberts downtown. Or, I guess, if you didn't mind not getting your negatives back, you could drop it off at a CVS or Walgreens. Of course, getting the negatives back is kinda the whole point of shooting film in 2021.

I haven't bothered trying to put a battery in it to see if the meter works. I have a light meter app on my iPhone if I need it, but C41 negative film has pretty decent exposure latitude and as long as I stick with the "Sunny 16" rule and don't try any really tricky shots, I probably won't need it. Since the camera itself is entirely mechanical, all the battery does is power the meter, anyway.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #195...

Here's a larger photo of the 509 LS Edge with my Trijicon RM08G mounted:

FN has a video up with, in amongst the expected advertising fluff & superlatives, a good look at the basic features of the pistol.

Because Racegun

My initial look at the FN 509 LS Edge is up at RECOILweb:

"Developed with input from demanding shooters like Dave Sevigny and Tim Kennedy, the FN 509 LS Edge has a host of details to help it deliver the results. For instance, the suppressor-height irons, solid black in the rear and fiber optic with a bright green light pipe up front, line up for a lower-third co-witness on most miniature red-dot sights.

The magazine release, while still ambidextrous, has the right-hand button heavily beveled, almost flush with the frame. This keeps an aggressive high grip from inadvertently dislodging the mag. 

The lightening cuts in the slide of the FN 509 LS Edge aren’t just there to look oh-so-2020; they reduce the mass of the slide, helping to both keep the gun shooting flat and to remain compatible with the recoil spring assembly of its duty-size kin."

Dave Sevigny with the LS Edge

I was proud of the "you might say that a whole legion of Edge variants will follow this one in subsequent years" line. Especially because I first said it during the initial presentation.

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Let's get this done.

Indiana's state legislature went into session last week, and saw the introduction of House Bill 1369, which is our latest run at Constitutional Carry. 

This bill does not affect the availability of concealed carry permits for Hoosiers who want one for the purposes of interstate reciprocity or the amended Gun-Free School Zones Act. (This was the error of our first meaningful attempt at Constitutional Carry years ago, which just tore out all permitting language, root and branch.)

We've run this play in the legislature a few times in recent sessions but the former Speaker of the House, despite being a Republican who called himself "Indiana's Conservative Leader" but was mostly in the hip pockets of the State Chambers of Commerce, was a problem. Since the Chambers of Commerce were still buttsore over our expanded preemption law, he dutifully allowed Constitutional Carry to die in committee, session after session.

Well, Bosma's gone now, so let's git 'er done this session. Hoosiers can contact their state reps via link here, although actual letters or phone calls are always more effective at the state legislative level.

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That's a lotta guns...

Thank goodness I already have a gun, because that line is cray-cray. 😮 https://t.co/0okoW438qX

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 9, 2021

People don't generally line up like this to buy guns with the intention of turning around and immediately turning them in. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

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Not How This Works

The headline on the latest Washington Post opinion page piece on the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha reads:

Seven shots. Point-blank range. No charges.

I understand that the writer is very upset at what they seem to think is a miscarriage of justice, based on their legal training from old Law & Order reruns, but...um...I've got some bad news for them. Neither the number of shots nor the range they were delivered at have any bearing at all on the legality of the shooting.

The question is not how many times the shooter shoots or what range he shoots at, it's:

"Are you in reasonable fear of immediate, otherwise unavoidable, death or grievous bodily harm to yourself or another innocent person?"

If there's a dude within arm's length of me who's not dropping the knife, well...

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The good ol' days...

Remember when we were all relieved that 2020 was over?
Man, those were the good old days...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 6, 2021

Man, we were so young and innocent and hopeful then, way back in the salad days of last Friday...

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This aged well, too.

Don't look down, little goat!

Watching them just chill out halfway up the dam is wild, but there are definitely some high pucker factor moments in there, at least if you're cheering for the goats and not gravity.

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That's certainly very carefully worded.

The WaPo notes this morning:

Which is technically true, I guess, since the African American senator from formerly Confederate South Carolina, Tim Scott, is not a Democrat.

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2020 Strikes From Beyond the Grave

It was a lot easier to hoard ammunition when I didn't shoot as much.

2020 was a slow year, and I still burned up a little over six thousand rounds of my own 9x19mm, not counting the couple of times I was lucky enough to get a class with Other People's Ammunition. These days it's a situation of "Beggars Can't Be Choosers" and so my favorite brand of range ammo has been whatever's in stock. For test guns, I only shoot factory ammo for a number of reasons. If I pull components out of storage and set up the reloading press, it's going to be for recreational use only. Or because zombies are in the wire.

Anyway, this year has seen me buying steel-cased TulAmmo at prices that would have been a little high for premium jacketed hollow points in 2019. I've found myself shooting Scorpio, from the Czech Republic, which is a brand I'd never even heard of in the Before Times. (My friends in the EU assure me it's good stuff and a number said it was their preferred brand of range fodder.) And just before Christmas, on December 20th, I ordered some Sarsilmaz 124gr FMJ from AmmoMart.com at near sixty cents a round.

It shipped from Findlay, Ohio on the 22nd. A couple days after Christmas, I got an email from UPS letting me know that there were weather conditions causing my ground shipment to be delayed in Minneapolis, which seems rather a roundabout way of driving to Indianapolis from north-central Ohio, but okay.

The package finally arrived yesterday morning with a corner of the box stove in. The resulting hole was enough to have let one of the rounds get away, so my 250-round order turned into a 249-round one.

Gotta say I'm not super-impressed with Sarsilmaz's packaging. The material of the boxes is closer to construction paper than cardboard, and the plastic cartridge trays are brittle and flimsy. We'll see how it does when I get to the range with a chrono today or tomorrow.

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Changing of the Guard

The Year of Carrying Double-Action didn't work out the way I wanted it to. Initially I was going to tote the Langdon Beretta for a month or two at the beginning of 2019 while I sorted out which plastic double action I'd finish out the year with. One thing led to another and I wound up toting the LTT for the whole year and doing all my schooling and gaming that year with the Spaghetta. I didn't settle into carrying the Grayguns Sig SP2022 until the start of 2020...and then 2020 happened.

What little gun school I managed to get in this year was incidental to various product launches and therefore used whatever guns were provided there. While I toted the Sig for the whole year, between ammo shortages and 'Rona, it just didn't see much work. After Thanksgiving I just put the SP2022 away and finished out the year carrying a 1911 in a Milt Sparks VM-2, waiting for the calendar page to flip...

And now it's 2021 and time for my next CCW gun project. Like I said, I didn't get to much gun school last year, but what little I did all involved shooting dot-sighted guns. Plus, early last year I wrapped up a 2,000 round test on the FN 509 Compact MRD with the Trijicon SRO. I was intrigued by the little gun, only slightly larger than a Glock 26, but with an optic, a usefully-sized accessory rail, and a 12+1 round capacity (15+1 with the 'stendo).

So the plan is for 2021's carry gun to be the little peanut butter colored FN with a mounted Trijicon SRO and a Streamlight TLR-7. I'm initially carrying it in a Spark holster generously provided by Henry Holsters. For now it's strong-side IWB until I shed the COVID nineteen (probably closer to COVID twenty-five, but the bathroom scale's on the fritz).

Whatever classes I manage to enroll in or matches I manage to shoot this year will be with the little FN. The idea of a subcompact pistol with a reasonable mag capacity and a usefully-bright WML is intriguing. I'm not a believer in the necessity of a WML on a carry gun, but I think they're very useful on a firearm used for home defense. Traditionally, this meant either carrying a bulky light you didn't need, or using separate pistols for carry & home, or mounting and removing a WML on your carry gun every morning and evening...none of which are what I'd call optimal solutions. So this is kind of a workaround for all that, a "have your cake and eat it, too" thing.

We'll see.

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"If Batman did meth..."

Seen on the bookface:

Now I want to write "Trailer Park Bruce Wayne". Instead of a hidden garage in a hillside, the "Bat Cave" is a carport and the Batmobile is concealed under a tarp. Bruce's buddy Al is this guy who rents the spare bedroom and keeps the Batmobile's smoke screen tanks topped off with Winstons and drives down to the Circle K to swap out the propane tanks for the flamethrowers.

It looks like someone was making a Jack Daniels-fueled attempt at cloning the Cooper Markette, although why someone would want to clone a hideous failed Seventies kit car is beyond me. Were the people who laid all that extra fiberglass drunk at the time or what? Notice how the badge on the faux Continental hump doesn't center with the bar in the back window, and the taillights aren't either of them centered?

There was a story from Car and Driver back in the day... 

One of the writers had a Ferrari test car at home, I think it was a 275GTB. One of the magazine's photographers came over and they parked the car in the writer's front yard, pulled out a couple lawn chairs, and spent the afternoon drinking, talking cars, and contemplating the Ferrari from various angles. 

It wasn't until the photographer got the car for the technical three-view photos to publish with the road test that anyone noticed the Scaglietti bodywork was a hot lopsided mess. "Not a square corner or plumb line on the car." 

The writer joked in his review that two pairs of trained eyes had spent an entire afternoon ogling the car without noticing this, so maybe all the asymmetries were intentional, like the Parthenon. 

This is like that, but ugly instead of beautiful.

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Misplaced Childhood

Just watched the last ep of season 2 of The Mandalorian. All the feels. I was laughing and clapping and crying and all that stuff. 

"That was just fan service!" 

"Bitch, this fan's been waiting for that service since 1984." 

I mean, I liked The Force Awakens just fine, since it was basically Star Wars All Over Again, but it was just returning to the well of the original. And the ending of Rogue One had me ooh-ing and ahh-ing and nodding my head at the slickly done symmetry... 

But this? This was just a straight-up tug at my middle school heartstrings.

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An odd request...

Hasn't been much in the way of snow so far this winter, and I'm pretty ambivalent on that. It's pretty, but it can be a pain to shovel and it pretty well grounds the Mustang and at least puts a damper on driving the Bimmer until they have the main roads cleared. I'll slither a couple blocks to College Ave, but driving for a few miles with a wary eye on the traction control is a pain and there's just not enough snow in an Indiana winter to make a dedicated set of winter tires/wheels a worthwhile proposition.

What I am kind of annoyed about is that we haven't gotten any really good sustained cold snaps. The kind where the daily high doesn't get above freezing for a week or so. I'm looking at the ten-day forecast right now and we're going to be a third of the way into January with the daily high temps getting into the mid/high-thirties if all goes as predicted.

The reason I want a good stretch of cold weather is that that's what makes March bearable around here. When you've had some brutal cold spells in January and February, a mid-March day where the temps get up to 34º or 35ºF feels like sunbathing weather by comparison. When it's a couple degrees above freezing you can walk to 20 Tap without feeling like you need an extra undershirt, and stroll to Fresh Market in sneakers rather than winter boots, at least if you've been dealing with really cold temps for the last couple months.

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A recurring theme of late...

From Reason magazine:

"As with far too many public policy disputes (over climate change, criminal justice, health care, etc.), it is not enough to merely observe that the opposing team has different ideas about how best to address a problem. No, the bad guys are either intentionally trying to make things worse or just too blinkered to admit there's a problem in the first place. The more partisan you are, the more likely you feel surrounded by murderers and denialists."

It's a good piece and worth reading. Also, I swear I hadn't read it before tweeting this:

Modern American is all about polarization. Half everyone is wearing masks while riding alone in their Teslas with the HVAC on Recirc while the other half is joining in mass “Lick a doorknob for Trump” rallies.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 2, 2021

When I was a kid, we had Choose Your Own Adventure books, and now we have Choose Your Own Reality. 

Don't like the world you see on regular old network news? Go to Fox News or MSNBC. If you're not getting the same buzz you used to from those outlets, you can always slide over to OANN or FSTV. 

On social media you can surround yourself with like-minded people, in groups where social capital is accrued by one-upping those around you in expressing the group's shared values more stridently than the next guy. If you do bother to take in media from the "other team" or tread in spaces where they congregate, it's not to understand them; instead, it's only a swift dip in and out, to copy/paste something for a fisking in front of your amen chorus, or maybe to count coup in the other side's comment section.

The insidious part is that modern social media, in a never ending quest for "engagement", is designed to foster this. "Oh, you like thus-and-such? Let us show you a bunch more stuff very much like thus-and-such. Just please stay online and clicking."

I have no idea what the end state of this looks like, but I'm not optimistic.

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I can't believe this made it to production.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Caleb Giddings (@radicaleb_)

I get that this is some graphic designer trying to make their hastily-ginned-up social distancing floor marker both racially- and gender-inclusive but, uh, minus several thousand points for not thinking through to the optics of the finished work, dude. 

Your sticker could be used in some alternate-history sci-fi flick where 21st Century South Carolina still has anti-miscegenation laws.

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Ah, the heady optimism of last spring...

"I'll take 'Memes That Aged Poorly' for 400 Alex...er, Ken."https://t.co/xMPMuZJn1j

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 2, 2021

Yum!

Bobbi cooked a corned beef brisket & cabbage, with some taters, onions, and carrots for New Year's Day feasting. We enjoyed the meal while watching the third episode of Season 5 of The Expanse.

Other than that, it was a slow day around Roseholme Cottage. It was icy out when I woke up and stayed overcast all day, although it warmed into the forties in the afternoon and melted off the dusting of snow from yesterday.

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All's Unquiet On New Year's Day

Went out front to pop off some bottle rockets tonight because I wanted to see 2020 off proper-like...

The lack of gypsy fireworks stands in the neighborhood here in the year of the 'Rona meant that the horizon was not as colorful as usual...but it was still very noisy. The decrease in the number of fireworks means that the people cranking off pistols and rifles into the air are much more noticeable.

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Zoom Zoom

So, 'way back in early 1995, I traded a 1979 Datsun 280ZX 2+2 and a thousand bucks for a Guards Red 1987 Porsche 924S. I thought this seemed like a really sweet deal...until I noticed a funny clunking noise from the Porsche's gearbox after a couple days.

See, the clutch on the 924S/944 used elastomer rather than springs to damp the clutch, and they tended to disintegrate the rubber over time. My shiny new Porsche needed a clutch replacement. And because the 924/944 family have a rear-mounted transaxle, this is a more complicated evolution than normal.

I ended up taking the car to a local shop, JMC Racing, that did import street car repairs as a sideline to fund their main work in open-wheel racing.

When I went to go pick the car up, they asked if I wanted to test drive it first. I allowed as how I wasn't qualified to judge if the repair was any good or not, so John McCracken jumped in the driver's seat and gave me a drive around the nighttime back roads of Forsyth County that looked something like this:

I had no idea a 924S could haul ass like that...

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Very Wary

"Oh, thank heavens 2020 is over," we'll say to each other, as we clutch our machetes and stalk giant carnivorous locusts through the radioactive bramble patches of summer 2021...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 31, 2020

This is only the third worst possible outcome. Second worst, of course, is that at midnight all our devices will automatically tick over to December 32nd.

The worst? Waking up to find the calendar reads "1/1/2020"...

I did not know that...

They're everywhere at this time of year, these bright red leafy flowers. Somehow I'd made it this far in life without noticing that they were spelled "poinsettia", since I'd always heard them pronounced "poyn-SET-uh", which is also apparently a correct pronunciation.

Another thing I didn't know was that the name isn't some derivation of their scientific binomial nomenclature or anything like that, but rather a reference to the man who introduced them to the U.S. from their native home to the south of us. That's right, the first US ambassador to the fledgling Mexican Republic was a former South Carolina Congressman and enthusiastic amateur botanist, one Joel Roberts Poinsett.

His career arc was fascinating, with visits to Moscow, a trip through the Khanate of Kuban all the way to Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a bit of derring-do in South America during the War of 1812, and serving as Secretary of War during the Van Buren administration.

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Clone Wars

At some point in my teenage years, I developed something of a crush on the Heckler & Kock MP5K. I mean, the regular MP5 was cool, and so was the integrally-suppressed SD variant, but it was the chopped-down kurz variant with its stubby foregrip that really lit my fuse. I have no idea why. Probably some combination of it looking very cool and being a diminutive fully-automatic machine pistol. Maybe it had good stats in a role-playing game I was into, or something? Anyway...

Owning anything like the real thing is onerous and kinda frivolous. Full-auto ones are stupid expensive and I still have flashbacks about trying to keep our knackered hangar queen of a rental MP5K-PDW running back in my days at Coal Creek Armory.

You can get an old HK SP89 pistol or its newer SP5K replacement, but to make it an authentic-looking MP5K or MP5K-PDW clone would require NFA paperwork. You'd either need to get a tax stamp to add the vertical foregrip, making it an AOW, or a stock and foregrip, making it an SBR. And then you still have a big, clunky semiautomatic 9mm pistol.

So the MP5K is one gun that I tend to be plenty happy with sticking an airsoft copy on the shelf and foregoing buying the real thing.

For that matter, an MP5K copy was my first experience with airsoft, back in the Eighties. At the time, airsoft wasn't really a thing in the US, so Daisy imported a handful of guns, most from Maruzen, and sold them under the "Daisy Softair" label. Their realistic appearance caused a bit of a stink, and so they were only sold for a couple years, '86-'87, before being discontinued, making them kind of collectible now.

The only one not made by Maruzen was the Model 15, an MP5K copy, that was made by Falcon Toy Corporation. Naturally it was my favorite, and I bought one from Service Merchandise back in the day, along with clones of the Intratec KG-9, Luger, and Smith Model 59. Recently I stumbled across one on eBay, and couldn't resist buying back a chunk of my misspent youth.

I'm not super-hip to airsoft terminology, but I believe these would be called spring-powered blowback shell ejectors? To operate them, you'd load the BBs into the plastic dummy shell cases and load those into the magazine. Chambering a round would cock the weapon, and when you fired, the slide or bolt would lock to the rear after ejecting the empty shell.

Modern AEG (airsoft electric gun) MP5K copies tend to have more faithful lines than the old manually-operated Daisy.

On the Model 15, this was done by cycling the vertical foregrip, and this meant there had to be space on the front of the receiver that the original MP5K did not have, giving the Daisy Model 15 a rather...er, distinctive appearance.

"Hey, that gun looks familiar..."

Produced for the US market, the Model 15 was careful to avoid any references to H&K, who are fiercely protective of their branding and trade dress. The Tokyo Marui AEG in the photo above was a gray market import from Hong Kong back in '02 or '03 and all HK markings are carefully covered up to avoid imperial entanglements. Nowadays, of course, you can get a licensed high-quality full auto electric MP5K clone straight from Amazon without having to worry that customs is going to jack up your transpacific shipment.

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Sometimes a picture is worth several thousand words

While writing to Slate's parenting advice column on the topic of practical firearms safety would seem to make about as much sense as writing to Soldier of Fortune for advice on potty-training or getting your toddler to eat broccoli, someone apparently has done just that.

Actually, they don't want gun safety advice, they just want some validation and asspats for ruining family gatherings with their anti-gun outbursts, and I guess Slate seemed like a good place to go for some of that.

"My brother and I both work in law enforcement and have service weapons. I lock mine up when I’m at home. My brother has taken to carrying his all the time, including around his small children in his home. I’ve had to refuse him entry to my home due to his unwillingness to come without it..."

The stock photo Slate used for the column was, um...illustrative of how much weight I'm going to give their advice.

A Springfield XD with a Hogue Handall (for bonus points, positioned too low, since it has to clear the grip safety, thereby forcing the shooter's pinkie into the worst possible place!) in a Serpa on a department store belt not designed to support a gun and improperly sized for the loops. It's like a layer cake of fail. A failcake, if you will.

"You wanna know how I know not to take anything you say seriously?"

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I'll second that.

Bobbi just recommended watching Counterpart, and I have to second that. 

It's a little bit sci-fi, a little bit Cold War spy drama, a little bit police procedural, a little bit corporate machiavellian infighting, with enough shoot-em-up and gun fu sprinkled through here and there to keep it action-y. Lots of guns, lots of tradecraft.

And the acting, cinematography, and writing is superb. This is one of those shows that was too smart for its own good, literally.

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