Automotif CDXLII...

For the 1961 model year, the full-size Buicks came in three different flavors. There was the top-of-the-line Electra, the middlin' Invicta, and the lower-spec LeSabre. The pecking order was signaled by the number of Ventiports on the fenders: The Electra got four, while Invicta and LeSabre owners could only flash three, which was the same number as on the new compact-size Special/Skylark models.

The LeSabre could be had as a hardtop coupe, hardtop sedan, two-door sedan, or as a four-door sedan like this Rio Red '61 parked on College Avenue the other morning. 

Behind the chrome grille with its floating Tri-Shield badge was Buick's trusty 364 cubic inch "Nailhead" V-8, so-called because of the appearance of its valves, which had long stems and small heads.

The standard '61 LeSabre motor had a 2-barrel carburetor and a 10.25:1 compression ratio, necessitating premium fuel, and was rated at 250 SAE gross horsepower. A no-cost optional engine had a 9:1 compression ratio, allowing the use of regular fuel but dropping output to 235hp.

Alternatively, a LeSabre buyer could spend an extra $22 bucks to kick it up a notch with the Power Pack  version of the 364, which had a 4-barrel Carter carb, dual exhausts, 11.25:1 compression, and 300 horses.

All three motors were backed by the 2-speed Turbine Drive (neé DynaFlow) automatic transmission. Well, we call it an automatic, but it didn't work the way we think of when we talk about modern slushboxes. If you drove it normally in "D", it stayed in the one gear all the time. The "L" ratio could only be selected manually, and if selected, it did not upshift by itself. The driving experience had more akin to a current CVT, at least aurally, than a typical modern automatic, as engine RPM & thus motor noise was governed as much by throttle position as road speed.

I wish I'd thought to get a picture of the dashboard, because this was one of the last years for the Mirromagic dash in full-size Buicks. The instrument panel lay flat in a cove atop the dash and was reflected into a mirror above it, the angle of which could be adjusted for best visibility to any driver's sightline.

Command and Control

Another good podcast from the guys at Tactical Tangents that has applicability outside the LE/.mil fields. Anybody in a supervisory or managerial role can benefit from this stuff.

No team in law enforcement is composed of robotic textbook-following automatons, nor would we want it to be, if we’ve ever found ourselves at 2MPH over the limit. But when a worst-case incident unfolds, we want every first responder to make the right decision at the speed of life, because in those incidents seconds often equal victims. How can we raise the lowest common denominator, so our people make the right decisions quickly without rushing to failure?

In this episode Mike and Jim talk about command and control, and teaching decision-making skills to team members. In this way, when everything hits the fan, the right decisions get made fast, and get made at the right level. There’s a reason for supervisors, commanders, and leaders, but it’s important to know when to let subordinates make decisions. Not every incident is The Big One, but nobody’s ready for The Big One if they haven’t been taught in the small ones.

This pic of Chuck at TacCon '17 doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the podcast, he just looks all command-'n'-controlly here.

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Faking Black & White...

I keep the Samsung TL500 set up to record two files with every shot. The camera records one in RAW format, which for Samsung uses the ".SRW" file extension, and one fine quality JPEG. You can set custom color balances for the JPEG like Soft, Vivid, Forest, et cetera. It took me a little bit of scrolling and testing to figure out that "Classic" was Samsung-speak for "Monochrome".

So that's what I use: One RAW file is recorded and a monochrome JPEG. Being as this is a 2010-vintage pocket camera, it takes it a hot minute to write that 24MB .SRW file. If you just wanted to turn the camera on and pop off a quick shot or two then shut it back off, you'll be waiting a few seconds for the green "Busy" LED to stop blinking before it'll retract the lens and power down.

The Classic setting gives you a pretty stark and contrasty B&W effect.

Here's what the scene actually looked like, via the processed RAW file:

Automotif CDXLI...

Porsche introduced the 911 in 1963, and for the fortieth anniversary of the car in 2003, Porsche made a special run of 1,963 "40 Jahre 911" models.

Here's one of them, most likely car number 0162 according to the registry, exiting the Fresh Market parking lot onto College Avenue.

That's a damned sharp-looking sled.

Photographed with a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

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Because the Internet Likes Dog Pictures...

Neighborhood puppers posing for the Canon EOS 7D & EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS.

The 17-55/2.8 is maybe the best lens Canon ever made for its APS-C sensor cameras.

QotD: Attention Economy Edition...

"Whether something is true—or, again, even plausible—is an afterthought. What matters is what will boost engagement, traffic, eyeballs. It’s the Ka-Ching theory of Truth.

Because truth and falsehood look equal in two-dimensional space, the incentive structure is all screwed up. Repeating boring truths doesn’t pay. Spewing transgressive, shocking, attention-grabbing falsehoods that get people riled up and confirm their angriest or darkest passions is where it’s at." -Jonah Goldberg

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Automotif CDXL...

For a GM product of this vintage north of the Ohio river that appears for all the world to be a daily driver, the fact that this thing's not a rusted out hulk is a wonder.

If I'm reading the tea leaves of the grille inserts correctly, this Light Blue Metallic Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale Brougham coupe is a 1980 model.

The eighth generation of the Oldsmobile 88 ran from the 1977 through the 1985 model years. Sharing the same platform as the Buick LeSabre, Chevy Caprice, and Pontiac Bonneville, it represented the first round of downsizing for General Motors full-size cars, losing eight inches of wheelbase relative to their '71-'76 predecessors. 

The 1980 model year represented the first styling refresh for this generation, and was one of the last model years to feature brand-specific engines, as GM was gradually homogenizing their powertrain lineup. (The first steps in this direction caused a bit of a stink in 1977.)

For the 1980 model year, the base motor was a 110 horsepower Buick 3.8L V6. The next step up was the 260 cubic inch (4.3L) version of the Olds Rocket V8, with 307 cid and 350 cid versions also available. These were rated at 120, 150, and 160 horsepower, respectively. 

Also available as an option was the disastrous Olds 350 diesel V8, which put out 105 SAE net horsepower when you could get it to run at all.

Alas, the 185-horsepower 403 cubic inch 4-barrel Rocket V-8 was discontinued after the '79 model year. It had been a sluggish seller due to fuel economy concerns.

You could get the 1980 Delta 88 models in plain, Royale, and Royale Brougham flavors, with each one having a more deluxe list of features as standard. The Royale Brougham was crowding basic Cadillac models when it came to included features.

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The Political Horseshoe, Autumn 2023

Found here.

It's funny 'cause it's true!

If there's one thing Tik-Tok Democrats and 4chan Republicans can agree on, it's Israel Bad.

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On the Rebound?

Indiana State Fair attendee with a Canon EOS 80D & Tamron 18-400mm zoom lens.

Something I noticed at the State Fair this past summer was that there were a lot more people carrying actual cameras... you know, the kind you hang on a strap around your neck ...than there have been for the last several years. I probably haven't seen this many serious cameras being used in the entire time I've been attending the Fair.

A shutterbug friend attending a Highland Games event out east last month also noticed an unusual number of cameras, real cameras of the interchangeable lens variety, relative to what he'd been used to of late.

Heck, on the random street corner I picked to stake out the Monumental Marathon here in Indy the other day, among the people waving cell phones, was a young shooter with a Canon Rebel T7 and kit lens.

Canon's last consumer DSLR, the Rebel T7. Only 479 clams at BezosMart, with lens!

That got me to wondering why this is, and here’s my theory:

Up through the end of the film era most people had some sort of camera, but unless they had photography as a hobby, it was generally only used to document special occasions: holidays, parties, holiday parties, vacations, sports games or concerts...that sort of thing.

This was because of two things. The first was that each photograph had real physical monetary and time costs, in film and processing and printing. The second was that in order to share those images with anyone, you had to be in the same place with them and get them to look at your physical photo.

That changed with three innovations that became increasingly common toward the end of the Nineties: Digital cameras, the World Wide Web, and broadband connectivity that could transmit images to your screen at something other than a snail's pace. (One of the first web fora on which I was a moderator would close and lock threads once they went over 100 kilobytes in size so that they wouldn't load too slowly for people on dialup connections.)

With the ability to share photos over the internet, the reasons to purchase a digital camera began to multiply. I remember on my first AOL home page what a pain it was to take physical photos and then get my then-roommate to scan them so they could be put online.

The new horizons of eBay and Craigslist gave normal folks who'd never consider photography as a hobby or pastime a reason to buy a digital camera. How are you gonna sell that sofa or old Honda unless you can upload some photos of it?

In fact, the need to sell my old '84 Trans Am was the impetus for the purchase of my own first digicam, a New-Old-Stock Sony Mavica FD-88 in October of 2001. The fact that I could use it to take pictures of S&W revolvers and upload them to internet forums was just a bonus. Ironically, I picked the Mavica not only because it was on sale, but also because it stored photos on floppies. Back then, there was no standard storage medium for cameras: Memory Sticks, SD and CF cards, SmartMedia, xD cards... they were all vying to be The One. I picked the Mavica because computers would always have floppy drives, right? Ell. Oh. Ell.

Over the next few years I upgraded digital cameras twice, first to a Nikon Coolpix 990 in 2003, and then a Kodak EasyShare V1073 in 2008. I was still using the Kodak when I got my first smart phone in 2011, an LG Optimus V, whose 3MP camera was no threat to the supremacy of the EasyShare with its 10MP sensor and sharp Schneider-Kreuznach 3X optical zoom lens.

My next phone with a camera was a Samsung Galaxy SII and, to be perfectly honest, if I hadn't gotten back into photography as a hobby, that's where I would have stopped buying cameras. The Galaxy's camera had an 8MP sensor and turned out perfectly adequate snapshots.

Here's the thing, though: That generation of smart phones... the Galaxy SII and the iPhone 5 ...put perfectly adequate snapshot cameras into the hands of millions of people, some percentage of which eventually wanted more. Being on Instagram or Flickr can expose a person to some pretty cool imagery of the kind that can't exactly be duplicated with a fixed 24mm lens and a 1/2.3" sensor.

Just like back in the film days, some people got their start with a Brownie or an Instamatic and decided that they liked taking pictures and wanted to be able to do more, a certain percentage of folks are using the modern-day equivalent of those ubiquitous snapshot cameras...and deciding that they want more.

Will digicam sales ever return to what they were? No, but only if you count the standalone inexpensive general purpose digicams. People don't need those anymore, because there's already one strapped to their phone.

But cameras for the specialized activity of photography are still with us, and maybe having a bit of a revival. After all, it's never been easier to share your photos than it is right now.

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Automotif CDXXXIX...

Here's a remarkably unscathed '92-'96 Buick LeSabre Custom in Dark Mahogany with all four fake alloy wheel covers matching and intact.

The seventh generation was the second iteration of FWD LeSabres, and the second-to-last one before Buick axed the nameplate after its 46th birthday in 2005.

Powered by the 170bhp pushrod GM 3800 Series I tuned-port injected V6, and sharing a basic platform with the Olds 88 and Pontiac Bonneville, the 1992 LeSabres were a curvy departure from the sharply-creased sixth generation cars.

The Olds 88's and LeSabres of this era have mostly emerged from the garages of Silent Generation and Baby Boomer oldsters and begun their gradual descent into hooptie-dom, but this one's still in Only Driven to Church on Sundays shape.

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QotD: Pot Of Message Edition...

From an article by George Packer at The Atlantic:

"Art that tries to give political satisfaction is unlikely to be very good as either politics or art."

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Message Fic

A critique flung at authors of fiction who get too polemical, first recorded in use against H.G. Wells, is that they'd sold sold their artistic birthright for a pot of message.

There're right ways and wrong ways to write a philosophical tome disguised as a novel. Nobody comes away from, say, Atlas Shrugged thinking "What a great action romance novel, and oh how subtly did she slip her message into the plot!" Instead it feels like you've just been harangued by ol' Strident Ayn for what feels like two thousand pages (which is nonsense, since the Kindle edition is only 1188.)

Meanwhile, ask someone about Starship Troopers and they'll be like "Oh, that Military SciFi novel?" without it crossing their minds that the majority of the book took place in classrooms of one type or another.

Having just re-read 1984 as a followup to reading Julia*, I was struck how much closer Orwell's novel is to Heinlein than Rand in structure. It's tightly written and steps along pretty smartly and in retrospect it's hard to think that maybe as much as half of it takes place either as the main character reading a political treatise or getting interrogated by the Thought Police. (I don't mean to spoiler 1984 for you, there, but yeah, Winston does get busted by the Brain Fuzz and given a cerebral shampoo.)

*What was also neat was realizing how the author of Julia had picked up a few little details from the original book and spun them into much more significant plot points when seen through other characters' eyes. The scene in 1984 where Winston passes the site of a recent rocket bomb attack and kicks a severed hand off the sidewalk into the gutter takes on a whole new tone, for instance.

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Now we're cooking with gas... or oil.


• On writing for the pleasure of writing.


• Anatomy of a motorcycle robbery.

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Automotif CDXXXVIII...

Here's a Chrysler LeBaron convertible with an almost miraculous lack of dents and rust.

The V6 badge on the fender combined with the hidden headlamps mark this Flash Red ragtop as a 1990-1992 model.

For '87 and '88, you could get the LeBaron, based on the K-car platform like virtually every other Chrysler product at the time, in coupe or convertible form. The original engine choices were the normally-aspirated SOHC 2.5L Chrysler four-banger, or the 2.5L turbo or intercooled 2.2L Turbo II. 

The former were gutless and the latter two needed to be revved more than the typical Chrysler buyer was likely to do in order to develop any power, to say nothing of the fact that a peaky turbo four and a three-speed automatic transmission go together like chocolate and onions.

So for the 1990 model year Chrysler offered the SOHC 3.0L Mitsubishi 6G72 V-6. While its 141 SAE net horsepower didn't match the 150hp 2.5L Turbo... to say nothing of the 175hp 2.2L Turbo II ...the greater usable torque at suburban cruising speeds more than made up for that for the car's target audience.

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QotD: The Hottest Of Takes Edition...

Alas, it's behind a paywall, but this bit from Nick Catoggio is too good to not pass along:

"In many cultures, holidays are celebrated in tandem, on consecutive days. Halloween is followed by the Day of the Dead; Christmas is followed by Boxing Day; Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday; New Year’s Eve is followed by, uh, New Year’s Day.

There’s a special pairing for pundits: Election Day is followed by The Feast of Hot Takes.

On The Feast of Hot Takes, you gather piecemeal results spread across different regions from the previous evening and arrange them to form a mosaic that perfectly matches your priors."

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Automotif CDXXXVII...

The Mercury Cougar, over its 35-year run, was the Car of a Thousand Faces.

It started life in 1967 as a more highly-optioned, Euro-feeling Mercury alternative to the original pony car, Ford's Mustang. The Cougar and Mustang shared a platform and bloated right alongside each other until the 1974 model year, by which time the duo had reached almost Torino-esque proportions.

At that point the Mustang got shrunk back to something like its original small sporty coupe size while the Cougar leaned right in to the bloat, becoming a midsize "personal luxury coupe" that shared a chassis with the midsize Ford Torino and Mercury Montego. Now competing with the Olds Cutlass Supreme and Chevy Monte Carlo, the big cat from Mercury added plushness and, well, flab.

For the '77 model year the Cougar was moved to the same platform as the LTD II and Thunderbird. Now there were sedan and wagon versions offered, while the Cougar XR7 coupe was basically a Mercury-badged T-bird.

Downsized in 1980 to use the then-new Fox platform, the fifth generation of Cougar retained the sedan and station wagon versions (based on the Ford Granada) while the two-door XR7 remained a rebadged Thunderbird.

The '83 Cougar finally shed the brand-diluting sedans. It was now only offered as a coupe on the Fox platform, with all-new rounded lines, albeit with a roof-ectomy in order to give it a jarringly vertical "formal" rear window. This was to distinguish it from the cheaper, sportier Thunderbird and spendier, sportier Continental Mark VII, with whom it otherwise shared underpinnings.

The Cougar in the picture is from the penultimate iteration of the nameplate. Based on the new independent rear suspension MN12 platform, which it again shared with the T-bird and Lincoln Mark VIII, the Laser Red 1996 coupe in the photo would have either had the base 145bhp 3.8L pushrod Essex V6 or the 205bhp 4.6L SOHC Modular V8.

After the 1997 model year, the Cougar badge was moved to a little FWD hatchback coupe based on the European Ford Mondeo. It was something of a consolation prize for Mercury, as it was originally going to be the next Ford Probe, but Ford was axing all the coupes from its lineup other than the Mustang and Escort ones.

The Cougar was discontinued after the 2002 model year, followed nine years later by the rest of the Mercury division of FoMoCo.

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Gauging the Pull

Back when I got asked to do my first for-pay gun review I picked up an inexpensive RCBS trigger pull gauge, the spring-loaded kind that's like a fish scale. It read up to eight pounds, and so I'd occasionally have to borrow some calibrated trigger weights if I was testing a pistol or revolver with a double-action trigger...or an unusually crappy single-action one.

A...uh...recent test pistol's trigger made me think that the eight pound scale might not be enough, so I finally broke down and splurged on a modern digital Lyman trigger pull gauge from BezosMart.

It has the advantage of giving output in pounds and ounces, rather than the eighth-of-a-pound hashmarks on the RCBS unit. Further, it can do a string of ten pulls and spit out an average. Handy!

Another bows out...

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina surprised even his campaign staffers last night by announcing that he was suspending his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

With Mike Pence, that makes two big-name Conservative Quixotes who've ridden their Rocinantes back to the barn after failing to dent the populist windmill.

Normally when a candidate exits a campaign there's a flurry of punditry about which of the remaining contenders they'll throw their support behind, but Pence and Scott's poll numbers have been so tepid that there's a distinct lack of speculation as to who they'll ask their twenty or thirty loyal boosters to rally behind.

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Automotif CDXXXVI...

The Eldorado debuted in 1953 as a sporty convertible coupe with show car styling at the pinnacle of Cadillac's lineup.

From then on, it remained as Caddy's sports-luxury coupe, and often debuted new tech for the company. The '53 had been the first Cadillac with a wraparound windshield, and the '67 Eldo was the first front-wheel drive Cad. The '76 Eldorado was the first with the fuel-injected 500, and the last Cadillac convertible until 1984.

The Eldorado in the picture, I think a '95 in Ruby Red, would be from the twelfth… and final …generation of the Eldorado. While the sportier Eldorado Touring Coupes had the 300hp version of the 4.6L 32V DOHC Northstar V8, this base model would have had the lower-revving 275-horse LD8 variation of the Northstar, with better low-RPM torque that didn't require so much pressure on the gas pedal from an orthopedic loafer to summon up. 

While 275 horsepower may not seem like a lot by modern standards, or by those of the ‘60s Muscle Car Era, the LD8 Northstar was a big bump over the ‘93 Eldo’s 4.9L pushrod L26 port fuel-injected V-8 that only put out 200hp.

The Eldorado nameplate went to that Great Country Club Parking Lot in the Sky after the 2002 model year.

Overheard in the Living Room...

Bobbi and I were watching S:2, E:9 of Bosch: Legacy over dinner last night. Right at the end of the episode a heretofore-suspected baddie turns out to in fact be a baddie.

RX: "I knew it! Didn’t I call it?"

Me: "Well, she was Chekov's floozy. There wasn’t much other reason for her to be in the story. But yes, you did call it out right when she first showed up on screen."

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Testing, Testing...

This Avidity Arms PD10, the single-stack 10-shot 9mm specced out by Rob Pincus, just arrived. I'll be wringing it out for a writeup in a forthcoming issue of RECOIL: Concealment.

It's been ten years in the making, so it'll be interesting to see if it lives up to expectations.

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Crazy-Eyed Crossovers...

On the one hand, I lament the ever-dwindling number of really cool sports sedans (as well as the practical disappearance of station wagons, sporty or otherwise) in this, the Age of the Crossover SUV.

On the other hand, there are crossovers and then there are crossovers. Probably my first experience seeing a crossover that really made my eyes cross was back in 2015 when I was visiting Kathy Jackson in Washington state. We were driving up to the Johnston Ridge Observatory overlooking Mount St. Helens and a Porsche Macan S pulled out of the scenic overlook just ahead of us and then proceeded to zip out of sight up the windy mountain road in a very un-trucklike fashion.

Above is a '22-'23 BMW X3 M40i, with a 3.0L DOHC turbo inline six pumping 382bhp to all four tires through an 8-speed auto. Car and Driver says it'll go 0-60 in 4.1 seconds and do the quarter in an eyeball-flattening 12.8 @ 108mph. And it'll circle a skidpad at .88 g's, which is as good as my Z3 2.8 on its best day. The idea of pulling those kind of g's in a station wagon on stilts that weighs most of two and a quarter tons is mind-boggling.

And then there's this Audi SQ5, the grandnephew of that Mount St. Helens Macan. It's a little less hairy than the M'ed-out X, but only a little. 

It's also got a 3.0L turbo six, although its cylinders are arranged in a vee, rather than lined up straight. With 354hp and an 8-spd auto with faux-manual capabilities, it'll tear off 5.1 second 0-60 sprints and 13.7 quarters at 102mph.

What gets me is the braking on the SQ5. It's a 4400-lb truckette and it'll stop from 70 in 148 feet. My Z3 will stop from the same velocity in 171 feet and that feels like you just drove head-on into a sand dune.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The Work-Life Diet. That reminds me of how I lost a ton of weight while working at CCA, between being on my feet all day and only eating anything like supper a couple nights a week.


• Prof. Yamane's book is finished and in the hands of his publisher. Hooray!


• Setting boundaries, big and small. (And enforcing them.)

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QotD: Poly-Ticks Edition...

Bobbi watched most of the GOP debate last night. I'm getting the vibe she's not feeling the Vivekmentum...

"I watched some of the Republican runners-up debate last night, the Island of Misfit Toys, and even in that group, Vivek Ramaswamy stands out as a jerk. Yes, in a profession of largely jerks, in a party that has embraced boorish jerkness, amid a collection of alpha jerks, he was still an outstanding jerk."

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Automotif CDXXXV...

There's been quite the brouhaha among auto buffs regarding the decisions by Ford and GM to expand the Mustang, Camaro, and Corvette badges into entire sub-brands. I mean, that almost happened with the Corvette from the start; in some alternate universe there were probably Corvette Nomad station wagons built right alongside the roadsters in 1953.

One of the most notable recent examples was Oldsmobile's use of the "Cutlass" name to cover all of its midsize coupes and sedans in the mid 1980s.

The Cutlass nameplate had been a winner for GM. Between the '78 and '81 model years, Olds dealers had moved something like two million of the RWD midsize Cutlass, which was available in coupe, sedan, and wagon body styles. 

Hyped by this success, in 1982 they renamed the existing rear-wheel-drive Cutlass the "Cutlass Supreme" and added the slightly smaller and cheaper Cutlass Ciera, built on the on the FWD A-body shared with the Buick Century, Chevy Celebrity, and Pontiac 6000. 1985 saw the Cutlass Supreme and Cutlass Ciera joined by the compact-midsize Cutlass Calais, build on the N-body FWD platform of the Buick Skyhawk and Pontiac Grand Am.

Like the Buick Century, the Cutlass Ciera was a darling of fleet buyers, and so while Chevy and Pontiac axed their A-body cars after the 1990 model year, Oldsmobile and Buick let theirs continue to sell alongside their more modern replacements all the way through 1996.

The car in the photo is a a post-facelift '90-'94 Cutlass Ciera S sedan in Bright White. It's in unusually nice shape for a GM sedan of its era, most of which have either decayed into hooptie-dom or succumbed to rust.

If we split the difference and guess at a model year of 1994, the base engine would have been the 2.5L Tech IV inline-4. This was the final evolution of the elderly pushrod Iron Duke four-banger, with throttle body fuel injection, 9.0:1 compression, and 110 SAE net horsepower, a nearly thirty-percent bump from the original 85hp carbureted version back in '77. If the buyer were feeling frisky...well, they wouldn't have bought a Cutlass Ciera...but if they were feeling frisky by buying-an-Oldsmobile-in-1992 standards, they could have ordered the optional GM corporate 3.3L pushrod V-6, rated at 160hp.

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Book Review: Do it to Julia. Right now.

I've read Orwell's 1984 at least a half-dozen times, from the first time in high school up to the present. (And no, the first time was not assigned reading. I was a precocious 9th grader who wanted to see what all the hoopla regarding the rapidly-approaching titular year was about*.) 

With each reading, I've become increasingly curious about the character of Julia. She seemed so much more streetwise and cynical than the protagonist and, while Winston viewed her as shallow and superficial, Orwell wrote him as such a misogynist that he's obviously an unreliable narrator. I kinda wanted to see the terrain of London, Airstrip One, and the Outer Party as viewed by Julia.

Apparently I was not alone in this, because Sandra Newman wrote the book I've been waiting for, and it was definitely worth the read.

Here's how reading it went:

Me, a fifth of the way into Julia:
“Okay, yeah, dammit. This is good. This is the POV of Julia I was imagining when I read 1984. Good stuff. Well written.”

Me, a third of the way into Julia:
“OH HOLY F$CK I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING…but…yeah, that seems right. I think what’s going to happen now is… no, wait. Don’t guess. Just read.”

It definitely stays true to the original and avoids subverting tropes just to be precious. There's a bit more action and intrigue, but that's to be expected, since Julia was a much more active character than the introspective and slightly timid Winston. I mean, in the original book he was skittish about sneaking into prole neighborhoods, but she seemed to have good methods of dodging snoops and telescreens, as well as access to black market goods that Winston did not, and now we find out why.

My major beef is that it's not nearly as tightly-written as the original, but in Newman's defense, she's telling a more sprawling story that contains the original inside it, and there's no shame in not being as gifted a prose stylist as George frickin' Orwell. We still read his stuff for a reason, after all.

Highly recommend.

*I was such a weirdo that my sophomore year in high school I had a picture postcard of the well-known BBC portrait of Orwell hanging in my locker, in the corner of which I'd scrawled "All the best in the new year! Love, Eric." Only one or two of my classmates who saw it even knew who it was.

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Ohio Joins the Doobie Brothers

 

Ohio voters overwhelmingly chose to legalize recreational marijuana yesterday. In today's 50/50 fractured political hellscape, a 57-43 drubbing is as close to a landslide as you're likely to get in a statewide election.

That puts Indiana in a nearly unique position of having every bordering state have some form of legal weed (recreational in IL, MI, and now OH, and medicinal in KY) while outlawing it entirely ourselves. Only Texas is in a similar situation.

Of course, as long as it's illegal on the federal level and I work with firearms for a living, I can't spark up myself. Although at this point five of the ten most populous states have legal recreational weed and two more have medicinal marijuana, so who knows when we'll reach a tipping point federally?

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Does Not Work That Way

At Beretta USA's webpage for their 80X Cheetah, a Common Tater* left the following...er, "review":

This isn't, of course, a thing that will happen, because the 80X is a straight blowback operated pistol with a fairly light, gracile slide, while the .30 Super Carry cartridge has a maximum SAAMI chamber pressure of something like 50,000psi. That's better than double the maximum pressure of .380ACP. 

In order to function safely, the hypothetical .30SC Cheetah would need a recoil spring that would be physically impossible to cycle by hand.

*"Common Tater" is ™The Tactical Professor

Puppers and Doggos...

In the beer garden behind Half Liter on Sunday afternoon were plenty of good doggos.

Fortunately I had the Canon EOS 40D and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS along with me that day! Thanks to the 1.6X crop factor of the 40D's APS-C sensor, the lens acts like a 38-168mm lens, which gave plenty of reach for pupper portraiture.

Crossposted at the other other blog.

Ain't nobody's business if I do.

I was immensely tickled by this line:

I first came across the witty term “OLC,” or “Out Loud Carry,” on a public discussion forum, a response someone left for a question about a friend bragging about their carry. The commenter added something to the effect of, “Dude, your mouth is printing.”

An unpleasant hypothetical scenario I've pondered goes something like this:

I'm in some random Kwik-E-Mart with a friend or acquaintance while we're on a roadtrip, grabbing some Combos and a Slim Jim, and while I'm perusing the beef jerky selection a disturbance at the register makes me aware that the joint is being stuck up.

I stay chill back in the corner of the store and, since the dude doesn't seem to be about to pop me or anyone else, I just mind my business as he heads for the door with his sack of loot.

At which point my companion blurts from one aisle over "Tam! You've got a gun! Do something!"

Fortunately, most friends of mine know better than to do this, since most of them are About That Life themselves, or I've at least made them aware that my blaster didn't come with a cape and a Batman Badge. If the bad guy grabbed the dough and is making his exit, he ain't my problem.

But this is why I don't generally talk about this stuff with random acquaintances and strangers.

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Automotif CDXXXIV...

Celica GT photographed with Nikon 1 V2 & 18.5mm f/1.8

Toyota's Celica nameplate dates all the way back to 1970, when it was introduced as a sporty rear-wheel-drive coupe that looked and drove like a 5/8ths scale Ford Mustang.

In the late Seventies it spawned a version with a slightly stretched wheelbase and a 2.6L SOHC inline-six, dubbed the Celica Supra.

For the '86 model year, the 4-cylinder Celica was moved to an all-new front-wheel-drive platform, leaving the 6-cylinder Supra to carry on as a separate model.

The seventh and final generation of the Celica appeared for the 2000 model year. By then, sporty coupe sales were already falling in the face of ballooning SUV and Crossover sales. A strong Yen and Toyota's corporate image as a purveyor of stodgy Camrys and Corollas didn't help Celica sales, either.

The car in the photo is a 2000-2004 Celica GT liftback coupe in the boringly named Black color. Apparently the Toyota of North America marketing department ran out of cool-sounding adjectives after Super White, Absolutely Red, and Carbon...Blue? Why is Blue "Carbon" and not Black? Anyway...

The base GT was powered by the 1.8L 1ZZ-FE four-banger, putting out 140 SAE net horsepower. If you ordered the GT-S package, you got the 180bhp 2ZZ-GE that had variable valve timing and lift. This was the same motor Lotus used in their Elise. That's almost as much power as the 2.8L M52B28 six in my Z3, despite being a whole liter smaller.

Alas, this didn't generate enough excitement to save the nameplate.

After years of slumping sales, Toyota pulled the plug on the Celica after the 2006 model year.

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Tab Clearing...

• Down the Road has photos from the Feast of the Hunter's Moon up in Tippecanoe County.


• Ever wonder why the stereotypical haunted house in the US is in the Second Empire style? Here's why.


• Big Tech's "attention rents".

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Security through obscurity.

Apparently something in the post about the Lamborghini Huracán violated Facebook's Community Standards for Cybersecurity.

Now, hell if I know what magic combination of words triggered it.

I have pretty much never run afoul of the normal posting standards. I know not to use violent verbs with direct referents because robots are too dumb to tell when you're threatening to kneecap someone as a joke or for realsies, and I don't use the array of impolite slurs that would get me flagged because I'm not a boor. But I have no idea what innocent terms happen to be current cybersecurity buzzwords.

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Automotif CDXXXIII...

Tractor manufacturer and HVAC magnate Ferruccio Lamborghini was a mechanic in the Italian army during World War Two. After the war he got his start in business by opening a garage, where he had a sideline in hot-rodding Fiat 500 "Topolinos".

As he branched out into manufacturing and became a wealthy businessman, he bought a series of Ferraris and, being something of an opinionated gearhead in his own right, he quickly was at loggerheads with that notorious iron tower of ego, Enzo Ferrari himself.

So Ferruccio said "Fine! I'll just go make my own supercar company! With blackjack and hookers!" or words to that effect.

Lamborghini sold off his stake in the car company during the fuel crisis years of the early Seventies, and it wandered in and out of bankruptcy before being bought by Chrysler in 1987, which brought an influx of cash. (That's right, the Lambo Diablo was technically a Mopar.)

Chrysler sold the company to some Malaysian and Indonesian investors in 1994, who in turn passed it off to Volkswagen AG in 1998, who nestled it under the umbrella of their Audi subsidiary.

And that's why this vicious-looking Lamborghini Huracán, sporting the deep, dark Nero Noctis paint, is riding on the same basic chassis as the Audi R8 supercar.

What's in a Name?

In my latest column at Shooting Illustrated, I discuss the notion that the trend to names rather than alphanumeric designations for commercial American firearms is neither new nor nefarious.

"[I]n the early 20th century, the Doughboys and G.I.s might have been issued an M1911 or M1911A1 pistol, but if they didn’t smuggle one home in their duffle bag as a souvenir after the war, when they felt the twangs of nostalgia for their wartime sidearm, they’d go into the local gun store and find that there were no handguns of that name from Colt.

See, “M1911” was a purely military designation. However, the Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company sold all manner of variants on the commercial market in the 1900s under names like “Government Model,” “Gold Cup,” and “Combat Commander” without anybody fearing it would send people’s plates spinning off their sticks."

It's a "Reflex", not an "FN5xx"

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Automotif CDXXXII...

Unless you were a car nerd back then, it's hard to overstate the stylistic one-two punch of GM's Third Generation F-bodies in '81 and then Ford's 9th Generation Thunderbird in '82. I remember seeing my first one of these in the church parking lot, surrounded by the angular sheet metal of baroque '70s Detroit iron, and it looked like a bullet car from the future.

All through the '70s, Detroit had been obsessed with "the formal look". All sharp creases, straight lines, and vertical greenhouses, with bluff chrome grilles committing horrible crimes against the laws of aerodynamics. If you look at the Ford Granada, Dodge Diplomat, or Chevy Caprice Classic, you can't help but feel that the Big Three's engineering departments spent much of the Disco Era patiently explaining to the Styling Departments that square wheels were an impossibility.

I mean, look at the frumpy, boxlike sadness that was the 8th Generation of Thunderbird!

Its replacement for the '83 model year, like the one in the photo (going by the grille, it's actually an '85 or '86) not only looked the business, it was more potent than its predecessor, too.

The top motor in the '82 T-bird had been the 115-horsepower 255cid 2bbl V-8. The 255 was a smaller-bore version of the 302. Back in 1980, on the heels of the second Fuel Crisis, Ford was supposedly planning on discontinuing the 302 altogether and replacing all V-8s with the then-new Essex V-6.

By the time the new '83 T-birds were revealed, however, Ford reversed course. The base Thunderbird motor was the 110-horse 3.8L Essex V-6, and the 302 was back as an option, with 140 SAE net horsepower. There was also a Turbo Coupe model, that came with a 144hp 2.3L OHC turbo four and a standard 5-speed manual, alloy wheels, and sports suspension. The '83 Turbo Coupe was easily the sportiest Thunderbird in a dozen years.

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The Tyranny of the Morning People

I'm with Tom Nichols here. Let's just stay on DST year-'round. Jog in the dark, overachievers.

"Americans still venerate the idea that mornings are super productive, and every year, we’re all forced to give back an hour of sunlight in the afternoon so that our overmotivated friends and colleagues don’t have to endure their first latte in the predawn gloom. Instead, the rest of us have to feel the darkness enveloping us in the late afternoon, when we’re trying to get stuff done at work while the morning people nod off behind their desks."

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Automotif CDXXXI...

Few automotive rivalries are as iconic as that between the Chevrolet Camaro and the Ford Mustang. They originally started out pretty even in the late Sixties, what with them both being sporty coupes based off their respective makers' small sedan platforms. 

For most of the Seventies, the Camaro had the edge, since it remained a full-on Pony Car for its second generation, while the Mustang II spent a few years wandering in the Pinto-derived wilderness.

In the Eighties, the tables were turned, as Fox-body 3rd generation Mustangs with 5.0L H.O. motors and Borg-Warner 5-speeds romped all over their 3rd Generation F-body rivals from GM. An attempt to give the IROC-Z Camaro an advantage by fitting it with a Corvette-derived TPI 5.7L V-8 was foiled by three things: 

First, for Camaro use the Corvette's aluminum heads were replaced by cast iron ones, making the motor heavier. Secondly, the hood line of the Camaro necessitated a convoluted, more restrictive intake path versus that of the 'Vette. Finally, the 5-speed gearbox used in the Camaros was apparently not up to the torque of the 350 (which is why the Corvettes of the day still used a 4-speed box with a weird overdrive unit bolted to its ass end) so 'Vette-motored Camaros were all equipped with slushboxes.

Camaro fans got their vengeance in the Nineties with the 4th Gen Camaros, like the Bright Teal Metallic Z28 in the picture. Equipped with a 275bhp LT1 5.7L V-8, it had no trouble getting enough air into the motor, and the standard Borg-Warner T56 6-speed had no problems getting that power to the ground, either.

If this Camaro Z28 is a '94 model, it would have been the archenemy of my Mustang GT at the traffic lights of America, and frankly the 5.0 under my Ford's hood is a little weedy by comparison.

It's all cool though. My days of being silly at the traffic light are mostly over.

Mostly.

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Six Blown Horses in the Lotus Position

Lotus Evora GT
Nikon 1 J4 & 1 Nikkor 10mm f/2.8
1/800th, f/2.8, ISO 200

Wide Angle at the War Memorial

In my ongoing effort to "see" better with wide angle lenses, I took the Nikon 1 J4 with the 1 Nikkor 10mm f/2.8 along on yesterday's trip to the Indiana World War Memorial. That's the equivalent of 28mm on a full-frame camera, so it's wide-but-not-crazy-wide.

I posted the same photos at the other other blog, albeit with more camera-specific arglebargle, if that's your jam.

Geritol Alert

So my friend came down from Da Region to visit today and we went down and took in the Indiana World War Memorial and University Park south of it.

Afterward we tooled back up to SoBro for an alfresco lunch on the patio at Fat Dan’s… we’re heading into the time of year where these outdoor dining opportunities are rare and treasured …and we both of us commented on the excellent Spotify channel playing on the sound system. It was a festival of The Cure, Depeche Mode, INXS, Talking Heads, B52’s, The Clash, Echo & the Bunnymen; classic fare from our late teens and early twenties. Oldies that, to us Gen X’ers at least, don’t feel old.

After my friend left, the channel drops “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails.

I’m never ready for that.

Meanwhile...

At the other, other blog, I give some thumbnail impressions of the Nikon Coolpix S6500.

Bad Guys Making Bad Life Decisions

The morning television news threw me for a loop today. The very first story I saw after the TV cut on was about the officer-involved shooting at the Burger King the other day, and released the name of the IMPD who had to shoot the dude using his backup gun. Turns out I know the guy. I first met him at MAG-40 up in Rochester, and he was an assistant instructor at the carbine class I took from Uncle Pat. Sometimes it's an uncomfortably small world.

That bad guy picked the wrong officer to throw down with, but better him than some other less experienced, less trained cop who might have panicked.

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Your mission, and you should choose to accept it...

Greg Ellifritz takes a look at the current situation and offers some practical advice if you're in some entertainment district and violence erupts between some of the other attendees:

"Don’t involve yourself in this stupidity. It will only harm you in the long term. If you intervene, you will either get shot by the thugs, shot by the cops, sued by the person you shoot, or arrested. If that doesn’t happen and you make a statement to the cops you take the chance of being hunted down by the arrested party’s crew at a future date before trial.

[SNIP]

If you are in a large public gathering and an argument breaks out, get as far away as possible. Stay far away from any of the protests in your town. If caught in a confrontation, seek cover and escape as soon as possible. Only draw your gun if your life is being directly threatened and your opportunity to escape if being actively blocked. Recognize that drawing your weapon in a situation like this will probably increase your risk of harm rather than decrease it."

Read the whole thing.

I generally avoid The Strip up in Broad Ripple in the evenings... and especially weekend evenings ...because it's way too crowded and my club kid days are more than a decade in the rearview now.

But also there's more of an edge to the altercations of late. Oh, sure, we used to be able to count on Sumdood getting affronted in the crowd outside The Vogue once every couple years and trying to settle his grudge by whipping out his popper and getting to popping, but those were very infrequent.

The frequency is increasing, though, and since Dracos, 'stendos, and switches are fashion accessories amongst the wannabe banger crowd now, there tend to be a lot more "to whom it may concern" projectiles in the air.

A Dark Day in Hoosieropolis...

Former IU coach Bobby Knight went to that great Assembly Hall in the sky yesterday. 

He was a titan of basketball, which is the official state religion of Indiana (and my lack of appreciation for squeaky round ball is how I know I'm merely a naturalized Hoosier and not a true native) and his passing is the top story in the local news.

Tom Cochrun wrote about his memories of Coach Knight here.

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Good Sleep is a Performance Enhancing Drug

Cats are some of the most efficient little predators on land. Do you know what else cats are really good at?

Relatedly, I just listened to a great Tactical Tangents podcast featuring a doctor whose specialty is healthy sleep habits.

"The downsides of sleep deprivation are legion: irritability, poor judgment, even lowered testosterone. Yet the duties of the .mil and LE career fields are well known for demanding odd and/or long hours that can make it hard to get good sleep. Mike talks with Dr. Paul Sargent of O2X, a specialist in human performances and sleep factors, in how to get the good shut-eye."

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Hey, look!

For those of y'all who don't get it in the mail, my review of the Springfield Armory Echelon in Shooting Illustrated is up in its entirety on the website...

I actually wear several hats as a gunwriter. When I’m writing editorially—such as in my “Handguns” column here at Shooting Illustrated or on my own personal blog—I’m free to opine on things that are purely subjective, offering readers my opinion on topics like “Why cats make better pets for introverts than dogs” or “Why .312-inch-diameter projectiles launched with sufficient energy are ideal rounds for normie-private-citizen-CCW use and all y’all folks who call them ‘mouseguns’ are just wrong.”

But, when I’m reviewing a firearm for the magazine, it’s my duty to set all that aside and be completely objective. When it comes to firearm reviews, I need to stick to classic journalism ethics, so sorely forgotten these days, and deliver just the “Five Ws:” the Who, What, When, Where and Why of the firearm in question. Just the facts. Part of that is treating the gun being tested as a unique firearm, in and of itself, without dragging in personal biases.

Automotif CDXXX...

Auto exec Bob Lutz is a certified Car Guy. When he was head of product development at Chrysler, he helped bring the Viper to the showroom floor largely unchanged from the wild, bare-bones show car. When he went to GM, he tried to get the Holden Monaro, a front-engine RWD V8 performance coupe built by GM Australia, imported to the US as a revived Pontiac GTO.

Unfortunately, by the time the project came to fruition, the Aussie dollar was a lot stronger and the GTO, which had originally been priced to go head-to-head against the Mustang GT, was now ten grand more than the Original Pony Car when it hit showroom floors as a 2004 model. Dealer hype premium markups for early models pushed the street price dangerously close to Corvette territory.

Overpriced and undersold, the Monaro-based GTO sank without a ripple after the 2006 model year.

But that wasn't the end of GM Australia cars in the U.S. market.

Pontiac imported the Holden Commodore sedan, also rear wheel drive, starting in 2008, as a replacement for the discontinued Bonneville and Grand Prix. Alas, it only lasted through the 2009 model year...as did Pontiac itself.

Dubbed the G8, it could be had in base, GT, or GXP flavors. The latter two could be had with snarly V-8 motors and manual transmissions, while the base model...couldn't.

The red taillight lenses on the one in the picture say it's a base model Pontiac G8, which has the GM corporate DOHC 3.6L V-6 rated at 256hp driving the rear wheels through a five speed automatic transmission. The paint color, Sport Red Metallic, marks it as a 2009 model.

Despite outmuscling my '98 Z3 2.8 and '94 Mustang 5.0 GT under the hood, it's not as quick as either. Car & Driver could only get a seven second 0-60 run out of the base G8, and a mid-15 second quarter. Those would have been big sports sedan numbers...in 1992. In 2004, though, the air dam and those hood scoops on the base G8 are writing checks the drivetrain can't cash, largely because the curb weight is only about a good trunkful of groceries shy of four thousand pounds.

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