Re-Fragmentation

Once upon a time, America had three TV networks. It was a fluke of history that lasted maybe a few decades, from the mid-Fifties to the late Eighties and the rise of cable, but for that period of time, we had something very close to a national monoculture. Show up at work in the morning and everybody would have probably seen the same TV shows last night. Further, there were a handful of big national news magazines... monthlies or weeklies ...that everyone read, and blockbuster movies tended to linger a lot longer in theaters in those pre-cable and VHS days, ensuring that most everyone got a chance to see them.

The era of cable and DVDs and the dawn of the internet caused a certain amount of fragmentation, but some coherence came back with the dawn of the big social media sites.

Half everybody was on Facebook and/or Twitter. Increasingly, though, people are fleeing to smaller, also siloed, alternatives that are safe spaces for their particular politics; Web 2.0 versions of Web 1.0 titans like FreeRepublic and Democratic Underground. Even if you're still on the big sites, their algorithms are so finely honed that they can let you silo yourself as effectively as if you'd migrated.

"The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture."

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The Who-this?

So the US has put together a task force with some of our NATO allies as well as Bahrain and Seychelles to protect shipping in the Red Sea from Houthi attacks. 

"As of Monday, details on what ships will be involved in the force were not available, a Pentagon spokesperson told USNI News Monday following the announcement.

The U.S. Navy has at least three destroyers in the vicinity of the Bab el Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden – USS Carney (DDG-64), USS Mason (DDG-87) and USS Thomas Hudner (DDG-116) have all operated in the region. The U.K. Royal Navy guided-missile destroyer HMS Diamond (D34) and the French Navy guided-missile frigate FS Languedoc (653) have operated in the Red Sea as well."

The Houthis, whose slogan is "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews, Victory to Islam" are obviously Big Mad about the whole Gaza thing and are almost certainly being egged on by Tehran and Moscow, who are eager to put a stick in the spokes of as many western wheels as possible.

Meanwhile, BP has announced that it will be suspending oil shipping through the Red Sea, which will do nothing good for petrol prices.

On Monday, oil giant BP became the latest company to announce it would be pausing its shipments through the Red Sea. Several shipping companies, including MSC, Maersk, Euronav and the Evergreen Group, have said they are also avoiding the Suez Canal as militants target cargo vessels.

Roughly 10 percent of all maritime oil trade goes through the Red Sea — which connects to the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. Without access to the Red Sea route, many ships will have to take the far longer and costlier journey around Africa to reach their destinations.

So the question is whether the west is going to keep shooting down $20k RPVs from Ali's House of Discount Drones with multi-million dollar SM-2 and Sea Viper missiles, or are we going to try a strike using carrier aircraft and cruise missiles to knock out Houthi launch sites and storage facilities. Because in the latter case it would have to be a large enough strike to get them to knock it off for a bit, without being so large as to widen the shooting war(s) going on in the Middle East right now.

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Red (Sea) Alert...

Important line from the latest post at TLP:

"The Biden administration has displayed understandable and otherwise admirable restraint in the face of these continued Houthi provocations. With the war in Gaza still raging, America doesn’t need to see another front opened up in the Middle East. But the Houthis have kept up their attacks on the freedom of the seas—the Navy destroyer USS Carney shot down 14 attack drones just this past weekend, for instance—and transnational container shipping companies Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, and MSC have announced they will keep their ships out of the Red Sea. The problem has slowly snowballed into a significant crisis, one that could find the United States and close allies like Britain and France taking direct military action against the Houthis in the near future."

Note that bit in bold. A tremendous amount of shipping between Europe and Asia transits the Suez Canal. Twelve percent of all global shipping transits the Red Sea. Remember how jammed up things got when the MV Ever Given blocked the canal a few years back?

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Wild & Free

There's a local quasi-feral cat in our 'hood who our neighbor named Copper.

She's been a neighborhood fixture for many years now and had several litters of kittens by numerous feline Lotharios... I remember one notable occasion where I turned the corner on a side street in the neighborhood, only to find Copper and one of her babydaddies, a burly scarred gray & white tom named Thug, taking the advice of McCartney and Lennon right there in the middle of 56th Street and not at all inclined to move for the car.

She's very skittish and it was several years before she was successfully trapped and taken to have her baby-makin' bits deactivated. She still roams the neighborhood, although she's no longer helping populate it.

I was surprised that I was able to get this shot, even with the long 70-200/4L on my 1D Mark III. Normally if you turn and look directly at her, even from several houses down the block, she'll scuttle for cover. I guess having the camera up in front of my face blocked the threatening gaze of a pair of eyeballs.

Bangity.

2,750 rounds. 

Zero malfunctions. 

Still going.

Turn up the Kawaii!

Pentax’s original Q debuted to reviews that were equal parts enthusiastic and bemused. Back in 2011 nobody was really sure how the new field of mirrorless cameras was going to shake out. What, in effect, were these new cameras for?

The original Q offered a lot of “real camera” functionality, but its sensor size made it seem like a fun “play camera”. Its sturdy magnesium shell and eight hundred dollar price tag had it competing with established DSLR systems, but its lens selection was limited to the 01 Standard Prime and the 02 Standard Zoom and a handful of plasticky novelty lenses: the fixed focal length, fixed-aperture trio of the 03 Toy Fisheye, 04 Toy Lens Wide, and 05 Toy Lens Telephoto.

In 2012, Pentax leaned into the fun kawaii aspect of the tiny camera and replaced the Q with the Q10.

Pentax Q10, with Nikon D2X for scale.

While it also sports a 12MP 1/2.3" backside-illuminated CMOS sensor like its predecessor's, Pentax claims some hand-wave-y improvements, as well as faster autofocus. The most important change between the original Q and the Q10 was the price drop. Whereas the earlier camera had been $800 with a fixed-focal length prime lens, the new one was two hundred bucks cheaper and came with the 02 Standard Zoom in the kit.

It accomplished this by replacing the magnesium body of the Q with an entirely polymer outer shell. The new body had a slightly more sculpted top plate and a deeper finger grip that somehow gave it more SLR-like lines.

If you read my earlier review on the Q, all the buttons and controls are in the same place on the newer camera. However you could now get your kawaii little mirrorless Pentax with a hundred different combinations of body and grip colors. It's what attracted me to the camera in the first place; I thought it would be neat if Tamara Keel could get a camera, teal.

The other improvement to the Q lineup in 2012 was the addition of the 06 Telephoto Zoom, a 15-45mm f/2.8 zoom lens that had a field of view on the 1/2.3" sensor equivalent to an 83-249mm lens on a full frame camera...and yet it was about the size of a shot glass.

The Q10 is a fun little camera, and with the addition of the longer zoom, you could now have a reasonable three-lens kit: a standard zoom, a long zoom, and a fast standard prime. Within the limitations of the smaller sensor, the Q series had become a viable, if quirky, alternative to more normal entry-level DSLRs and mirrorless cams.

Q10 with 02 Standard Zoom

Q10 with 02 Standard Zoom, using "blur control" mode to simulate background blur

Q10 with 02 Standard Zoom

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I was there, Gandalf…

It’s true. All of it.

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All God's Children Got the A-Bomb

"The Pentagon's recent report on China's expanding nuclear arsenal highlights growing American concerns about the changing global nuclear landscape. Against the backdrop of increasing Chinese aggression against India, worsening U.S.-China ties, and a longstanding India-Pakistan rivalry, a series of interlocking contests involving multiple nuclear actors has emerged—presenting the United States with a much more challenging nuclear equation than it faced during the Cold War."

The multipolar nuclear world of today is a lot more complicated than the good ol' days of NATO versus the Warsaw Pact.

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Automotif CDLV...

I know that aesthetics are entirely subjective, but to my eyes, the current RZ34 reboot is easily the best-looking Nissan Z-car since the Z32 of the Nineties.

This Black Diamond Metallic '23-'24 was absolutely arresting as it rolled up College Avenue.

The 350Z and 370Z were capable cars, but always struck me as kinda paunchy-looking. This one is nice and taut-looking, yet has just enough stylistic throwbacks to the original gangsta 240Z to give a whiff of nostalgia.

J'approuve.

Photographed with a Canon EOS-1D Mark III & EF 70-200mm f/4L IS.

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Saturday Morning Surfing...

• Really good profile piece on Robert Downey Jr. at Vanity Fair.


• Good news! Mayim Bialik may be smart and a good actress but she was a terrible Jeopardy! host.


• I was not expecting to find a piece on my friend Bob Owens at The Atlantic. I can tell that the writer was doing his best to be fair, but he came into the story front-loaded with way too many biases to see past them.

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Sex On Wheels

I'm busy writing something, so y'all go ahead and ogle this Ferrari F458 for a bit...

Pentax Q10, 12MP

Nikon D800, 36MP

Automotif CDLIV...

It was only this year that I discovered the meaning behind the numbered Oldsmobile models. 

Way back in the Thirties, Olds made two basic series of cars, the F-Series and the L-Series. The former were smaller and had an inline six engine, while the latter were larger and had a straight eight. By the early Forties, these were replaced by three models: the 60 Series, 70 Series, and 90 Series. The first digit would be the series number while the second signified the number of cylinders, so a 76 would be the middle series car with a six cylinder, while a 98 was the king of Oldsmobile hill, packed with every luxo feature they had plus an eight cylinder engine.

The car in the picture is from the eighth generation of the Olds 98, being a 1966 convertible in Nocturne Mist. Power would come from the 425 cubic inch version of Oldsmobile's famed Rocket V-8 producing either 360 or 375 SAE gross horsepower, depending on the compression ratio.

Yum?

I normally like to keep a bag of those Tennessee Pride mini sausage biscuits in the freezer. So few foods from my adolescence and early twenties have remained palatable in my Pretentious Hipster Foodie Douchebag adulthood, but the little nuclear sausage biscuits still have.

The serving size is just right, and it's easy to pull out a two-pack, toss them on a paper plate, stick 'em in the microwave for 45 seconds, and it's a quick brekkie at my desk while blogging or doing the morning crossword with zero cleanup afterward. Just toss the plate and napkin in the lidded trash can in the corner of the office and get back to writing.

Anyhow, last time I was at the grocery store I saw these Jimmie Dean biscuit rollups (with sausage, egg, and cheese!) on sale and thought "Well, heck, let's give those a try. How bad can they be?"

For starters, they're not individually wrapped, nor are they in little two-sammich pouches like the Tennessee Pride fare. Instead there's just a big plastic envelope with a dozen frozen nutrient pucks sliding around loose in there.

I gotta say, when I slid a couple out onto a plate, they did not look like the picture on the box.

I definitely felt like I was in some dystopian sci-fi future, about to put two "RATION BARS, FROZEN, BREAKFAST, SOUTHERN STYLE" into the food reheater.

Taste report? Well, they weren't awful, but they're no Tennessee Pride comfort food, either. The idea seemed sound: Take breakfast burrito fixins and wrap them in biscuit dough rather than a tortilla. The execution was a little weaksauce, though.

Don't think I'll be repeating this particular purchase.

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Truly an Age of Wonders

RX: "...and the box even had a picture of a clown on the front."

Me: "Yeah, I remember that box. It was a lot of kids first introduction to c... clownophobia."

RX: "There's actually a word for that: 'coulrophobia'."

Me: "Oh, I know the word, but I suddenly realized I had no idea how to pronounce it."

Before the internet, I would have had to go to the bookshelf with the big dictionary, look this up, and decipher what the the good people of Oxford meant by "kälrəˈfōbēə".

Now I can turn to Google...

...or just say out loud "Alexa, how do you pronounce the word for a fear of clowns?"

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I have been kilt onna streets yet again.

 

A couple of common taters objected to my post about speed strips, because there are several speedloaders which are much faster.

I replied:

"In general, with a revolver carried for personal defense (as with any handgun carried for personal defense) you're going to solve the problem with the ammunition in the weapon or you aren't going to solve the problem.

Reloads, whether for a Glock 34 or a J-frame, are mostly woobies, as well as a way to save you the embarrassment of having to hand a half-empty gun to responding officers.

If you're playing some game where you're reloading revolvers on the clock, a speedloader is definitely the way to go. But the fastest ones, like the SL, are useless for CCW because of the ease with which they will disgorge their contents. The only speedloader that holds its rounds sturdily enough that I'd recommend it for carry is the old HKS, which is only marginally faster than strips.

Plus speedloaders are bulky AF to carry, and most people won't bother.

But you do you."

(True Story: I had an HKS CA-44 loaded with five .44 Spl 200gr Silvertips rolling around loose in the bottom of a purse for close to a decade without dropping a round.)

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Counting coup on a Malibu coupe.


• Changes are coming to Professor Yamane's blog.


• Practicing the smooth press.

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Automotif CDLIII..

By its fourth generation, the Honda Accord was all grown up, in more ways than one. 

Road & Track had already done a comparison test of the third generation sedan with the Mercedes-Benz 190E and the Honda more than held its own, such that the photo spread to open the article was a closeup of the car's snouts with their hood emblems switched.

The 1990 fourth generation sedan, like this Frost White example, was ten inches longer and seven hundred pounds heavier than the first Accord sedans to hit these shores in our bicentennial year as 1977 models. Back in the mid-Seventies "made in Japan" was still synonymous with cheap and shoddy, and the Accord did as much as anything to turn that rep on its head.

Those first Accords had 72 horsepower 1.8L CVCC carbureted four cylinders, while the 1990 sedan here would have either a 125- or 130-horse 2.2L 16V SOHC motor, depending on the trim level.

While rumpled around the edges and showing some hints of rust, this thirty-year-old Honda is still plugging along.

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The Shape of Things to Come

Enclosed optics, direct mounted via standard footprints, in such a way that they don't require ridiculously high sights are the wave of the future in the slide-mounted MRDS field.

No adaptor plates or suppressor-height sights are required on this FN Reflex micro-nine with an enclosed Holosun EPS Carry and a Streamlight TLR-7 Sub.

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Squirrel(s)!

The leaves are off the trees and the squirrels are plump and active, foraging for acorns to bulk up for winter. It's too cold to sit outside at Fat Dan's and wait for neat cars to drive by, but primo squirrel-spotting season, and that means it's time for longer zoom lenses on my walkabout cameras.

The upper photo was shot with a ten year old Nikon D7100, wearing a 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR zoom. (The best all-round DX Nikon zoom, period.) The 120mm equivalent long end on this lens makes it a little short for optimum squirrel spotting. The little dude upside down on the tree trunk was only a dozen or so feet away, but only the 24MP resolution of the D7100's sensor allowed me to crop it down to something useful.

The photo below was shot with the 2004-vintage Nikon D2X & 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II combo. That extra focal length helps, as this photo didn't need near as much cropping, even though the squirrel was twice as far away.

A Hotter Way to Strip

I can't remember where I first read about carrying just four rounds in a speed strip. I was thinking it was something Massad Ayoob wrote, since that's the first place I first heard about a lot of stuff, especially back in the day, but Mas is a fan of five rounds in a six round strip. 

I think the four-round strip idea originated with Michael De Bethencourt, but I probably learned about it secondhand from Chuck Haggard, Gorillafritz, or Claude Werner. The theory behind it is that it's a lot faster to get rounds into the chambers two at a time, and it's sometimes better to get the gun up and shooting quickly than it is to fumble that fifth round into the cylinder.

Anyhow, for quite a while, I always saw that as a sort of secret sign. If I saw a picture of someone's carry revolver and they had a speed strip with two pairs of rounds separated by a gap in the middle, I'd think "There's a dude who knows what time it is."

The first time I saw Caleb Giddings post a pic of a strip loaded with two rounds and a space, and two more rounds and a space, and then two more rounds, I was gobsmacked. What kind of voodoo, cool guy, go-fast esoterica was this? What revolver accessory manufacturing company was so switched on that they were offering such a clever  gadget, which would let you load quickly in pairs anything from just two rounds to a whole cylinder full, (assuming you had the time.)

I PM'ed Caleb.

He wrote back "They're just eight-round Tuff Strips. Duh."

D'OH!

They come in 8-shot .32 size, as well!

Incidentally, you'll note that the reloads in these things are Hornady Critical Defense. I'm not a huge fan of Critical Defense, especially in .32 Mag, since it's light-for-caliber and will underpenetrate if it does expand (never a given out of a snubbie).

But that conical bullet shape makes it a breeze to reload in a revolver. You can practically chuck those things into the charge holes from across the room.

Contractions

I've come to really dread Decembers. Thanks to industry contractions, I've lost a couple of regular work outlets and of my three biggest remaining customers, one's bimonthly and another publishes ten times a year, and so as I discovered last year, my income takes a serious ding in the last month of the year.

I should have anticipated this and gotten a seasonal retail gig. I sure will next year.

I'm not in any danger of going hungry or not paying bills, and everything goes back to normal in January, but it does make for a pretty lame Christmas season. If anyone's feeling motivated to hit the tip jar in the next week or two, it wouldn't be taken amiss.

And God bless us, every one! Ho ho ho!

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Packing the Dot

One of the things I wrote about regarding the optics-ready Taurus 856 TORO when it came out was that the idea of a small-to-medium CCW revolver with a miniature red dot sight was so novel that nobody had really figured out how to holster it yet.

The first holster I tried was a prototype from Dark Star Gear, who basically took their classic Apollo compact revolver holster and cut away a slit to clear the optic. I've used the regular Apollo plenty in the past and it's a great holster for small wheelguns.

Problems arose from the optic-ready prototype, though. It worked fine for carry in the appendix position, well forward of the hip (and the flatter your tummy, the better it worked) but if you tried to carry anywhere over on the strong side, your belt would apply torque directly to the optic. Further, once you drew the revolver, you belt would collapse the area where the optic sat and make reholstering a tricky proposition.

The solution, as my friends at PHLster discovered, was to add a little garage for the optic...

I've been carrying this setup strong side at 3 o'clock for several weeks now. It's comfortable, your belt doesn't foul the optic, and reholstering is a breeze since if basically acts like a funnel for the muzzle.

For the best in comfort and concealment, it's even available assembled on an Enigma Express rig from PHLster, ready to put on and go.

I need to get this setup into a class and really put it through the wringer, but after almost a month of carry and a fair bit of dry practice, I haven't had an issue with it yet.

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These Times Keep Getting More Interesting

The number of intrusions into U.S. infrastructure-linked networks by hackers traceable to the Chinese government is on the rise, apparently.

"Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, these experts said.

The intrusions are part of a broader effort to develop ways to sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific, they said.

Among the victims are a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline, people familiar with the incidents told The Washington Post. The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country."

Being able to mess with a rival nation's utilities would be a potent force multiplier. It's a new feature of warfare and one that hasn't really been thoroughly explored; it's like if the Lufwaffe could have preceded Adlertag by shutting off the power to the London tube and the Chain Home radar stations.

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We Live in a World of Miracles & Wonders

This is a headline that describes an actual thing that really happened:

Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found

H/T to Kevin D. Williamson

And so it goes...

Via Facebook I learned that David Drake passed away yesterday. His website confirms the sad news.

The sheer number of times I referenced him on this blog should tell you what a loss this is. Other than a few fantasy series and some of his "co-authored" stuff (meaning Drake sketched the outline and the junior author did the grunt work of writing), I have pretty much nearly everything he wrote.

I think I'll re-read With the Lightnings in memorium.

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When things go rodeo...

Bodycam footage of the IMPD officer successfully deploying his backup gun and shooting the dude who'd just snatched his service weapon and shot him in the leg with it is available online now.

The fight goes to the ground and the officer has to access and deploy his BUG with his support hand while on his back and entangled in a melee. It's times like that when having made a bunch of deposits in the training bank pays off, because that's a heck of a big withdrawal.

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Rugged

There's a certain attractive quality to rugged, reliable gear. Think of the adulation heaped on Glocks for their durability:

A saying I remember from being in camera stores where my dad worked when I was a child was "If you have a Leica and a Nikon and have to take a photograph over a wall, stand on the Nikon and shoot with the Leica, because it won't hurt the Nikon."*

Jim Grey was just out and about with a new-to-him 1963-vintage Nikon F, which was the company's first pro-grade single lens reflex camera:

"The F is nigh onto indestructible. It would surely survive a drop from your hands to the ground, it would probably survive a drop off the roof of your house, and it might just survive a drop from an airplane."

It still works great for a sixty-year-old tool! No wonder survivors are bringing good money.

Do you know what else a Nikon will survive? Fifty years of being buried in a mountaintop glacier near the summit of Aconcagua, with twenty four frames of potential evidence of foul play sitting exposed inside it, waiting to be developed...

"FOR NEARLY 50 years, a Nikomat camera, carried by an American woman, sat frozen in a high-altitude time capsule. But it was not frozen in place.

Where the camera was dropped may not be where it was found. The Polish Glacier has been shrinking and shifting, cracking and moving downhill by the pull of gravity and with the change of seasons.

And on a sunny day in February 2020, the heart of the Argentine summer, the camera sat on a stocky penitente, like a museum piece on a pedestal.

[SNIP]

The camera was intact; the only crack was inside the lens. The mechanisms worked. The leather holster screwed to the camera bottom had probably protected it from leaks."

*The only exception might be if your Leica is a Leicaflex, aka "The Diesel Leica", which was their baroquely overbuilt attempt at an SLR. One survived plummeting to the floor of the Mojave Desert from a crashing F4 Phantom II.

It's got aliens, German Shepherds, and a very important knife.

Alex, the protagonist of Marko's latest novel, Scorpio, was born in Pennsylvania but doesn't remember it because her parents relocated to the colony world orbiting 18 Scorpii when she was only two.

Unfortunately, when she was still a tween, the giant extraterrestrials known as Lankies got there, too.

Alex and a couple hundred other colonists were near enough to the underground shelter known as The Vault to barricade themselves in semi-safety as the Lankies set about systematically destroying the colony and setting up their own atmosphere processors. Alas, her parents were not among the ones that made it to shelter.

We learn all this retrospectively, because the novel opens with Alex spending her twenty-first birthday riding in the back of an armored personnel carrier with some of the surviving troops of the colonial garrison, who she assists by working as a dog handler. 

That's an important gig because Ash, the squad's military working K9, can sense approaching hostile aliens through the humid, unbreathable soup of the Lankyformed atmosphere better than any human.

The little group is on a salvage mission, hoping to scavenge something usable from the colony's wreckage to keep the little group in The Vault alive and thriving as best they can.

And then the dog starts growling...

Read the book! I just finished Scorpio and really enjoyed it.

Balmy.

We tied the record high temp for December 9th here in Indy yesterday, with temps hitting the low-to-mid sixties around the metro area, which was nice except for the whole pissing-down-rain thing in the middle of the day.

But we're back to much more seasonal temps today, with the predicted high only being 36ºF, and that occurring at 10AM with the temperature dropping from there.

Still cloudy, though.

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Meme Dump

Automotif CDLII...

The funky compound rear window and the pattern of the grille mark this Chevrolet Impala Sport Coupe, painted an eye-catching shade of Earl Scheib Blue, as a 1979 model.

New in 1977, the sixth generation of the Impala was shorter, taller, and narrower than the previous generation, as well as being lighter and more thrifty at the pumps. This was a good thing, because the Second Fuel Crisis hit not long after they came out.

For 1979, Impala Sport Coupes featured the 250 cubic inch "Turbo-Thrift" 115bhp inline six as the base motor, with a choice of optional V-8s. You could get either a 2-bbl 305 rated at 130bhp or a 170 horsepower 4-bbl 350. (Unless you lived in California, where the 6-cyl made 90hp, and the V-8s were reduced to 125 and 165 horsepower, respectively.) All of them had the ubiquitous 3-speed Turbo Hydramatic slushbox.

Though they were just a shadow of the Muscle Car Era's horsepower glory, the Malaise Era rarely looked better than the bubble-window Impala coupes.

Photographed with an Olympus E-3 & a Zuiko Digital 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 II.

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Not thrilling me with your rhetoric.

There's a businessman from the northeast of the state, name of Doden, who's spending a mint on TV ads for his 2024 Hoosier gubernatorial campaign. 

I'm presuming he's launching this big ad campaign because current Senator Mike Braun has a huge leg up in the race. Braun has name recognition and existing campaigning infrastructure, plus endorsements from both traditional Republican orgs like Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, as well as the big one, an endorsement from Trump himself.

Anyway, this other GOP candidate keeps touting his background as "the grandson of a preacher" in his ads, which leaves me feeling all "Bro, we're not holding an election for state chaplain, here."

Plus in his latest ad, homie vibes like a slightly fashy Forrest Gump. See for yourself:

Historic Illiteracy...

You know, the very first Terry Pratchett Discworld novel I read, way back in 2007, was Monstrous Regiment. Kind of an unconventional entry point for the series, but I'd picked up a hardcover at Books-A-Million* on a whim.

At the time, I was unaware of the existence of John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, written back in that fun period of the Reformation when Protestant churches ran more towards witch hunts and heretic burnings than praise bands and Wednesday night suppers. 

The title translates to modern English as something like "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Unnatural Rule of Women", and was basically a big gripe-fest against the existence of Catholic queens (at the time there were Marys in both England and Scotland, at whom Knox was Big Mad, and they weren't exactly fans of his, either.)

Having read a lot more on the Reformation, the excesses of various early Protestant sects, and the Thirty Years' War since then, it only made my recent re-read of Monstrous Regiment that much better. Pratchett was so adept at weaving multiple layers of commentary into a book.

*That hardback turned out to be autographed. A treasure.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• A head-on view of a McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. The Voodoo is interesting as being one of the last planes whose design started out intended as a long-range bomber escort.


• The internet is made of people. Still. (Beware of the links on that sixteen year old VFTP post.)


• A heartwarming Christmas tree tale...

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Gasp. Shock.

Wow, who could have seen this surprising plot twist coming?

And here I'd been thinking he had the Russian constitution amended just for kicks...

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Automotif CDLI...

2003 marked the fiftieth anniversary of "America's Only Sports Car" (providing you don't count all the other American sports cars). To celebrate, Chevrolet offered a special 50th Anniversary package, RPO Z25. It was available as a coupe or convertible and came complete with special fender badges and its own paint color, "Anniversary Red Metallic".

In Indiana, cars can be issued "Historic Vehicle" license plates when they're twenty-five model years old, so this 50th Anniversary 'Vette is only four years off from being able to wear year-of-manufacture plates. 

I did not know that.

"In 1942, Norman Lear signed up to fight the fascists. He served as a radio operator and gunner in a B-17 bomber named “Umbriago” by its crew, after a catchphrase of the comedian Jimmy Durante. As Lear watched bombs spill out of the plane’s belly over Germany, he said in a 2021 interview with the Yiddish Book Center, his attitude was “Screw ’em.” But there was also a complicating empathy: “I remember thinking, imagining a table of family, of Germans, sitting around the table as the bombs dropped.”"

I did not know that Norman Lear was a veteran of 52 missions over Germany.

See the window just ahead of the "KK" letters, and the two windows in the top of the fuselage above them? Those are the windows Norman Lear would have looked out of from the radio room of "Umbriago". If you want to know the duties of a B-17 radio operator, they're enumerated at this site, along with some good shots of the radio room.

I was too young to really get All in the Family. I was not quite three years old when it premiered and eleven when it ended.

MeTV has been airing four episodes every Sunday evening, and I watched the first several seasons' worth here recently and it was really exceptionally good television. I can see why it was considered so novel for its era, and surprisingly relevant even today.

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Automotif CDL...

That Bonus Built Ford F-1 was in the Meijer parking lot the other morning, now sporting a front license plate that indicated I guessed right last September and it is indeed a 1950 model.

If the V8 decal in the window isn't fibbing and if it still has the stock motor, there's an 8RT 239 cubic inch Flathead Ford under the hood, putting out 100 SAE gross horsepower.

The Bonus Built trucks were the very first of Ford's F-series truck line that is still in production today and a perennial best-seller.

The 100 horsepower rating on a 3.8L V-8 seems ridiculously low to modern eyes, and was even low by the standards of the '70s-'80s Malaise Era, but remember that it only had a single 2-barrel carburetor flowing about 150cfm, a 6.8:1 compression ratio, and a fairly conservative redline.

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Meme Dump

As Quiet as a Middle Finger

Interesting article about the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, West Virginia:

"As we exited the observatory’s parking lot, the truck’s computer monitor started bleeping angrily. Before we reached the main road, we picked up 13 wireless signals. Within a half mile, we found 66 signals. Niday’s gadgetry was going berserk. But instead of jumping out of the truck to ticket Wi-Fi offenders, he simply took note of the sources of radio noise and kept driving, unfazed.

Within five miles, we tallied more than 200 signals, some coming from the homes of staff living on the observatory’s own property—a blatant violation of the facility’s regulations.

[snip]

A house across the street from the observatory had Wi-Fi with the network name “Screw you NRAO,” an unsubtle middle finger to the observatory’s calls for quiet."

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Automotif CDXLIX...

The K-car front wheel drive platform arguably helped a moribund Chrysler battle its way back into the black from near-bankruptcy in the early Eighties, after it had been pulled from the brink by a government loan.

Other than trucks, the legacy RWD sedans, and the L-body compacts (Omni/Horizon/Charger/Turismo), pretty much every vehicle made by Mopar in the Eighties and Nineties was on a variant of the K-car chassis. The K-car platform was to Chrysler what the ground-beef patty is to McDonalds; shuffle a few basic ingredients around it and you can come up with a pretty good-size menu.

Need a sporty coupe? Shorten the K-car for the Daytona. Need a minivan? Stretch the K-car for the Caravan*. Need a largish sedan to replace the Diplomat & Fifth Avenue? Hey, check out the stretched K-car in the picture above!

That's a 1990-1993 Chrysler New Yorker Salon in Black Cherry Metallic. The Salon was a sort of base model New Yorker introduced in 1990, that deleted the hidden headlamps, had a simpler taillight treatment, and used a bluff chrome grille similar to the cheaper Dodge Dynasty. The corner of the car you can't see is all stove in, but it's in otherwise nice shape, including all four fake wire wheel hubcaps.

Power would have been provided by Chrysler's port fuel injected 3.3L 150bhp pushrod V-6, and sent to the front wheels via a 4-speed A604 Ultradrive automatic transmission made right up the road at the plant in Kokomo, Indiana.

*To head off the tidal wave of ackshyually emails, the minivans didn't technically use the K-car chassis. They had their own platform...that used K-car drivelines and suspension. 

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When You Need a Backup Gun.

Most cops of my acquaintance are pretty religious devotees of carrying a backup gun. An IMPD officer who I've known for years and have trained with in the past is alive today because he carries a backup gun and has trained to proficiency in its deployment and use.

For the average normie private citizen CCW toter? I mean, if you can carry one and train with it, great. It's probably best practice, I guess.

Personally I haven't habitually carried a BUG since... whenever I stopped wearing "shoot me first" vests with any degree of regularity, so probably back in 2007 or 2008.

Mostly.

There's one circumstance where I do carry a second gun pretty religiously, but I don't know that you could rightly call it a backup gun in those cases, and that's when I'm out and about in the dead of a Hoosier winter. I'm not tough enough to roam around in sub-freezing weather with my coat unzipped, and that makes accessing a blaster carried at the waistline, whether inside or outside the waistband, strong-side or appendix, a little hard to get at in a hurry.

Greg Ellifritz wrote about this recently:

"A friend once asked me for some winter coat carry advice. He normally carried a 9mm Glock 19 inside the waistband. Living in Minnesota, he found access to his Glock to be rather difficult when the gun was covered up by his heavy winter coat. My friend wanted to supplement his Glock with a smaller pistol carried in his outside coat pocket for quicker access in cold temperatures. Which pistol would be the best choice?

That’s a good question. Before I moved to Texas, I braved Ohio’s winters regularly carrying a revolver in an outside coat pocket. When the snow accumulated enough to cover up my ankle gun if I stepped in a snow drift, I carried my police backup gun in my outer coat pocket. "

Go and read Greg's piece.

I largely agree with his take, although I'm not as concerned with being able to fire the gun from inside the coat pocket. What I am concerned with, however, is being able to access the firearm while seated, especially in my car with the seatbelt fastened. While that's not actually as hard to do under an unbuttoned overshirt in summer as some people seem to think it is because they've never tried nor practiced it, it is in fact well-nigh impossible under a zipped up winter coat.

For that reason I select winter coats with a specific kind of upper chest pockets, the kind with vertical zippered openings along the centerline.

The photo above has the revolver hiked up and hanging out of the pocket just so you can see it, but normally you can't. It works without any shuffling of the garment when sitting on the driver's side (in the picture I'm in the passenger seat of Shootin' Buddy's Tacoma). Best of all, it can be accessed easily with the strong side hand, somewhat akin to a tanker-type holster, but it can also be drawn cavalry-style with the support hand if necessary. It's no coincidence that this is where the BUG pocket is on a 5.11-type vest.

That's the same Smith & Wesson 432PD with CTC LaserGrips in a cheapo Uncle Mike's pocket holster to keep it correctly oriented in the pocket that I've used for this job nearly twenty years. There are more rugged holsters out there, but I think this is only my second or third, and it's about due for replacement. If you wanna be all Vimes' Boots about it, there might be a sixty dollar leather holster that'll go twenty years without replacement, or you can buy a fifteen buck nylon one every seven years.

The downside to this in the winter is that you can't use the coat check unless you have a way of discreetly slipping the holstered blaster out of your pocket and into a purse or bag or whatever, so you gotta be that goober who drags your coat with you everywhere.

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Automotif CDXLVIII...

The Volvo 200-series debuted in the 1975 model year, available as both a 2- and 4-door sedan, as well as a station wagon. These rugged rear-wheel drive cars were the most popular Volvos yet on the U.S. market, and really helped cement the marque's reputation for safety.

Though the styling remained more or less the same over the entire model run, the composite headlamps on this Polar White 240 wagon, seen parked on College Avenue in SoBro on a drizzly morning in early December, mark it as an '86-'93 car.

That's right, this same shape was available for purchase on Volvo dealer's lots for a nearly two-decade stretch, proving that it's hip to be square.

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QotD: Politics Is Showbiz For Ugly People Edition...

"In the age of social media, one need only be right for a moment—for one pithy putdown or quick comeback. That kind of superficial politics inevitably leads to figures such as Santos." -Kevin D. Williamson

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Artsy...

Beaded water on painted sheet metal makes for an easy artsy subject.

These were shot with the Pentax Q10 and the 8.5mm f/1.9 01 Prime lens.

8.5mm is the equivalent of a "Nifty Fifty" on the little 1/2.3" sensor. (Well, 47mm equivalent, actually...)

"Ooh, ooh! Pick me!"

Another good episode from the guys at Tactical Tangents:

Having a good selection procedure is important for getting the right members on a team. Mike steals a page from advertising, only where an ad man conceptualizes the ideal customer, he’s looking for the ideal SWAT guy. The process could work for any team selection, though. Just think about what the ideal candidate would say, think, do, or feel, and look for those people. Listen to this episode for ideas on how to do just that.

Overheard in Front of the Television...

Watching Batman on MeTV last night... the episode from the second season with Otto Preminger* as Mr. Freeze ...I mused aloud:

"When I was a kid, if you’d asked me “Who’s freakier, Colonel Hogan or Bruce Wayne?”, I’d have been all “Oh, Bruce Wayne for sure. I mean, he runs around with a teenager in tights and booty shorts” which just goes to show that you never can tell."

*Three different actors played Mr. Freeze in the TV series. George Sanders played the role in the first season, but was unavailable in the second, so Otto Preminger got the part. According to Wikipedia, "Due to tensions and difficulties on set in Preminger's two-part storyline, Eli Wallach replaced Preminger in the role of Mr. Freeze for the final two-part storyline of season 2." That sounds like an interesting story, which I'm fixing to look into. Preminger was a controversial dude, but his Mr. Freeze is the most memorable of the trio, and probably why heavily-accented Schwarzenegger got the part in the execrable Schumacher flop, Batman & Robin.
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R8 with 7D

The second generation of Audi R8 shares its chassis... and basic V10 power plant ...with the Lamborghini Huracàn, just like the first generation was a platform mate with the Gallardo.

This Ibis White one with the cheeky license plate was photographed with a Canon EOS 7D.

It's hard to believe that Canon's EOS 7D will be celebrating its fifteenth birthday next September. When it came out in 2009, it was an instant favorite, combining the rugged, weather-resistant construction and pro controls of Canon's 5D series of full-frame cameras with an 18MP APS-C sensor and a price tag a hair under two grand.

The 1.6X effective boost in focal length and blazing 8 frames per second speed made it popular with nature, sports, and air show photographers, and it was among the first DSLRs to be able to shoot 1080p HD video. (Mind you, I'm strictly a stills photographer and I don't think this moving picture fad will stick around.) The original 7D remained in production unchanged for five years, an eternity in the Peak Digicam Era. Used ones can be found for as little as under two Benjamins at BezosMart.

This Audi R8 was photographed using the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM zoom lens, which is probably the best lens Canon ever made specifically for its crop sensor DSLRs. When it came out in 2006 there was some head-scratching as to why it didn't rate the red ring of an "L"-series lens, but it does lack weather sealing and has a polycarbonate lens barrel, plus I think Canon just plain likes to snub crop sensor shooters as a bunch of poors who should move up to full frame.

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QotD: Skilled Trades Edition...

"The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." -John Gardner

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Return to the Lanky Wars!

Marko's latest novel set in the Frontlines universe is an Amazon First Reads selection this month, meaning it's free to read for Amazon Prime members!

Dive in to Scorpio...

Automotif CDXLVII...

The other day I noted the unusual longevity of the Corvette and Mustang nameplates, which will be celebrating their 71st and 60th birthdays, respectively, in 2024. I also noted that almost no model name had such an enduring run.

In the photo above is one of the closest: Oldsmobile introduced the 88 in 1949. Its predecessor, the 1948 Olds 78, was powered by a 257cid straight eight rated at 112 horsepower, but while it carried over the Futuramic postwar Olds styling of its predecessor, the 88 featured Oldsmobile's brand new Rocket V8. The 303 cubic inch Rocket had overhead valves, a 7.5:1 compression ratio, and put out 135 SAE gross horsepower.

The 88 nameplate remained in production through ten whole generations, and the Bright White 1994-'95 Oldsmobile Eighty Eight Royale is an example of that final generation.

The tenth generation of the 88 was the second one after the car had gone to a front wheel drive platform in 1986, and this '94 Royale would be powered by the GM corporate 3800 V6. This was a Buick-derived port fuel injected pushrod 3.8L motor rated at 170bhp SAE net.

Oldsmobile axed the 88 name after the 1999 model, finishing a fifty year run, among Detroit's longest.

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