Fashionably Dumb

My eye started twitching the first time I heard about books being sold by the foot, available in whatever colors were needed to complement a room's decor.

This site, for instance, sells "Authentic books for interior design, décor, wedding centerpieces, movie props, staging and more!" At least they sell "authentic" books. If that's too much trouble, or you want to avoid the musty smell of pages full of knowledge in your living room, you can buy fake ones online at BezosMart. Ironic, if you ask me, given Amazon's humble origins.

Since social media can ruin anything, even something as awful as decorative books, it's now working on doing it to this trend. Interior Design TikTok has come up with a name for it: "Bookshelf Wealth".

Kailee Blalock, an interior designer in San Diego, posted a video to TikTok last month that sought to define bookshelf wealth and school viewers in achieving the aesthetic in their own homes.

“These aren’t display books,” Ms. Blalock, 26, cautions in the video, which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.”

I wonder if I can get a job working for an interior designer where I break the spines on books, dog-ear a few pages, scribble a random note or two in the margins, and maybe leave a yellowed old Fresh Market receipt in the pages like a bookmark.

Something's Amiss Among the Wing-Wipers

Ah, the USAF Air National Guard, America's thirty-seventh line of defense... 

I kid, I kid. Thanks to post-Vietnam reorganization, the U.S. military actually depends pretty heavily on National Guard components for its combat power. The Hoosier Air National Guard, for instance, includes the 122nd Fighter Wing out of Fort Wayne, currently in the process of transitioning back to F-16's from A-10's.

But I gotta say that some of the Air National Guard's junior enlisted didn't exactly cover themselves in glory in the media in the Year of Our Lord 2023.

There was, of course, the high-profile incident of A1C Jack Teixeira back in April, who got busted for trying to impress his fellow dorks in a video game chatroom with the classified documents he copied from his day job as a Guard bum at a Massachusetts ANG intel wing.

What flew beneath my radar was that the same month saw A1C Josiah Garcia of the Tennessee ANG decide he wanted to be a hitman, using his 1337 TNANG combat skills (he claimed his nickname in the unit was "Reaper".)

So he went to a parody rent-a-hitman site on the internet and... get this ...he sent them a resume.

The parody site helpfully hooked A1C Garcia up with a not-at-all-a-parody FBI agent who offered him real money to ice an imaginary person. Garcia accepted the bogus assignment and the real bucks and is now looking at time in the graybar motel.

Folks, all that hire-a-hitman stuff doesn't work in real life the way it does in the movies. 

When I'm shopping for a store-brand John Wick, I look for a dude with his finger on the trigger of a derp tier AR that looks like a Cheaper Than Dirt catalog threw up on it.

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Automotif CDLXII...

For the 2004 model year, the Chevrolet Malibu nameplate was migrated over to the midsize GM Epsilon platform, which had debuted as the '02 Opel Vectra.

The four-door sedan was joined by this funky five-door wagon, called the Malibu Maxx. It had a glass moonroof over the rear seating area like an old Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. While the sedan had a four-cylinder as the base motor, the Maxx came with the GM High Value LX9 3500 V6, a pushrod motor displacing (as you might guess) 3.5 liters, and rated at 201bhp. For a dull rental car looking transportation module, the Maxx was reasonably quick.

This Medium Gray Metallic example is starting to show nibbles from the rust monster around the rear wheel arches, and the driver's side fender looks a bit rumpled, but it's overall pretty straight. They only made the Maxx for four years, discontinuing it after the 2007 model year.

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I was today years old...

...when I learned the word "mondegreen", and I already love it madly.

Per Benjamin Dreyer:

"Perhaps you’ve run across the term “mondegreen”? I’ve long known it to mean a misheard lyric or bit of poetry, but its full meaning I learned only minutes ago — because I finally deigned to investigate. “Mondegreen” was coined in 1954 by writer Sylvia Wright to commemorate her having misapprehended the phrase “laid him on the green,” in this line from a Scottish ballad: “They have slain the Earl of Moray / An’ laid him on the green.” Wright heard wrong, thinking there were two slaying victims, the earl and “Lady Mondegreen.”"

Bobbi's been pushing me to read Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, and I think the linked column has pushed it to the top of my to-read pile.

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Brrrrr!

It is currently two degrees below zero, fondly Fahrenheit out there.

A reminder to my fellow Hoosiers that 0°F is not, in fact, an arbitrary number like the internet memes say, but is instead the freezing point of brine.

You know what brine is, right? That's the stuff they spray on the roads to keep them from icing up. Well, it's not working quite as good as it should until we get a little warmer today. (And we're only going to get a little warmer. The forecast high is supposed to be a balmy 5°F sometime late this afternoon.)

Interesting Analysis

Big if true, as they say.

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Odds, Stakes, and Realistic Threats

From an article by David Merrill about using NFA items for home defense:

"Unless you’re involved with the illicit narcotics trade and living in a trap house, or your place is home to an underground gambling ring, the number-one threat won’t be armed men breaking in raid-style, but instead theft — people breaking in when you aren’t home and burgling your stuff. When we talk about home-defense firearms, there’s a balance to be struck; you want the firearm to stay safe from tiny hands and sticky fingers while still being easy to access."

From a piece by Greg Ellifritz on threat assessment:

"Have you ever considered the difference between being in a dangerous situation and being in one where you have limited response options?

I think a lot of us in the gun/self-protection world get those feelings confused."

That post linked above is one that a lot of the "rawr I'll never go anyplace where I can't carry a gun rawr" crowd need to read and heed. As Melody Lauer put it, “Don’t let your desire to protect your life keep you from living a life worth protecting.”

Remember: Millions of people go unstrapped yet remain unclapped every day. The gun is just a tool, and one with a very limited and specific use case, at that. If you need it, odds are good you've probably already made some mistakes. If I had to choose between perfect, omniscient situational awareness or perfect, turboninja pistol skills, I'd choose the former every time and just nope on out of situations where I'd need the latter.

Wordle Wobble

I used to use fairly random start words for Wordle, a different one every day. Eventually, though, I settled in on the one the WordleBot used for hard mode: "SLATE".

Well, they've juggled the dictionary and now WordleBot's favorite hard mode start word is "TROPE". I'm sticking with "SLATE". I don't care what the robot says, the letter P is not found in the sacred name of Etaoin Shrdlu.

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Inevitable Pivot…

Now that the U.S. led coalition has started cratering the launch sites of the missiles and drones that Houthi rebels have been using to harass international shipping in the Red Sea, I’m wondering how long until the MAGAverse pivots from “This would never have happened if the world didn’t perceive us as weak because our guy isn’t in the White House” to “Whaaah! Why are Democrats launching attacks that will only suck us into another pointless foreign war?”

It’s the “Heads, I Win. Tails, You Lose” school of politics.

EDITED TO ADD: Less than 24 hours, as it turns out. Although watching Rashida Tlaib and Matt Gaetz singing in perfect two-part harmony is novel.

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Rocket the Kasbah

So, last month I wondered...

...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.

Well, we have the answer to that question, as yesterday saw airstrikes by Navy Super Hornets and RAF Typhoons, as well as a barrage of sub-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles on Houthi launch and weapons storage facilities in Yemen.

The Houthis, of course, immediately protested and resorted to argumentum ad Israelium.

"A Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdul Salam, said on social media that the group would remain by Gaza’s side. He said there was no justification for the strikes on Yemen because its actions do not threaten international shipping, and vowed that the group would continue to target Israeli ships and those heading to Israel."

Which seems like a weird thing to say when you've been launching drones and missiles at random ships which have nothing to do with the Israelis, but the Houthis don't exactly strike me as a very organized bunch.  Also, "I blame the Jooooos!" focus groups well, especially in that corner of the world, so I guess it's worth a try.

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O hai Jack Frost

I was wondering when winter was going to get here for realsies. It's been unseasonably balmy for the last couple months and we've only had a couple half-assed attempts at snow. Nothing that even rated sweeping the walks clear thus far. (There's no point going out there in the freezing cold with a broom or shovel before dawn if it's all gonna melt off by lunchtime, after all.)

Well, if Weather Underground is to be believed, we won't be seeing the far side of freezing for at least a week. Not much in the way of snow though. I have mixed feelings about that. I'm generally not a huge fan of the white stuff... see the above enthusiasm regarding shoveling ...but bone-numbing cold without snow feels like a ripoff. If you're going to freeze me half to death, Gaia, you could at least be scenic while you're doing it.

QotD: Misanthropy Edition

From a web discussion elsewhere:

”Morons are nature’s original renewable resource.”

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Automotif CDLXI...

When a road trip takes me across Illinois, I always pause to gas up in Terre Haute, just this side of the border. Due to the esoterica of CCW laws, there's no problem with me being strapped while driving across the Land of Lincoln, but I can't get out of the car to get gas with my heater on, lest I... I dunno, go all Hoosier on them or something.

At any rate, this most recent trip out to the St. Louis area, I extended my gas stop long enough to grab a burger at Mickey Dee's, too.

I was glad I did because I spotted a Mazda MX-3, which is not at all a common sight.

They were only imported for a few years, from '92-'96. The performance version, the MX-3 GS, had a twee little 1.8L V-6 under the hood, with variable intake geometry and a 7,000 rpm redline.

The lack of aero doodads and the stamped steel wheels lurking behind the plastic wheel covers tell us that this Brilliant Black specimen is the more pedestrian RS coupe, which would have had a fairly tame 1.6L four-banger.

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Artsy Fartsy

Once upon a time, taking pictures on film was just photography. It's how you made pictures.

Now it's "film photography", the province of hobbyists, some die-hard holdouts in the art photography world, and also hipsters who have injected a lot of hand-wavery and woo into what was just a fairly straightforward and scientifically understood process. Kind of like tube amps used to be just "amps" and now there's... but that's a whole different thing, and one on which I'm not at all qualified to comment.

I am, however, qualified to talk about how minilabs worked, back in the days when they were still wet-printing with light shone through a negative onto photo paper.

Basically, you'd have different "channels" on your printer for different film types. To calibrate the channels, you'd shoot prints of these test negatives (called "Noras" for reasons that should be obvious) and then check the grayscale target with your densitometer, which would let you know if the calibration had drifted.

You needed the different channels because films handle color differently, and even have different tinges to their substrates. (Normie Fuji negative film, for example, has a more magenta tint to the negative as opposed to the familiar orange of normie Kodak Gold.)

You'd then twiddle things into calibration and be off to the races.

As long as your processor was running right and your channels were properly calibrated, gray would be gray, no matter what film you put through it.

That was the science part of it.

The art part was that lab tech sitting there squinting into the glowing window and looking at the negative and... if they were good and they cared ...making on-the-fly corrections as needed. If you have old prints from that era and look on the back of the photo, you might see a string of dot-matrix printed digits something like "N +1 N N", which indicate what adjustments had been made from the default channel setting.

I considered myself pretty good, and the paper waste numbers on my shifts backed me up. See, you'd weigh the contents of the shredder at the end of a shift. Having to reprint a whole 36 exposure roll of 4x6's put a fair amount of paper in there, and that Kodak paper wasn't free.

There was nothing more cringe for me than going to pick up some prints from a 1hr lab and finding the color off. It told me the staff just didn't care.

It was harder to notice in normie color photos unless there was a lot of sky, or people wearing white, or whatever. One place it was hard to hide, though, was if you'd had some of the C41 process monochrome film printed: Kodak BW400CN or Ilford XP2. This was black and white film that was designed to be processed in color chemistry. It's hard to hide your colors being out of calibration on your channel when there shouldn't be any color in there in the first place.

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Automotif CDLX...

My first Lyriq sighting in the wild.

This photograph doesn't do the car justice, as it was just a quick waist-level snap with the little Nikon 1 J1. I didn't want the lady in the driver's seat to think I was a weirdo by circling the car while looking for the best angle through the big D2X DSLR hanging around my neck.

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National Enquirification Proceeding Apace

With their departed host Tucker Carlson reduced to flirting with flat eartherism to attract eyeballs and harvest clicks on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, Fox News's prime time replacement has to get really weird to keep up.

I gotta admit, I didn't have "The MAGAverse gets assmad about the very existence of Taylor Swift" on my bingo card.

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Enshittification Finally Caught Me

I'd heard others complain about the the current parlous state of Amazon search results before, but had yet to really experience them for myself.

I mean, if I'm going to go get some Pom pepper spray from the Pom store or a box of Surefire CR123 batteries from the Surefire store or a Terry Pratchett book from Kindle, there's not a lot of searching involved. I know what I'm looking for and going right to the thing, like way back in the day when I won a bet with a friend by going into a Gap store and finding the shelf my jeans were on with my eyes closed.

And when I'm buying groceries direct from Amazon Fresh, they're unlikely to try to steer me to a third party vendor selling DIET MOUNTIAN DAW.

But generalized search is a hot mess, apparently. Per Cory Doctorow:

"Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads."

The other day I realized I needed a fresh batch of winter socks and so, not wanting to drive over to Meijer, plugged "wool socks" into Amazon's search dingus.

Now, I'm no connoisseur of insulated hosiery, but I'm pretty sure that I'd never heard of XoxOY or Insoool or these other companies offering me $3.99 six-packs of wool socks with thousands of positive ratings written in some dialect of ESL whose origin was hard to pin down.

Fortunately I recollected that Browning licensed their name to a line of outdoor clothing and I'd had their wool socks before, so I plugged "Browning wool socks" in and found some that looked like the ones I'd had and were sold by and shipped from Amazon proper.

Then this morning I noticed it was supposed to piss-pour rain all day and frankly my sole remaining umbrella is on its last legs. So, hey-ho, off to BezosMart!

Friends, if I'm uninformed on socks, I'm positively ignorant on umbrellas. My umbrella-buying experience has generally been limited to grabbing a Totes off the rack at the drug store or Target and tossing it in with the soda and chips in my basket.

I'm sure there is an umbrella equivalent to a Glock: durable, workmanlike, reasonably-priced. Likewise there's probably a Rolls Royce of umbrellas, made by English brolly craftsmen to exacting standards of workmanship and constructed of the best materials well enough that your grandkids will be able to use it to stay dry at their parents' funerals.

I have no idea what those umbrella brands are, though, but I'm pretty sure that they're not being sold in three-packs for $7.99 by WOW-DRY. I'd be afraid to open one of those umbrellas for fear of finding a note written in Malay saying "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a Sihanoukville umbrella factory!"

In the end I bought one that seemed not too terribly scammy or gimmicky and was priced reasonably commensurately with its purported features.

We'll see how it goes.

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Class Warfare

If you've read much Peter Turchin... and you should ...then you're familiar with his concept of "elite overproduction".

In Kevin D. Williamson's latest (paywalled) newsletter, he gives a good example of what the results of "elite overproduction" actually look like at the street level:

"As a cynic might expect, the credentializing and professionalizing of these institutions has not always led to excellence: In the golden age of American newspaper journalism, reporters and editors were in the main people who had not graduated from any college with any kind of undergraduate degree, much less one in journalism. In this, the toilet age of American newspaper journalism, promising prospects and leaders are expected to have graduate degrees in journalism from Columbia, Northwestern, or Penn. Dozens of big tech firms started by dropouts and uncredentialed upstarts celebrate the romance of their garage days but would need an extraordinary reason to even consider hiring someone like one of their founders for the most ordinary job, while the HR departments are barnacled over by otherwise unemployable grievance-studies graduates. Public libraries that were run for generations by volunteers or by bookish generalists now are in the care of people with advanced degrees in something called library science, under the management of whom our libraries have been turned into makeshift mental wards and masturbatoria for vagrants making the most of the public internet connections."

(Williamson signing on at The Dispatch is what pushed me into subscribing.)

Automotif CDLIX...

It's a size of car that the British call a "spanner"... no, wait, that's what they call a biscuit. This size car they call "Executive", meaning it's larger than a compact but smaller than a "Luxury Saloon".

In America it's a midsize, and Mercedes has been making them since the Fifties. Nowadays it's referred to as their "E-class", sized between the compact C-class and full-size S-class. It's the equivalent to BMW's 5-series or a Ford Taurus or whatever Chevy's currently calling the Maluminpala.

When the generation shown in the picture debuted back in the mid-'80s, it was just the known in-house as the W124 platform. Back then the letters went on the end of Mercedes model, and the "E" in 320E would have stood for "einspritzmotor", signifying a 3.2 liter fuel-injected car.

For the '94 model year, the letters got moved to the front of the model designation on Benzes*, since referring to a car as having an "einspritzmotor" in 1994 would have been as redundant as referring to it as a "vierräder". So from '94 on, the E320, like the '94-'96 wagon in the picture, was a midsize E-class with a 3.2 liter motor.

In this case, that 3.2L motor was a DOHC inline six putting out 217bhp. The '96 E-class was the last hurrah for the classic M-B straight six, with six cylinder Benzos using V-6 motors until 2017 saw the revival of the inline, with the turbocharged M276.

*Causing a great deal of distress for car nerds like me who had actually gone to the trouble of cracking the alphanumeric code on Jerry decklids. Don't get me started on how the numeric designations on Mercedes and BMW models only have the most tangential relationship to engine displacement now.

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The Music of the Gears

What you're hearing there is sixteen very angry little cylinders arranged in a vee, each one displacing just under a hundred cc's, being force-fed air from a supercharger drawing through a pair of SU carburetors. The result was six hundred frantic horsepower at twelve thousand ear-piercing RPM.

It was basically a pair of 750cc V-8s end-to-end with the thicket of shrieking straight-cut gears driving the dual overhead cams smooshed between them.

And it sounds glorious.

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Dynamic Duo

History is replete with examples of super-powered dynamic duos: Batman and Robin, Ruth and Gehrig, Swift and Kelce, Pinky and The Brain.

If you're a Nikon fan you could add to that list the D3 and D700.

That pair was actually a successful reboot of an iconic power couple from the closing days of the film era. Nikon's F5 was a bombshell professional grade camera that arguably established the shape and size of future pro bodies from all the serious manufacturers. It was packed to the gills with the latest technology 1996 could conjure, and it had a built-in vertical grip that both made it easier to use in portrait mode and also held the eight AA batteries that, at eight frames per second, could suck up a 36 exposure roll of Velvia in about the time it takes you to say "Whoops! I totally forgot that film costs money!"

The F5 was an enormous, heavy, incredibly rugged camera, which you could use to bludgeon someone into unconsciousness and then take perfectly-exposed, crisply-focused pictures of the crime scene.

So in 1999 they gave it a little brother in the form of the F100. Still rugged, still weather-sealed, but it lost the bulbous vertical grip and its cavernous battery compartment. This shaved three and a half frames per second off the frame rate, but it also shaved a whole pound off its bulkier sibling's avoirdupois, from 2.75 pounds to 1.73, batteries included.

The F100 was popular with photogs who worried about weight or wanted something a little more discreetly-sized than the enormous full-on pro F5, as well as making an excellent second body for the traveling professional photographer.

Fast forward to 2007 and Nikon released the D3, its first DSLR to sport a full-frame sensor, which they dubbed "FX" format in Nikon marketing-speak. Nikon's first two generations of digital pro bodies, the D1 and D2, were like the F5 in size, shape, features, and ruggedness, but housed a smaller APS-C DX sensor. Since Canon had full-frame bodies in its lineup since 2002, Nikonians had been itching for a return salvo for five long years.

The D3 was an enormous pro camera, though, with a price tag to match. So the following year's announcement of the D700, which was lighter and smaller and less expensive without sacrificing important features or essential ruggedness or... most importantly ...that big 12MP CMOS sensor, was greeted with hosannas.

Of course, what good is a smaller, lighter camera without smaller, lighter lenses?

Hey, look at this mid-'90s Mercedes-Benz E320 wagon I snapped using the Nikon D700 and 28–200 mm f/3.5-5.6G zoom lens!

The 28-200mm G is tiny and light for its focal length range, much smaller and lighter than my rugged old 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6D "Street Sweeper".

It's not without its downsides. The lightness comes from its construction, with both the barrel and mount made of plastic. You wanna remember that plastic mount if you have it mounted on a D3; with a regular metal-mount lens you can pick up even a heavy Nikon pro body by the lens, but I wouldn't do that with a 28-200G.

The small size comes from the lack of a manual aperture ring, as well as the lack of a Vibration Reduction system or an internal focusing motor. Unless your camera has an in-body focusing motor, this is a manual focus only lens. And even with autofocus it can be slow to travel from one extreme of the focusing range to the other.

But it gives great results, all things considered, and did I mention it's crazy small and light? Jim Grey reviews it here, Ken Rockwell here, and there's a fascinating piece by the gentleman who designed the lens here. 

I snapped the same Mercedes wagon with the Nikon 1 J1.

It really gives you an idea for the effect of sensor size on depth of field. The little 1" sensor J1 was shooting at f/4.8, while the big full-frame D700 was shooting at f/7.1, yet there's enough background blur with the latter to really make the subject pop.

I like the Nikon 1 J1, but I love the D700.

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Highly Relatable Content

Few things are more frustrating that to have someone craft what they think is a scathing rebuttal or an adroit counterpoint when all they're actually doing is showing that they read no further than the article's title.

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The Best Car Holster!

I’ve come up with* this really badass car holster that attaches to your belt. That way if you have to un-ass your ride in a hurry, the gun comes with you automatically. Even better, it saves you money because you can use it as your restaurant holster and your mall holster, too!

Steal this look!

* I mean, technically PHLster came up with the holster. They're just missing the marketing gold mine of branding it as a "car holster", because the low-information toter sure seems to want a car holster really bad judging by the garbage emails that clog my spam filter.

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Gourmet Dining

I was putting together a little cheese plate for brekkie yesterday morning. A little brie, a little gouda, some crackers... that sort of thing.

What beverage should one pair with brie and gouda at 9:00AM?

I went with Dr. Pepper & Cream Soda Zero Sugar, served chilled in the can.

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Meme Dump

World Turned Upside Down

I remember back in 1984 when the Soviet Union, a military superpower, was supplying missiles to North Korea and Iran.

Fast forward to this 2024 Wall Street Journal piece, which I can't even imagine trying to explain to 11th grade Tamara:

“The United States is concerned that Russian negotiations to acquire close-range ballistic missiles from Iran are actively advancing,” one of the U.S. officials said. “We assess that Russia intends to purchase missile systems from Iran.”

Delivery of the Iranian missiles could happen as soon as this spring if the purchase proceeds, but U.S. officials don’t believe the deal has been completed.

The Iranian missiles would add to Moscow’s recent acquisitions, which include ballistic-missile launchers and several dozen ballistic missiles from North Korea, the officials said.

On Thursday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Russian forces fired at least one of the missiles into Ukraine last week and that it had landed in an empty field.

Several days earlier, Russia had launched multiple North Korean ballistic missiles, which have a range of about 550 miles, and the U.S. was still assessing those attacks, Kirby said.

"Well, 1984 Me, it turns out that the Nineties are going to be unexpectedly faboo, but then stuff's gonna start getting weirder and weirder and you just aren't gonna be ready for 2016 and beyond."

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Fluffy the Killer

The old joke goes: "Why are cats such assholes? Because they're God's perfect killing machines, but they're also tiny and adorable and humans keep scooping them up and talking baby talk to them."

At an adorable 3.5 pounds, the black-footed cat has the right to be among the crankiest of them all...

"Adorably big-eyed and smaller than a house cat, black-footed cats are far more successful at hunting than lions. They can jump up to five feet in the air and 6½ feet in distance; they kill eight to 14 meals per night and can eat 3,000 rodents a year.

“They’re considered the fierce cat,” said Bob Cisneros, Hogle Zoo’s associate director of animal care, who described kitten Gaia as a “mighty warrior.”

“These guys are voracious hunters,” he said."

That new resident at the Salt Lake City Zoo is pretty much fully grown at three pounds, which is about a fifth of the mass of Huck or Holden when they're in fighting trim. (Less than a fifth if we haven't been monitoring their dinner portions carefully.)

It looks like if I want to see black-footed cats, the closest ones are in Cleveland's Metroparks Zoo or the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

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A Jog Around the Blogs

• Surveillance Detection Principles: "Follow-Home" robberies are a thing. Do you know how to tell if you are being followed and what to do if you are?


• Jim Grey is trying his hand at bite-size five minute podcasts every Wednesday this year.


• Revolvers are just Awesome.

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Stopping Gun Grabbers

How to stop gun grabbers? (The literal kind, I mean.)

Did you ever wonder what was meant by "Level I" and "Level III" and other ratings for security holsters? There's a good article series underway (Part One and Part Two are already up on the web) explaining the history of the term and how it's applied by Safariland, the successor firm to the Rogers Holster company who originated it, as well as other holster makers who have latched onto it as a marketing device.

If you're gonna walk around advertising you have a blaster, you might want to be able to hang on to it.

Gen3 Glock 37 in a Safariland ALS Level I retention holster.

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Antisanguinity

Mitch Daniels is not optimistic...

"Paradoxically, these ominous projections can help worrywarts like me move through what might be called the stages of political grief. A decade ago, an optimist could tell himself that a democratically mature people could summon the will or the leaders to stop plundering its children’s futures, and to reconcile or at least agree to tolerate sincerely held cultural disagreements.

For a while after that, it seemed plausible to hope for incremental reforms that would enable the keeping of most of our safety-net promises, and for a cooling or exhaustion of our poisonous polarization.

Now, I’m grudgingly ready to surrender and accept that the cliché must be true: Washington will not face up to its duty except in a genuine crisis. Then and only then will we, as some would say, focus on the existential threats to our iconic institutions."

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Speaking of football...

The last time I really paid much attention to NFL football was the Eighties, when I was in high school.

In 2009 I described the Rip Van Winkle sensation of tuning in to a game:

"Wasn't that pass interference?" "Do they know they only have one running back?" "How can they go for two? This isn't college football." "When did they start using jet packs and lasers?"

I've started watching a little more. The corner pub, Fat Dan's, airs Bears home games and also the Colts if the Bears aren't playing. It's still pretty Rip Van Winkle to me, but I'm getting the hang of thirty years worth of rules changes.

Over at The Online Photographer, Mike has a lengthier dive into the changes as he's noticed them.

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Introvert Nightmares...

I hate those dreams where you get stuck in awkward and uncomfortable situations, like the one where the temp agency mistakenly sent me to be the starting quarterback for an imaginary NFL team... the Smallville Ocelots or Anytown Meerkats or whatever. Then there was the one where I was trapped for an excruciatingly long 20-floor elevator ride with the Obamas, trying to come up with the sort of pleasantly apolitical small talk that one resorts to when one is trapped in a confined space with extroverted strangers.

Last night I dreamed I was in my mid-20s, and I had to go on a road trip to pick up my mom from the hospital and bring her back to my place. And accompanying me on this roadtrip was (also inexplicably young) Tucker Carlson. 

We took Tucker's Karmann Ghia, and I spent hours cooped up in a car with someone whom I was desperate to avoid talking about anything remotely political with. And then of course there's the return leg of the trip with mom crammed in the car with us and now I have to worry about her saying something political too.

I'd rather have spent sixty floors in an elevator with Barry and Michelle. Lordy that was an excruciating nightmare.

Did you know...?

That's the building we used to jokingly call "Broad Ripple's skyscraper", before the neighborhood sprouted a jungle of 4- and 5-story "mixed use" residential/retail spaces.

It was a professional building, with dentist's offices and whatnot on each floor. Now it's owned by the bohemian Hotel Broad Ripple.

Hence the big peace symbol.

Back during the Cold War, conservative Boomers and Silents called that "the footprint of the American chicken". 

GenX and Millennials mostly knew it from the button on Private Joker's helmet cover, next to the scrawled "BORN TO KILL" slogan. Occasionally, on posters or fliers touting a Sixties hippie-themed school function, a clueless X'er or Millennial would hilariously get it mixed up with the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star logo.

I once heard a fundie preacher... I've mentioned that I grew up in a Baptist concentration camp, right? ...tell the congregation that it was actually a secret satanic symbol; an inverted cross with the arms broken. I guess when you're looking for the devil behind every bush, you get a lot of false positives.

In actuality, as I learned while reading P.J. O'Rourke's essay "Among the Euroweenies" in Holidays in Hell, it originated in 1958 as the logo of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It's a combination of the semaphore signals for "N" and "D".

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Happy New Year!

Let's hope 2024 is a good one!

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Pupper!

My cousin's dog, Ruby.

Nikon 1 V2 & 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2...

I'm sure you've seen it but...

...it's still the best music video ever...

Life with old cars...

I see that the Mustang's spit off the little plastic boot from the base of its radio antenna again. Good thing I buy them by the three-pack.

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A lot on my plate, all of a sudden...

Normally the last week of the year, between Christmas and New Year's, is the easiest time for blogging. All you gotta do is cue up a few pre-written listicles about your five or ten favorite ____s from the last year, and you're golden.

Alas, the Fates decided that Reality would make a big-ass capital letter appearance in my world here at the end of "2020: III".

Stay tuned! More content is coming! I've posted more frequently this year than any other year since, like, 2014!

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Heart Check...

When you park your car and get out and start walking toward the store, do you stop and look back at your ride and feel a little swell of love?

I've been driving this Mustang for four years now and it still gives me big feels.

Mixed Legacy

So, as you have probably heard, Gaston Glock shuffled off his mortal coil a couple days ago.

He probably had more impact on the world of handguns today than any other single individual not named "Sam Colt" or "John Browning".

Not that he was necessarily a design genius or brilliant gunsmith or whatever. He was an engineer who owned a company that hired designers and gunsmiths, but the end result is that he made a pistol that was dirt cheap to manufacture yet adequately reliable, accurate, and durable.

I carried Glocks for years. I likely will again at some point. I was a moderator at the GlockTalk forum twenty-three years ago. I even had a Glock desktop theme on my Win95 computer. (Remember desktop themes? Mine played a .WAV of that Tommy Lee Jones "nickel plated sissy pistol" quote when I shut it down.)

At the same time, there's no denying that Gaston's dirt-cheap-to-manufacture pistol really kicked off the race to the bottom that has consumed the handgun market over the last thirty years.

So my feelings on hearing this week's news are... complex.

Staying Well...

Another good episode from Tactical Tangents:

"Wellness isn’t just a soft and fuzzy term bandied about in the Human Resources department. Healthier, happier employees perform better, and in professions where the rubber meets the road, wellness is tactical. The trite concept of Work/Life balance isn’t so trite when lives are on the line. How do you keep yourself all happy and centered and still put in the grind to do the work? Listen to this episode to hear some ideas."

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The internet is made of cat pictures...

The Pentax Q-S1 that debuted in 2014 would turn out to be the final iteration of the Q series. It was basically a Q7 with the outer shell re-sculpted into more "Leica-rangefinder-esque" contours.

I was headed out the door yesterday with the Q-S1 & 8.5mm f/1.9 01 Standard Prime lens in my jacket pocket when I noticed Huck napping in the window seat looking adorable, so I snapped a couple photos.

The upper one is taking the .dng RAW file and running it through Photoshop's RAW convertor, and the lower one is a monochrome .jpeg straight out of the camera.

Photo Cheating...

With the 1.6X crop factor of Canon's APS-C sensor, the EF 50mm f/1.4 lens is transformed from a normal lens into a short telephoto, ideal for portraiture work. It's fast enough for available light work indoors, even on the old EOS 40D!

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Meme Dump…

Curiosity

I was walking down the sidewalk the other day when a squirrel up ahead of me noticed me coming and bolted for safety. However instead of running into the front yard of the house to my right, she jumped for the tree growing in the devil's strip to my left.

The tree was not very big. My camera, however, was quite large (Canon EOS-1D Mark IV), and I managed to get it up in front of my face before she peeked out around the trunk to see if I was still there.

With the camera in front of my face, instead of being confronted by a pair of forward-facing predator eyes pointing right at her, there was just a blank black rectangle making clicking noises.

Curiosity overpowered caution, and the squirrel sidled toward me along a branch as I shuffled slowly forward with my EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoomed all the way to its limit (136.5mm equivalent on the 1D's APS-H sensor) until I was practically up in her grille.

Finally her nerve broke and she scampered back down off the tree and across the street to the safety of a larger tree.

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Automotif CDLVIII...

The 1988 model year was a jolt for fans of classic Detroit iron. The G-body coupes from General Motors, practically the last bastion of classic midsize front-engine, rear-wheel-drive coupes, got axed and replaced with smaller front wheel drive substitutes.

The G-body Buick Regal and Pontiac Grand Prix, cars that had been the staple of NASCAR were gone. (The Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme and Chevy Monte Carlo got a one model year reprieve, with the RWD Olds still being sold for the '88 model year as the Cutlass Supreme Classic alongside its FWD replacement, and the Monte disappearing for '89, replaced by the 1990 Lumina coupe.)

Those G-bodies were the cars that much of GenX learned to drive on, borrowing dad's Cutlass 442 or mom's Monte Carlo LS on a Friday night and doing the only performance modification you could do that could be undone without anyone being the wiser: Flip the air cleaner lid upside down so you could hear the weedy little 305 or 307 smog motor sucking air through the Rochester carb for all it was worth while you brake-torqued it at the traffic light in front of the Dairy Queen to annihilate that kid in the Accord coupe.

The replacement for the RWD G-body Pontiac Grand Prix was built on GM's new FWD W-body platform, also known as the GM10 cars.

In addition to going to front wheel drive, the sixth generation Grand Prix offered another change, because starting with the 1990 model year, a 4-door sedan was offered alongside the coupe; a first for the Grand Prix nameplate.

For the 1994 model year, Pontiac gave the Grand Prix a mild styling refresh, with new front and rear fascias. The car in the photo, a Grand Prix SE sedan in Medium Teal Metallic, is from the '94-'96 model years. The steel wheels and plastic wheel covers tell us it doesn't have the GT package, so under the hood you'll find GM's 3.1L 3100 pushrod V-6 rated at 160 SAE net horsepower.

With the port fuel injected engines, there was no flipping the air cleaner lid over for that easy 2hp boost, alas...

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Merry Christmas to all y'all!

From all of me here at VFTP to all you imaginary people in my computer, I hope you have a joyous holiday!

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Moving Pictures

The photo editors at the New York Times put together their selections for the year in pictures.

Say what you want about the Gray Lady, when it comes to photojournalistic talent (and writing quality) it's still the big leagues for a reason.

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Automotif CDLVII...

The third model year of the fourth generation of Ford Mustangs was a notable one. The 1996 model year saw the absence of the classic Windsor pushrod V-8 that, in one form or another, had always had a home under Mustang hoods ever since the start back in 1964. (Well, except for the cursed year of 1974, about which we do not speak.)

Instead of the classic 302cid "5.0" motor... which was actually 4.9 liters, but that doesn't look as cool on fender badges ...the '96 Mustang GT, like the Pacific Green convertible above, had a SOHC 2V version of Ford's new 4.6L Modular V8, rated at 215 SAE net horsepower.

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Terminal Roles

Here's a fascinating article on the Dungeons & Dragons players on Texas's death row.

It's definitely worth a read.

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Automotif CDLVI...

Here's a Chrysler LeBaron convertible from after the mid-cycle refresh. Mopar milked six model years' worth of sales out of the second generation of LeBarons on the front-wheel-drive K-car platform before giving them a light styling update for the 1993 model year.

Gone were the hidden headlamps of the '87-'92 models, replaced with simpler and cheaper flush headlight lenses. The coupe version disappeared after the '93 model year, leaving the cash-cow convertible to soldier on for two more model years, to 1995. Also vanished were the various turbo fours, meaning that this Radiant Red '93-'95 LeBaron GTC ragtop, which unbelievably still has the factory wheel covers, sports the only motor left in the lineup, the 141-horsepower Mitsubishi-sourced 6G72 3.0L SOHC V-6.

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Back toward the light...

If you can read this, you've made it.

Oh, it's gonna be cold and miserable for a couple months yet, but we just passed the darkest day of the year. From here on out, the sun spends a bit more time above the horizon every day. 

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Gorillafritz has thoughts on flashlight usage. (Departments issuing weapon-mounted lights without adequately training officers in how to use them are a blight upon the land. I've heard horror stories of officers directing traffic with their WML. It's only a matter of time before I hear about one using their TLR-1 to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.)


• Bobbi finds ominous rumblings on the international scene.


• Pragmatic pondering on the problems of pocket poppers.

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Overheard in the Office...

TV [down the hall]: 🎶🎵Merry Merry Merry Christmas🎵🎶 

RX: "Harry Harry Harry Krishna... His brother is Ted Krishna." 

Me: "Their dad is Joe Krishna." 

RX: "He sells used cars."

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Jihadi or Joker?

An interesting long-form piece on how the FBI and NYPD investigate... and maybe groom ...terrorism suspects.

In this case we have a former USMC reserve NCO who got into Boogaloo groups online and converted to Islam and then, well, read the piece for yourself...

Fong focused his energies on a new meme-oriented Instagram page about Islam, which eventually birthed a new chat group on Signal. Fong, the administrator of this new group, called it “Mujahideen in America.” He wanted the group’s discussions to involve Islam, guns, and training.

“We’re going to go over here to talk about self-defense,” Fong, who went by the username asian_ghazi, said, describing what he viewed as topics for the group chat. “Boogaloo stuff, like kind of guerrilla tactics, but mostly for hypothetical scenarios, mostly self-defense, weapons safety, firearms.”

Fong had curated the group’s membership. There was Daniel, a Russian speaker Fong first met in the WhatsApp group that had fractured. There was also James, a teenager and recent convert to Islam who shared Fong’s ironic sense of humor. James had brought someone named Moussa into the group.

Moussa, pushy and boisterous, started to bring up terrorist groups in the chat. Daniel joined in, giving his opinions about Islamist movements in Chechnya and other parts of Russia.

“Their talks about this kind of stuff would be here and there,” Fong said.

Fong didn’t know what to do. Should he kick these guys out? He’d already seen one internet group fall apart. But he struggled to tell if this discussion went beyond harmless intellectual curiosity and debate.

Daniel and Moussa weren’t who they claimed to be. Daniel was working undercover for the NYPD. Moussa was an FBI informant, known in the bureau’s parlance as a “confidential human source.” They’d been tasked to find and secretly investigate potential terrorists online.

When does shitposting cross the line from First Amendment protected bantz and become Providing Material Aid to Terrorists?
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Take A Picture or Make a Picture?

Jim Grey at Down the Road has a good eye for interesting details on cars. Whereas 99% of my car photographs are simple shots of the entire car from a quartering angle at about sedan-driver's-eye height (designers tend to take pains to make this an attractive view, since it's how you see most cars), Jim gets in close for the neat bits of styling.

I think it's pretty artsy, but he's got a good point in his post yesterday about what makes actual art.

I've noted before that I'm probably hindered in my progress as a photographer by being too much of a camera liker.

I should sit down with my Blackfork Guide again. ("Six things that happen in your photograph whether you want them to or not.")

Training B.S. Detector Checklist...

It's weird to run across something I wrote syndicated online someplace when I was searching for something unrelated, but here's a piece I did a few years back on separating the wheat from the chaff when seeking handgun training beyond the basic "here's where the bullet comes out" sort:

"There’s lots of good training available, many different schools of “gun-fu” if you will, and the trick is to not get taken in by the bad stuff. Peter Barrett, another gun writer and friend of mine, once came up with a handy checklist for spotting the charlatans out there. I’ve used it for years, and this column is something of an expansion of that list.

First, give his (or her) social media presence, if any, a critical look-over. Are comments disabled on his YouTube videos? Is the only place to interact with him inside of his own forum where any skepticism or doubtful questions get deleted or flooded by hostile comments from his acolytes? That’s a danger sign.

When looking at his résumé — he does have something like a résumé up, right? — is it just a vague list of who he’s trained, with no mention of who he trained under? The best instructors I know are always out attending classes and trying to learn something new or maybe just looking for new tips or tricks for teaching. I don’t care who an instructor has trained. I want to know who trained him.

Does every technique in the school or class come from within the school or class? Did it all spring straight from the guru’s head? The not-invented-here syndrome can turn an instructor into a self-licking ice cream cone in a hurry. Again, the best instructors I know are constantly and cheerfully stealing good ideas from each other..."

Go RTWT.

A reminder...

Openly carrying a sidearm isn't a "deterrent". It's just letting everyone who sees it know that you have a handgun. They get to decide how deterred that makes them feel.

If Sumdood is willing to go hands-on with a young, fit, athletic cop and rip his Glock out of a Level III duty holster with enough force that it breaks the retention device, why is he going to be "deterred" by some guy who looks like 300 pounds of chewed bubble gum and isn't even aware of his surroundings?

Not deterring anybody.

At this point, sure, why not?

In my email in-box:

Probably because what good is living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia without people looking like they're living in a horrible cyberpunk dystopia, I guess?

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