Meme Dump

Glamour Pigeon

I'm no ornithologist, but I think this is a mourning dove, which is essentially a shyer, more tastefully-dressed pigeon with a good diet and better public relations.

Snapped with an Olympus E-5 wearing a Panasonic Leica D Vario-Elmar 14-150mm f/3.5-5.6, which is a great all-purpose walking around lens on the Oly Four Thirds DSLR bodies. Alas, the lens hoods for these long-discontinued superzooms remain unobtainum.

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Way Too Much Information

Didn't we kill an awful lot of redcoats specifically to ensure that I wouldn't have to endure television newspeople telling me the condition of the king of England's junk before the breakfast hour?

I realize that RAF Typhoons are doing yeoman's work helping us bomb Houthi launch sites further back into the stone age right now, but if splashing a couple of them in an egregious blue-on-blue incident would get the talk of the royal package off my morning TV news, I'd be at least moderately in favor of it.

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Jerkwater

I was today years old when I learned the source of the term "jerkwater town".

Original steam locomotives could only go a fairly short distance before needing to replenish their water supply. The solution was to add a "tender car" behind the locomotive that carried additional fuel and water (there was a water tank under the wood or coal you see piled in the car behind the locomotive in old western movies.)

Even so, that only stretched the range to maybe a hundred and fifty miles or so between top-ups. Out in the west, this might not be far enough to get you to the next station, so the railroads built fuel and water stops at regular intervals along their routes where the locomotive could top up its tender. You've seen those water towers with the long spout that the engineer could jerk out over the tender to dump water into its tank, right?

Little hamlets would often spring up around these fuel & water stops, even though they didn't have an actual train station...

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Trail's End

Here are the keepers from my last stroll with the Nikon D1X, wearing the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8G ED AF-S zoom lens...

This was shot at ISO 800 indoors, available light with the 17-55/2.8 wide open.

Always a Student

Yesterday afternoon Bobbi had to run an errand, so I rode along and while we were out, her car swung into the parking lot of Half Price Books as though on autopilot. 

I picked up copies of Humans of New York and Peace, Love and Pepper Spray to add to my small collection of photo books. Also, I picked up Getting Your Shot: Stunning Photos, How-to Tips, and Endless Inspiration From the Pros and Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs of People.

While I'm not what you'd call a professional photographer, I have been paid for a picture or two at this point, and I've learned along the way. Mostly what I've learned is how much more there is to learn. That's the flip side of Dunning-Kruger: once you fall off the other side of Mount Stupid, you have an endlessly long slog up the Slope of Knowledge out of the Valley of Despair.

That goes for any skill. Greg Ellifritz is a widely respected trainer in the world of firearms and personal protection, and he writes:

"I think it is the job of a professional instructor to remain up to date in their fields of endeavor. I won’t stop taking classes as long as I am teaching these skill sets. I vow to never become one of those instructors whose peak instructional training is a weekend NRA class.

I think I owe it to my students to show them that I am continuing to do the work."

One of the meta-instructive things at a group event like TacCon or the old Paul-E-Palooza was you got to see which instructors were out there taking classes from other presenters in their free time. When someone decides they're too cool to learn anything new, it makes me question the value of their teaching.

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Ironically Orwellian

Look, I get that the World War Memorial downtown is an historically significant monument and one of the crown jewels of Indianapolis. We don't want it vandalized and it's probably a good idea to have video surveillance to help apprehend anyone who would do such a thing.

But could they have picked a slightly less ironically Orwellian location for the camera housings?

"Safe beneath the watchful eyes!"

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Stargate

There's apparently a stargate in downtown Indianapolis, on the state government campus, right behind the Indiana Statehouse.

Fuji X-T2 & XF 16-80mm f/4 R WR

David Merrill and I strolled around downtown taking photos yesterday and he was like "Let's go to the stargate!" and I was moderately embarrassed that I was entirely unfamiliar with said sculpture, what with having lived here for years at this point.

Now I'm low-key obsessed with getting the ideal shot of the thing...

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #249...

The Fabrique Nationale Five-SeveN with a Trijicon RM08G and a magazine full of very angry bees.

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King of the K-frame Carry Magnums

One of the most sought-after postwar K-frame variants, from back in the earliest days of the Smith & Wesson Performance Center: 

"In the early ’90s, Smith & Wesson introduced their Performance Center, and back then it was much more of a custom gun shop than it is now. With the pistol half of the Performance Center helmed by Paul Liebenberg and the revolver side of the house under the supervision of John French, the shop turned out small numbers of essentially hand-built variations on the standard production models found in the Smith & Wesson catalog.

In 1995, the Performance Center took standard round-butt Model 13 frames and fitted 3-inch heavy barrels, but with a full underlug. The cylinder latch was cut away on the bottom to make sure it would clear speedloaders, which wasn’t the standard practice on S&W revolvers at the time. With the action converted to double-action only, the hammer spur was bobbed and the trigger had a non-adjustable overtravel stop fitted in its backside.

The action was slicked up, the cylinder charge holes were chamfered, and the barrel was treated to quad Mag-Na-Ports to tame recoil. Finally, the whole thing was finished in a bead-blasted matte blue, fitted with abbreviated Eagle Secret Service grips for maximum concealability without compromising grippiness, and the finished product was etched with the Performance Center logo."

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Requiem for a Heavyweight

I had my Nikon D1X out to get some exercise a couple days ago, and when I went to take a shot, the shutter made a weird noise and it looked like the mirror didn't cycle properly. I powered it off for a quick count of ten Mississippi and turned it back on again and everything seemed to return to normal.

Then yesterday after noon I was out with it again and when I went to take a shot the mirror stuck in the up position. Even with a fresh fully-charged battery, the camera just makes a muted whirring noise when the shutter button is pressed and the mirror doesn't budge.

Nikon D1X & 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D VR

I think this is the end for my D1X. Time to put a body cap on it and shelve it alongside my Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, which had taken to spending more time throwing error codes than functioning properly.

Considering that Nikon launched the D1X in early February of 2001 with serial number 5100000 and mine is serial number 5100496, it's an old one. I was down to one really good NiMH battery pack and one that was on its last legs. It was too old to even work with my favorite Nikon DX lens, because it couldn't control the electronic diaphragm on the 16-80mm f/2.8-4E.

At this point it's a 20+ year-old DSLR that, to judge by the body, saw years of hard pro service before I bought it back in 2015; the equivalent of a workhorse getting a job giving kiddie rides at a petting zoo as a retirement gig. It's not economically repairable, but I've had some good times with it. Took it to Blogorado back in '15, shot some roller derby with the Atomic Nerds in Albuquerque, and it accompanied me on plenty of neighborhood walks.

I knew this day was coming, but I'm still a little sad.

Good job, Nikon.

Great Moments in Bad Gun Ideas

This photo just popped up in my Microsoft OneDrive memories for the day...

I mean, the trigger was nice, and it shot okay, but the more and more I thought about it, the lessless  I dug the whole basic concept behind it...

"Hey, guys, let's make a pistol that adds a bunch of extra mechanical complexity while negating one of the principle advantages of 9x19mm, namely dirt cheap training ammo, all for the dubious benefit of adding a possible 25-to-50 feet per second of muzzle velocity!"

I mean, if you want one as a range toy-slash-safe queen simply for the mechanical curiosity because you're an absolute gun nerd, that's understandable, but I'm pretty much of the opinion that it's a fundamentally unserious choice as an actual life-saving tool.

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Eek.

"Scott Napper, a biochemist and vaccinologist at the University of Saskatchewan, can easily envision humanity’s ultimate doomsday disease. The scourge would spread fast, but the progression of illness would be slow and subtle. With no immunity, treatments, or vaccines to halt its progress, the disease would eventually find just about every single one of us, spreading via all manner of body fluids. In time, it would kill everyone it infected. Even our food and drink would not be safe, because the infectious agent would be hardy enough to survive common disinfectants and the heat of cooking; it would be pervasive enough to infest our livestock and our crops. “Imagine if consuming a plant could cause a fatal, untreatable neurodegenerative disorder,” Napper told me. “Any food grown within North America would be potentially deadly to humans.”

This nightmare illness doesn’t yet exist. But for inspiration, Napper needs to look only at the very real contagion in his own lab: chronic wasting disease (CWD), a highly lethal, highly contagious neurodegenerative disease that is devastating North America’s deer, elk, and other cervids."

Well, if you want me to read your article on CWD and other prion diseases, that's certainly an effective hook of an opening paragraph, let me tell you.

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Automotif CDLXVI...

Here's a first generation Chevrolet C/K pickup, obviously someone's half-done hot rod project (or entirely-done rat rod... it can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.)

The doors say it's a '64-'66, I think, although I'm hardly fluent in Old Truck.

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Can I get an "amen"?

"[T]his disaffected bloc of Americans (and the poor souls living in swing states) will have to endure months on end of extreme partisan rhetoric, negative advertising, cable news vitriol, and people losing their minds on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok about other people’s political views and choices—all fueled by billions of dollars in unaccountable funds from wealthy sources and activist groups that are perfectly content to see the country break in two for ideological or financial gain.

[SNIP]

The only rational form of self-protection from this madness is to refuse to engage in America’s misshapen partisan politics and to instead pursue other forms of citizenship.

Focus on something other than politics. Talk with friends and colleagues about anything other than partisan divides and culture war clickbait. Turn off and disable the media and tech sources spreading partisan negativity. Turn the mind towards something positive and constructive in life rather than imbibing party propaganda designed to make people anxious, confused, angry, or vengeful."

To be knee-deep in the Very Online kulturkampf these days is to drink from a firehose of negativity and panic and anger, because that's what gets the clicks and the donations and the virality.

To see a politician's TV ad is to be bombarded with images and messages suggesting the country is on the verge of ruin unless you vote for our guy... oh, and help us save America by giving us money by texting CANDIDATE to 12345.

The effect is to keep your "fight-or-flight" reflex on constant low burn, keeping your brain simmering in a 24/7 broth of stress hormones.

Unplug from that shit. Go a week without talking to anybody about anything political. Otherwise you're going to find yourself listening to a podcaster or vlogger rambling about how the CIA Deep State is rigging Taylor Swift to make Travis win the Vaccine Bowl for Biden or whatever cockamamie nonsense is making the rounds now. If you do find yourself watching that and nodding along, you need to go outside and touch some grass, friend.

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Retro Pockets

I used the Amazon gift card Bobbi gave me for my birthday to order a used Kodak Easyshare V1073.

Now I have a copy of each digicam I used before getting my first DSLR:

• Sony Mavica FD88
• Nikon Coolpix 990
• Kodak Easyshare V1073
• Canon PowerShot SX500

Now to go back and see if I can reshoot some things I shot back in the day, using the same gear, but do it better! The arrows are the same, but the Indian's gotten a bit better over the years, or at least I'd like to think so.

Alas, I won't be able to re-do the Lucky Gunner Blogger Shoot, or Knob Creek, or classes with Louis Awerbuck and Todd Green, or...

Kodak Easyshare at Knob Creek in 2011

Monday Morning Meme Dump

Nonsense Etymology

In case you were wondering what a "pompatus" was, now you can know the rest of the story.

That's the sort of deep-dive nerdery I dig.

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The Moment

Once upon a time, the cover of Sports Illustrated was the showcase for some of the best sports photography in the world.

"For sports fans of a certain age, the memory of running to the mailbox to see what was on the cover of the latest weekly issue of Sports Illustrated is indelible. For decades, the magazine’s photographers, writers and editors held the power to anoint stars and deliver the definitive account of the biggest moments in sports, often with just a single photograph and a few words on the cover. It was the most powerful real estate in sports journalism."

Over time, though, it became less an exhibition of action photography and more and more of a celebrity showcase.

"“It became less of a news thing and more of a personality thing,” said Al Tielemans, a staff photographer for almost 20 years. He described an evolution of editors’ wanting the key moment of the game, and then a good photo of the star of the game, and then a photo featuring the most famous person in the game, and then finally just a headshot of a star."

SI laid off all its staff photogs in 2015, and now the publication itself might be a goner.

"The internet, and social media platforms like Instagram, mean that more photography is showcased to more people than ever before. Now that fans see every angle of every game, with highlights and shots available instantly on social media, no single image has the same power that Sports Illustrated’s cover once did."

Checking their online schedule, it looks like the first weekday matinee home game for the Indianapolis Indians is on Wednesday, April 17th. I guess I'll mark my calendar and get ready to go larp as a sports photojournalist...

Pew, Improved

The ability to swap mags from subsonics to supers and have, essentially, an MP5SD in the sheets and a Krink in the streets is a big improvement in utility.

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And then there were two...

With the closure of the last Kmart store in New Jersey, there are only two remaining locations in the continental USA: one in Miami and one in Long Island.

"Remember that you will end up like Kmart."

RX: "There are only two Kmarts left?"

Me: "In the continental US. There's one in Guam and another few in the US Virgin Islands. Six, total."

RX: "How does a business like that survive with only six stores?"

Me: "I think the question contains the answer."

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Snail Mail

I used to gripe about peeking in the sheet metal box of crushing disappointment bolted to the front of the house, looking for checks. I haven’t done that as much lately. All my clients now, even the ones you’d think would be the most hidebound and retrograde, have gone over to direct deposit.

Except one. That one still wants to squeeze the berries to make the ink and sharpen a quill for a pen and lovingly hand-roll the papyrus, and then slip the paper check into the dispatch pouch by hand.

You’ll never guess which client’s check is about three weeks late at this point. (HINT: It didn’t involve electrons in any way.)

This is hair-pullingly frustrating. I’d been hoping that the fates would see that I got my paycheck for my birthday, but that wasn’t in the cards. Now I’m just hoping they get off their asses before bills come due at the end of the month.

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"NO!" in a can...

I'd only recently found a good chart explaining the various "marks" used on pepper spray canisters. I knew that, for example, the one I'd carried in my pocket for so long was Sabre Red in a Mk.6 canister, and that POM Industries had recently expanded their line to include a Mk.3 canister, but what was the significance?

It looks like these dispenser sizes came from Defense Technology, one of the earliest companies selling OC. They have an explainer sheet in PDF form here.

The Mk.3, in the middle, is kinda chonky for pocket carry, and more at home on a duty belt (or maybe stashed by your front door). The one on the right is the Mk.6 size, which is about as big as you'd want to carry in a pants pocket, and only if your jeans aren't too snug. It takes a fairly roomy pocket.

On the left is the standard POM pocket/keychain sized unit, which sacrifices capacity for portability.

You'll note that Def-Tec's literature says that the Mk.6 is capable of "12-14 short bursts", while POM's advertising copy for its little pocket spritzer claims "up to 20+ half-second bursts". Yet the POM is a half-ounce canister while the Mk.6 has .68 ounces of payload. This is because in real life nobody gets a half-second spritz. It generally takes a good "One Mississippi" to paint a proper back-'n'-forth orange stripe across Sumdood's peepers.

I'll carry either the POM or the Sabre Red Mk.6. (And if you're ordering Mk.6 make sure it's not foam or gel, and that it doesn't have any goofy additives like CS, since the latter just makes decontam more of a pain without adding any benefits on the front end.)

Shark Size

Here's an interesting point made in an article about a scientific debate that's raging over the size and build of the extinct giant shark, megalodon.

It’s not unusual for paleontologists to disagree about ancient animal bodies — sometimes with a ferocious intensity. Gottfried recalled witnessing some scientists get into a heated disagreement over the angle of the thigh bone when assembling a triceratops specimen.

John Hutchinson, a professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, is part of the team that put forward the controversial 3D model of the megalodon. He said that the stakes are always high in science, but particularly when working on species that attract both public and scientific fascination.

“The more celebrity an extinct animal has, and the rarer it is, the more competitive or heated the disagreements can be,” Hutchinson said. “I know this all too well. I worked on T. rex.”

Hutchinson said that, early in his career, people used 2D illustrations of fossilized skeletons and shrink-wrapped skin around them, making them quite skinny. Based on these models, people believed Tyrannosaurus rex was around 11,000 pounds. But now, using various methods, scientists mostly agree that an adult T. rex would have been somewhere around 17,000 pounds.

The bit about shrink-wrapping the skin around the skeletons was interesting. I have a book on my Kindle shelf titled All Yesterdays that's a neat look at how illustrations of prehistoric animals have evolved over time, and also has some freaky-looking pictures of modern animals if they were reconstructed by yesterday's paleontologic illustrators from skeletal remains. You'll never look at cows... or your cat ...the same way.

When I was a kid, brontosauruses dragged their tails across the ground as the slid through the bog from one lake to the next, now they gallop in herds... and T. rex has feathers. Science is always on the move and adapting to new data.

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Automotif CDLXV...

1970 was the final year for the eighth generation of the Oldsmobile Ninety Eight. This iteration had debuted in the 1966 model year and, along with its GM platform mate, the Buick Electra, saw a light restyling and a 1" wheelbase stretch for 1969.

The '70 Olds Ninety Eight was available in a variety of coupe and sedan configurations, as well as a convertible, like this Rally Red example parked at a local shop (the same one that works on my rides.)

The Oldsmobile 98 and Buick Electra convertibles were the top of the General Motors totem pole for the buyer who wanted a sporty luxobarge, stickering right around five grand when optioned out, which was still about a thousand less than a Coupe De Ville.

The Ninety Eight ragtop only came with one powertrain in 1970: A 455 cubic inch Rocket V-8 hooked to a Turbo HydraMatic 400 3-speed slushbox. Featuring a single 4-bbl Rochester carburetor and a 10.25:1 compression ratio necessitating premium gas, it was rated at 365 SAE gross horsepower, enough to move two and a quarter tons of ragtop with reasonable alacrity.

Sorry for the somewhat potato-quality photos. The autofocus of the little Canon PowerShot SX500 IS budget superzoom gets confused and hunts around a lot in the light misty drizzle. (Also, I had inadvertently left the ISO set to 800 from some evening shooting I'd been doing the other day, and the little 1/2.3" sensor is crazy noisy at anything over 400.)

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Tailfins and Dagmars


• Match safes


• Your house... and property ...is not a free-fire zone.

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There's a reason for that...

Blogger Comrade Misfit writes, regarding the just-announced Taurus 327 Defender TORO:

"If a K-frame-sized .32 is an offering, a seven-shot gun would be a better idea."

The answer, of course, is that the 856/327 revolvers from Taurus are not exactly K-frame sized, although they're a hair fatter than a J-frame. There's not enough meat in the cylinder for seven .32 charge holes. In fact, that's the reason that they still catalog the 5-shot 605 in .357 Magnum with the older, smaller diameter cylinder and there isn't a .357 Mag version of the 856.

She can be "meh" all she wants. As for me, that extra inch of barrel and the factory Hogue neoprene banana, plus the night sight, give me the wantsies something fierce.

The 2" 327 with the boot-style grip is a handful with .327 Fed ammo, it's really more of a .32 H&R Mag gun. But with a little more weight out front and more to hold on to, .327 Gold Dots might actually be viable.

I wanna put one on the clock...

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Light and Shadow and Texture

With the right lighting and some raindrops, even a slightly rumpled old VW Passat in the grocery store parking lot can shout "Hey! I'm ready for my closeup!" as you walk past.

This was snapped with my Nikon D3 and a late-'80s vintage push-pull AF Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 zoom.

That old push-pull zoom is about the cheapest pro-grade constant-aperture telephoto zoom out there. It lacks stabilization and uses the in-body focus motor, so autofocus performance is decidedly sluggish by modern standards, but it's extremely nice glass and that fast maximum aperture makes up somewhat for the lack of stabilization.

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Meme Dump...

Automotif CDLXIV...

Here's an unusually rust-free '83-'84 Dodge 600 sedan. 

The 600 was the next step up in the '80s Dodge sedan hierarchy from the Dodge Aries. It rode on what Mopar called the "E-platform", which was the K-car platform with the wheelbase stretched three inches. This longer platform was not only used for the 600, but also the higher-zoot Chrysler New Yorker.

The steel wheels and and lack of hood vents or fender badges on this Garnet Red example mean there's no turbo lurking under the hood, so power... such as it is ...comes from either the base throttle body injected 2.2L Mopar four cylinder rated at 99bhp, or the optional Mitsubishi G54B "Silent Shaft" 2.6L four cylinder, which put out 101bhp. While the Mitsu unit was rated at almost the same power, it put out 140 ft-lb of torque at 2800 RPM, versus the 2.2's 121 ft-lb at 3200.

Neat Blaster!

Ian's got a video with the story behind a very historically significant Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special, from back when S&W had cool names for their wheelguns instead of boring numbers.

We can make you better, faster, stronger...

"Who among us doesn’t want their blaster to shoot faster and more accurately?

There’s a whole industry of aftermarket parts to support this communal urge, but it’s important to understand the code phrases that pop up in the advertising for these aftermarket goodies: “No Gunsmithing Required” means that either some fitting will be required, or that the part is so undersize that it can be truly “Dropped In”—from clean across the room. “Some Fitting May Be Needed” translates to a gunsmith will be needed. “Gunsmith Fitting Recommended”—and bring money.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve the speed and accuracy of your pistol that require the addition of not one single part..."

Punked.

DeSantis kisses the ring.

Via the NYT…

Getting torpedoed in the Granite State ahead of a tossup for third in SC has apparently made Ron decide 2028 discretion is the better part of 2024 valor.

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They're not wrong...

A Storm of Sparrows

One of the houses that backs up to the alley leading to Fresh Market has a small tree in its back yard that is laden with red fruit in the winter months. I believe it's a choke cherry, but I used woodcraft as a dump stat, so I have no real clue.

At any rate, I'm strolling down the alley in the bitter cold on the way to lunch when I hear a frantic racket of chirping coming from its boughs.

I glance over and there's a small mob of sparrows, little spherical feathered balls that frantically bouncing up and down and hopping from branch to branch and yelling for all they're worth.

Normally, being at eye level in the bare branches there, if I turned and looked right at them, they'd skitter off to someplace safer, but their attention is absolutely fixed on something other than me, so I glanced up into the tree to see what had them so worked up.

Ah, trespassers!

The cardinals around here have been extremely camera-shy in my experience. Just turning and looking at them will have them dart away to safety before I could even get my camera to eye level, but these two were as intent on the sparrows as the latter were on them.

Mr. and Mrs. Redbird obviously wanted to horn in on the smaller birds' winter larder.

I found myself wishing for a longer lens or more megapickles. The 70-200mm on the APS-H sensor of my EOS-1D Mark III gave me an effective maximum equivalent focal length of 260mm, and the 10MP sensor on the older DSLR didn't allow for a ton of cropping. I'm keeping an eye out at Roberts, hoping they get a good used 70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS lens in on trade. That would be a good lens for shooting classes and matches, too...

Be Wary of Predictions...

Do be sure to note the date on this memo...

If a butterfly flaps its wings just a bit harder or softer, the downstream effects are nigh unpredictable.

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As Time Goes By...

When I was in my twenties, my big source of disappointment at sunrise on Saturday was that the party had wound down and it was time to go home and get some shut-eye.

Nowadays my big disappointment at sunrise on Saturday is that I only get crosswords in the NYT and the WaPo, because The Atlantic doesn't do a Saturday crossword.

Tempus fugit.

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Automotif CDLXIII...

From the outside, the 6th Gen Camaros may have the best lines of the current crop of pony cars.

Too bad they drive like you're trying to conn a machine gun bunker while peering through the firing slits.

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

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Performance Center

I was pretty happy with how this photo for RECOIL: Concealment turned out. The article's not half bad either, if I do say so myself.

It's on newsstands now, or you can get a genuine dead tree copy from BezosMart.

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Dress For Success

There's a great piece here by Erick Gelhaus on matching your gear in a class with the realities of your life and the aim of the class.

Erick, dressed for success.

In my journey through the firearms training universe, I've interacted with two broad groups. One was kinda centered around Tom Givens and the Rangemaster crew, as well as Craig Douglas and his Shivworks collective. There was a fairly strong emphasis on CCW-oriented skills. You'd find those folks at Pistol-Forum, the old TPI board, and the like.

The other largely orbited Pat Rogers, and they posted at Primary & Secondary, M4carbine, Arfcom, and was very .mil/LE-centric. Even the private citizens who showed up at these classes would have war belts and tactical gear, and things were very carbine-heavy. 

At one of the old Friends of Pat events, I remember mentioning to one of these dudes that I'd never attended a class where I didn't shoot my day-to-day carry gun from concealment. He thought I was joking.

I don't own a "classtume" and, of the sixty-some classes I've taken, only four even involved using a carbine. (And the first one, Carbine & Pistol with Louis Awerbuck, I was using the back pocket on my jeans as a mag pouch. I joked that if I wanted to be really authentic in the class, I'd have taken it in pyjamas and a bathrobe, since that's almost certainly how I'd be dressed should I ever have to use a carbine for realsies).

In shoothouse classes, armor is a necessity. If you're LE or .mil. it might make sense to take a class in rifle plates. But if you're just the typical private citizen and you're taking ten carbine classes to every pistol one, and that one pistol class is run with a Safariland SLS on a war belt instead of your daily IWB rig, you're probably not allocating your training budget in the most efficient way possible.

Not that there's anything wrong with that! It's a free country and you can take all the entertrainment classes you want, but at least be honest with yourself about what it is.

Not my actual pyjamas.

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Photo Books

Over the last couple years I've begun to accumulate photo books...

End of the Caliphate is probably the most traditional photo book of the bunch. A coffee-table-sized hardcover tome, it's light on text, other than a short introductory essay by Anthony Lloyd and an afterword by the photojournalist, Ivor Prickett. What it's heavy with is glossy, gripping photos by Prickett, who spent a great deal of time embedded with Iraqi SF as they evicted the Islamic State fighters from Mosul and northwestern Iraq.

Shooter: Combat From Behind the Camera, another book of coffee table dimensions, is more text heavy, combining the reminiscences of SSgt Stacy Pearsall, USAF Ret., with the photos she took while embedded with U.S. Army troops, mostly in Diyala Province. 

Car Sick is book-as-art. It's a collection of photos by Tim Vanderweert, the blogger at Leicaphilia, whose eye and wit we sadly lost almost exactly a year ago. I didn't provide a purchasing link because unless you stumble one of the limited number of existing copies getting re-sold out there, they're all gone. Tim agonized over the quality of the printing and almost certainly lost money on these.

The most recent addition is Vinyl Village, a softcover photo essay by Jim Grey, who blogs at Down the Road. Jim's mostly lived in cities and only recently moved to the Indianapolis 'burbs. The book is an illustrated essay based on his musings while walkabout in his new environs during the Year of the 'Rona. It's a print-on-demand type book, rather than a glossy art book, but as the photos are more documentary-type black and white film photos, that's not as much of a distraction as it could be.

Maybe someday I'll have enough photos to make a book.

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Unsolicited Firearms Industry Opinion

ATTENTION:

If you’re launching a brand new pistol at SHOT ’24 and it uses adaptor plates to attach slide-mounted optics, you are three years behind the curve. 

Adaptor plates are a retrofit kludge for existing designs. New pistols need to direct-mount the most size-appropriate footprints (RMR and 507k on full size double-stacks, 507k on compact/single stack.)

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FN’s Reflex knows what time it is. That optic is attached directly to the slide.

When Japan First Challenged Germany

In 1985, Road & Track magazine tested a top-of-the-line Honda Accord SE-i versus the entry-level Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3. The premise being that Japanese build quality had gotten to the point where it was challenging the Germans, a then-startling claim. (Honda was still a year or so out from launching its Acura brand in the U.S., but it was on the horizon.)

Option-wise, the Accord SE-i was loaded. It had power windows, door locks, and outside mirrors, leather upholstery, and even a few features the Benz lacked, like remote trunk and fuel filler door releases.

The 190E, on the other hand, had features the Accord didn't offer, such as power seats and antilock brakes.

Interestingly, the Mercedes and Honda both had 5-speed manuals. When's the last time M-B offered a row-your-own transmission on this side of the pond?

Both cars had fuel injected SOHC four cylinders. The Honda's was a 101bhp 1.8L driving the front wheels, while the RWD Benzo's 2.3L motor was rated at 120 horsepower.

The cars' 0-60 times were almost identical: 9.8 seconds for the Accord versus 9.9 for the Mercedes. The Honda also edged the 190E on the skidpad, at .79g to .77g. The Mercedes, at 114 mph, was a bit faster on the top end, and its ABS let it outbrake the Accord from sixty mph by ten feet.

The big difference was in the prices as tested, where the thirteen thousand dollar Honda was over ten grand cheaper than the M-B.

1985 was basically about the dawn of the modern car era: Computer-controlled fuel injection, power doodads becoming increasingly common, expected automotive lifespans increasing...

But it's pretty wild to see how far we've come since then.

I remember reading this article in my senior year, in the back row of my AP U.S. Government class.

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Short Attention Spans, Long Air Campaigns

Every time another round of strikes goes into northwest Yemen, the media acts faintly surprised, as if to say "I thought we blew up the Houthi's missile stuff two news cycles ago?"

While it's not like we're hunting Viet Cong supply columns in triple canopy jungle, or even Serbian tanks and artillery among the forested slopes of the Balkans, we're still trying to knock out a stockpile of mobile cruise missile and drone launch vehicles that are sometimes as small and mobile as a pickup. The Houthis have been stockpiling these over the course of years of shipments, mostly from Iran, and even our most confident estimates were that the initial round of airstrikes only degraded their total missile and drone capability by twenty to thirty percent.

Fortunately that corner of the Arabian peninsula is the armpit of the world and largely devoid of natural overhead cover. At the same time, this isn't like the jump-off of Desert Storm or Iraqi Freedom, where we've been spending a month or more developing targeting data for a mammoth airstrike package. This one is largely happening on the fly.

The Houthis are eager for the shoot 'em up, as you'd expect from a bunch of dudes with "Death to America" right on their flag.

Despite efforts to deter them, the Houthis have refused to back down, vowing to retaliate and welcoming the prospect of war with the United States with open delight.

“Yemen is not an easy military opponent that can be subdued quickly,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi official, said in a post on the social media platform X after the American-led strikes.

Thing is, we have no intention (or desire) to fight the Houthis in Yemen. We're all regime-changed-out over here. The Yemenis are just going to have to sort out their problems on their own.

We're just going to hang back and blow up anything the Houthis have that can be used to attack shipping. Of course, this also requires interdicting incoming replacement armaments, and we need to do that, too.

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Little craters full of sweet and salty.

I'd forgotten how perfect a toasted English muffin is as a delivery device for melted Irish butter and orange marmalade.

I'd thought they were about as English as Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent, but Wikipedia says that they do have them in the scepter'd isle, but they just call them "spanners" ...er, "muffins".

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