Apropos of nothing in particular...

"Strip Mall Funeral Parlor" is the name of my next band.

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Automotif CDLXXXIX...

Spotted pulling into the SoBro Fresh Market on a Grey Poupon run was this Series I (2010-'14) Rolls-Royce Ghost in the disappointingly prosaically named "Silver" color.

With a chassis derived from the then-current BMW 7 series and powered by a twin-turbo 6.6 litre BMW V12 rated at 563 SAE net horsepower, the Ghost's power is certainly "Adequate", even when dealing with a curb weight that's only about a case of Perrier short of two and three quarter tons.

Photographed with the Nikon D700 and Nikkor 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G superzoom lens.

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EV Speedrun Challenge

"Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.

Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters."

Basically, Tesla's challenge was to learn how to make a car company faster than established car companies could learn how to make Teslas.

The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

ZCQOTD: "This man has built an impregnable stone house with lovely west-facing balconies on the summit of Mount Stupid."

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Automotif CDLXXXVIII...

Speaking of unexpected sights, check out this absolutely pristine '84 or '85 Ford Tempo GL coupe in Medium Regatta Blue.

The Tempo was the downsized front wheel drive replacement for the Ford Fairmont. It was the second FoMoCo car to feature the new curvy aero styling after the '83 Thunderbird and presaged the coming of the bombshell '85 Taurus. (If you weren't around then, it's hard to understand what a splash the original Taurus made after a decade of square-edged boxmobile sedans from Detroit.)

The Tempo's platform was derived from the Escort and it was powered by Ford's 2.3L pushrod HSC, for "High Swirl Combustion", inline four cylinder engine, driving the front wheels through either a 3-speed auto or 4-speed (in 1984) or 5-speed (for 1985) manual. For '84, the HSC had a 1-bbl Holley carb and was rated at 90bhp. In 1985, the carb was replaced with electronically controlled throttle body fuel injection, which actually dropped power to 86 SAE net horses. Performance was tepid, and 0-60 times could best be described as "eventually".

For '86, the Tempo received a facelift, getting flush headlamps that better complemented the aero styling. (NHTSA approval hadn't come through before the styling of the '84 models had been finalized.)

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Random 1911 Musing...

Y'know, I wonder if the proliferation of relatively cheap CNC machinery is responsible for the overall rise in the quality floor of 1911s over the past couple decades?

I mean, thirty years ago if you weren't spending a G on a 1911, it was basically understood that you were buying a pistol kit that might cycle ball reliably. Nowadays even the Turks will sell you a Government Model clone that will probably run adequately out of the box, at least with good magazines and bullet profiles that aren't too weird and are in the normal 185-230gr weight range.

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Do it, bro!

Photobucket has been sending me messages for literal years that my inactive account would be deleted and that if I didn’t respond, it’d be a goner.

I’ve never responded, but those dudes still haven’t deleted my account (which I am hoping they will. I only had it because a couple forums on which I was active a decade or more ago didn’t have their own photo hosting.)

Are you gonna bark all day, little Photobucket? Our are you gonna bite?

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Sorry...

I absolutely have to get some chrono testing done this morning so I can ship off a review this afternoon.

I won't go to the outdoor range on the weekends... it'd be impossible to get any chrono testing done then anyway ...and today's the only dry weekday in a solid block of rainy weather stretching from last Tuesday to this coming Friday. We're on pace for one of the wettest Aprils on record here in Indy.

Duty calls.

More this afternoon...

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Automotif CDLXXXVII...

This one almost slipped past me before I realized what I'd just seen and jogged down to the corner to grab a photo of it at the traffic light.

What we've got here is a right-hand drive JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) 1994-'96 Toyota Mark II in the Tourer-V trim level, meaning it's packing a 280bhp twin-turbo 1JZ-GTE 2.5 liter inline six. These midsize RWD sedans are popular tuner cars in Japan but were never imported here.

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Totin' trends...

It's been interesting noticing the trends at TacCon now that I've been there for seven years.

The first one I attended, at DARC in Arkansas back in 2017, was largely after the "Caliber Wars" were over. I'm sure there were a few .40s and .45s in attendance, but 9mm was the overwhelmingly most common chambering and it wasn't even close.

I obviously didn't get pictures of everybody shooting in every class, but I'd feel pretty comfortable stating that probably half everybody was shooting a Glock of one variant or another, with M&Ps being the second most common, and the remainder a mishmash of Sig Sauers, HKs, and Berettas, mostly. I only got pictures of one guy using a red dot; an RMR mounted on an 9mm M&P.

Next year TacCon was at DARC again. Glocks were still the most common gun, but probably only a plurality at this point. Sig P320s were already vying with M&Ps as the second most commonly seen pistol. There were a handful of people using red dot optics in 2018, and John Johnston made it into the man-on-man shootoff with one.

At 2019, down in Louisiana at NOLATAC, there were more red dots, and Rick Remington won the shootoff with an RMR atop a 9mm Wilson. Glock alternatives continued to grow in popularity.

After a one-year hiatus during the Plague Year of 2020, TacCon was held at Dallas Pistol Club in 2021.

That's when I first started seeing significant numbers of the smaller pistols, like Glock 48s and Sig P365s. Red dots were commonly spotted in every class and were no longer limited to hardcore dot proponents who'd had pistol slides custom milled for RMRs.

2022 was back at DPC again. Red dots and smaller pistols were everywhere, even in the shootoffs.

2023? More of the same.

For 2024, the biggest difference I noticed was that there was a greater number of people who were willing to talk openly about living "the snubby lifestyle" à la Darryl Bolke. I spent the weekend at the the range, catching rides back to the hotel in the evenings; I'd get dinner and socialize in the lobby a bit and then head to my room to process photos. There weren't many potential scenarios I could visualize there that I didn't feel reasonably comfortable solving with a 3" .38 Special revolver, especially since I was surrounded most of the time by switched-on, like-minded individuals. 

Gear-wise, dots had become downright prevalent. Walthers had become more common. I don't know how Walther's doing in terms of overall market share, but they've certainly penetrated the serious training hobbyist demographic. The majority of optics were now Holosuns. Enclosed emitter optics were trending. If you added 365s and 320s and the few die-hards still shooting the hammer-fired classics together, there may have been as many Sigs as Glocks, if not actually more.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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Automotif CDLXXXVI...

Here's a 1987-1990 Pontiac Firebird Formula. If that's the factory paint, I think that's an '87, because that's the only year that solid (non 2-tone) Bright Blue Metallic was available as an option on the Formulas.

The third generation of the F-body, before its mid-cycle refresh for the 1991 model year, is a sort of historical record of the American performance car renaissance. 

When the third gen Firebirds debuted for the 1982 model year, the base Firebird came with a 151cid throttle-body injected 90bhp Iron Duke four cylinder and a 4-speed manual and the baddest Trans Am had an LU5 305 cubic inch V8 with "Crossfire fuel injection" rated at 165 SAE net horsepower.

For 1990, the last model year before they uglified the nose cone, the cheapest loss-leader Firebirds had a 140bhp 3.1L V6 with a 5-speed gearbox and the Trans Am could be had with a 245bhp L98 Tuned Port Injection 350 under the hood.

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Angry Manbaby

As you may know, Elon Musk has been nursing an incredible case of butthurt for something like twenty years because the rest of the board at PayPal wouldn't agree with him that "X" was a totally bitchin' name for an online finance company.

He's been so obsessively assmad about it that he inflicted "X" on one of his offspring as their legal moniker, thereby pretty much guaranteeing future estrangement issues when the kid becomes old enough to realize that daddy is a nerdy weirdo.

Most famously, as soon as he bought Twitter, he renamed it "X", which was the corporate equivalent of drunk-dialing the person who dumped you back in 2001 just to go "NEENER NEENER! I don't miss you at all!"

If you want an example of how petty and obsessive he is about this issue, check this shit out:

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

They can't do anything about the hordes of ░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ spambots, but they had coders diligently working to make sure you didn't hurt Elon's fee-fees by deadnaming his company.

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Oof.

Left Dallas yesterday morning slightly after 0800 CDT and got back to Roseholme Cottage sometime just before 11PM Eastern. That's a long day on the road and I am wiped out. (And I was just passengering. I find that, when I'm driving these days, something around six hours is nearing my limit.)

I'm hoping to muster the energy to deal with a suitcase full of dirty laundry sometime this evening, but I have a feeling that today's otherwise gonna be pretty much a write-off.

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Pew! Pew! Pew!

The man-on-man shootoff against reactive targets at TacCon is always something worth watching.

Gun Nerd Solstice

Wrapping up TacCon today and heading home. It's a busman's holiday for me, in that rather than going to gun school myself, I'm just wandering around taking photos of people attending the training event of the year.

People will ask me the polite "Hey, how you doing?" thing by way of conversation, and it's so uncommon to be able to answer "There is literally no place I'd rather be and nothing I'd rather be doing."

You gotta love it...

"Caitlin Clark couldn't play for a Division One NCAA men's team!" -Joel in IT, 5'8" 240lbs

Wide Open

Mike at The Online Photographer asks how often people shoot with the aperture on their lenses cranked wide open. For myself, the answer is "only when I'm doing available light candid portraiture indoors" pretty much.

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Automotif CDLXXXV...

This was something that doesn't happen often. Myself and fellow Indy-area car spotter Jim Grey both caught this 1979-1985 Jeep Wagoneer Limited, possibly the same day. Certainly we both saw it on College Avenue.

The faux-woodie fad was starting to wane by the early Eighties. For '79, you could get your 4WD Wagoneer with either a 97bhp 258 cubic inch inline six, or a 360cid American Motors V-8 fitted with a Motorcraft 2bbl carburetor and pumping out 127 SAE net horsepower.

I LOLed.

A very tall tree in a neighbor's yard had gone the way of all living things.

I'd been eyeing it nervously for some time because a largish limb had come off in a storm, only to have its plummet interrupted by getting snagged in some lower branches. There it hung, right over the sidewalk, like some giant toothpick of Damocles. I'd idly wonder, strolling under it on windy days, if this would be the day that it completed its groundward journey, leaving me pithed like a giant, pale, baseball cap wearing frog.

Anyway, they had a tree company out the other day and they stripped it of its remaining limbs, leaving the giant, forked trunk standing naked in the yard, awaiting the next run of good weather so they could finish the job.

Bobbi, commenting on the remains of the oak, said "It's the Treenus de Milo."

(Personally, I think it more resembles the Winged Victory of Some Ol' Tree.)

...and fruit flies like a banana.

Reminder to my fellow GenX'ers: Reminiscing about the Eighties and Nineties today is like our parents and grandparents reminiscing about the Forties and Fifties back in the Eighties.

"If Back to the Future was set today, Marty would go back to 1994. The kids in the past would be listening to Nirvana. Marty would amaze and confuse them with White Stripes and Radiohead songs, and intimidate his dad by pretending to be Neo from The Matrix. He'd be baffled by the lack of wifi."

If they re-shot Christine today, the demon car would be a 1999 Chrysler 300M and its radio would randomly play Kenny Chesney tunes.

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As predicted...

Last October, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas terrorist massacres on Israeli citizens, I wrote:

Zahal has probably a two week window where they could get away with rather a lot of murder and not many tears would be shed until long after the shooting died down.

It was gonna be a tough job rooting out Hamas from their nests among the densely-populated Gaza Strip, but with the outrage still fresh, much of the world would probably look the other way for a reasonable amount of collateral damage.

What's happened though, is the process got bogged down and drawn out and basically the Israelis have been speed-running America's post 9/11 flailing.

It took us almost seven years to go from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers to Nisour Square, but they made it from the Supernova music festival slaughter to wiping out the World Central Kitchen aid workers in less than six months.

News cycles are fast, attention spans are short, and the general public's grace is finite. This latest episode is only going to increase outside pressure on the Israeli government to pursue a cease-fire.

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Automotif CDLXXXIV...

BMW's plug-in hybrid i8 still looks exotic ten years after its launch. It's got a 228hp turbocharged 1.5L inline three cylinder motor in the back, with a 129hp electric motor driving the front wheels. It can putter around town on just the electric motor, or use the electric motor as a booster for the gas motor in performance mode. Car and Driver got a 4.0 second 0-60 and a 12.5 quarter out of their U.S. spec test car.

Mostly just intended to be a tech demonstrator and a tentpole car for future hybrid Bimmers, they made a bit over 20,000 of them from 2014 to 2020, of which 6,776 were imported here.

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LOL you loser

I’m sorry, I just can’t take a grown-ass man running around calling himself “IcyReaper” seriously.

Go stuff yourself in a locker, dork.

Eye Roll John Winger GIFfrom Eye Roll GIFs

Some people didn't get the message.

Joke's on you. 

April Fool's Day is on the 2nd of the month this year because of leap year.

The neighborhood hangout...

I got around to processing a couple of the shots I took at Fat Dan's on Saint Patrick's Day.

Taken with the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS, which is one of my favorite combos.

Automotif CDLXXXIII...

"Kinda makes you wonder how they got all that power out of only 488 cubic inches." -Brock Yates

I vividly recollect that bit of snark from Yates in one of the bits of video that came with the seminal 1994 computer racing game, The Need for Speed.

"All that power", in the case of the '98-'99 Dodge Viper GTS coupe in the photo would be 450bhp SAE net. As a total number that was still big digits in the late Nineties, although it was normally produced via smaller, more tightly-wound motors that were often fed via forced induction.

This led to some people pointing out that their favorite car produced almost as much power via an engine less than half the size, while seemingly not understanding that a big dumb motor in a tiny little two seat car was the whole point of this spiritual successor to the Shelby Cobra.

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Uh Oh

Anyone familiar with the Taxonomy of Modern Dangers is aware of the potential monkey menace. Well it looks like things are jumping off in Thailand.

Warring monkey gangs? Like the Jets and the Sharks?

"Familiarity with firearms"?!? 

I hope that just means that the macaques recognize the tranquilizer guns the cops are using and flee before they can get darted. Because the other possible interpretation is... well, we've all seen that movie and it doesn't end well.

Wait, we have the org charts for the gangs?

Clearly, there's only one solution to this problem: We have to get a monkey boy from one gang and a monkey girl from the other to meet and fall in love...

"Two troupes, both alike in dignity,
In fair Lopburi, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where monkey blood makes monkey paws unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife."

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Automotif CDLXXXI...

When the guy driving this 1973 Corvette noticed me and my camera, he put on a little bit of a show when the light at 54th Street turned green.

It sounded healthy and he stayed on it long enough to spin 'em again on the 1-2 upshift.

Unreal

It's like the entire business model of the Fox News Cinematic Universe and the entire larger constellation of Right wing social media grifters is finding dumb stuff to get not-very-bright people extremely agitated about.

Today's is especially silly.

Automotif CDLXXX...

Here's a 1951 Chevrolet 3100 pickup in Fathom Green, from the "Advance Design" series that ran from 1947 to 1955, when they were replaced by the "Task Force" trucks. It would have a Chevy "Stovebolt" 216 cubic inch pushrod inline six under the hood, rated at 96 SAE gross horsepower.

I almost didn't get the shot. The only camera I had to hand was the Nikon Coolpix A, which has a fixed 28mm-equivalent focal length lens. It takes it a full "one Mississippi" to extrude its glass when you switch it on, so I'm happy to have got the snap I did. It's a fantastic street photography camera, but this ain't the kind of street photography for which it's meant.

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Scammer's Arrogance

So I'd gotten into playing a game called MLB 9 Innings on my iPad. I'd spend about thirty minutes or so after lunch fiddling with my team and playing the various game modes. It had become a part of my daily routine.

It's one of those "Free to Play" games where you'll need to occasionally spend money if you like winning and upgrading your team, and every other week or so, I'd buy a $4.99 or $9.99 pack of in-game currency or player upgrades.

Every once in a while Com2uS, the publisher, would double-charge my Apple Pay account. I checked on the subreddit for the game and other players had noted the same thing, but warned that if you asked for a refund, they'd give it to you but lock you out of your game account.

Then the other night I spent $4.99 on a pack of game bucks... and got charged for that and a $29.99 booster pack that I did not either ask for nor receive.

So I went and asked for my refund, which I got, and my account was locked, as I'd been told, and I now have that thirty minutes after lunch back as free time to do some reading or something instead of playing digital baseball, and an extra couple gigs of free storage on my iPad.

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Rise of the Machines

The opening shots in the Humans versus Robot Dogs war have been fired in Massachusetts:

Moreira was barricaded inside a home on St. Francis Circle after a 911 call about a person holding someone else at knifepoint, police said at the time. The person escaped, but when officers arrived, at the home, Moreira allegedly opened fire on a SWAT vehicle and periodically shot near the officers who’d circled the home.

State police eventually decided to send in three robots, including Roscoe, to find where in the building Moreira was holed up. Roscoe cleared the top two floors of the building, then discovered him, holding a rifle, in the basement, police said.

He knocked the robot dog down, then started to walk up the stairs, but, when Roscoe righted itself and started following him up the stairs, he knocked the dog over again, then shot it three times. Its pilot lost communication with the dog.

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What I'm Reading...

I'm about finished with Kara Swisher's Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. She's been covering the Silicon Valley beat since before most of today's tech giants were even startups and she's kept allll the receipts. This book is a hell of a purse dump, let me tell you.

Hey, look!

Gaston, who passed away recently, was not a gunsmith by training or avocation, but it would not be out of line to say that he’s had as large an effect on the handgun market as such enduring legends like Sam Colt and John Moses Browning.

Controversial? Yup. Aesthetically challenging? Perhaps. The Glock G17 nonetheless transformed and—with the expiration of early patents—continues to transform the defensive-handgun market, like it or not.

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Every Picture Tells a Story

Look, I don't have much of a hard time believing that some percentage of stolen or illicitly purchased handguns in the US are finding their way to Haiti, but something like ninety percent of the long guns I'm seeing in photos there are your typical run-of-the-mill Third World Kalashnikov variants.

Which made the photo here interesting:

I'd bet lunch money that that's a picture of the BBC photo stringer's hired private security contractor. I'll bet it got wired to London in a big batch of photos from the current unpleasantness and someone in editorial or the design department (I don't know the exact online workflow at the Beeb, sorry) thought "Ooh! This one looks dramatic!" without understanding what they were looking at, and used it.

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Meme Dump...

That didn't take long.

The usual suspects are already in full "ship fuel can't melt steel beams" mode at Gab 2.0, I see.

Tab Clearing...

• In a time-honored Russian tradition, the FSB is likely going to work over the ISIS arrestees with rubber truncheons until they admit to being Ukrainian.


• The Fraud of the Century: How a carbon credit scam in France made millions.


• Avoid doing the monkey dance.

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Time flies like a jet fighter...

I was really not ready for all these fighter planes that were the New Hotness in the mid-late Seventies to be celebrating a half century of flight.

This time it's the Tornado, still in service with the Luftwaffe. I was six when the first prototype flew, and in middle school when they went operational with the Jerries.

I LOL’ed

I saw someone online refer to Candace Owens as “Canned Ass Owens” and it caused me to express mirth audibly.

Look, you don’t pick messy public feuds with the boss, and no single employee is more important than the organization. Start thinking like that and next thing you know you’ll be doing “documentaries” about testicle-tanning on Xitter.

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Ignorance is no excuse, they say…

I just closed a column with the sentence “Know the law, so the law doesn’t get to know you” and I could have kept going for another thousand words.

For instance, there are a lot of very pro-2A states with very relaxed, liberal handgun carry laws that, at the same time, have strict prohibitions against loaded long guns in vehicles.

This isn’t an “anti-gun” thing, it’s the result of the state having a strong hunting culture and therefore having laws intended to thwart poaching and “road-hunting”.

This is the kind of thing folks need to be aware of on roadtrips. Don’t just glance at your handy CCW reciprocity map and think that it’s an indicator of the entire regulatory climate along your route.

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Finding the Dot

Gideon Optics sent one of their Judge mini red dots to mount on the Taurus 327 Defender TORO, so we'll see how it does when screwed to the topstrap only an inch or so away from the 40,000 psi detonations of full house .327 Federal Magnum loads.

Of course, revolver duty is actually a lot kinder than the whiplash these optics experience when mounted on the reciprocating slide of a self-loading pistol.

I've been using a dot-sighted revolver for about a year now, and I had to learn a different technique of finding the dot than the one I have used for years with semiautos, but that's gonna take a whole post of its own...

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It's Caturday!

Huck would like to remind y'all that it's Caturday.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #252...

You know how I know that I've been living in plastic pistol land for a long, long time? The Walther PDP Steel Frame Compact test pistol arrived for a Shooting Illustrated review and I was like "Jeezis this thing is a boat anchor. How the hell is anyone supposed to carry this?"

I threw it on the scale and it weighed in at a hair over two pounds, six ounces. You know what else weighs a hair over two pounds, six ounces? The Smith & Wesson 5906, as do the various full-size steel 1911s that I carried every day for something like ten years. 

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Hey, look!

My review of the Girsan MC 14T is online now. The 14T is a blowback .380 with a tip-up barrel that's derived from the Beretta Model 86, albeit with some significant improvements. You should go read about it!

Make your answer in the form of a question.

You know, in retrospect I'm kinda sad that we didn't get more Aaron Rodgers as a host on Jeopardy!, especially as his orbit has gotten increasingly far out there.

Can you imagine this?

Contestant: "I'll take 'People Who've Walked on the Moon' for $400, Aaron."

Aaron: "It's a hoax, you sheeple!"

Contestant: "Okay, then, give me 'Famous Vaccine Inventors' for $200?"

Aaron: "AAAARGH!!!" *rips up note cards*

Later:

Aaron: "And for Final Jeopardy, 'The water is turning the frogs' this. You have thirty seconds." 

Music: 🎶 Doo-do-doo-do... 🎶

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Automotif CDLXXIX...

The Pontiac GTO is flashier, the Olds Cutlass 442 was rarer, and every muscle car nerd knows that the Buick GSX Stage 1 was the real hero of the bunch at the drag strip, but in my heart the Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport is the king of the '68-'72 GM A-body muscle cars.

They eschewed the flashy wings and scoops and rubber nose cones of their platform-mates, and that let the really clean lines of the A-body hardtop coupe, with its swoopy fastback roof silhouette, shine through.

Is this super-clean, lightly-modded 1970 Chevelle a real SS? Only the VIN knows for sure. The Monza Red paint was a Corvette-only color in '70 (Chevelles came in a slightly darker hue called Cranberry Red) and it lacks the cowl induction hood, but something over eighty percent of '70 SS Chevelles were ordered with the base juice lifter, 2-bolt main L34 396 and it's unlikely that most of those had cowl induction.

Anyway, whether it began life as an SS or got turned into one with the aid of a Year One catalog, this is one sweet ride.

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Phyllis Schlafly 2.0

On "Tradwife" social media influencers:

"It was only recently that I recognized the blatant hypocrisy hiding in plain sight: I tapped the profile link of a popular Aussie tradwife and was met with a barrage of links urging me to transact: an Amazon storefront, affiliate codes, a mailing list…even an e-book. I tapped through her website and discovered MLM-coded language: “Are you a stay-at-home mom looking to grow your Instagram and earn extra income while juggling the joys and challenges of motherhood?” Oh, no. The “anti-hustle” lifestyle is, in fact, a thinly veiled mega-hustle—one much more convoluted than the Tupperware parties that came before it.

I perused her site. Oh, look, I thought, a lead magnet! (In digital content marketing, a “lead magnet” is a free downloadable item you give away in exchange for an email address.) Hers just so happened to be iPhone backgrounds featuring affirmations like, “With humility, I embrace my role, upholding traditions as the keeper of our cherished home.” What struck me about her website was how familiar it felt: This was pretty transparently a content creator’s monetized hub, no different from the courses, e-books, and affiliate codes distributed by the boss-babe influencers the tradwives claim to disavow. Oh my gosh, I whispered to no one, She’s girlbossing all over us! The call is coming from inside the housewife!

I have to hand it to them: what a diabolical brand strategy! Build a career teaching other women how not to have a career."

Mash that like button and subscribe! This uplifting of tradional roles is sponsored by Betty Crocker!

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Spywriting

Yet another interesting account of being a guest speaker at the CIA employee's creative writing group, albeit this time from a former case officer:

"Writers emerging from one of the world’s most secretive organizations is perhaps not as strange or ironic as it sounds. On its face, of course, espionage lends itself to colorful stories. There’s the tradecraft—wigs, disguises, false passports, dead drops, brush passes. The secrecy and elitism of a closed world. The sex appeal of trying to woo informants, convince odd characters to betray their countries. The exotic, often gritty, locales. The danger and high stakes of global issues like terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue nation-states. If this isn’t top-shelf thriller stuff, what is?

But in the years since I left the agency, I’ve learned there are also less obvious things that compel a former to start typing. The quieter wraiths. Ghosts of decisions, the effects of war, failed or unresolved operations—all the things that pop into your head in the grocery store and wake you up at zero dark thirty. In my case, I helped apprehend an alleged Al-Qaeda terrorist in Baghdad—only to learn, years later, we might have nabbed the wrong guy. The irresolution and guilt still plague me; they came out in my novel in the form of a spy caught in the crosswinds of the Arab Spring who makes decisions that have lasting and unintended consequences. Espionage, I often say, is a profession of loose ends."

RTWT
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So anyway, I started blasting...

So I slapped a Swampfox Justice on the Rost Martin RM1C and took it to Indy Arms the other morning as part of a trip to help longtime friend-of-the-blog Global Village Idiot’s daughter pick out a pistol.

I brought along a box of Winchester 124gr NATO ball and figured I could get the lane next to theirs and put some work in with the new review gun while ducking into their lane every now and again to offer pointers and get feedback. The pistols she was considering were a Glock 43X, a Shield Plus, and a Taurus GX4.

I ran the pistol-training.com Q-PT target out to seven yards and popped off three shots at the center of the 8” circle, just to see how close to zeroed the dot was. They made one ragged hole about two inches high and right.

Rather than fiddle with adjustments that morning, I just started putting five and ten rounds in the magazine at a time and hosing. And I mean hosing.

Other than that one shot out of the circle at 12 o’clock, which came from getting a little bit too aggressive while prepping during recoil (b-BANG!), I’m really very pleasantly surprised, especially since the PD10 is the only striker gat I’ve put in much trigger time with over the last several months, since I'd been mostly shooting revolvers and the Walther PD380.

Automotif CDLXXVIII...

Much like the Porsche 356 Spyder that I saw earlier the same day, this Shelby Cobra is almost guaranteed to be a kit car replica. Also much like that Porsche 356 Spyder, who cares? It's awesome!

My BMW Z3 says "Roadster" right on the door sills, but it's not truly a roadster, because it has a permanently installed folding top. This Cobra is a true roadster, in that if you're out for a drive and it starts to rain, and you don't happen to have the top stowed in the boot and can't find an overpass under which you can wait out the storm, you're gonna get wet.

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Clickbait

Y'ever wonder about the increasing prevalence of those bizarro obviously AI-generated images that are popping up on the Bookface of late?

Here's a deep dive into the reason behind them...

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Sproing!

With the arrival of the vernal equinox today, spring is officially here! Well, technically it will be here at 11:06PM Eastern Daylight Time.

Hooray! If you're reading this you've survived another winter!

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