Great idea.

You in?

Boomsticks: The gun-control test...

Gun control has become such a polarized issue, such an idee fixe, in Big Party politics that aberrant positions on the topic can be used as a clue to a politician's motives and actions on totally non-related issues. A couple of examples:

1) Northeast Democrat Against Gun Control: This legislator probably ran as a Democrat because a GOP incumbent had things all sewed up in her district.

2) Southwestern Republican For Gun Control: Most likely up to something they're afraid will make folks mad enough to shoot when they find out about it.

Same planet, different worlds...

Why does the sight of this make me want to set up a huge smoker full of ribs and a clay pigeon thrower on the beach upwind of them?

Well, I don't want to badly enough to drive to California. Nothing personal to my CA readers, embattled islands of sanity that y'all are, but I wouldn't cross the California state line to pick up a hundred dollar bill lying on the ground two feet inside it.

(H/T to Victory Soap.)

Politics: ...and the teeth-grinding commences.

I have no real love for the peccadilloes and strange beliefs of the Right. From politicians with a tenuous grasp of the Constitution to preachers sticking their noses where they don't belong, I get a twinge of annoyance at least once a day. It remains largely an annoyance, however, as so much of what they hold dear has very little impact on me in my daily life: I don't gamble, have no desire to marry another woman, and don't have any children for them to teach that the Earth is flat or that Harry Potter is the tool of the devil. Besides, they generally want to let me keep my guns, so if they get too annoying in the future I figure I can always shoot them.

Not living in California, the nut-fudge looniness of the left has mostly been a source of humor to me for the last twelve years, like the comic opera politics of some far-off land with too many consonants and not enough electricity. The Left has had less influence at the national level for the last decade than an outboard motor would have on the course of a supertanker, but with the convulsion of November '06, that has all changed, and suddenly they're out to really get me good and surly, because they're not after my Good Times, they're after my money.

The sophisticated Blue State city-dwelling agnostic may mock the tent-revival evangelical's belief that "With God, everything is possible", yet he somehow leaves unexamined the fact that he believes the same thing, except that "God" is replaced by "legislative fiat". Feel unsafe around harbors? Worried that the bad guys might try to smuggle something in? Just pass a law decreeing that every single container entering every single seaport in the US must be physically inspected. Never mind how, never mind that it will make US ports look like the DC Beltway at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon; it's the law. Just make it happen. Anguished over folks not making enough money? Pass a law raising minimum wage. Never mind where employers are going to come up with this money (Hint: layoffs and price increases), just make everybody un-poor, and do it now. This belief in show-of-hands metaphysics, this idea that reality can be changed by a simple House Resolution and a big dollop of earnestness, doesn't just annoy me, it sets a vein bouncing in my forehead.

That tremor you felt this morning? That wasn't the East Tennessee Seismic Zone, that was me grinding my teeth. Look forward to feeling more of it in the future.

Hey, neat!

With Ford's Mustang, Chevy's Camaro, and Dodge's Challenger all paying homage to their '60s progenitors, it's good to see that Pontiac knows which decade its nostalgiac soul is centered in.

Disco, baby. Paint it black, make the thunderchicken decal on the hood gold, stuff Burt and Sally inside, and roar off down memory lane... :)

Of all the cars I've owned, the one I feel the most irrational nostalgia for is my Trans Am. It was a tired old thing, with interior trim bits falling off, a wheezing smog motor that had a hard time chirping the tires, and t-tops that leaked. I'd bought it cynically as a cheap-to-get-fixed and moderately-fun-to-drive conveyance that would last me a year or so until I could afford something better, but it did have good-looking lines and it made that sound. The Beemer I drive now would suck that old Pontiac's headlights out without raising a sweat, but I've never driven the Z3 back and forth down an alley with the window down just to hear the staccato rumble of the exhaust mutter back to me off the walls... "This is me, sounding like a juvenile delinquent." Heh. Also, the Z3 may have been trouble free thus far, but there's some truth to the saying that a GM v8 will run like crap longer than most cars will run at all.

(Betcha DaimlerChrysler's kicking themselves for torpedoing the Plymouth marque. Who gives a crap about the Challenger? Now, a reborn 'Cuda... that would sell like bottled water at a habanero festival!)

(H/T to SayUncle.)

How festive...

So, I click on Site Meter and a Universal Studios banner ad is there in the left margin. I'm busy perusing my site's data, and The Cat In The Hat's noggin pops up in all its Javascript glory.


Out of the corner of my eye I notice the cartoon cat suddenly cast his eyes downward for a second...

Great. An animated anthropomorphic feline on my computer screen is ogling my boobs. Hey, buddy, I'm up here...

Boomsticks: Practice pays off...

When folks look at little snubnose revolvers like the J-frame Smiths or the Taurus 85, it's not uncommon to hear "Oh, you can't hit anything with those little things..." I'd tell them about my former boss, who'd ding pie plates at almost fifty yards shooting double action with his little Bodyguard Airweight, but you could tell they didn't really believe it.

He was, of course, "staging" the double action trigger, which is kind of a no-no if you want to really get good with one. For myself, I was happy when all that trigger time paid off yesterday with some pretty righteous shooting with my little 2" Model 34. Rapping out a steady stream of shots in double action mode (*bangbangbangbangbangbang*) I was keeping them all in nice little two-inch clusters in the upper and lower A-zones at a modest seven yards. I'm sure I could have gotten it under an inch in slowfire and maybe even tighter shooting single action, but that wasn't really the point of the exercise.

This doesn't make me any Kay Clark Miculek, but it'll do for what needs doing. Remember that next time you hear someone saying you can't hit anything with a snubbie.

It's an interesting morning, in the Chinese sense of the word.

US aircraft allegedly launched airstrikes against islamist holdout enclaves in the south of Somalia in the hopes of taking out Al Qaeda members responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings. Meanwhile, Washington is expected to announce sanctions against Bank Sepah, a large Iranian bank, to continue putting pressure on Ahmadinejad to 'fess up to his nefarious WMD activities and shut them down. Finally, with some of the heaviest street fighting we've seen in a while going down in the Sunni quarter of Baghdad, the Democrats are making noises about exercising their power of the purse and de-funding military operations in Iraq.

...and all this before I've had breakfast.

Politics: No less than expected.

The Democrats are setting up an ambitious legislative assault for their first hundred days. Among the planned actions is a bill declaring the coastal strip of the ANWR a protected wilderness area, which would make drilling there a no-no forever, or so they hope.

Look, y'all: The ANWR is going to get drilled. It can be done now in a deliberate and highly-regulated fashion, or it can be done in the future, in a blind and non-eco-friendly panic when Chavez shuts off the tap to back up his buddy Ahmadinejad. Which one do you think will be more likely to generate National Geographic photos of homeless musk oxen?

Mmm-Mmm good!

Went with Bob to EdisonPark steakhouse for dinner last night, and left with a happy tummy. We split a seared ahi tuna appetizer, and I was so proud of myself for remembering how to manipulate chopsticks without sticking food in my ear or flinging a chunk of tuna into the bud vase in the center of the table. The prime rib sandwich was deeeluxious, as were the mushrooms that I snagged from Bob's plate whenever he wasn't looking (and I'm not even the world's biggest mushroom fan...) I'll be going back for my next Day Off Dinner treat...

It's a fine day for treason and treachery.

Few things elicit the same hindbrain twinge of revulsion in me as betrayal, and boy, oh, boy is my hindbrain all a'twinge after reading the news this morning. The sin of Judas is a popular one in the news these days, from places as far apart as Warsaw and Havana.

The new Archbishop of Warsaw had his job offer revoked when it turned out that he'd spent twenty years playing Bishop Finkski, stool pigeon extraordinaire, to the Communist-era Polish security services. Wonder how many kneecaps got broken in questioning thanks to tips from the good cleric? Wonder how many Poles will never look at the inside of a confessional quite the same way again?

Meanwhile, to the south of here, Cindy Sheehan will be manning a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun travelling across Castro's Cuba to go denounce her homeland on foreign soil. When reminded of the US trade embargo that makes travel to Cuba technically a crime for US citizens, she airily responded that she believed her mission was exempt from those restrictions, since she was only travelling there for the purpose of lambasting her government and gaining publicity by doing something goofy on the wrong side of the Guantanamo gates.

Lastly we go to my old stomping grounds of Cobb County, Georgia, where a local woman apparently noticed that, while her wedding vows went on at length about loving and cherishing and that sort of thing, they were pretty much silent on the topic of slipping your beau an antifreeze mickey. Having done in her husband in such a fashion, she went on to poison the man with whom she was cheating on him. Now the state of Georgia intends to kill her, but not with antifreeze, more's the pity.

Dante reserved the ninth and lowest circle of hell for the sin of treachery. Betrayal of friends, betrayal of country, betrayal of family; each had their own special area and gruesome torment. Oddly, there appears to be no shortage of people clamoring to get in...

The Price of Admiralty...

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, I hope they take Visa!

-"The Song of the Dead"
R. Kipling

I am typing this while looking at a small cube of teak from the orlop deck of HMS Victory, the deck on which Nelson bled out his life and attained immortality in the aftermath of the fleet action at Trafalgar. Yesterday, 202 years after that epic battle, the Royal Navy announced that it would be slashing its blue-water fighting force by half due to financial reasons. With a shrinking defense budget increasingly allocated to supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, rumors were also afloat (about the only things that were off the coast of England) that one of the RN's overseas stations might be abandoned too, to help further tighten the belt.

From the 17th Century to World War II, Great Britain deliberately maintained a fleet large enough to defeat the next two largest navies in the world. Conscious of her position as an island nation, freedom of the seas was not just a philosophy, it was the lifeblood that kept the heart of England's economy pumping. Despite being supplanted in this role by the United States in the postwar world, the Royal Navy remained a potent force on the world's oceans.

Maybe the world has changed enough that Britain no longer needs her "oaken walls". Maybe, but I doubt it. Her commerce still needs to be protected, and the English Channel isn't as wide as it once was. For a Royal Navy that hasn't been an underdog since the days of the Spanish Armada but is now "no better than a coastal defence force", let's hope the world remains a peacable place.

(Thanks to Marko for tipping me off to the sad news.)

Blog Stuff: Bwahahaa!

Oh, gawd, y'all aren't going to believe this one without a picture to prove it:



Note the search terms: "porch verses mercedes".

Is he looking for poetry written about a girl named Mercedes by someone sitting on a porch? Is he curious about which is a better place to sit and drink a beer: A treated pine deck or a 560SEL? What the hell is he searching for? And who let him near a computer?

I feel old...

Way back in the day of dialup BBS's, PCBoard, RoboComm, SillyLittleMailReader, 2400 baud modems, and all that, I remember a sigline that said "And you may tell yourself | This is not my one gig drive!"(spoofing "Once In A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads.)

Tonight I was rummaging through a pile of old game CDs, thinking about installing some of them on VFTP Command Central, when I became worried about disk space, so I checked. I only have 87 gigs free. I'd better cut down on downloads...

Blog Stuff: Fiddling with the blogroll...

I confess: My blogroll isn't much based on the usual "Group Blogroll" thing (although I have a decrepit version of The Rocky Top Brigade blogroll up since it was largely my blogfathers Les Jones and SayUncle, as well as Countertop, who caused me to start this thing) or the alternate "Reciprocal Links" thing, since my blogroll consists almost solely of folks I read every 1-3 days, or those I feel obligated to include due to their early influence on my blogging or because they work in close proximity to my kneecaps while carrying loaded guns. That being said, without further ado...

It is with great reluctance that I yank The Meatriarchy, MotorcycleCommuter, and Guns & Butter, since they are all on self-imposed hiatus.

I replace them with:

Victory Soap: Her writing reminds me so much of an old friend of mine that every time I read it I feel like I'm sitting in a booth in the mall food court making fun of passersby.

Ambulance Driver: New to blogging, but I'm hanging on his every word. Maybe the only blog on the 'net to use the sentence "This doesn't look like any ostrich attack I've ever seen."

Oleg Volk's LiveJournal: Not only can he take purty pictures, but he can rite good, too.


Read and enjoy. I do.

Politics: Comedy gold!

I'd never read the blog of an imaginary person before, but thanks to the magic of teh intarw3bz, now I have.

Meet the real imaginary Capt. Jamil Hussein; human vaporware, AP deep throat, off-the-record moonbat news source extraordinaire, and screamingly funny to boot. :)

PS: For those unaware, the Iraqis are now saying "Whoops, we think he's a real guy after all." But they supposedly want the AP to pick him out of a lineup. The story is developing. It is not, however, as funny as the "Blackberry post" on that blog...


(H/T to Les Jones.)

Blog Stuff: Viewing '06 From The Porch...

Given that this is the first week of the new year, I'm going to take advantage of a gimme post idea from Mostly Cajun, passed on by Kevin at The Smallest Minority; to wit, a "Best Of 2006 At VFTP" post:

In January, I wrote one of my most read posts up to that date: "Boomsticks: The Once And Future Pistol", my paean to John Moses Browning's seminal fighting pistol. It still drags in a couple of linked hits or flotsam from Google daily. February's highlight, judging by commentary, was the post titled "Politics: Bill Gates' Pizza", a rant on the zero sum view of economics. I bemoaned my clothing choices in "It's hard to be both fashionable and heavily armed." during March, and April brought a poke at bogus 'operators' entitled "Thank you for calling Fort Bragg. How may I direct your call?". May's big musing was on the NSA's phone database, and was called "Politics: If you use my tin can & string, can I tell Mom?". Electronic safety devices for firearms were the topic of June's "Boomsticks: ...like a screen door on a submarine", while July brought a discussion of the realities of microeconomics in "Boomsticks: Economics 101". July was also the month that I sold out for hits. August will be remembered as the month of The Great Flying Shampoo Panic in "The Air Travel Scenario: Reality bites." The ninth month saw my first Instalanche and my most widely-linked post yet: "I ain't goin' out like that..."; October's hit was "The sacred Middle Class". The big post in November was actually the firestorm in the comments of the War on (Some) Drugs post "...and look where it's gotten us" which more or less led directly to the "The Revenge of Barney Fife" post in December.

...and that was the year that was at View From The Porch.

News Flash:

When you write stuff on teh intarw3b, people can read it.

Coming tomorrow: A team of physicists from MIT proves that water is, in fact, wet.

Like my own personal rollercoaster...

Well, here I am, watching dawn paint the mountains somewhere in the far western corner of North Carolina, and I have to be at work today somewheres around noonish.

That means that shortly I'll get to play Need For Speed: BMW Unleashed down about forty miles of Route 68 through the mountains, or maybe I'll take the Cherohala Skyway, or maybe I'll...

I just wish it was warm enough to drop the top.

Happy '07!

This morning rosy-cheeked Aurora, goddess of the dawn and bringer of the flannel tongue, greeted me with the bells of a new year, ringing in my skull.

May it be a prosperous and safe one for all y'all!

Best wishes from all of me here on the VFTP management team.

Now I'm gonna go shoot some more... :)