Riddle Me This:

The local Kroger in Broad Ripple is the tiniest Kroger in the world; kind of a 1/3rd-scale version of a modern supermarket. Obviously, this makes its selection of stuff a bit narrower, but it still has most of what you'd expect to find at a grocery store.

It has a full planogram section on one gondola, or whatever it's called in modern retailing terminology, devoted to "green" household stuff; five or six shelves high by three feet wide crammed with Gaia-friendly products from companies like Seventh Generation and Method. They have organic biodegradable non-toxic fabric softener, fer Vishnu's sake...

...but they don't devote two pegs in housewares to clothesline and clothespins.

I don't get it.

The best soundtrack ever.

Some folks like busting clay pigeons or shooting one-hole groups with weird benchrest rifles and probably think I'm odd for getting my ya-yas knocking over steel plates and bowling pins with a pistol. Some folks aren't happy unless their gun has micrometer sights and adjustable everything, and others aren't having fun unless their shootin' iron is an authentic piece of Old West Tech. And for some folks, true shooting nirvana is only obtainable behind a gun with "da switch".

I have an embarrassing confession to make: Shooting machine guns doesn't really do much for me. I mean, I've worked around them for a while and that pretty much jaded me right out of what little fascination they held for me in the first place. It's like a regular gun, but it shoots real fast, and ammo ain't free, y'know what I mean? And jeezis do they get dirty. If someone else is buying the ammo and cleaning the gun, I suppose I'd take a whirl behind the trigger, but I doubt I'd spend all day on the line at Knob Creek. Now, I know other people really get a charge out of it, and that's cool with me.

However, I sure don't mind watching other people shoot machine guns, let me tell you, or even watching other people watch other people shoot machine guns. It's a beautiful sight, watching ammo going downrange by the pallet load, all in an eyeblink and knowing that it's the equivalent of setting piles of Grants and Jacksons on fire, just for the sheer exuberant fun of it. Conspicuous destruction; a unique 20th Century sort of Potlatch, and the crowd is as enraptured at the cordite-scented, ear-shattering destruction as anybody you'd see at a fireworks display or in the front rows of a rock concert. The look on a kid's face as he basks in the glow of total electric candy-coated Armageddon, with his dad standing next to him looking just as entranced, is wonderful. The spectacle is, quite literally, awesome.


Really, what I go to Knob Creek for is the gun show; roaming the tables piled high with stuff, running into people I know, seeing the oddities... It's a really good gun show, but since the whole thing takes place within 100 yards or so of all that Armageddon being unleashed on the firing line, it's even more than that: It's a really good gun show with the bestest soundtrack ever.

Overheard in a Waffle House:

The waiter has just taken our beverage orders as Shootin' Buddy returns from washing his hands...

Me: "Well, he was a very polite young man... Oh my gawd, did I just say what I think I said?"

SB: "You should tell the ladies in your quilting circle about him. Maybe one of them has a daughter or a niece...?"

Me: "'A very polite young man...' Oh, please, just shoot me now."

SB: "No way. You'd shoot back."

Ooh, my poor head...

I don't know what triggered it, but I am sporting a headache that feels like someone whacked me on the head with an axe handle and then gave me a love tap with the other end of the axe for good measure.

I blame pollen.

Machine guns in the morning!

Less than 12 hours to showtime:

Beltfeds and subguns and antitank rifles,
Loud GE Gatlings that ear muffs can't stifle
Cannon and mortars and Tannerite fun
These are a few of my favorite guns!

Tanks for the memories...

We're boots-on-the-ground here in Kentucky and I got to visit the Patton Museum for the first time. It was teh awesome.

I touched a King Tiger! There were just a whole butt-ton of tanks that I'd only seen in pictures, all up-close and not even surrounded by ropes or anything.

Afterwards we went to U.S. Cavalry, and they were having a $50 boot sale! It's like Christmas in April!

Way down the rabbit hole.

So, over at Sipsey Street mention was made that the good old "mobile U.S. Army guillotine train cars" trope is back in the top ten.

This is our third administration that was about to round us up and decapitate us for being black white Christian gay Democrat gun owners militia kooks hippies racists Tea Partiers. (It's a pretty elastic meme.)

If the video at the link doesn't give you your daily dose of crazy, you can always go drink from the fire hose...

Overheard in the Office:

Me: "If you're going to have gun laws, which we do, even though I think we shouldn't, then there has to be a definition of 'gun'. Otherwise you could say 'Well, I took the front sight off it, so it isn't a gun anymore, because I took it apart.' I mean, how far do you have to take it apart before it is no longer a gun?"

RX: "...ultimately, all laws are based on reductio ad absurdium. Er, absurdum."

Me: "Yeah, 'absurdium' is the ore they dig up to make laws out of."

RX: "Law is the dross from refined absurdium."

Money into noise...

Getting ready to saddle up for the drive to Knob Creek in the AM.

Anybody else going?

Man vs. Wild...

Alone in the woods isn't always as "alone" as it feels. Casey shares some thoughts at his blog based on a recent experience...

I said, right out loud, "Holy Crap! You're a coyote!". The coyote looked back at me with a look that clearly said he wasn't sure how humans had gotten to the top of the food chain, if that was my brightest comment.

I remember being in the piney woods of Georgia and hearing rustling in the brush, brush where numerous great big soybean-fed South Georgia feral hogs had been killed over the years, and wishing I had something more substantial in my hands than a falling-block .243 loaded for whitetail. You know, just in case...

The very root of the problem.

All politics is, they say, local, and in local political issues we get to see the Big Problems facing America explained in the most simple and easy-to-understand terms.

For instance, in the fair suburban hamlet of Greenwood, Indiana, people occasionally drive their vehicles into retention ponds and glug their last before they can be rescued. This has naturally raised a hue and cry from the bereaved calling for guard rails around said ponds.

Greenwood looks into exactly how much this will cost, and...

[T]here are logistical issues. Some ponds are on private property, and barriers will be costly.

"We're looking at about $750,000," said Richards.

But the price doesn't put off Mike Farmer's stepfather.

"I don't know how many lives it takes before money doesn't become an issue," said Mears.

Money, Mr. Mears, is always an issue.

I know you don't understand this, but things like guardrails are not crapped out by some benevolent unicorn; they have to be built by people. These people would probably like to be compensated for their services.

We can't just wave a magic wand and make money a non-issue, you dolt. It doesn't work that way, although I can understand how watching Congress at work might convince you otherwise.

Non sequitur.

So the Hutaree thing is clinging like grim death to the front page. The latest news being a tape that the FBI stool pigeon made.

In the tape, Grand Field Marshal (or whatever his rank was) David Stone Sr. starts out sounding like any other disgruntled wookie-suiter I know:

"In this nation, we think we are free, but you need a certificate to be born, a license to drive, a permit to build, a number to get a job and even a paper after you die," says David Bryan Stone Sr., 45, the alleged head of the Hutaree militia,

I'm with ya so far, Dave, 100%.

Get up, stand up! Stand up for your rights! Fight tha power!

...accused of conspiring to overthrow the government and plotting to kill police officers.

"These are permission slips from the terrorists organization called the new world order," Stone says in the tape...

Wait, what? You lost me there. I'm still trying to figure out how shooting the meter maid gets rid of social security numbers and income taxes. Can you run that one by me again?

I'm beginning to pick up the vibe that there's a sort of "Underpants Gnome" revolutionary plan at work here. You know: "Step 1: Shoot meter maid. Step 2: ??????? Step 3: Utopia!"

"Every day, we watch ever so close for those evil blue helmets to appear on our streets -- but as long as through Interpol, law enforcement mercenaries called the brotherhood working for the new world order are doing such a great job, then we don't need to watch for these foreign armies to come to our shores. They are already here," Stone says.

I'm sorry, come again? You're saying that the meter maid is part of the UN interpol brotherhood conspiracy? I'm gonna need some proof on that before I just saddle up and start busting caps, if you don't mind. And when I say "proof", I don't mean "mysterious patterns in the stickers on the backs of road signs".

Curses.

There's a hole-in-the-wall Chinese joint in Broad Ripple called "King Dragon" that has fantastic kung pao chicken. It's not too heavy on the veggies, lots of chicken & peanuts, good and spicy, and is served up in really generous portions.

But King Dragon is apparently a wingless dragon; he cannot fly your food to you, you must go get it from him.

I try and make sure I only work up a serious kung pao chicken mojo on days when I have to run up there to get groceries next door anyway.

San Fran Redux...

Look, if I'm going to suffer the indignities of probulation to board an airliner and fly to a city where I'll be disarmed like a peasant and forced to pay Monopoly-money prices for goods and services in a tourist trap, it's going to be Rome or London, not the City by the Bay.

I'm sure it's lovely, but I'm just really not a "buildings, food, and terrain features" kind of tourist. I mean, I haven't even seen all the buildings or sampled all the food in the city in which I live yet. I know that makes me out to be terribly provincial and all, but there you go.

I'm MacLovin' it.

Well, I thought it was funny...



.

I don't get it...

Joel linked to a story where some New Yorkers got busted for what media types think is an "arsenal".

If they were going for the whole "scary-looking killer death assault gun" angle, then the attached photo was particularly unimpressive: A couple wood-furnitured self-loading shotguns, a stackbarrel fowling piece, a rusty rabbit-eared side-by-side, and a Marlin levergun with, like most Marlin leverguns, too much glass in those stupid Kwiksite see-through rings. So I went and read the article, which claimed that there were a total of thirty guns in the "arsenal", which left the junk-on-the-bunk display in the photo some twenty-four guns light.

Googling up the name of the alleged arsenaleers, I discovered another photo, this one showing a couple .22 crank-cockers, an old sporterized Arisaka, and what appears to be some sort of underhammer front-stuffer, among others, but no pictures of the alleged "assault rifles" or the ten handguns.

The thing is, in the photo accompanying the second story one can clearly see part of a stainless Mini-14 in an aftermarket black plastic side-folding stock just out of frame to the left. That one might be kinda scary looking, in an '80s A-Team kind of way, so why wasn't the photo centered on it? Could it be that all these guns look equally scary to an herbivore?

I doubt it.

Shermlock Shomes is skeptical of Hereditary Congresscritter Andre Carson's claim that Tea Partiers shouted the "N-word" at him not once, not five times, but "fifteen" times.

I am a survivor of Carson's congressional race, which was a sort of Special Olympics of Elections. I have seen him in commercials and interviewed on TeeWee more than OSHA guidelines deem safe; exposure to that many meaningless platitudes is what causes babies to be born with extra heads.

I have yet to see proof that Andre Carson can count to fifteen without pulling off a sock.

Uh, no thanks...

From email:

Dear Fellow Gun Rights Activist,

I would like to personally invite you to our 25th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC), which will be taking place September 24, 25, and 26, 2010 in San Francisco, California at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport hotel.

[blah blah blah & et cetera redacted]

Sincerely yours,

Alan M. Gottlieb

In response:

Dear Mr. Gottlieb,

Thanks, but no. I wouldn't go to San Francisco to judge a naked Russell Crowe lookalike contest with an open bar and free round-trip tickets, even if they let me keep the winner. Have a fun convention!

Sincerely yours,

Tamara K.

Gun School:

It looks like Rob Pincus will be taking his roadshow through CCA in Knoxville again in May.

Unlike old Soviet Union, gun school comes to you!

Somewhere an editor is crying in his beer...

Staghounds reports a bit of an oopsie at The Gray Lady in an article on ChiCom computer espionage.

I got a screen grab for posterity, just in case it goes down the memory hole:



I see sensitivity training in someone's near future.


UPDATE:

That was fast! Winston Smith was at his desk early this morning. I'll bet someone's resume is being updated right about.... now.