Overheard in the Office:

RX: "They're all upset about the NRA sponsoring this NASCAR race; it will come only 'two months after Michael Waltrip memorialized the victims of Newtown'..."

Me: "What does Newtown have to do with anything? It's going to be the NRA sponsoring the race, not the APA."

War of the rats...

A pretty amusing story involving jack-lighting dumpster rats:

"I switch on the handheld equivalent of the Bat-signal, and there, in the spotlight, sits Our Villain. And he doesn't even act like we're a threat to his dinner. He's about to find out how wrong he is..."

He paints quite the mental picture...

Felis catus remindus

The antibiotics must be taken twice a day. Who knew that Huck's noisy, frantic pre-mealtime attention-getting antics at 0600 and 1800 would suddenly become so value-added?

"What's that, little buddy? Time for me to take my pill?"

QotD: Gaffe-a-Minute Edition...

From Mark Steyn:

The United States has the biggest, most expensive government on the planet. For an ordinary U.S. citizen merely to be ushered into the presence of the president and his wife requires a Social Security and background check. But nobody thinks to do a Google search before getting the first lady and secretary of state to give an award to a Hitler-quoting terrorist-supporting America-hater.

Boy, I'll bet that Kerry and the rest of the State Department crew wish they could push the peregruzka button on that one!

The White House pays their sequester-proof official calligrapher $96k a year, and I know that they aren't actually making chicken scratches from nine to five, M-F, so maybe they could use the interludes to do something useful, like maybe Google foreigners about to be let into the Oval Office?

Bonus old shotgun pic...

...at the other blog.

More other stuff to follow over there, soon.

Toss me the burner...

So, I'd been keeping house without a shotgun for a while, ever since I sold the Model 11. My roommate had a shotgun, but I didn't have one.

Well, that's not necessarily true. I'd acquired a vintage Remington Model 10-A at a stupid cheap price because it was a funky old Pedersen-designed takedown shotgun, plus stupid cheap price. (Seriously: I paid for it with singles out of the coffee can I keep change and singles in at the end of the day. I have a hard time passing up a working gun with a two-digit price tag.)

Still, it was a nearly-hundred-year-old shotgun of questionable reliability and a stock that consisted of more crack than wood and which would likely fly to splinters under the recoil of high brass buckshot, since it was largely held together by numerous coats of yellowing varnish.

So, for all intents and purposes, no shotgun.

The other weekend, standing in a practically-denuded gun store with Shootin' Buddy, I saw a brand-spankin' new Remington 870 slug gun, with the improved cyl. smoothbore 20" tube and rifle sights, a setup that screams '80s tacticool in much the same way as a two-tone 1911 with Pachmayrs. This particular SKU is no longer in production, but during rushes like this, the dusty corners of wholesalers' warehouses get cleaned out as beggars can't be choosers. I've had that conversation with a sales rep many a time:

Me: "Hey, Dave, you got any Remington 870 Polices?"

Dave: "Nope."

Me: "How about those regular Express Home Defense models?"

Dave: "Nope."

Me: "Geez, what about the Whiz-Bang Inc. Tactical Special Editions? They've got a bunch of extra high-dollar crap on them but I reckon I can price at a lower margin and move even them right now..."

Dave: "All out of them, too. I tell you what, other than bird guns, the only 870s I have in the warehouse right now are a few of those discontinued smoothbore slug guns with rifle sights. I can make you a deal on those..."

Me: "I'll take 'em."

Dave: "How many?"

Me: "Have you been reading the papers? How many you got?"

It was stupid cheap, like $350 for a new gun right here in the middle of the panic. And the Vice President said I needed a shotgun, and patriotic Americans should listen to their Vice President... Did I mention it was stupid cheap already? Not as stupid cheap as that Model 10 was, but it's getting to the point where anything from a quality name-brand manufacturer that has a three digit price tag and a "3" in the first slot is pretty uncommon.

So I did the right thing and took this dangerous gun off the street. I replaced the overlong and heavy plywood buttstock with a Magpul one via Brownells, and I figure to put a Mesa 4-shell side saddle on there and a sling and call it good.

Not that I really needed a gauge but, you know, now I've got something for if I want to dabble more in 3 Gun shooting or take a shotgun class.

Plus, I'm sure Joe Biden is proud of me.

Two Remingtons, roughly a hundred years apart...

Well, that was... unpleasant.

It was a pretty good size chunk gone; nearly an inch square. The donor site for the graft left a pretty impressive line of stitches, too.

I'm trying to keep a stiff upper lip about the whole thing. We'll see how that works out. Right now, my face hurts like a sumbitch and I'm depressed and angry and starving and tired and just over it, all at the same time.

Hopefully I'll be back to my normal perky ray of sunshine in the morning.

Musical Interlude...

"Take it! Take another little chunk of my nose now, baby..."

Just had another slice taken, and the waiting resumes. I am given to understand that the missing piece now extends out onto the bridge of my nose.

Stage the first...

Mohs surgery is done in stages, with the doctor trimming around the edge of the tumor and then examining the excised bit under a microscope to see if the edges are clear. (As it was explained to me, it's like slicing out a Reese's cup, flipping it over and squooshing it flat on a microscope slide to see if any chocolate is extruding through the cup; if there is, you go back and excise a larger scoop and repeat the process.)

We've just done the first scoop, a divot approximately the size of a nickel out of the side of my nose. I am now sitting in the waiting room, awaiting news of if they need to slice more.

I am less than happy right now.

"Soft, docile, toothless creatures..."

The ongoing hooraw over the decision to allow passengers to carry their bitty little pen knives onto airplanes is positively appalling.

The Flight Attendants' union is still pitching a conniption over allowing more "deadly weapons" on planes. An NBC reporter was interviewing people at the airport yesterday morning, and the bedwettery of the "Man (for lack of a more apropos term) On The Street" was actually painful to watch. I found myself yelling "Oh, harden the **** up!" at the screen.

The only knives I currently own that fall under these criteria are attached to keychain-size multitools and are less useful as weapons than, say, my belt. Assuming arguendo that the vital ingredient of a person with hostile intent is present, you're in more danger from the plastic shank they give you with your food in first class or an improvised shiv made from the complementary beverage can than you are from the 2" non-locking blade on a Victorinox key fob.

I can't get over the amount of hand-wringing accompanying this. When I first heard the news, my ears perked up, thinking that my Spyderco Dodo or CRKT Urban Shark would be accompanying me aloft, but no. Imagine my chagrin. At least I'll be able to keep my keychain in my carry-on rather than having to check it throu... no, wait, I guess they'll probably still lose continence over the monkey fist.

While I'm amazed at the puling and cringing that goes on at the sight of a penknife, I guess I shouldn't be; as far back as twenty years ago, I've had a roomful of Americanus cubiculanus suburbia shrink back, eyes all askance, as I pulled out a tiny, money-clip-sized CRKT K.I.S.S. to open a box. (The irony there is that I started carrying the K.I.S.S. because the Spyderco Snap-It I had previously carried clipped to a belt loop had a propensity to spook the straights in an office environment.)

At this rate I expect solid evidence of h. sapiens' eyes migrating towards the sides of the cranium over the next few generations.


EDIT: Jesus, they've got a Flight Attendents' union rep on the Today show right now, and she and Matt Lauer are emoting and quivering in two-part harmony over the sight of the kind of thing I keep on my keychain.  Matt asks... well, he doesn't ask so much as he Oprahs; I half expected him to reach out and rest a comforting hand on her knee... "The TSA says they want to let the screeners focus on finding explosives, things that could actually bring down an airliner. Does that make any sense to you?"

As Shiva is my witness, she responded with "No. I'm a flight attendant; I'm out in the cabin. I'm a first responder and the last line of defense..."

...and she said something else, too, but I couldn't hear it over me yelling "No, honey, you're a waitress in a bad restaurant at 28,000 feet!" at the screen.

Eensy beensy snowflings...

So, sometime yesterday afternoon, the rain suddenly got all white and fluffy...

It must have thought I missed New Hamster, because it kept coming down, in fits and starts, all through the evening and into the night...

Fortunately, the worst of it passed by to the north. I hear Shootin' Buddy had half a foot of the stuff up there in the Wabash valley, but there's just shy of four inches of heavy, wet snow to get off the walks down here in Hoosieropolis. Which I am about to go do...

They ain't dead yet?

So, the media is nattering on about "trend-setting Silicon Valley company Yahoo! doing away with telecommuting," and as Tim Berners-Lee is my witness, the first thought to flicker across my mind was "Yahoo! is still in business?" and I checked the browser on my iPad and, wow! They were!

I wonder if this applies to the whole Yahoo! empire, or if the GeoCities division offices are exempt?

(I see that Best Buy has decided to emulate them. Is this going to be a new thing for investors to keep an eye on? When all the rats are ordered to report back onto the ship, go short?)

Modern Problems

So there I was yesterday, in the chair in grad perio for my followup visit. Photos had been taken, I'd drooled in a test tube for five minutes, and now we were on to one of the more unpleasant things that goes on there: dipsticking my gums.

She'd finished my upper jaw and had done the outer part of my left lower jaw when the woman who was doing the charting on my doctor's laptop said "Wait, it's not letting me save. It's just got this little spinning color wheel?"

I glanced over my shoulder and groaned. Yup, it was a  MacBook. The "beach ball of death" had just swallowed all the chart data and I was going to have to reschedule and come get my gums dipsticked again. They were all kinds of apologetic, and I told them not to worry about it; I certainly understood computer problems.

But I'll bet this never happened to Grandma.

That was new...

Went down to the almost-a-dentist this morning and saw an SUV in the parking lot with an antenna farm on the roof and so many radios and orange flashers on the dash that it was a wonder the driver could see out.

Got up to the fourth floor and there in the waiting room, looking like 300 pounds of chewed midnight blue polyester-clad bubblegum, was a guy in unbloused BDU floods revealing an inch of white tube sock above his scuffed boots, a mechanic's shirt, an orange-lined blue jacket, a basket-weave belt with pouches for radio and multitool, and a mesh-back ball cap with "INDHS" and "HAM" flanking either side of the state seal.

I've met cop mall ninjas and fire department mall ninjas and even EMT mall ninjas, and everybody and their brother has met SEAL Delta Ranger Sniper mall ninjas, but I don't believe I'd ever clapped eyes on a DHS mall ninja before. This was an entirely new variety of holster-sniffer in my experience, but I guess every organization with a uniform has its badge bunnies; somewhere some poor schlub is wearing blue gloves and searching himself for secreted explosives while moaning "Yes, TSA Agent, yes!"

So, this guy goes driving around and pretends he's America's ninety-seventh line of defense, somewhere on the org chart between the USCG Reserve and the Knights of Columbus?

Yow.

Dream big, my friend...

Rule 1: All guns are always loaded, insha'Allah.

I often complain on this blog about the Cletii and their casual disregard of the rudiments of gun safety. They make going to gun shows a slightly butt-puckering experience for those with an aversion to being muzzled by people whose trigger fingers behave as though they had magnets in them.

There's only one demographic that could possibly induce a higher pucker factor in me: Imagine Cletii, but with massive bank accounts, an unlimited sense of entitlement, and an unshakable belief that whatever happens is going to be the will of God, so... safety? Meh.

That was my first thought when I saw this gun show. You couldn't pay me to attend an arms expo in the Gulf States. I'd take my first, trembling step through the door into the exhibition hall and then freeze into a slightly-quivering statue, with my eyes fixed and glazed and this scene on an infinite loop in my mind:

I am irrationally angered by this.

Vandals broke into the garage at a Monroe home on Sunday, possibly looking for money. When they didn't find any, they poured paint and oil everywhere, including all over boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

Okay, thievery is bad enough, and so is vandalism, but what kind of giant douchecanoe destroys Girl Scout cookies? What did those thin mints ever do to you?

Hurting little kids' feelings and destroying cookies; that's some real class there, man. I'll bet that earns you tons of respect and street cred.

Brrr!

24°F.

That's what the thermometer in Shootin' Buddy's truck read yesterday morning at the range: 24°F.

I ungloved* long enough to load my six 22/45 magazines twice, for 120 rounds of deuce-deuce downrange. I also fished out the seven loose rounds of 9mm WWB that were rolling around the bottom of the ammo can and ran them through the G19, because I at least wanted to see how it worked while all gloved up. It was my shortest range trip in quite some time.

The black-bullet Winchester M-22 had probably a half-dozen light strikes in all that, but since the gun was dry and hasn't been cleaned since the late Cretaceous, I'm not ready to blame the ammo yet.

We stopped by Bradis guns, and the place looked like it had been hit by locusts. No .22LR. One lonely Glock in the showcase and one lonely AR on the wall behind it. About the only thing that was plentiful were racks of Mosins and stacks of 7.62x54R spam cans. Also 5.45x39mm. Unfortunately, I'm all stocked up on the former and have nothing through which to run the latter.


*I use insulated bikie gloves for most of my wintertime warm hand needs that don't involve snowball fights. They're light, warm, and windproof, and I can use them on the bike, too.

Countdown...

Thursday. Thursday morning they take a melon-baller scoop to my nose and I find out whether I have to start wearing a bag over my head or run around looking like a leaf-nosed bat in public or what.

I'm relieved to be getting it taken care of, and scared to death all at the same time.

Mélange.

My dream last night had a musical score that I totally don't recognize. That's never happened before. I had no idea that there was a composer lurking in my subconscious.

The tune is earworming me pretty badly right now, and I'm trying to keep it from getting all mashed up with the Trentemøller tune that's stuck in there as well, although I have no idea how I can get it out and into a store-able format; I haven't touched a musical instrument since the cello in, like, sixth grade and I can't carry a tune well enough to hum it to someone who can transcribe it. It's like having a snippet of a strange xenomorphic speech trapped in your head that you don't know the alphabet for and your human mouth can't form the alien sounds.

But anyhow, on to the dream for which this particular piece of music served as the score...

So, as I noted earlier, I was recently up in New Hampshire, and then last night before bed I got together for a couple hours with a bunch of people in World of Warcraft, and so once my head hit the pillow...

...there was a Blogmeet up in a suspiciously online-video-game-looking version of New Hamster, like Manchester but with lots more large and spiky architecture and incongruous palm trees, and getting to the tavern where it was being held, you had to be careful as you circled in on your flying mount, because if you flew a little off course and got too low over Massachusetts you'd draw aggro from the Massachusetts State Police who would cast Felony on you. This would pretty much knock you off your mount and kill you with one zap, and when you resurrected at the graveyard, all your weapons would be gone.

I swear to you on a stack of John Ross and R.A. Salvatore novels I really dreamed this.

Blech.

Stay away from the NOS in the green cans. It tastes like slightly-watered, lightly-carbonated Delsym cough suppressant, complete with the faintly gritty mouthfeel.

It'll get the heart going in the morning, though, especially if you slam a can of the stuff after watching a Chris Matthews show that included Dan Rather as a panelist. I swear, I thought those two were going to ask the ladies to leave the room so the two of them could engage in some mutual fapping to a picture of the president. The only other time I've seen that look on someone's face, it was a member of the JV chess club talking about a varsity cheerleader.

I know conservatives get a little misty-eyed when talking about Reagan, and liberals of a certain age talk about JFK like he was the greatest thing to happen to the office since Jefferson was in it, but the obsessive adulation some of the professional punditocracy have for the current Chief Executive would get them slapped with a restraining order if they directed it at a secretary. You get the feeling that Chris Matthews has a little shrine in a closet, with carefully-clipped pictures of Barry taped all over the wall, or that the Secret Service is going to find Rather skulking in the bushes around the White House one night with a roll of duct tape and a steak knife.

Woke up to a cell phone battery that was flatter than western Kansas, and Shootin' Buddy's supposed to be here at 0800 so we can do a Broad Ripple breakfast and then go freeze our asses off at Iggle Crick, which opens for the season this weekend. Shootin' Buddy has gotten back into reloading, and I reckon I should look at setting the press up myself. I really want something better than this little Lee turret press, though...