2013 was the gun-banner’s Stalingrad, their El Alamein. It was the maximum push, their furthest line into our lines. Now is the time for Guadacanal, for Kasserine Pass, for Kursk. It’s time to go on the offensive and take back some of the ground we’ve lost.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
QotD: End Of The Beginning Edition...
You know how I hates me some negative thinking and loser talk, so I loved this analogy from ExurbanKevin in his look back at the battles of 2013:
You don't ever take sides against the family, Dick.
Since Dick went crying to the New York Times with a tale of how those extremist whackos in the gun industry had given him a wedgie for not being extremist enough, it's only fair to link to Claire Wolfe's rebuttal in the February issue of S.W.A.T. which, despite being penned weeks ago, is suddenly quite timely again thanks to Dick's latest bout of confabulatin'.
Tab Clearing...
- Cruising the islands of British Columbia on the kind of boat that starts communist revolutions. Be sure and check the photo gallery.
- At the other end of the universe from the yachting piece above: Owsley County.
yeah, yeah, yeah...
I'm awake! I'm awake!
I've got to pull some clothes on and drag the trash cans back through eight inches of rapidly-melting slush to the back yard. Be with y'all in a moment.
I've got to pull some clothes on and drag the trash cans back through eight inches of rapidly-melting slush to the back yard. Be with y'all in a moment.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Distilled essence of YouTube.
Needs more Affliction shirts and shaved heads, but it looks like their sunglasses selection skill fundamentals are solid.
Be right back; I need to go burn the leg of my pants so people will think I’ve been in the $#!+.
(H/T to Gun Nuts Media.)
Stop! Hammer time!
While I was at TAC in Knoxville, I got some pictures of an "Assembled In Portugal" High Power getting a beavertail welded up to protect the owner from getting blood all over his nice pistol. It was a pretty handy bit of welding and blending. If I had a High Power, I'd probably have had them do it just because.
As an aside, there's a valuable lesson here. See, the owner had already had the gun heavily customized: barrel, sights, Cylinder & Slide lockwork and safety, Cerakote finish, and a partridge in a pear tree. Then when he went out to shoot the gun, it ate up the web of his hand and he brought it back in for the beavertail, which is going to require the frame being re-finished again.
Unless your gun is stainless, it's easiest on the wallet if you do all the metalwork you think you're going to need to do all at once. If you're just going to have it done in a rattle-can finish like Duracote or whatever, it's not too bad, but if you've got to get it re-parked or re-blued more than once, it can be rough on your wallet and the gun.
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| Click to embiggenate. |
Unless your gun is stainless, it's easiest on the wallet if you do all the metalwork you think you're going to need to do all at once. If you're just going to have it done in a rattle-can finish like Duracote or whatever, it's not too bad, but if you've got to get it re-parked or re-blued more than once, it can be rough on your wallet and the gun.
Winter Wonderland
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| Where the sidewalk ends... at least the navigable portion of it. Connoisseurs of types of snow will note that this was the kind that blew against the side of the phone pole and then froze there. |
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| Mediocre insulation makes for epic icicles. |
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| The view towards the Grocery store from in front of Twenty Tap. |
"Well, I bet you thought your little book was pretty clever."
I kid... mostly, but come on, that cover was just like a red flag in front of a bull. Seeing just the title on the spine, I had scooped it up hoping for an instruction manual, not a lecture. It was begging for a blog post.
Anyhow, as a side observation, Tamara's Third Law of Used Bookstores is "The enjoyability of a read is inversely proportional to the likelihood of finding it on the shelf." Despite McKay having an inventory that would shame a middlin' city library, you're lucky to find three or four Heinlein or Pratchett books at any time. Florence King? Fat chance. I scoured the shelves on my quarterly visits for years, looking for Fraser's Flashman
books in vain, until I lucked into the place the day after someone had apparently traded in their complete set.That a book published so recently is so well represented on the shelf speaks volumes. Sure enough, the Amazon reviews
bear out my suspicions: "This book has the dubious honor of being only the second book I have ever thrown in the garbage, so that
no one else would waste a moment of their precious time reading my
copy." Ooh-kayy... I'll wait until it's on TV, I guess.Thursday, January 09, 2014
Speaking of the Russian Front...
There was hardly any snow on the ground worth speaking of until just south of Greenwood, and then suddenly it was like someone had flipped the snow switch and the guard rails were buried under the spoil from the snowplows.
Just north of Edinburgh, though, in the median on the oncoming side was another mute display of how quickly it went from pouring cold rain to frozen solid. A Volvo eighteen wheeler was just off the shoulder in the median with its hood hinged forward. It looked strangely shrunken until I got closer and realized that it must have slithered off the road when the rain turned to slush and buried itself to the axles in the mud, which then froze up, leaving it trapped like a Kraut Panzer outside Moscow.
Just north of Edinburgh, though, in the median on the oncoming side was another mute display of how quickly it went from pouring cold rain to frozen solid. A Volvo eighteen wheeler was just off the shoulder in the median with its hood hinged forward. It looked strangely shrunken until I got closer and realized that it must have slithered off the road when the rain turned to slush and buried itself to the axles in the mud, which then froze up, leaving it trapped like a Kraut Panzer outside Moscow.
Never done that before...
Dithered in Knoxville and finally set out shortly before noon. It was maybe 15F and things were clear until I hit the mountains south of Jellico, where a lot of cars seemed to think the white salt on the road was the same as the white snow on the grass, and so you never knew when you'd come on a knot trying to pass a car 55-ing it along in the slow lane.
Once into Kentucky, the snow pretty much vanished, although the icicles on the cliffs of the highway cutouts attested it was still cold. Gassing up on the north side of Lexington, it was 21F according to the weather app on the portable magic elf box.
Heading west on 64 took me out from under the worst of the cold. Despite the walls of the steep cutout east of the Kentucky River bridge being draped with icicle sheets that would have looked more appropriate lining I-89 outside of West Lebanon, NH, most of the weather stations around Louisville were already reading ~32F.
Heading north into Hoosierland on I-65, the icy patches on the shoulders began getting closer to the travel lanes, while the petrified turbulence of frozen rapids in spillways leading into the roadside ditches gave mute testimony to how quickly pouring rain gave way to lunar cold earlier in the week.
I did something I never would have done before: At exit 29, bearing in mind the pictures from Indy traffic cams and Bobbi's reports of surface streets in the Circle City, I pulled off and got a motel room to shoot the final into Roseholme Cottage after rush hour the next morning.
Under regular conditions, I'd be maybe an hour from home. Realistically? I didn't want to tackle the last leg as it was getting dark, with the roads jammed with idiots* in a vestigial rush hour. It's supposed to get above freezing today, and I'll take the last bit after morning rush hour, fresh and rested.
*If it was just me? I'd drive that Subie home like I had a Finnish last name. But it's all those other people, the ones that want you to be part of their wreck, that worry me.
Once into Kentucky, the snow pretty much vanished, although the icicles on the cliffs of the highway cutouts attested it was still cold. Gassing up on the north side of Lexington, it was 21F according to the weather app on the portable magic elf box.
Heading west on 64 took me out from under the worst of the cold. Despite the walls of the steep cutout east of the Kentucky River bridge being draped with icicle sheets that would have looked more appropriate lining I-89 outside of West Lebanon, NH, most of the weather stations around Louisville were already reading ~32F.
Heading north into Hoosierland on I-65, the icy patches on the shoulders began getting closer to the travel lanes, while the petrified turbulence of frozen rapids in spillways leading into the roadside ditches gave mute testimony to how quickly pouring rain gave way to lunar cold earlier in the week.
I did something I never would have done before: At exit 29, bearing in mind the pictures from Indy traffic cams and Bobbi's reports of surface streets in the Circle City, I pulled off and got a motel room to shoot the final into Roseholme Cottage after rush hour the next morning.
Under regular conditions, I'd be maybe an hour from home. Realistically? I didn't want to tackle the last leg as it was getting dark, with the roads jammed with idiots* in a vestigial rush hour. It's supposed to get above freezing today, and I'll take the last bit after morning rush hour, fresh and rested.
*If it was just me? I'd drive that Subie home like I had a Finnish last name. But it's all those other people, the ones that want you to be part of their wreck, that worry me.
Derp Sells, A Continuing Series
I have never jumped out of a helicopter with a knife in my teeth, won any shootin' trophies, or designed a unique firearms operating system, but I've spent many years slinging guns across the glass, enough that I'm something of a Subject Matter Expert on the buying habits of Cletus. Speaking from that middlin'-lofty height, I feel comfortable in saying that it's a good thing this looks like it's going to cost more than $50, or the ranges of America would be covered up in bandaged Cletii...
The overlap of "people likely to want this" and "people able to afford it" is hopefully very tiny. If you can't spot several big problems with the very concept, I want you to go stand in a corner and feel bad about yourself while the rest of us talk about you behind your back. At least those ludicrous pistol bayonets will let you clear a malfunction without giving you stigmata.
What I want to know is how that guy busted all those ridiculous "gun kata" poses while keeping a straight face?
EDITED TO ADD: Well, first he disabled comments, then he turned off embedding, and now he's pulled the video from YouTube entirely. I hate it for him; it's gotta sting to hold your brainchild up for everyone to see, only to have people point and laugh. Obviously some time and effort went into the design and manufacturing, but time and effort alone don't make an idea good.
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The overlap of "people likely to want this" and "people able to afford it" is hopefully very tiny. If you can't spot several big problems with the very concept, I want you to go stand in a corner and feel bad about yourself while the rest of us talk about you behind your back. At least those ludicrous pistol bayonets will let you clear a malfunction without giving you stigmata.
What I want to know is how that guy busted all those ridiculous "gun kata" poses while keeping a straight face?
EDITED TO ADD: Well, first he disabled comments, then he turned off embedding, and now he's pulled the video from YouTube entirely. I hate it for him; it's gotta sting to hold your brainchild up for everyone to see, only to have people point and laugh. Obviously some time and effort went into the design and manufacturing, but time and effort alone don't make an idea good.
.
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Cool Tool...
Traffic conditions in Indianapolis, including current average speeds and clickable views from INDOT traffic cameras, is available here.
More stuff is at the INDOT site proper.
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More stuff is at the INDOT site proper.
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Travel check...
Weather and road condition check: Anybody along the I-75/I-64/I-65 route between Knoxville and Indianapolis?
Thanks!
Thanks!
Tuesday, January 07, 2014
QotD: Isn't This Where We Came In? Edition
Look, we already tried this experiment. We took a country full of people whose work ethic and obsession with ordnung is downright proverbial, and then we divided it in half and ran each half with a different operating system.
One side ran iAdamSmith and the other one was rebooted under MS-DAS Kapital, and just look how different the same hardware performed! In the words of a former resident:
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One side ran iAdamSmith and the other one was rebooted under MS-DAS Kapital, and just look how different the same hardware performed! In the words of a former resident:
Guess which half of the country had to put up barbed wire and minefields after a few years to keep its population from fleeing to the other half? Guess which half of the country ran its economy and environment into the ground?Despite the fact that running the experiment under controlled conditions has always produced the same results, there's never any shortage of chuckleheaded douchebags, campus revolutionaries, and bored children of privilege ready to #occupywhatever.
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Life in the panopticon.
Prep school in Danvers, MA goes to clear plastic bookbag rule after a bomb threat, treating the kids like they were common ghetto dwellers.
It's been fifteen years since the whole clear/mesh bookbag thing has been going on in some school districts.
Kid's been going through metal detectors and carrying a clear bookbag since he was 6, what is he going to consider an "unreasonable" search when he's 26?
It's been fifteen years since the whole clear/mesh bookbag thing has been going on in some school districts.
Kid's been going through metal detectors and carrying a clear bookbag since he was 6, what is he going to consider an "unreasonable" search when he's 26?
Dating a dead horse.
I own a few self-loaders that bear the mark of the prancing pony, but they're not really my first love. When you cut me, I bleed blue and white, not blue and gold, so I was completely unaware that Colt's has added a serial number lookup service at their website.
For instance, I plug in the number on my older 1908 Vest Pocket, and it tells me that it was made in 1909, whereas the newer one dates to 1916. This saves looking for that tiny little blue booklet that always goes missing.
A factory letter including data on to whom the gun was shipped is still $75-$100, though. A factory letter from Smith is still $50. This is because Colt collectors are Fancy Dan rich dudes and Smiths are the workingman's collectibles. (If the workingman in question is a $75/hr union employee.)
(The post title comes from the time a guy brought in a Colt for repairs that looked like it had come up off a U-boat wreck. The gunsmith expressed doubts that it was worth the time. "But Shannon!" I said "It's got a prancing pony on it!"
"That's not a prancing pony," retorted Shannon, "That's a dead horse.")
For instance, I plug in the number on my older 1908 Vest Pocket, and it tells me that it was made in 1909, whereas the newer one dates to 1916. This saves looking for that tiny little blue booklet that always goes missing.
A factory letter including data on to whom the gun was shipped is still $75-$100, though. A factory letter from Smith is still $50. This is because Colt collectors are Fancy Dan rich dudes and Smiths are the workingman's collectibles. (If the workingman in question is a $75/hr union employee.)
(The post title comes from the time a guy brought in a Colt for repairs that looked like it had come up off a U-boat wreck. The gunsmith expressed doubts that it was worth the time. "But Shannon!" I said "It's got a prancing pony on it!"
"That's not a prancing pony," retorted Shannon, "That's a dead horse.")
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