Hey, when did that start?

Apparently Blogger now supports animated .gifs hosted internally. Huh.
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Ingenious.

The built-in pedometer and included fitness app on my new phone is ingenious in two ways:

1. It makes a game out of trying to better your totals from the day before, or at least not let the averages slump. Gotta move, even if it means just taking a few extra laps around the house!


2. And in order to make sure you don't get short-changed on your pace count, you keep the iGadget with you at all times.

Looks like I jinxed myself...

Today I need to go buy myself a good expectorant.
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Sorry 'bout that...

Having already suffered through the flu and some awful upper respiratory thing that tore through the gun store staff, I thought I was done being sick for the season.

Apparently not.

Fever, ache all over, and a really impressively sore throat. At least there's no coughing or nose-blowing with this one.  Massive amounts of vitamin C, Sucrets, aspirin, and sleep.

While I go nap some more, y'all read the latest from LawDog...

See you in a bit.
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Disconnect

"Rising minimum wages make automation more cost-effective"

It's an article of faith among Progressives that carbon taxes will disincentivize pollution, and yet the same people swear up and down that a hairnet & nametag tax won't disincentivize hiring the marginally employable.
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Stereotypes

From an article about another dumb thing to hang on police duty belts comes this gem:

Guns that fire rubber bullets attained brief notoriety in Russia after an argument about the merits of philosopher Immanuel Kant in a southern Russian bar devolved into violence in October 2013. One man fired several rubber bullets at his philosophical opponent, who was injured but not killed.

Wow. "...[A]n argument about the merits of philosopher Immanuel Kant in a southern Russian bar devolved into violence..."

That might be the most Russian thing I've ever read.
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Low-Information Voters

So this one woman on Twitter apparently noticed coverage of the Democratic party caucuses in Wyoming today, and decided to check and see how the GOP results were going. She liked what she saw!

.@LauraWalkerKC Now make fun of low-information voters loving Trump!

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 9, 2016

Others saw her Tweet and decided that the media coverage was biased!

It's weird, the media is only covering the Democrats race in Wyoming. https://t.co/xuCjsAuBUS

— Michael Wiley (@MinneMike) April 9, 2016

The joke, of course, is that the reason the media is only covering the Democratic caucus in Wyoming today is because the GOP had theirs last month.

Something something low-information voters...
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That's forever in blog years...

Tim Berners-Lee put up the first web page in 1991. If he's waited just a few years, he could have put a link on it to Charles G. Hill's blog, dustbury.com, which turned twenty today.
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Product Placement...

I hadn't seen Casino Royale yet, unbelievably, but that got fixed last night.

No wonder the subsequent Daniel Craig movies get judged so harshly. I was always like "Why do people hate on Quantum of Solace or Spectre? These are perfectly adequate Bond flicks." And they are, by the standards of A View to a Kill or The World Is Not Enough.

Loved the blatantly subversive fan service of the camera lingering on a dripping Daniel Craig emerging from the ocean. Y'all can do that as often as you want, Eon Productions.

Since I was watching it on the small screen with a Tanq and tonic instead of on the big screen with a bucket of popcorn, I was probably more detached than I would normally be with such an action-oriented movie. This made it easy to note the crazy-heavy product placement by FoMoCo and Sony. Pretty much every electronic device, from computers to cell phones to cameras, that appeared on-screen was a Sony product.

And as for FoMoCo? Well, Bond drove a rental Ford Focus to the lah-ti-dah seaside resort. As he's pulling in, he passes an Explorer pulling out. A couple duffers pull up in a Range Rover (then owned by Ford), and mistake him for the help, dismissively tossing him the keys to their SUV and demanding he park it. He does so by putting it in reverse and plowing it ass-end-first into what appears to be the FoMoCo corner of the Detroit Auto Show:


Notice he backs it between a Lincoln (FoMoCo) and a Volvo (FoMoCo) into a Jaguar (FoMoCo) and through careful camera work, the only cars whose distinct brand identifiers are visible in the background immediately before and after are also Ford products (a silver Land Rover beforehand and a silver Lincoln Town Car after.)

Of course Bond is back in an Aston Martin in this movie, too, since Ford still owned them in '06.

No Jacket Required

"Take Me Home" is playing...

Me: "Yeah, this is from Phil Collins' last good album..."@markokloos: "Before he turned into the Garfield of pop music."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 9, 2016

From elsewhere...

1910

I put one fifty-round box each of Sellier & Bellot and Magtech 230gr FMJ ammo through the Glock 37 today. The gun continues to endear itself to me way more than it should.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,910 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, one failure to fire on round #1,712, and one parts breakage. 90 rounds to go.
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Lyrics

He's Trump, he's Trump
He's on my screen
He's Trump, he's Trump, he's Trump
He's orange and mean

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 6, 2016

Aphorism

To the old saw "If you don't shoot weekly, you'll shoot weakly," I'd append "...and dry-fire daily so your shooting won't be fail-y."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) April 6, 2016

Message From the Past

The other day, Bobbi took a rack-mount terminal in to work that had been sitting in a corner of the living room for, well, a while.

When she moved it to the car, it exposed a little pile of stuff that had sat behind it. In that pile of stuff was a box from Farmer Frank. He'd sent me a small package with a couple boxes of .405 Winchester a couple years ago, and it was one of those things where you get a package, you know what's in it, and you set it aside unopened because the contents aren't something you intend to use right that second.

I'm not ashamed to say I teared up a little when I finally opened that box to store the ammo away. I should see if they'll let me bend the caliber restrictions at Indy Arms Co. if I come in early enough one morning, just to pop off a round or two.
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GlockGlockGlock

Took the Glock 37 and another hundred rounds of Remington .45GAP to Indy Arms Co. this morning. I planned ahead this time and already had one box loaded into magazines before I left the house.

The second round gave a *click* instead of a bang. While the hit looked a little off-center, this photo makes the striker indent look way more off center than it was. That's a pretty good lick, there. It went off on the second go.

The rest of the session passed without further incident.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,810 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, one failure to fire on round #1,712, and one parts breakage. 190 rounds to go.
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From the Department of Backup Redundancy Bureau

The North Korea monitoring project 38 North says that satellite imagery shows "suspicious activity" at a nuclear enrichment site in North Korea. 

Is there such thing as non-suspicious activity at North Korean nuclear sites?
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To the Citizens of Planet ManhattAngeles...

If you're puzzled by the The Price Is Right-episode-gone-amok into which the normally reliably staid GOP primary seems to have morphed, here is a field guide to your potential new cracker overlords.

If you have a cousin working in the ManhattAngeles oblast on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, you might call them for help in differentiating the tribes, because these howling savages are just outside the wire...er, "Loop", there.
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Back to the Glock

After two weeks of shooting nothing but the Canik, I was a little worried about coming back to the Glock 37. Would I have forgotten how to run the thing?

I took a hundred rounds to the range with me, but...and this is so girlie...I hadn't trimmed the nail on my trigger finger well back like I usually do when shooting Glocks. So, given the more vigorous recoil of the .45GAP compared to the 9mm I'd been shooting for the last fortnight, plus how thin and brittle my nails are, it bent funny and started to tear on the last round of the fourth magazine.

Not having a nail clippers and not wanting to tear the nail into the quick (because ouch!) I fired the last loaded magazine weak-handed and reeled the target in, saving the second box of ammo for Tuesday. Note to self: Put nail clippers in range bag. (Usually these are needed for a thumbnail blowing up while loading a shotgun.)

Anyhow, the gun shot like I hadn't set it aside for half a month, including the ten rounds fired weak hand. There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

The Glock 37 has now fired 1,710 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one failure to feed on round #1,589, and one parts breakage. 290 rounds to go.
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Brrr...

I had been planning on going to Marion County Fish & Game in the morning to shoot, but Weather Underground tells me we won't see the right side of 40°F 'til lunchtime or so, so it looks like it's the neighborhood indoor range for me.
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