Automotif CXLVIII...

Driving home from the range yesterday, I noticed this in the parking lot of the corner shop where I get minor stuff done on the Zed Drei.

I pulled into the parking lot and did an orbit while hanging the Nikon 1 J1 with the 10-30mm kit zoom out the driver's window.

My feelings toward the lines of the fixed-head coupe have softened over time. I used to consider the roof a bulbous abomination on the E-type's beautiful lines, but it's gotten to where I find it rather attractive from certain angles, like that rear quartering view.

Internationale

An interesting article at Rolling Stone about foreign fighters with the YPG...

“We ended up with a mixed platoon,” Franceschi says. “Ideological and ex-soldiers. We were sharing our perspective on revolution with the military guys, and they were giving us training and advice. It was beautiful to watch.”

Sunny Day...

Bobbi and I walked over to Good Morning Mama's for brunch today.

The weather was positively gorgeous. High seventies and low humidity. Just enough clouds in the sky to look all fluffy and photogenic.

We sat on the patio, shaded by both the pergola and the umbrellas at each table. It was pretty idyllic. The breeze stayed tolerable until it was about leaving time, by which time I'd picked up a gnat that had decided that slaloming through my eyelashes was great sport. We'd finished up by then anyway.

I had the stuffed burrito Sonoma, which is just eggs, chorizo, peppers, onions, and cheese, wrapped in a flour tortilla. Bobbi had fried eggs over house-made corned beef hash.
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Although I can't think of a practical reason...

...the idea of a Glock 42 in 9x18mm Makarov just tickles my fancy.

If only they made a .32ACP conversion barrel. I'd be on that like a duck on a junebug. I'd buy a Glock 42 just because such a barrel existed.
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Clone Correct...

Looks like Sig is bringing the .mil version of the P320 to the commercial market as the P320-M17.

That's kinda cool...

Magpul has gotten into the sunglasses biz.

They seem to offer blue mirrored lenses, which I'm partial to, and my Wiley X AirRage sunglasses are about wore out. (Sunglasses that rely on tension in the temples plus friction from rubber pieces on the temples to hold on to your noggin eventually get un-tense and non-friction, it turns out. Based on my experiment, this takes about five years.)

I use ballistic-rated sunglasses because I don't want special shades based on whether I'm planning on going to the range that day or not. This way I always have eye pro with me.
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What They Think Of You...

Indiana is bracing for a hotly contested senate race this fall, with incumbent Joe Donnelly (D-IN) facing GOP upstart Mike Braun, who won one of the nastiest primary mud-wrestling contests it has ever been my misfortune to live through.

With control of the senate teetering on a knife edge, this race is attracting national attention and a lot of out-of-state dough. In fact, the Senate Majority Project ad below complains that "out of state billionaires"...ie the Kochs...are buying ads to smear our beloved "Indiana Joe". (A recent pro-Braun ad accused Donnelly's family printing business of off-shoring south of the border and dubbed him "Mexico Joe".)


The thing is, the Senate Majority Project has received a couple million from Bloomberg, as well as at least $10M from Newsweb Corp, which is Chicago billionaire Fred Eychaner's company.

So an ad complaining about out-of-state billionaires buying ads was paid for by out-of-state billionaires.

But they think you're too dumb to know that. You know how I know this? Well, this ad was no doubt produced by some LA or NYC agency, and look at who they think will convince those on-the-fence blue collar union worker* Hoosiers who voted for both Obama and Trump, Lugar and Donnelly. They assembled this People of Walmart cast of Totally Not Actors to convince us confused hilljacks of flyover country that people just like us were standing up for Indiana Joe.

There's a tiny chance I'd vote for Braun, because the dude's SoCon mouth noises he made for the primary seemed about as convincing as the visual effects in the original Star Trek series, but I'm insulted enough by this ad to guarantee it'll be a cold day in hell before I vote for Joe Donnelly.

*Did you catch the patch on Do-Rag Dude?
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Some is good, more is better, too much is just enough.

Shootin' Buddy's theory on redundancy for your carry gun was that you should "find a gun you like, and buy five copies." That way you'd have:

"One on your hip, one in the safe, one at the local gunsmith, one at the manufacturer being overhauled, and one stored off-site at a trusted, safe location."

Commander Zero seems to have a similar eye toward redundancy, and explains it here. Go read.
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RIP 9/21/2011-7/11/2018

I think it was about six years ago that Bobbi and I walked into Target's camera department...well, it was just like an aisle or an aisle-and-a-half by then...and saw a display for a new and unfamiliar camera from Nikon.

It took interchangeable lenses, but not regular Nikon lenses. The back and top of it were nearly devoid of controls, like a compact camera. There was what looked like a mode dial, but it was mostly unfamiliar hieroglyphics instead of the normal "PASM".

There was a position with a movie camera icon, so that was video. And there was a green camera icon, which I guess would be automatic scene selection? Program mode? Who knew?

There was a video display playing a looped commercial showing the cool burst photography tricks, and high speed video. I remember the price tag seemed gobsmackingly expensive, as much as an entry level DSLR kit, maybe a few bucks more.

And some parts of it didn't impress 2011 me, who didn't know much about cameras.

The lens that came with it only had three zoom X's, while the Kodak EasyShare pocket camera I was using at the time had that many and cost me a fraction of the price. They both had the same number of MP's, too. (2011 me didn't know much about sensor sizes and crop factors at all, and only had a half-forgotten grasp of apertures and ISO's and other such things.)

In retrospect, it's like the Nikon engineering department had been dragged kicking and screaming into building a mirrorless camera with the sole directive that it not steal a single sale from Nikon's meanest entry-level D3100. The result was a camera that seemed oddly frivolous to camera nerds and yet frighteningly expensive to people who wanted to move up from clipping plastic magnifiers to their iPhone lens...or from Kodak EasyShares.

The last new bodies in the series had been released back in early 2015, and everyone knew that the Nikon 1 was dead, so the announcement a few days ago was pretty much pro forma.

That being said, the early ones like the J1 I'm playing with this month are available dirt cheap as refurbs or used, and even the J5's can be found as NOS in some places for decent prices. Last of the Nikon 1 line, the J5 had a much more normal camera interface, but it was too late to save the line of quirky cameras.

I do want to see how the high-speed video and burst shooting does for action shots at the range...
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I bought it for the lenses...

Ten dollar find at a hamfest. If the #Canon works, that’s a bonus. #canonfdlens #filmisnotdead

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Jul 16, 2018 at 8:05am PDT

QotD: Not Fellow Travelers Edition

OOCQOTD: "Saying "I LIKE GUNS" should not be ollie ollie oxen free for being a dick, no matter how famous you are."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 16, 2018

Trivial Pursuit...

On the top of the stack in the Reading Room is Osprey's US Cold War Aircraft Carriers: Forrestal, Kitty Hawk and Enterprise Classes.

I was idly skimming the section covering CVN-65, the Mobile Chernobyl, and noticed that it named the ship's skipper at the time it was commissioned: Vincent P. de Poix. Dude was a fighter pilot in the South Pacific with VF-6 for a little over a year in '42-'43.

Think about this as a metric of the speed of technological advance in the 20th Century: The first captain of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier got his primary flight training in a fabric-covered open-cockpit biplane. When he was born in 1916, the unofficial air speed record was 134mph in a British S.E.4 fighter plane, which is likely rather slower than the first plane to land on the Enterprise was going when it trapped the wire.

As far as the ship he was skippering, it remained in service until the end of 2012. To put that in perspective, the Enterprise's first captain was born during the Wilson administration, before commercial radio was really even a thing. The youngest sailor on her last deployment was born during the Clinton administration, about the same year as the letters "www." started popping up on billboards and in magazine ads.
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Ugh.

Finishing up writing a piece and trying to come up with delicate ways to tell the reader that they're likely wrong about something...

Meanwhile, have a pretty picture from my 'hood:

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From Elsewhere...

Wait, that goober in Illinois saw a woman wearing a Puerto Rican flag on her shirt and started yelling “Are you a US citizen?”

Has that ignorant spoo-bubble been asleep since 1897?

Hey, Jasper, here’s a surprising telegram from President McKinley.
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Photography Is Not Terrorism

So, okay... Lesson learned: When I'm out semi-surreptitiously photographing people and stuff on the street with small cameras, I shouldn't look all Arabic while doing it. And I definitely shouldn't wear one of those radical-chic keffiyeh scarves either.
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Range day...

Rushing along with the P365 review, today was an outdoor trip with Mike Grasso to get some chrono numbers.

I was going to grab some pics for an online sidebar while I was at it, but I left my camera bag at home. Fortunately there was a camera in the pocket of my gun burkha, a Samsung TL500...

This is a .jpg straight out of camera. I remember shooting with my previous Leica D-Lux 3 (nee Panasonic LX2) under very similar conditions...

I just wasn't as happy with the results. The slightly newer Samsung seems to do better in the shade. That's probably why the Leica got sold.

#MyLifeInPictures

Hi Chew is not just
A sort of Japanese poem
Today I learned this pic.twitter.com/UUIpTW6awn

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 10, 2018

Trollololol

Posing with a trophy from a gun "buy-back", a police sergeant shows off a deadly Hi-er Point LUL-Z Mk.XIII "Ghost Gun".

One more assault weapon off the streets!


(h/t to alloutdoor.com)

Coarse Idjit Filter

OOCQOTD: "The internet was a better place before you could wind up on it by accident."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 10, 2018

Freakout Fatigue

So the announcement of the president's SCOTUS nominee was greeted by choreographed raucousness on the steps of the Supreme Court.

I'm assuming the whole thing was planned ahead of time, because of the four rumored short-listed candidates, Kavanaugh is the one least deserving the hysterical overreaction ("very confirmable", in the words of Chuck Todd).

I guess Bernie and Liz didn't want to waste the chance to get a bit of photogenic grandstanding in as politicking season ramps up toward November, and 2020 beyond that.

I have to say that I don't get the spaz-out over the idea of a GOP president nominating the replacement for a justice who was selected for the high court by Ronald Reagan.

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