That Time of Year

With the first big heat waves of summer, the news is full of stories about how important it is to not leave [kids, pets, the elderly or disabled, et cetera] in a parked car.

The gem of the stories is always when they share tips for avoiding these tragedies, one of which is always "To avoid forgetting an infant in the back seat, keep something back there that's important that you won't forget, like your purse or briefcase."

Ouch.

Earlier I was thinking that these were the first caps I'd busted since the FN High Power launch event in Georgia back in early March, but I think I made a couple range trips between then and TacCon. I didn't do any shooting at TacCon except the camera kind and don't think I've done any since?

It shows. 

Pistol shooting is a perishable skill.

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The Great Indoors

Got magazines loaded for the High Power so I can walk in at Indy Arms and get to blasting right away when they open at ten.

When it's hot and humid enough, the HVAC system on an indoor range can have a hard time keeping up with the sheer volume of outside air being hauled in by the filtration system. Every bit of the entire volume of air on that range is exchanged in less than ten minutes, if I'm remembering rightly. It's generally fine until outdoor air temps hit the nineties and the humidity is high.

I'd imagine that ranges where the weather's like this for a significant chunk of the year will build more capacity into the air conditioner servicing the range. I remember CCA's not having too much trouble keeping up during a normal Knoxville summer. I don't know enough about air conditioning to grok the specifics. 

I wonder what it's like in places like the Pacific Northwet where A/C wasn't the norm until recently? When I took that class from Kathy at FAS back in 2015, it was pretty hot, but we didn't spend much time on an indoor range, and I've slept since then.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #213...

Fresh off the truck, this FN High Power is slated for a full-length review for the print edition of Shooting Illustrated. 

As a bonus (big thanks to Lucky Gunner) it's also going to crunch through 2,000 rounds of assorted ball and hollow point ammo, from premium grade stuff to... um, less-than-premium-grade? Let's go with "more budget-friendly" ...fodder, all in the name of science, for Shooting Illustrated Online.

Let's turn up the juice and see what shakes loose.

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The Longest Day

It's the summer solstice today, which means sunrise here in Indy happens at 0617 and it doesn't go down again until 2117, with Civil Twilight lasting almost until ten PM.

Ma Nature is celebrating the date by bringing the humidity back, replacing yesterday's dry 90°F with a more sticky 97°F. 

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Yikes.

Got another test in the works...

“It’s like a scaled-down 5.56 round!”

”They forgot to scale the price tag down to match.”

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 20, 2022

This is why we can't have nice things.

The caption to this photo in an online gun article reads "This rig from Crossfire Holsters is stable, secure and readily accessible", when you can look at it and plainly see it's neither of the first two things.

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California Dreamin'

I'm generally over the whole genre of "Fisking Some Random Anti-Gun Column". Everybody on both sides generally has their minds made up and the whole "I'm not arguing with them, I'm arguing so the undecided people who read it can see my arguments" is just a pipe dream. 

There aren't any undecided people reading 1,000-word columns on gun control on the internet. 

Generally these fiskings are just done by people counting virtual coup in order to get asspats from culture war teammates in their own hugbox, usually by saying "Hurr durr, other team bad!" in a humorous fashion.

Still, I have to recognize game when I see it, and this one is good. It's not just some blogger titillating their comments section by coming up with novel ways to call their opponents "poopieheads"; it's a genuine effortpost and deserves a read.

Here's an excerpt:

Microstamping is straight science fiction. A totally non-viable technology. Steel, brass, and aluminum under momentary pressures varying from 24,000 to 80,000 PSI don’t work this way. Neither the firing pin nor the chamber can in any way reliably imprint a QR code or whatever else someone is thinking onto a spent case. This is basic materials sciences.

This utopian pipedream sits firmly in the realm of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ and it will remain there, probably until the end of conventional metallic cartridge ammunition. This suggestion also assigns an absurdly over inflated importance to ballistic matching and tracing in criminal investigations. It isn’t that important. It isn’t unimportant but it isn’t that important. Tracking down people via the social aspects of their interpersonal interactions is going to remain the most reliable method, not checking to see if a microstamp on a casehead can find an owner through a trace report (which takes a good while) to a dealer.

So no, there is no ‘right’ to fire a gun anonymously, beyond the obvious protections you have against unreasonable search, seizure, and privacy in general. There is just no way to make this magic work.

Even if we could get a reliable case print with material durability, which we cannot, a few seconds with polisher compounds or something like swapping firing pins and all the effort to imprint cases is wasted. Heck a modestly forward thinking criminal type could pick up brass from a range and leave it at the scene, or use one of the many brass catcher devices. Reloaded ammunition would carry multiple microstamps. You could make it against the law to remove stamps, like mattress tags, but what particular brand of neerdowell do you believe wouldn’t take a basic defacement step to protect themselves? They already make the attempt with serial numbers.

Go and RTWT.

Actual Anti-Gun Protest in Broad Ripple, 2013

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Caught Up In The Gears of Injustice

Check out this horror story...

A man’s life was changed after he spent 17 days in a New Mexico jail because American Airlines wrongfully accused and identified him to police as a shoplifter at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

Michael Lowe boarded a flight at DFW Airport in May 2020. More than a year later, he said, he was on vacation in New Mexico when he was arrested on warrants he had never heard of for a crime he did not commit.

For more than two weeks, Lowe was held in Quay County Jail at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in “grossly unsanitary conditions,” according to the lawsuit. Lowe said he didn’t even find out what he was charged with until after his release.

The horror comes not only from the kafkaesque facts of getting hauled to jail on a mystery warrant, but also from the gulag-like conditions in the Quay County lockup. This isn't some third world prison, or even an overcrowded underfunded city jail in some coastal megalopolis; just your basic county hole in rural-ish New Mexico. 

It's not just bad that an innocent man was subjected to these sort of conditions, but that anybody is, here in these United States.

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Automotif CCCXI...

Sunday's weather was absolutely glorious, with temps in the mid seventies and low humidity, complimented by gentle breezes. It was perfect convertible weather, and this gentleman was out making the most of it in his Triumph TR6.

It's a later one, '74-'77 as attested by the grotesque rubber bumper warts required to meet U.S. safety standards.

While the few TR6's of this vintage sold in the motherland were fuel-injected, American market cars (by far the majority of TR6's sold) had a pair of Strombergs feeding fuel-air mix to the slightly undersquare, cast iron, pushrod straight six, resulting in 105 SAE net horsepower from 152 cubes of displacement.

Acceleration, consequently, was hardly eyeball-flattening. Most tests reported 0-60 times in the ten-to-eleven second range. Still, everything feels fast when your ass is only inches from the pavement.

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Built like a tank...

I had my Nikon D1X out yesterday. I'm not sure of the shutter count on my example, but it's an old one. D1X serial numbers started out in 2001 at 5100001, and mine's number 5100496. The 17-55mm f/2.8 DX glass on the camera wasn't much newer. The serial number would indicate it was an early one, too, probably made in 2003.

Still takes a decent photo...

This would have been top flight pro kit in 2003. Six grand worth of body and next thing to two more of lens. 

I got the lens, cosmetically well-worn but functionally fine, for a bit less than five bills at Roberts. For use on crop-sensor Nikon DSLRs, the 17-55/2.8 has largely been supplanted by the excellent 16-80mm f/2.8-4E. The latter has a greater focal length range, spiffy new nano crystal coating, and vibration reduction to more than make up for the stop of aperture it gives up at longer focal lengths. Thing is, it uses an electronically-controlled diaphragm that the D1X is too old to communicate with.

I don't know if a camera store or pawn shop would even give you any money at all for a D1X these days. Used ones are bringing about a hundred bucks or thereabouts.

Still takes an okay photo. Nikon builds their pro bodies like tanks; you could bludgeon a dude to death with one of these and then take pictures of the crime scene with it.

Book Report

Having mulled on it, Citizen of the Galaxy is one of my favorite Heinlein juveniles. It's "classic science fiction" in that it postulates one big difference in technology, in this case just interstellar travel, and then uses that to mull over the effects on human society...or in this case, societies.

Our protagonist moves through several cultures: 

• A street urchin beggar on the streets of a planet with a stratified culture where slavery is legal. 
• A crewman on a free trader spaceship. In this universe, each trading ship is a sort of combination corporation and family clan, with generations of one tribe crewing the ship.
• An enlistee in the space navy.

...and more.

Without burdening the story, Heinlein introduces the reader to several different cultures, all through the viewpoint of Thorby, the young freed slave.

On the free trader, the protagonist encounters a space anthropologist studying the culture of the traveling space merchants, and I'm kicking myself for not recognizing the name the first time around...

"Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist’s view, ‘justice’ is a search for workable customs.” -Dr. Margaret Mader

Such an obvious anagram for "Margaret Mead"...

Not a tech-heavy book, although the computers are still gigantic machines. Our hero spends some time as a Fire Controlman on spaceships, directing missile fire at space pirates, and the computers are things that you input data into and then read out the calculations from dials and gauges before launching the missile by pushing a button. In 1956, apparently, the ides of just letting R2D2 handle the whole process from target acquisition to launch control was still a bit too sci-fi.

Next up: The Door into Summer.

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Fishing for Suckers

Looks like some conservative-adjacent organization or another sold their email list to a scamPAC again, because my email inbox has been full of pleas for dough from the gullible.

Some of this stuff is just turbo-cringe.

Look at these two back-to-back missives: a request to sign a "Fathers Day Card" for Republican Daddy, and a passive-aggressive declaration that if I don't send dough now, we're "finished".

"Bro, we can't be finished, because we never started. Get lost."

Who falls for this sort of marketing? It must have a payoff, or they wouldn't be doing it.

Jeez, it's like the "G" stands for Grifting, not Grand.

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Mobile Vending Machine

Your car is not a gun safe, as the saying goes.

Turns out it's not such a great camera bag, either, as these tales of woe tell.

Given my proclivities for older cameras I'd almost feel bad if someone were to bust a window to grab an imposing and expensive-looking D1X or D200, only to find that the pawn shop or camera store wouldn't even buy it from him (or would give him twenty bucks at most, if he could seem honest and pathetic enough.)

Thanks to the resurgence of interest in film photography, that F5 body is probably worth as much as the D200, P7000, and both lenses in this picture, combined, and F5's are only bringing three bills and change.

So, yeah, even if I'm only running into the store for a minute, the camera comes with me. I don't want to spend $300 replacing a window for a camera that barely cost that.

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Artificial Dankness

This is the funniest DALL-E Mini I've yet seen...

I'm probably going to hell for laughing at this as hard as I did.

Sadly, there's no actual Fisher Price guillotine. Nor either a Lego one that I can find, at least not as an official kit. You can get a nice guillotine Christmas tree ornament, though, if you're a weirdo.

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How do you say "Anchors Aweigh" in Mandarin?

China's just launched the Fujian, which is an entirely domestically-designed carrier rather than a rehash of the Russian Kuznetsov-class, like the last Chinese-built carrier was. 

Also unlike the Kuzentsov-derived Shandong, the Fujian is a real grownup CATOBAR ship, with electromagnetic catapults and everything. The only other big CATOBAR bird farm that isn't in the USN is the French Charles de Gaulle, but the Fujian is much larger than the French carrier, and only about fifty feet shy of a Nimitz class in overall length.

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...and speaking of the weather...

...it's apparently been too much for the A/C here at Roseholme Cottage.

Fortunately the HVAC dude can be here Friday afternoon. Hopefully it's not too spendy... or something that requires a part that backordered from now 'til Ragnarok.

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Lens-fogging weather

Current dew point is 74°F and likely to get a few degrees worse as the day goes by. Air you can wear.

Can't build a railroad until it's railroading time.

Anyone concerned about the hypothetical possibility of ICBMs should look at the amusing failure of Mister Langley's so-called "flying machine". https://t.co/odV8jOXZPN

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 15, 2022

Captured Moments

"Take inventory in your life. Slow it down, and notice the little things that life shows you every single day."

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