Range time...

Gonna do some chrono testing on a few different JHP loads from the High Power today. Winchester Silvertips, Hornady Critical Defense, and Underwood JHP loads are on the docket. Something tells me the Underwood is spicier than the box flap claims it is...

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Dry

Despite getting a good inch of rain between Thursday night and Saturday morning, we're still way short for the season. They're saying we might get a small bit of rain tonight as a front passes through and then there's nothing else in the forecast for at least a week.

The lawn's gone dormant and even the catnip that's now growing rogue in the flowerbeds along the front of the house is looking a bit down at the heels. Only the mint seems unfazed.

Lugging gallons of water to the flowers and veggies is going to be a twice daily chore for a bit.

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Yikes.

You know how there are those occasional missing person stories with a gruesome ending, where they find the person weeks later behind some heavy piece of furniture where they'd fallen and suffocated? This is worse.

This reads like something that kicks off a Stephen King short story* from way back in his more tightly-edited, way-scarier days...

Duncan Alexander Burrell Gordon, of Greer, was reported missing in early May from the recycling plant where his father is a supervisor.

Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said Gordon apparently fell into the plastic shredder where he was working May 5, the last time he was seen, news agencies reported.

*I'm referring, of course, to the creepy-ass story "The Mangler", which was originally published in Cavalier magazine and can be found in the collection Night Shift. Apparently it got a godawful movie adaptation which, despite being an absolute box office flop and panned by critics, spawned a pair of straight-to-video sequels.

Automotif CCCXIX...

A fifth-gen Austria-built Supra above and, below, a 1985 Celica GT-S droptop.

The latter is the last model year for the RWD Celica, featuring a 116bhp 2.4L four-banger.

The convertible top conversion was actually done by ASC in California on Celica bodies that had been specially reinforced on the production line in Japan, and was a $6500 price bump over the $11k sticker on the hardtop GT-S.

This was a bunch of dough for the time; you could check every option box you wanted on a Mustang GT or Camaro IROC-Z and have a hard time hitting the $17k mark, and you'd get V8 power to boot.

Less than 4,500 GT-S convertibles were made, 200 units in MY '84 and the rest in '85.

Both those Toyotas were photographed with the Canon EOS 1D Mark III and EF 28-70mm f/2.8L lens. The 1.3x crop factor of the APS-H sensor in the old pro Canon sports body means the midrange L zoom has a field of view equivalent to a 36-91mm lens on a full frame camera. It's a little short for ideal car-spotting duties still, since shooting across the full four lanes of College Avenue at the intersection requires a bunch of cropping, but not as bad as it would be on a full-frame body.

What's interesting to me is that, even though there are only ~4500 of these things in existence, there are at least two immaculate ones in the neighborhood.

Meanwhile...

The High Power had now crossed the 1500 round mark, thanks to Lucky Gunner. Deets are over at the Patreon page.

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It's true.

I mean, buying a full size CDP and replacing the nylon MSH with an S&A unit, gutting the lockwork in favor of some C&S drop-in bits, binning the FLGR, making sure the extractor is strac and replacing it if it's not, and putting in a Wilson Bulletproof slide stop has long been one of my "when I get around to it" projects. 

Why? I dunno, I like the way they look, for one, and I also keep thinking about alloy-framed 5" 1911s. I sometimes miss that Springfield Lightweight Loaded I got from Marko years ago and then went nuts with titanium bits to make it even lighter. (It's also the only 1911 where I replaced the metal MSH with a nylon one. Gotta shave them ounces!)

Of course, those are all things I'd do to pretty much any Kimber/SA/Colt-tier pistol off the rack anyway. I look at most sub-$2k 1911s as buying a frame/slide/barrel kit.

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Huh.

From the "They ain't dead yet?" department, apparently Journey has released a new album.

I think the only Journey album I ever bought was an 8-track that came with the car.

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You Can't Uninvent The Wheel

Sure looks like a homemade muzzle-loading double barrel strapped to a board to me. The only difference between it and a medieval handgonne is the construction material and the fact that it's fired by electronic ignition, probably a battery shorting across some steel wool, rather than a burning fuse.

Everything you need to make it is at Lowe's or Home Depot.

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QotD: Someone's Having Fun Somewhere Edition

“For the New Puritans, a smug sense of self-satisfaction is the most delicious dish of all.” - Noah Rothman, Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun

Next up on my nonfiction reading pile.

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Stop Drawing to Tippy Turtle

It's a hard habit to break, and I often catch myself reverting, just like it took a while to deprogram myself from the classic bent-elbow Weaver.

That first bit, about keeping your head stationary (or reasonably so) and bringing pistol to your eyeline, rather than ducking your head to go hunting for the sights, is huge. It especially makes all the difference in the world if you're running a dot.

Remember the lesson of Buddha Cat, which applies whether the dot is in an optical sight or on the front blade of your irons...

I was today years old when...

...I learned that Victorinox makes a Swiss Army knife version specifically for cheese enthusiasts, and it is dubbed the "Cheese Master".

I can't stop watching this.

"This became known as 'The Smith Family Fireworks Incident' and was talked about in neighborhood lore well into the 2040s..."

Ummmm. pic.twitter.com/XOESbiyjV9

— Cody (@new_orleansjazz) July 6, 2022

They keep lying for the cause.

That central premise of the piece is a factually incorrect.

Mail order firearms sales didn't end until 1968.

Federal background checks didn't happen until 1993.

I purchased my first semiautomatic rifle in a mall sporting goods store, pre-NICS, and walked out w/ my purchase.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 6, 2022

Whatever you want to blame this on, the availability or ubiquity of firearms is not the controlling variable. This piece opens with a flawed premise and doesn't get any better from there.

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Automotif CCCXVIII...

I'm pretty sure that I had never before seen a 1958 Edsel Citation rollin' on dubs before. This thing has some truly baroque styling.

Photographed with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and an old EF 28-70mm f/2.8L USM. Though long superseded by newer 24-70/2.8 lenses with image stabilization, the old 28-70 puts up respectable DXOmark numbers and is capable of turning out crisp images even on the 50MP sensor of my 5DS, plus it's quite reasonably priced for "L" glass if you find one on the used market.

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Air You Can Wear

I just finished watering the veggies out back and the flowers in the front yard. Four trips in and out, all told, hauling water.

The sun's not really up, between the haze and clouds in the eastern sky ant the tall trees in the neighborhood, but the air temp's already 78°F with a 70 degree dew point. It's cloyingly sticky, so that your eyeballs practically fog as you step outside.

We're supposedly heading for a high in the mid-nineties today and a dew point well into that "oppressive" range. Hopefully the air will wind up with more water in it than it can hold at some point during the day and dump some of it on the ground. We've had so little rain that I passed on my usual half-assed Independence Day fireworks last night because I didn't want to have to keep a fire extinguisher handy for the lawn.

Farmer Frank would not have been happy with the summer weather so far this year.

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Happy Independence Day!

This is the day we commemorate George Washington swimming across the Delaware to bust Martin Luther King out of jail, where he'd been unjustly imprisoned for cracking the king of England's royal bell in Philadelphia. This is why it's now called the Liberty Bell.

Washington and King went on the lam, putting together a group of dissidents and malcontents, including Ben Franklin, Tom Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart. This crew began waging guerrilla warfare against the king, using the tactics developed by Francis Marion and Robin Hood.

In the end, after many cool shootouts and various heists and capers on royal outposts, the king was chased back to England and Washington's crew celebrated with Budweiser, grilled hamburgers, and fireworks.

The End.

Automotif CCCXVII...

Immaculate Six-Four Impala hardtop coupe in Riverside Red, photographed on a sunny summer Saturday in SoBro with a Nikon D2X & a 17-55mm f/2.8G DX zoom.

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QotD: Turbo Pissed Edition

"These days, “mobilize” is just a political consultant’s term to get our voters as pissed off as possible. This is unsustainable. It is dangerous. And it will not lead to permanent victory, but permanent political warfare and the law of unintended consequences." -Jonah Goldberg

Culture Club

We got all cultured up this morning when the Tom & Jerry hour played this 1939 MGM classic, The Blue Danube.

Torture Porn

No, seriously. I'm using the phrase literally.

Apparently years before E.L. James published any of her weirdo softcore Twilight fanfic, Gina Haspel was getting her freak on in memos to CIA headquarters from the black site she was running in Thailand.

Sitting atop one of those pinnacles of pain in Thailand, where al-Nashiri was repeatedly thrown against a wall, waterboarded, forced naked into a coffin-like box and threatened with a gun and electric drill, was Gina Haspel, the ambitious base chief and future CIA director.

And boy, did she enjoy it, judging by her pulse-pounding cables back to headquarters from Thailand in 2002. In prose seemingly inspired by bodice-ripping romance novels, the onetime U.S. Army base librarian described how the psychologist James Mitchell (whose hiring by the CIA remains a bizarre subchapter of the torture years), “strode, catlike, into the well-lit confines of the cell at 0902 hrs…deftly removed the subject's black hood with a swipe, paused, and in a deep, measured voice said that subject—having 'calmed down' after his (staged) run-in with his hulking, heavily muscled guards the previous day—should reveal what subject had done to vex his guards to the point of rage."

"Strode, catlike"? "Hulking, heavily muscled"? Are you effin' kidding me? I haven't seen prose that purple since that time I wasted ninety-nine cents on some self-pubbed garbage thriller on Kindle, and this is actual official dot-gov correspondence.

I understand you have to inform headquarters about how your torture program is going, but is it too much to ask for you to keep both hands on the keyboard while doing it, Ilsa?

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