Those gullies needed washin'.

Good Guy With A Gun

So a dude walks right past the "NO GUNS ALLOWED" signs and into the food court of a mall in a suburb on the south side of Indy with a rifle and a bunch of loaded magazines and opens fire.

Instead of a horrific double digit body count, there were only four fatalities, counting the asshole, because some good citizen also ignored the signs (which have no legal weight in Indiana, anyway) and capped his ass before he could empty his magazine.

Unbelievably, one of the local newscasters actually said that they'd contacted law enforcement to see if they'd arrest anyone for violating the "NO GUNS ALLOWED" policy of the company that owns the mall.

Honey, even if such a thing were legally possible, no prosecutor in their right mind would do such a thing, unless they were just dying to lose their next election.

Oh, and nice shootin', Tex.

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Automotif CCCXXIII...

Here's an extremely rara avis, at least here in the U.S.A.: An '89-'91 Nissan Pao.

Only about 31,000 were made, and sold exclusively on the Japanese domestic market, the entire production run sold out within three months of the time they started taking orders.

It's got a carbureted 1.0L inline four, putting out 51bhp to the front wheels through either a 3-speed auto or 5-speed manual.

Photographed with a Canon EOS 1D Mark III & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS.

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I'm stuck in a kookocracy.

There are people who think the James Webb Space Telescope is a secret Illuminati orbital mind control laser or some crap like that because of course there are.

If it makes a splash in the headlines, you can bet someone will be there to say that it’s actually a Freemason plot or that it's a false flag or aliens or whatever else.

The worst thing about social media is that it allowed idiots and assholes to heterodyne in ways not previously possible. 

Instead of these wacky loners having to physically find each other to exchange mimeographed newsletters of kookery, face-to-face and hand-to-sweaty-hand, they can gather in throngs in virtual auditoriums and try and outdo each other by concocting dumber and more outlandish crap and expounding it more sincerely than the kooks around them.

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QotD: Audience Participation Edition...

"Great photographs don't happen simply because you point a box somewhere." -Thom Hogan

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The Need for Speed...

One thing I noticed when I was shooting the D1X last month was how quickly the buffer filled up. I popped off several shots at that Caddy as it rolled by and the camera made me stop and let it catch up at something like seven or eight.

This confused me as all the media about the camera, even when it was new, claimed the D1X could shoot three frames per second for 21 consecutive shots before the buffer filled. 

The sports-oriented D1H had less resolution but could blaze away at 5 FPS for forty shots before it bogged down. That's a full eight seconds with the shutter button mashed; enough time to cover an NFL play from the snap.

The disconnect, as I soon figured out, was that I was shooting in RAW, which was not as often done in the earliest days of digital. That buffer that held twenty-some JPEGs only holds six or seven .NEF files (Nikon's proprietary RAW format.) You can count "two Mississippi" and then you're done until the buffer's flushed out, or has room for another image.

From a retrospective on the D1X's predecessor, the original D1:

The super fast speed was partially hindered by the settings. While JPEG processing was really fast and almost instantenious, switching to RAW cause the camera to crawl. Storage time went sky high, 45 secs per photo not uncommon. People complaining today about slow CF/SD cards shoud respect that a microdrive could only deliver 0.5 MB/sec and the D1 electronics limited the fastest CF Cards (12x Lexar) to data rates well below 1 MB/sec.

I was using a 133x Transcend 2GB card, probably capable of receiving data a lot faster than the old D1X could send it, so at least the buffer probably cleared faster.

(Cross-posted at Digital Fossils.)

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Automotif CCCXXII...

Continuing the yellow convertible theme from the other day, here's a nice clean Volkswagen Thing.

The similarity to the Kübelwagen of the World War II Wehrmacht is no coincidence, as the Type 181, sold in West Germany as the Kurierwagen, had been developed as a runabout for the Bundeswehr. Like the Kübelwagen, it relied heavily on Beetle mechanicals. Also like its forebear, and unlike the contemporaneous Willys Jeeps, it was rear wheel drive only, counting on light weight, ground clearance, and the engine being mounted in the rear to make up for some of the difference in offroadability.

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How far is it?

If you play the web game "Globle", the "Draw A Circle On A Map" tool is turbo useful...

Also, I guess, if you're a military history nerd and wanted to see what the action radius of a Q-39 Sky Dominator squadron operating out of an airfield on Vanuatu would have been.

Automotif CCCXXI...

The neighborhood TR6 was out and about again the other day. Check out those smiling faces! These folks are clearly living their best lives.

Photographed with the EOS 1D Mark III & EF 28-70mm f/2.8L

Wholly Hole-y.

The Mechanix gloves I've used for years to haul the trash cans to and from the curb as well as for general yard work are finally too hole-y to countenance any longer.

Fortunately Amazon's got a Prime Day deal on all kinds of Mechanix gloves (even the tacticool ones) running for the rest of the day for as much as half off. Bought two pairs this time, just in case.

Automotif CCCXX...

1965 Ford Galaxie 500 ragtop in Vintage Burgundy with the 250bhp 4-bbl 352cid FE big block. The '65 and '66 were clean-looking cars and Ford sold a mess of them.

Projection...

"And is Antifa in the room with us right now?"

When your bubble is so hermetically sealed that you think black bloc anarchists are big Biden fans...https://t.co/NM9rSNLRyc

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) July 13, 2022

Speaking of knives...

I've mentioned before about how blunt trainers for the Spyderco "waved" Endura and Delica are discontinued, uncommon, and expensive when you can find them. They're so uncommon and expensive that literally the first piece I ever wrote for Shooting Illustrated Online was on how to make an improvised "wave" for a regular Spyderco trainer.

Well, good news everyone!

Kershaw is making an Emerson waved trainer and they're seventeen bucks on sale at BezosMart right now.

It's obviously not the same as a waved Delica, but it's roughly comparable in size and shape and, most importantly, deploys identically from a pocket or waistband.

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Just Walk Away

In a video clip shared by Chris Fry of MDTS which I'm only going to link rather than embed for obvious reasons, there's a good lesson in how quickly an altercation can turn deadly.

You'll notice that one group of dudes is trying to walk away, while the other is just not willing to let it go. Even after a dude draws a knife, you've got that one big guy striding right at him with his chest thrown out in the posture of someone who's used to things going their way because of size and strength.

Oops.

One quick flick of the knife guy's hand and next thing you know, homie is bleeding out on the pavement. The thing that gets me is that he had to walk over to the guy in order to get hisself killed.

Ugly and completely avoidable. In the words of the great Warrior Poet, Humungus...

Such a deal!

Amazon's got a Prime Day deal running on the Canon EOS M6 Mark II mirrorless camera, bundled with the kit zoom and detachable electronic viewfinder (normally sold separately for, like, two-fitty), for under nine bills for the whole kit.

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Poking Holes

So Caleb shot some Federal 85gr .32 H&R Magnum jacketed hollow points into gel. In bare gel he got a little bit of expansion, but through cloth he got bupkis, with the bullet not expanding at all. It clogged up, yawed through a hundred and eighty degrees, and continued on bass-ackwards until it came to a rest.

I could have told him it would do that. In fact, I did.

This is why I carry Federal 95gr LSWC in my S&W 432PD. There's nothing magic about expansion. As far as I'm concerned, its most important function in CCW pistol ammo is moderating excessive penetration in service calibers. I've seen unexpanded Winchester Ranger-T 127gr +P+ penetrate clean through two sixteen inch blocks of clear gel.

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A post shared by Caleb Giddings (@radicaleb)

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.