Packing the Dot

One of the things I wrote about regarding the optics-ready Taurus 856 TORO when it came out was that the idea of a small-to-medium CCW revolver with a miniature red dot sight was so novel that nobody had really figured out how to holster it yet.

The first holster I tried was a prototype from Dark Star Gear, who basically took their classic Apollo compact revolver holster and cut away a slit to clear the optic. I've used the regular Apollo plenty in the past and it's a great holster for small wheelguns.

Problems arose from the optic-ready prototype, though. It worked fine for carry in the appendix position, well forward of the hip (and the flatter your tummy, the better it worked) but if you tried to carry anywhere over on the strong side, your belt would apply torque directly to the optic. Further, once you drew the revolver, you belt would collapse the area where the optic sat and make reholstering a tricky proposition.

The solution, as my friends at PHLster discovered, was to add a little garage for the optic...

I've been carrying this setup strong side at 3 o'clock for several weeks now. It's comfortable, your belt doesn't foul the optic, and reholstering is a breeze since if basically acts like a funnel for the muzzle.

For the best in comfort and concealment, it's even available assembled on an Enigma Express rig from PHLster, ready to put on and go.

I need to get this setup into a class and really put it through the wringer, but after almost a month of carry and a fair bit of dry practice, I haven't had an issue with it yet.

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These Times Keep Getting More Interesting

The number of intrusions into U.S. infrastructure-linked networks by hackers traceable to the Chinese government is on the rise, apparently.

"Hackers affiliated with China’s People’s Liberation Army have burrowed into the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year, these experts said.

The intrusions are part of a broader effort to develop ways to sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific, they said.

Among the victims are a water utility in Hawaii, a major West Coast port and at least one oil and gas pipeline, people familiar with the incidents told The Washington Post. The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country."

Being able to mess with a rival nation's utilities would be a potent force multiplier. It's a new feature of warfare and one that hasn't really been thoroughly explored; it's like if the Lufwaffe could have preceded Adlertag by shutting off the power to the London tube and the Chain Home radar stations.

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We Live in a World of Miracles & Wonders

This is a headline that describes an actual thing that really happened:

Tomato lost in space by history-making astronaut has been found

H/T to Kevin D. Williamson

And so it goes...

Via Facebook I learned that David Drake passed away yesterday. His website confirms the sad news.

The sheer number of times I referenced him on this blog should tell you what a loss this is. Other than a few fantasy series and some of his "co-authored" stuff (meaning Drake sketched the outline and the junior author did the grunt work of writing), I have pretty much nearly everything he wrote.

I think I'll re-read With the Lightnings in memorium.

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When things go rodeo...

Bodycam footage of the IMPD officer successfully deploying his backup gun and shooting the dude who'd just snatched his service weapon and shot him in the leg with it is available online now.

The fight goes to the ground and the officer has to access and deploy his BUG with his support hand while on his back and entangled in a melee. It's times like that when having made a bunch of deposits in the training bank pays off, because that's a heck of a big withdrawal.

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Rugged

There's a certain attractive quality to rugged, reliable gear. Think of the adulation heaped on Glocks for their durability:

A saying I remember from being in camera stores where my dad worked when I was a child was "If you have a Leica and a Nikon and have to take a photograph over a wall, stand on the Nikon and shoot with the Leica, because it won't hurt the Nikon."*

Jim Grey was just out and about with a new-to-him 1963-vintage Nikon F, which was the company's first pro-grade single lens reflex camera:

"The F is nigh onto indestructible. It would surely survive a drop from your hands to the ground, it would probably survive a drop off the roof of your house, and it might just survive a drop from an airplane."

It still works great for a sixty-year-old tool! No wonder survivors are bringing good money.

Do you know what else a Nikon will survive? Fifty years of being buried in a mountaintop glacier near the summit of Aconcagua, with twenty four frames of potential evidence of foul play sitting exposed inside it, waiting to be developed...

"FOR NEARLY 50 years, a Nikomat camera, carried by an American woman, sat frozen in a high-altitude time capsule. But it was not frozen in place.

Where the camera was dropped may not be where it was found. The Polish Glacier has been shrinking and shifting, cracking and moving downhill by the pull of gravity and with the change of seasons.

And on a sunny day in February 2020, the heart of the Argentine summer, the camera sat on a stocky penitente, like a museum piece on a pedestal.

[SNIP]

The camera was intact; the only crack was inside the lens. The mechanisms worked. The leather holster screwed to the camera bottom had probably protected it from leaks."

*The only exception might be if your Leica is a Leicaflex, aka "The Diesel Leica", which was their baroquely overbuilt attempt at an SLR. One survived plummeting to the floor of the Mojave Desert from a crashing F4 Phantom II.

It's got aliens, German Shepherds, and a very important knife.

Alex, the protagonist of Marko's latest novel, Scorpio, was born in Pennsylvania but doesn't remember it because her parents relocated to the colony world orbiting 18 Scorpii when she was only two.

Unfortunately, when she was still a tween, the giant extraterrestrials known as Lankies got there, too.

Alex and a couple hundred other colonists were near enough to the underground shelter known as The Vault to barricade themselves in semi-safety as the Lankies set about systematically destroying the colony and setting up their own atmosphere processors. Alas, her parents were not among the ones that made it to shelter.

We learn all this retrospectively, because the novel opens with Alex spending her twenty-first birthday riding in the back of an armored personnel carrier with some of the surviving troops of the colonial garrison, who she assists by working as a dog handler. 

That's an important gig because Ash, the squad's military working K9, can sense approaching hostile aliens through the humid, unbreathable soup of the Lankyformed atmosphere better than any human.

The little group is on a salvage mission, hoping to scavenge something usable from the colony's wreckage to keep the little group in The Vault alive and thriving as best they can.

And then the dog starts growling...

Read the book! I just finished Scorpio and really enjoyed it.

Balmy.

We tied the record high temp for December 9th here in Indy yesterday, with temps hitting the low-to-mid sixties around the metro area, which was nice except for the whole pissing-down-rain thing in the middle of the day.

But we're back to much more seasonal temps today, with the predicted high only being 36ºF, and that occurring at 10AM with the temperature dropping from there.

Still cloudy, though.

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Meme Dump

Automotif CDLII...

The funky compound rear window and the pattern of the grille mark this Chevrolet Impala Sport Coupe, painted an eye-catching shade of Earl Scheib Blue, as a 1979 model.

New in 1977, the sixth generation of the Impala was shorter, taller, and narrower than the previous generation, as well as being lighter and more thrifty at the pumps. This was a good thing, because the Second Fuel Crisis hit not long after they came out.

For 1979, Impala Sport Coupes featured the 250 cubic inch "Turbo-Thrift" 115bhp inline six as the base motor, with a choice of optional V-8s. You could get either a 2-bbl 305 rated at 130bhp or a 170 horsepower 4-bbl 350. (Unless you lived in California, where the 6-cyl made 90hp, and the V-8s were reduced to 125 and 165 horsepower, respectively.) All of them had the ubiquitous 3-speed Turbo Hydramatic slushbox.

Though they were just a shadow of the Muscle Car Era's horsepower glory, the Malaise Era rarely looked better than the bubble-window Impala coupes.

Photographed with an Olympus E-3 & a Zuiko Digital 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 II.

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Not thrilling me with your rhetoric.

There's a businessman from the northeast of the state, name of Doden, who's spending a mint on TV ads for his 2024 Hoosier gubernatorial campaign. 

I'm presuming he's launching this big ad campaign because current Senator Mike Braun has a huge leg up in the race. Braun has name recognition and existing campaigning infrastructure, plus endorsements from both traditional Republican orgs like Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, as well as the big one, an endorsement from Trump himself.

Anyway, this other GOP candidate keeps touting his background as "the grandson of a preacher" in his ads, which leaves me feeling all "Bro, we're not holding an election for state chaplain, here."

Plus in his latest ad, homie vibes like a slightly fashy Forrest Gump. See for yourself:

Historic Illiteracy...

You know, the very first Terry Pratchett Discworld novel I read, way back in 2007, was Monstrous Regiment. Kind of an unconventional entry point for the series, but I'd picked up a hardcover at Books-A-Million* on a whim.

At the time, I was unaware of the existence of John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, written back in that fun period of the Reformation when Protestant churches ran more towards witch hunts and heretic burnings than praise bands and Wednesday night suppers. 

The title translates to modern English as something like "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Unnatural Rule of Women", and was basically a big gripe-fest against the existence of Catholic queens (at the time there were Marys in both England and Scotland, at whom Knox was Big Mad, and they weren't exactly fans of his, either.)

Having read a lot more on the Reformation, the excesses of various early Protestant sects, and the Thirty Years' War since then, it only made my recent re-read of Monstrous Regiment that much better. Pratchett was so adept at weaving multiple layers of commentary into a book.

*That hardback turned out to be autographed. A treasure.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• A head-on view of a McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. The Voodoo is interesting as being one of the last planes whose design started out intended as a long-range bomber escort.


• The internet is made of people. Still. (Beware of the links on that sixteen year old VFTP post.)


• A heartwarming Christmas tree tale...

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Gasp. Shock.

Wow, who could have seen this surprising plot twist coming?

And here I'd been thinking he had the Russian constitution amended just for kicks...

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Automotif CDLI...

2003 marked the fiftieth anniversary of "America's Only Sports Car" (providing you don't count all the other American sports cars). To celebrate, Chevrolet offered a special 50th Anniversary package, RPO Z25. It was available as a coupe or convertible and came complete with special fender badges and its own paint color, "Anniversary Red Metallic".

In Indiana, cars can be issued "Historic Vehicle" license plates when they're twenty-five model years old, so this 50th Anniversary 'Vette is only four years off from being able to wear year-of-manufacture plates. 

I did not know that.

"In 1942, Norman Lear signed up to fight the fascists. He served as a radio operator and gunner in a B-17 bomber named “Umbriago” by its crew, after a catchphrase of the comedian Jimmy Durante. As Lear watched bombs spill out of the plane’s belly over Germany, he said in a 2021 interview with the Yiddish Book Center, his attitude was “Screw ’em.” But there was also a complicating empathy: “I remember thinking, imagining a table of family, of Germans, sitting around the table as the bombs dropped.”"

I did not know that Norman Lear was a veteran of 52 missions over Germany.

See the window just ahead of the "KK" letters, and the two windows in the top of the fuselage above them? Those are the windows Norman Lear would have looked out of from the radio room of "Umbriago". If you want to know the duties of a B-17 radio operator, they're enumerated at this site, along with some good shots of the radio room.

I was too young to really get All in the Family. I was not quite three years old when it premiered and eleven when it ended.

MeTV has been airing four episodes every Sunday evening, and I watched the first several seasons' worth here recently and it was really exceptionally good television. I can see why it was considered so novel for its era, and surprisingly relevant even today.

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Automotif CDL...

That Bonus Built Ford F-1 was in the Meijer parking lot the other morning, now sporting a front license plate that indicated I guessed right last September and it is indeed a 1950 model.

If the V8 decal in the window isn't fibbing and if it still has the stock motor, there's an 8RT 239 cubic inch Flathead Ford under the hood, putting out 100 SAE gross horsepower.

The Bonus Built trucks were the very first of Ford's F-series truck line that is still in production today and a perennial best-seller.

The 100 horsepower rating on a 3.8L V-8 seems ridiculously low to modern eyes, and was even low by the standards of the '70s-'80s Malaise Era, but remember that it only had a single 2-barrel carburetor flowing about 150cfm, a 6.8:1 compression ratio, and a fairly conservative redline.

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Meme Dump

As Quiet as a Middle Finger

Interesting article about the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, West Virginia:

"As we exited the observatory’s parking lot, the truck’s computer monitor started bleeping angrily. Before we reached the main road, we picked up 13 wireless signals. Within a half mile, we found 66 signals. Niday’s gadgetry was going berserk. But instead of jumping out of the truck to ticket Wi-Fi offenders, he simply took note of the sources of radio noise and kept driving, unfazed.

Within five miles, we tallied more than 200 signals, some coming from the homes of staff living on the observatory’s own property—a blatant violation of the facility’s regulations.

[snip]

A house across the street from the observatory had Wi-Fi with the network name “Screw you NRAO,” an unsubtle middle finger to the observatory’s calls for quiet."

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Automotif CDXLIX...

The K-car front wheel drive platform arguably helped a moribund Chrysler battle its way back into the black from near-bankruptcy in the early Eighties, after it had been pulled from the brink by a government loan.

Other than trucks, the legacy RWD sedans, and the L-body compacts (Omni/Horizon/Charger/Turismo), pretty much every vehicle made by Mopar in the Eighties and Nineties was on a variant of the K-car chassis. The K-car platform was to Chrysler what the ground-beef patty is to McDonalds; shuffle a few basic ingredients around it and you can come up with a pretty good-size menu.

Need a sporty coupe? Shorten the K-car for the Daytona. Need a minivan? Stretch the K-car for the Caravan*. Need a largish sedan to replace the Diplomat & Fifth Avenue? Hey, check out the stretched K-car in the picture above!

That's a 1990-1993 Chrysler New Yorker Salon in Black Cherry Metallic. The Salon was a sort of base model New Yorker introduced in 1990, that deleted the hidden headlamps, had a simpler taillight treatment, and used a bluff chrome grille similar to the cheaper Dodge Dynasty. The corner of the car you can't see is all stove in, but it's in otherwise nice shape, including all four fake wire wheel hubcaps.

Power would have been provided by Chrysler's port fuel injected 3.3L 150bhp pushrod V-6, and sent to the front wheels via a 4-speed A604 Ultradrive automatic transmission made right up the road at the plant in Kokomo, Indiana.

*To head off the tidal wave of ackshyually emails, the minivans didn't technically use the K-car chassis. They had their own platform...that used K-car drivelines and suspension. 

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