Too much of a good thing.

Via the Maddened Fowl, I learned that the RCMP actually negotiated with the Canuckistanian bus decapitator dude for three hours after they showed up.

Now, okay, I'm as big on due process of law as the next person, but when you show up at the stopped bus, and it's empty of passengers except for one (1) dead guy and a blood-covered guy with a knife in one hand, a severed noggin in the other, and some human flesh hanging out of his mouth... well, that's not a "suspect", okay? You've got your man, Mister Mountie. That's the guy, right there.

"Come out of the bus!"

"No."

"Bang!"

Problem solved; taxpayers richer by whatever amount it's going to cost to house and feed and try this guy; gene pool a bit cleaner than it was yesterday. What's the big deal?

Sunny delight.

In talking with various smart people over the last few years, I have developed a pretty bleak view of the immediate future of our republic. I really don't think it's going to get better in my lifetime. I really think the system is irretrievably broken. I really think that my declining years are going to be spent in a European-style surveillance-ridden nanny state; a giant England with NASCAR and slightly better gun laws.

We can't vote our way out of this mess; it's voting that got us into it in the first place. As long as the prison cell has cable TV, high-speed 'net access, and four bars of signal from Verizon, most folks are happy there. The only freedom you will enjoy is what you can eke out as a stainless steel rat in the meager interstices of a concrete and steel world.

There are some who think an apocalyptic pro-freedom revolution will occur when the true patriots will rise up and throw off the oppressive chains of the evil overlords. How that will happen in a land where a majority of folks expect to be bailed out of bad mortgages and have discounted digital TeeWee tuners provided for them by the .gov is only fuzzily explained.

Others remain guardedly optimistic.

I wish I could.

That could be bad...

So we're in the produce section at Kroger the other day, getting fixin's for a pot roast, and we happen to notice a little mixup in the pepper department.

There's a basket of little orange peppers and a basket of long green ones. Under the long green ones it says "Habaneros" and under the little orange ones, it says "Anaheims". Someone in West Knoxville is going to be told "Honey, I want to try this new Southwestern Grill recipe; I've always wanted to try cooking Tex-Mex. Here's a list of stuff I need from the grocery store..."

Hilarity ensues.

Misplaced priorities...

So, one Richard Cooey claims he's too porky to be executed. He says he's fat enough that they have a hard time finding his veins when they draw blood, and that could cause him unnecessary suffering. Plus he's taking some kind of medication or another for seizures that could reduce the effects of the sedative and cause his execution to be "excruciating".

Unnecessary suffering and excruciating pain like the two girls you raped and killed, Richard? Or a different kind?

Hey, Ohio, if you're getting all squeamish about this at the last minute, I'll be glad to drive over and handle the job with 26 ounces of Estwingazine, administered intracranially. I might even feel a little bit bad about it afterward, which is more than Mr. Cooey can say.

(UPDATE: I really need to read Marko's blog before I post in the mornings...)

Overheard In Front Of The TeeWee...

Cubs/Astros game is in progress...

Gunsmith Bob: "Why are you rooting for the Cubs?"

Me: "I think the two teams I hate the most are Houston and the Mets."

GB: "Houston? Why Houston?"

Me: "I guess because of all those times the Braves had to play them in the postseason. They're The Enemy."

GB: "That's a weird reason to hate a team. I mean, any decent person would hate the Mets, but the Astros?"

Outsmarted by Ronald McDonald.

Being a good parent is hard work and requires a bit of smarts, but every day some idiot goes out of their way to remind me that any old idiot can reproduce. Take some of the targets of the following CNN piece:

Study: Most kids' fast-food meals have too many calories

First, let's examine the basic premise of the article: The hypothetical person in question, who has successfully swum upstream and spawned, is now inside a small restaurant, one of whose mascots is a cartoon dude with a giant double cheeseburger for a head, looking for a nutritious meal for their child. Even if you printed the instructions on the heel in large type, using monosyllabic words, this person would manage to keep the piss in the boot.

The supposed twenty-pound brain behind the CSPI study contributes some real gems:

"Parents want to feed their children healthy meals, but America's chain restaurants are setting parents up to fail," CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan said in a statement. "McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and other chains are conditioning kids to expect burgers, fried chicken, pizza, french fries, macaroni and cheese, and soda in various combination at almost every lunch and dinner."

Look, first of all, if parents want to feed their kids granola, salad, and tofu, they can start by staying the hell out of restaurants that have "Fried" or "Burger" as part of their names. Second, it's not the restaurants that are conditioning the junior porkers to expect fat-fried lard with every meal, okay? It ain't the Hamburgler steering your minivan into the Mickey Dee's parking lot and swiping the credit card every time the little bundles of joy whine to have another McNugget-and-chocolate-sundae Happy Meal crammed into their pieholes.

There are those of us who are adults, capable of making our own bad dietary decisions, who actually liked the taste of salted french fries fresh out of the seething lard vat. Thanks to the whining, lawsuit-prone Cake-Eaters of America, our dining options have dwindled to next to nothing. Now they want to leverage their lack of control over their little hellspawn to neuter what's left of the menus at America's fast food joints.

If these people have their way, we're going to wind up having to put them in the Low-Cal Soylent Green vats, and who really wants that?

(H/T to Squeaky Wheel Seeks Grease.)

Overheard at the computer...

Gunsmith Bob: "Why does the Google search box say 'famous fruit hat'?"

Me: "I couldn't remember Carmen Miranda's name for the IMAX post. Check out the first search result."

Touching bases.

Dear Diary...

Had breakfast this morning at the Waffle House; steak & eggs, medium rare and up, hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, peppered and cooked crispy. My cholesterol had dropped to dangerously healthy levels since moving to big, flat, square, cold Yankeeland, but it's all better now. (What is it with the shapes of states? It's like once they got west of Ohio they lost their protractors and all they had left to draw maps with were straightedges...)

Stopped in at the Armory and said hi to most of the rest of the crew I'd missed on Saturday. Still haven't seen Dr. Strangegun yet, but I've got a couple days yet down here in the land of wilting humidity to get that done. Got to drool on some of the CCA 1911s, which were eminently drool-worthy. Melonite does not rust when drooled on, either.

More later...

Chairman O

You have got to be kidding me.

A change of heart?

For the five of you who haven't yet read it, Lissa of "Looking For Lissa" has a couple posts up about her gradual conversion from self-identified liberal to self-identified conservative. Interesting musings on how this relates to her relationships with family and friends and ponderings as to whether conservatism makes one heartless or less idealistic.

Learn something new every day.

I had no idea that they had trailer parks in France.

Meanwhile, that report wins the Clueless Comment of the Day Contest:

"In addition, officials say a 76-year-old man whose house was among those destroyed in Hautmont has killed himself, but they could not yet comment on his motive."

Well, gosh, why ever would an older person who has just watched their entire life get demolished feel like ending it all? "That's okay, Pierre! Just put in another 76 years of hard work and you can replace everything!"

Today In History: Potpourri.

On this day in:

1790: The Revenue Cutter Service was formed. Obviously, sea-going tax cops were less than popular in America, so they added fishing drowning people out of the drink to their portfolio and changed their name to the U.S. Coast Guard.

1892: Lizzie Borden's parents came down with a mysterious fatal case of axeitis. Popery suspected.

1916: Liberia declares war on Germany.

1917: Germany notices.

1944: A Dutch collaborator finks out the Frank family to the Nazis.

1964: LBJ goes on TeeVee to complain about events that may or may not have occurred allegedly near the purported Gulf of Tonkin, on or about the last couple of days, and says we should bomb the crap out of North Vietnam.

1977: Jimmy Carter, figuring that lack of government is the reason that the economy's in the crapper and energy costs too much, signs into existence a whole new federal Department of Energy. Because more government always helps.

Knight thirty-three percent darker. More biff, pow.

1) For those who have never been in an IMAX theater, it's one of those places that could simultaneously trigger agoraphobia and acrophobia. Other places may claim "stadium seating" because one row of seats is four inches higher than the one in front of them, but in an IMAX theater, it's "Stadium" as in "the cheap seats at Yankee Ditto". The LA Lakers could sit in front of you and not block your view. Abe Lincoln and Carmen Miranda would not need to doff their chapeaux.

2) It's really immersive if you're sitting in the miraculously empty seats that are dead-center on the screen, halfway up. I'm serious; if you put a dot in the geometric center of the screen and extended an imaginary line from it back into the seating area, the imaginary line would have poked me in the real eyeball. This did wonders for all of the scenes that involved plunging off skyscrapers, and there are a lot of them. I get all squirmy and sweaty-palmed watching base jumping videos in YouTube thumbnails, so you can imagine my contortions when the camera POV is hurtling towards the ground on a screen on which you could park a small fleet of Greyhound buses.

3) There is a little repeating cue in the soundtrack that lets you know when something all psychotic and Joker-like is going to happen. It is noticeable in a regular theater. With a hundred jillion watts of Dolby Surround Sound handling the audio chores, it has the same effect on the base of your brain as the sound of rabbits in a trap, crying babies, and an asthmatic tiger in the bushes twenty feet away, all rolled into one.

4) Damn Heath Ledger for going and dying. I could have happily watched him reprise this role. He crafted the most chilling and compelling movie villain since Sir Tony Hopkins stood under those bright lights in an imaginary loony bin. The awful thing about Hollywood is that the kind of numbers this flick brings in trigger an atavistic response in the movie-making crowd. They will have to make a sequel, and they will try to find someone to do the Joker. For an idea of how bad that will suck, compare The Crow to The Crow II, City of Angels.

The Knight will be Dark again tonight.

The plan is to see if Heath Ledger is even creepier in stunning IMAX.

If I had to bet, I'd say "yes".

Haven't ever seen an IMAX flick before. After-action report to follow...

Did you look under the bed, too?

"Whoops! We forgot to check under the sofa cushions!" says the CDC, upon discovering that a whole bunch more people had AIDS than they thought.

It's shake 'n' bake, and I helped!

My two main obstacles to cooking have always been living alone, and a short attention span. Coming home from work or the gun store late at night, with only me to feed, it's too easy to just toss something in the microwave or oven or a piece of meat in a frying pan. I also had a paranoid fear of doing anything complicated that would allow me to get distracted and walk away from the process after a few baking disasters in my much younger days. You know, you get all caught up in the good part of The Two Towers and the time just gets away from you and... what's that smell?

As he's threatened to do for years, Gunsmith Bob got me to commit some cookery in the kitchen yesterday. He's been swearing it wouldn't be hard, and indeed it wasn't. It was an easy thing to turn out a nice meal of parsleyed potatoes, baked salmon, and asparagus sauteed in butter & garlic. I did not cut myself, set anything on fire, or get distracted and wander off, allowing everything to cook to charcoal briquettes.

Seeing as how the only two kitchen items of which I usually ever make much use are the microwave and the frying pan, I'm immensely proud of myself. Plus, anything that involved massive amounts of butter, pepper, and garlic was bound to taste swell. I can hardly wait to get home and show off for my roommate! "Look! I can has asparagus! We can eat it every night now! Isn't this awesome?"

All play and no work...

Of course, there's an ulterior motive for my trip, too. In addition to touching base with the crew at CCA and visiting some of my old haunts, I dragged my trusty laptop along. I've got three or four longer pieces for this blog rattling around, one for the Arms Room, and a small handful of blurbs for the folks at LEM, and maybe this will jar them loose.

The thing I want to talk about at the Arms Room is the nature of collecting military small arms and how time and demographics are changing the hobby. We're at a period of turnover, here; the generation that is now going into retirement is really only the second generation to collect breechloading military arms to any serious degree (before WWII, the idea of collecting 20th Century military arms was somewhat odd; collectors generally collected muzzleloaders) a lot of stuff that is considered rare and valuable on the market is rare and valuable because it disappeared into gun safes 40 and more years ago. Central and South American Mausers, for example, which have been overheated for almost a decade now, were snatched up in the 50s and 60s because they were the Mosin Nagants of their day; cheap, plentiful, and affordable on student's wages. Now we're seeing formerly rare Argentine and Venezuelan carbines coming out of hiding and on to dealer's tables. It will be interesting to see what this does to the market.

On the road. Again.

Hello, y'all!

I'm posting this from sunny Knoxville, where I have gone to say howdy to old friends and make sure they haven't changed the city around too much in the past six months.

Which of course they have.

As in, they closed the major interstate (I-40) through the heart of downtown. Yeah, that's gotta be good for traffic. Luckily I got here a bit late for Friday night rush hour, since I got stuck in a traffic jam in Middleofnowhere, Kentucky. (People, when the sign says "Left Lane Closed 3.5 Miles Ahead", it does not mean that you should try and proceed past all the slow-moving traffic for 3.4999 miles and then dive to the right at the last minute. It's because of arseclowns like you that the traffic is moving slowly in the first place.)

Just in case you were wondering...

...who's sewed up the freak, geek, and nerd vote this November.

Reincarnation is probably just wishful thinking...

...but if it were true, you would have to live a very, very virtuous life indeed to come back as a pen-tailed tree shrew, hanging around in scenic rain forests and subsisting on an all-booze diet without ever having to worry about your trim, seven-ounce figure.

(H/T to reader RedneckInNY.)