Who didn't see that coming?

After yesterday's rout in the Show Me State, just out of curiosity I punched "Missouri Proposition C rednecks" and "Missouri Proposition C hillbillies" into Google. I was not disappointed.

"Why won't you stupid cousin-humping rednecks vote for us?", indeed.

It's not a dry heat.

It's not raining. But it might as well be.

I woke up this morning before sunrise to the weather gnome telling me that it was 80°F out and the dew point was 77°. This would be a dew point described by meteorologists as "Extremely uncomfortable, fairly oppressive," or by laypeople as "I can't breathe! It's like being underwater!" (Above a dew point of 80°F, folks with bad lungs can start croaking.)

And then the sun came up.

This water can all just fall on the ground any old time it likes to, thankyouverymuch.

One-sided matchups of history...

I have a WWII-vintage Italian Carcano carbine. It is equipped with a folding gizmo that can only be called a "bayonet" because it is somewhat pointy and on the opposite end of the gun from the buttplate. Roughly as sturdy as a bent coat hanger and fitted with a hinge wobblier than Noam Chomsky, this device was unlikely to inspire confidence in a hungry and miserably-led Italian draftee huddling at the bottom of a foxhole, knowing that somewhere out there in the desert were Gurkhas.

If there has been a worse mismatch in modern warfare than a company of Gurkhas jumping into a trench full of Italian conscripts in the middle of the Saharan night, I’m not sure what it is. It must’ve been like lobbing a sackful of weasels into a henhouse.

Ground Control to EPA, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong...

So I stopped by the web's premiere source of kittens, butterflies, & sunshine last night to get my daily bowl of cold cheer and was suddenly overcome with a nearly overpowering urge to beat a bureaucrat to the floor with a lead pipe and hit him 'til he stopped whimpering. I mean, an even stronger urge than the one I usually have.

Why, you ask?

Well, let me tell you:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering a crackdown on farm dust...

Wrap your head around that one, if you can.

How do these people think the world works? Wave a wand in DC and reality bends to your will from sea to shining sea? Declare "haud pulvis fiat!" and suddenly Farmer Frank's tractors don't kick up any dust getting the soybean harvest in? Hey, let's get π rounded to 3 while we're at it and watch our students' grades rocket past the rest of the globe because math will be easier!

Gone in Sixty Seconds...

Once upon a time, I used to pay attention to the lists of "most frequently stolen cars", partly because I parked a Porsche on the street in Atlanta every night, but mostly just out of curiosity. Back then, the top four or five invariably contained such unexpected luminaries as the Toyota Camry and the Honda Civic. This is because these cars, being terrifically common, were in demand with chop shops.

So it was kind of a surprise when this latest blurb from the Highway Loss Data Institute wafted over the digital transom. A top 10 full of luxury SUV's? The Infiniti G37 parked at #3? The Nissan Armada? I mean, I can't remember the last time I saw a Nissan Armada.

Did somebody at the AP misread a press release and this is a loss-rate list and not an absolute frequency list? (I mean, if somebody steals one Bugatti Veyron, it'd probably vault to the top of the theft-per-vehicle list...) Or have all the chop shops gone out of business in the last decade?

What am I missing?

My favorite comments today...

Since I hate it if I use a good line at an away game and can't remember where it was later, I'm copying these here...

In response to a post at MattG's, a commenter wrote "Not everywhere is Texas," to which I replied:

Have you ever tried explaining that to a Texan in the Legal section of an internet gun forum?

A post at TJICistan that linked to a brilliant dissection of errors in the movie Agora, drew the response:

(Besides, when I think of Orestes and Cyril and Hypatia, I always think of Florence King’s bodice-ripper The Barbarian Princess… :D )

(Firefox spellchecker is obviously a misogynistic tool of the Christian patriarchy: It knows “Orestes” but not “Hypatia”. :p )

I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

Misread that.

Unc pointed to an article in the UK paper The Sun in which a whole passel of limeys dropped a pantload at the idea of some 'Murrican Bubba posting pictures on the interwebs of his teenage daughters posing with their hunting trophies, including what appears to be a splendid specimen of eland.

Amid the wagging fingers, quivering lips, and general attacks of the vapors was this quote: Should people hunt for sport?

I swear to you, on a stack of copies of The Art Of The Rifle, that I read that at first as Should you hunt people for sport? and the first thought that popped into my head was "Well, that all depends on the people, doesn't it?"

Cybersteampunk.

Super aero LPG-burning steam turbine record-mobile.

My roommate will so squee when she sees this.


(H/T to Insty.)

Everything old is new again...

Indianapolis tears down charging garage for electric automobiles to make room for new urban light rail terminal...

...in 1903.

Back to the Future!

Yes, but how are street-corner apple vendor numbers tracking?

Brian J. Noggle reports on an historic happening in St. Louis County, MO: The assessed value of property in the county has dropped for two years in a row for the first time since 1931-'32.

Meanwhile, SurvivalBlog linked to a story announcing that just across the river in East St. Louis, one of America's premier wretched hives of scum and villainy, they have just laid off 19 police officers, almost 31% of the department's total strength.

Noise in the 'hood.

The big news in Indy this morning is that last night a whole bunch of people were at a birthday party on the near Northwest Side (only a couple miles as the crow flies from model mom Fiona Lee's place) when all of a sudden and for no reason at all that anybody can think of, a "silver Chrysler 300" rolled up and Sumdood leaned out the window and emptied a 30-round magazine from a rifle into the crowd, killing two and wounding six.

I'm going to get some early bets in, here. First, I'm going to go 'way out on a limb and say that the shooter and at least one of the shootees were involved in gangs. Second, I'm going to bet that the shooter, should they ever catch him, will have a pretty impressive rap sheet and shouldn't have been running loose.

Meanwhile, important safety tip: If you get invited to the after-dark outdoor birthday cookout of Ice Dog, the #2 rock salesman from the 16th Street Crips, down in the 'hood, you should RSVP with a polite explanation that you need to visit your ailing mother that night after choir practice, and so you have to regretfully decline.

Attack on the Monon.

There was another attack on the Monon in Broad Ripple.

This time, Seth and Tiffani were walking home along the Monon just north of Kessler at 0100 Monday when Sumdood leapt from the bushes, decked Seth with some brass knucks, and took his wallet and Tiffani's purse.

The trail is closed after sunset.

"We have made our officers aware that the potential exists for problems," said Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department Sgt. Paul Thompson. "We would like to remind people to stay off of the Monon during the hours of darkness."

If we were serious about keeping people off the the Trail when it's closed, what I would do is I would pay somebody to lurk in the bushes during the hours of darkness with some brass knuckles...

Anyhow, it's a good thing guns are illegal on the Trail; somebody might have gotten hurt.

Ultra-clever WECSOG field fix:

From the Wile E. Coyote School Of Gunsmithing: "How to perform an emergency field expedient replacement of an AR-15 extractor spring using a rubber band and a knife."

That's pretty durn clever. Color me impressed. I'd imagine it'd go Tango Uniform in any kind of extended rapid fire, but if you'd suffered a broken extractor spring and were a long walk from a new one, I'd rather have a usable slow-fire carbine rather than a mediocre aluminum club.

Ooh! Ooh! I know the answer to this one!

Robb Allen asks:

What happens to a vampire in a tanning booth?

Well, he flounces off in a sparkly, goth-y sulk because he has to pay the new tanning tax. Duh.

The problem in a nutshell.

Islamic militants riot in Pakistan because British PM Cameron accused Pakistan of coddling Islamic militants.

Okay, then.

If irony were electricity, your TV would have exploded.

From the transcript of "This Week" on ABC yesterday:

PELOSI: ...So what we would like to see is for President Karzai be a more reliable, a stronger partner, ending the corruption, increasing -- improving the governance

AMANPOUR: Blahblahblah

PELOSI: Yakkity-smackity

AMANPOUR: Let's go to something much closer to home right now at the moment and that is the ethics conundrum with Representative Rangel.

...and they didn't cue the laugh track!

I mean, that's comedy gold right there. Sure, her timing was off, because she should have segued to Rangel immediately after Pelosi's comment on "improving the governance" but still, that's as funny as anything ABC's scriptwriters have done in their sitcoms.


(H/T to Freedom Is Mandatory.)

The change it had to come, we knew it all along...

Having come to power in the surge of student dissatisfaction with Lyndon Baines Bush's foreign wars, Barack Milhous Obama is now realizing that he will be keeping the boys over there longer than the voters were initially promised. The State Media Organs must have orders to start spinning a new "Peace With No Honor-Killings" angle to appease the base.

I can see paradise by the Surefire light...

Kevin of Exurbanleague.com took a four-hour low-light shooting course through Defend U.

In addition to valuable shooting skills and hands-on practice, he also acquired at least one totally awesome photo.

From the "I don't get it" files...

I'm still wondering just what kind of a moron steals a suppressor. I mean, a hot can is pure kryptonite. A hot .308 Win can is practically unsalable kryptonite.

It'd be like stealing, say, a garbage truck. Sure, they have a substantial dollar value attached to them, but who's going to buy it? You're going to wind up with something you can't use legitimately and which is only worth a C-note or two on the street, and for that you risk a murder rap with accompanying federal charges. Ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray, if you know what I mean.

Then again, if criminals were smart and possessed good planning skills they wouldn't be criminals, or at least not the kind that run around with guns and Halloween masks, and then lots of cops and lawyers and judges and so forth would be out of a job.

Something's rotten in Denmark.

So, as you have all no doubt heard, the NRA and the gun lobby callously murdered a helpless tot in suburbia again last week.

Well, actually, the tot was more in "urbia" than "suburbia". And the house was full of dope. Which, you know, made the presence of the gun pretty much de facto illegal.

And the tot was the daughter of the mother by a different boyfriend; the four-year-old accused triggerman was the son of the current boyfriend.

The current boyfriend who had allegedly left his very loaded, very large and heavy .45 on the kitchen counter. Which the precocious toddler somehow accessed and manipulated well enough to hit the daughter by another babydaddy right in the noggin. Amazing prowess for a preschooler, there. Must be all that X-Box.

Police say Fiona Lee was showering while her boyfriend, 23-year-old Curtis White, was downstairs with Aunesti, White's son and one other child.

At one point, White's four-year-old son grabbed a loaded handgun off the kitchen counter and fired the shot that hit Aunesti, police say.

Officers say Lee saw the gun should have put it away.

Police are looking for Curtis White, who police say has an extensive criminal record, they say they want to question him.

Yeah. I'd want to question him, too.

The NRA didn't cause this; the NRA works hard to prevent this. Remember kids, Eddie Eagle says "When you see a gun, stop! Don't smoke dope! Don't shoot your girlfriend's child in the head!"