Guns on a train!

I cannot believe the hysterical mouth noises being made by the pro-Victim Disarmament crowd about the whole firearms-on-Amtrak thing.

I mean dig this ABC headline:

New law allows travelers to bring guns with them on Amtrak train

The article goes on to use the phrase "carrying guns on trains", even though the regulations specifically forbid, you know, "carrying guns on trains", and are actually stricter than the ones that apply to flying with firearms. Having just flown with guns in my luggage, I can assure you that the only person who "carried guns" on that plane was the ramp rat at the top of the luggage conveyor belt.

As an added special bonus, a lawyer sucking at the teat of all that sweet Joyce Foundation cash working for the Brady Center to Criminalize Effective Self-Defense goes for the Big Lie:

"You don't go through metal detectors or security to get on the train. This allows anyone who can have a gun to bring it onto the train."

No, you thimble-headed gherkin, it is still just as illegal to carry the gun on the train as it was last week, when apparently the lack of metal detectors wasn't a problem for you at all. (And even if someone did bring a gun on board, what would they do? Wave it around and yell "Take this train to Havana!"?)

If at first you don't succeed, lie, lie again.

Jonesing.

If I don't get that M&P15-22 to the range this weekend, I'm gonna be pretty torqued off about it.

Seriously. I am jonesing to shoot that thing in the worst possible way.

I can see the music!

Alarm clocks are not meant to go off at 0600 Monday through Wednesday, 0500 on Thursday, and then 02frickin'00 on Friday and Saturday. I'm just sayin'...

I mean, I guess I should be happy, since it gives me a chance to be productive during hours I might have otherwise wasted doing something useless, like getting a good night's sleep. The problem is that by sunrise, I'm hearing music that isn't there and holding long conversations with the cat.

By the way, does anybody else get that thing with the music in a quiet house? Like when it's totally silent around the house and you're home alone and not even the HVAC is running, your brain interprets some low noise at the threshold of hearing as music you can't quite hear? And why does mine always interpret it as big band music? I don't even especially like big band music...

Obviously there aren't enough seagoing ninjas.

I'm reading Dangerous Waters, a very interesting book on the modern scourge of piracy. The author, after getting boarded and robbed on his sailboat by M16-wielding goons in the Straits of Malacca back in '92, set out to investigate pirates and their effect on oceangoing commerce. He interviewed survivors of pirate attacks, talked to prevention and recovery specialists, rode along on tankers and patrol boats. It's just a fascinating in-depth look at the whole thing.

It also ties neatly into this post by Billy, since the author pointed out that Russian and Israeli flagged vessels aren't often 'jacked.

The solutions, (which aren't going to be implemented until something truly horrible happens), are more active defense of commercial vessels combined with the kind of aggressive patrolling by the world's major navies that drove piracy almost to extinction by the 19th Century.

Thave Ferrith!

Folks, thank you so, so, so much for... er... chipping in, as it were, on the tooth thing.

I have been to Dentist A, and the prognosis given was grim. I'm on antibiotics and a special mouth rinse, and will be going to a Dentist B in the first part of next week, just because a second opinion is always a good thing.

Confuselated.

This is that one week a month where they mess with my roomie's schedule at work. Which meant the alarm clocks all went off here at Roseholme Cottage an hour earlier than usual yesterday and today they went off at 0200. Which means I am really, really disoriented.

Bobbi wrote a completely inoffensive generic holiday carol.

Meanwhile, my brain keeps singing "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head", except with the lyrics re-written to be about zombies:

Buckshot keeps mowing down the zeds.
But all the streets are still full of the walking dead
They're all moaning "Brains!", but
I'm never gonna save my brain by complaining...

I have no idea where this came from.

Hey, that's kinda cool...

Via a post at SayUncle's yesterday, I found out about a webzine called Girl's Guide To Guns.

I'm actually kinda surprised that they didn't have a link to Cornered Cat...

I feel fluffy.

Brian J. Noggle reviews the meaningless energy ratings on a dishwasher:

Estimated costs based on four loads a week. Hey, we eat 3 meals a day here, cook them, and sometimes bake with them. What kind of family does four loads a week of dishes, really? Some fluffy yuppie couple in the city with a standard-sized restaurant dishwasher?

Well, I'm not notably fluffy unless I'm wearing a wooby, and I haven't been accused of yuppiness since I sold the Porsche some thirteen years back (and to be fair, daily bathing probably qualified one for "yuppie" status in the eyes of my accuser...) but four loads a week sounds about right for Roseholme Cottage, which is occupied by only two adults, one of whom eats her lunches elsewhere and the other of whom is kind of hit-or-miss on the whole concept of "breakfast".

When Shootin' Buddy and I visited his friends in Chicago, I was amazed by their humongous and awesome dishwasher, (and it takes a pretty much NASA-grade appliance for me to work up much enthusiasm at all), but it wasn't 'til helping clear the table that I realized the need for it: Add three kids to the family dining roster and the only days that dishwasher isn't going to get a workout are the ones where the family's off to Disney World...

Stunning allegations!

Among other shocking WikiLeaks allegations:

...U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates... is quoted telling his French counterpart that "Russian democracy has disappeared and the government was an oligarchy run by the security services."

This is my shocked face.

Seriously, that's like using a secure channel to tell someone that you think water might be wet.

The really amusing part is that Putin responded with some petulant "I know you are, but what am I?" nonsense. I mean, everybody knows Putin's a crook, but I'd always figured he'd be better than that at pulling a poker face.

...and the Winter comes down like thunder outer Wisconsin 'crost the bay.

Winter dragged its feet this year.

Indian Summer lingered a bit, and then the weather got all indecisive and coy, like maybe it wanted to be cold and maybe it didn't...

...and then *BAM!* we went from daily highs that were five to ten degrees above average to a pretty fair dusting of snow on the ground and the prospect of not seeing the far side of forty degrees for more than a week. (40°F being the average December high around here.) It's like November took so long getting here that we've just decided to give it a miss and skip ahead to January.

The government creates jobs!

Well, one job, at least.

That's right, some guy has come up with a service to let people comply with the FTC's stupid new blogger regulations while staying inside the constraints of a 140-character Tweet.

See? Between this guy and all the people working three shifts at Porn-O-Scan Inc. to fill orders for airports, we'll be back to sub-five-percent unemployment in no time!

Broken.

So, Monday morning started out well. Cold, but sunny.

I went to Half-Price Books, and then headed back into Broad Ripple for a leisurely lunch at the Indian buffet...

...where I broke a tooth. Not just any tooth, either; snapped an incisor off, right top front and center.

I spent Monday evening and all yesterday in bed, curled into a fetal ball. I have neither the time, money, nor willpower to deal with this right now.

Just not feelin' it today.

Maybe later.
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If you go far enough that way, you can see the back of Alex Jones' head...

Hang out on various internet gun forums, go to gun shows, or spend any time on sites variously described as "conservative" or "libertarian" or what-have-you, and you'll eventually encounter some pretty kooky conspiracy theories. And I don't even necessarily mean kookiness about lizard people and secret FEMA guillotines, just people seeing patterns where there probably aren't any.

It's good to be reminded every now and then that there are folks politically opposite me who are equally susceptible, like this guy, who thinks that the whole outrage at TSA probulations is secretly funded and organized by shadowy right-wing organizations who want to privatize the TSA and keep it from unionizing... He gets bonus points for somehow tying it to Eric Prince and Blackwater, too!

It's another reminder that the political spectrum isn't a line so much as a circle, and no matter which direction you head from 12 o'clock, you eventually wind up on the bottom by the hatch where the cuckoos pop out.

The universe is massively unfair.

There is a long list of celebrities I wake up every morning hoping to hear have shuffled off their mortal coils.

Unfortunately, Leslie Nielsen is not among them.

Paging Charles Darwin...

Via Handgun Podcast, my attention was drawn to this fifty-five seconds of epic fail.

I was going to try to catalog everything wrong with it, from the total absence of trigger finger or muzzle discipline, to the lack of eye and ear protection, to the goobers repeating nonsense about the SKS being banned by the "Geneva Convention", but I ran out of room. Instead, I figured I'd write down everything they did right, and here's what I came up with: Nothing.

That kind of stupid should be painful, and often is, at least briefly...

Same, but Different.

Jay G put up a viddie of one of his favorite tunes.

I like that song, too. Sort of.

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Fountain Heads.

I don't think I will ever fully grok the fountain pen aficionado.

I mean, generally when I want to write something down, I want to do so with as little screwing around as possible: 1) Grab nearest writing stick. 2) Make marks on paper. 3) Done.

My roommate, on the other hand, is presently over at her desk engaged in a process full of splashing and clicking noises, somewhere between a Japanese tea ceremony and adjusting the SU carburettors on a British roadster. To get a pen writing. And she seems happy as a clam about it.

Just like last Christmas...

...I'll probably be doing most of gift shopping at Brownells.

It's handy that most folks I know can use stuff from there, because I like the lack of checkout lines and parking lots and so forth...

Priorities...

As usual, the TeeWee cut on to the local news this morning, in time for me to see a picture of some fire blurrily raging in what appeared to be a foreign land; the shot then cut to a picture of a US supercarrier, as the voiceover said something along the lines of

"As the Koreas continue to clash, China gets involved. But first, the scores from the weekend's high school football championships and this week's weather..."

Okay, can I make a couple requests?

1. Don't show quick jump-cut juxtapositions of fire, an American CVN battlegroup, and say the word "China" before my eyes have focused in the morning, okay? Please? It makes me jittery.
2. While I'm sure there are people that think the state AAA football championships are more important than a potential shooting war, I'll bet if you took a poll you'd find that... wait, scratch that. Just go back to request #1 and leave it at that.