Not much science and even less fiction.

Dealing with a bout of insomnia the other night, I lay awake in bed reading a thirty-year-old Pournelle-edited anthology of short stories and essays entitled The Survival of Freedom. Included in the collection is a story written in the late '70s by F. Paul Wilson entitled "Lipidleggin'", in which a dystopian future America has national health care and has banned cholesterol from food; the the story's protagonist is an antique dealer who is now running a profitable sideline in bootleg butter and eggs.

Now I'm living in a future America with national health care, where cities have banned trans-fats, it's against the law for me to throw electronics in the garbage, and people are discussing hoarding and smuggling 100-watt light bulbs.

What a total ripoff. I wanted the future with the flying cars, not the one with telescreens and Room 101.

About last night...

Roomie and Turk had gone out for their New Year's Eve shindig. I was curled up at home on the sofa with a book and nodded off peacefully probably sometime around 11PM...

...when I was awakened from my tranquil slumber at midnight, not only by the expected sounds of fireworks and the rattling noise of gunfire from the 'hood to the south, but also by some truly earth-shaking rumbles of thunder. Ma Nature apparently decided to join the noisemaking at the stroke of the New Year, and when you combined the rumble of thunder with the bang of the mortars and the rattle of the Lorcins, it sounded like a remarkably good war movie soundtrack. Good surround sound; I was impressed.

It's almost not even newsworthy anymore.

A motorist notices a cop car swerving down the road and calls 911, giving them the license number. Supervisors show up at the home of the operating officer, a 15-year veteran by the name of Ron Santa, and give him a breathalyzer... Two years ago, I would have been outraged; now I'm just glad he didn't run over any motorcyclists.

No numbers have been released, but judging from the subsequent actions of the police department, it looks like be blew somewhere between zero-point-DePrez and a full Bisard.

Ah, my fair city sure does have more than its share of red-nosed boys and girls in blue!

In a not-unrelated bit of news, our new county prosecutor, gun-fearing-weenie Terry Curry, was sworn in last night to replace the corrupt and scandal-plagued Carl Brizzi. One of the main planks in Terry's campaign was that he was going to dry out the IMPD with a Twelve Step program, the first step of which would include re-opening the OWI case against David Bisard. Maybe he can put a breathalyzer at Deputy Prosecutor DePrez's desk while he's at it.

Time heals some wounds better than others.

Lunch with friends today at bd's Mongolian Grill, always fun and filling. Spring the extra for the all-you-can-conquer buffet, and if you leave there hungry it's your own fault.

Like many a Mongolian-style restaurant, there's a moderately Genghis-toned theme to the place, leading me to ask my dining companions how many hundreds of years they thought it takes, on average, to make a really extroverted genocidal conqueror into a cute'n'kitschy sales motif. I mean, when are we going to see Wacky Adolf's House of Schnitzel? And can you imagine what the kiddie menu would be like there?

When "should" turns into "must".

With a couple days of above-freezing temperatures and a bit of gentle rain, I can see the lawn (and the street) for the first time in nearly three weeks.

We're scheduled for an unseasonably balmy New Year's Eve before returning to our regularly scheduled winter by Sunday.

That'll mean more opportunities for shoveling snow. Like many cities, Indy has sidewalk-clearing ordinances, although I’ve never heard of them being enforced. Fortunately, I don't have to deal with any petty frozen precipitation tyrants like the one Marko wrote about:

...a perfect example of what happens when a powerful bureaucracy gives a little man a badge, a ticket book, and legal authority to lord it over his fellow citizens. He doesn’t just do his job impartially; he relishes the power he holds, and he looks forward to using that power as often as he can.

I know I shovel our walk (and our neighbor’s) just for the smug sense of superiority it gives me to be one of the first people on the block to have a tidy, well-shoveled sidewalk. (I shovel the neighbor’s because it’s no big deal while I’ve got the shovel out. And she mows our front yard while she’s doing hers.) I can guarantee that if I had to deal with an Inspektor Tankle, my shoveling would be a lot more grudging, and I'd only do the minimum required to avoid the fine, mostly out of sheer cussedness.

This is a splendid example of the joys of government, which will always turn a “you should” into a “you must”.

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on...

Yet another earthquake in Indiana and I didn't feel a thing.

I feel a little cheated, actually. I mean, I don't want to experience an actual, you know, earthquake-type earthquake, but a minor tremblor that didn't actually break anything would be interesting. I mean, you only get to see the planet once, you might as well try and experience the whole show while you're here.

Worth the hassle?

The author of wilsonblog ran into a clerk at Wal-Mart who obviously didn't normally haunt the sporting goods department and was none too pleased to be there, forced to actually touch icky ammunition. She awkwardly went through the whole "pistol or rifle?" cash register script, which Wilson, being quite obviously over 21, had never heard before.

You know, I'm occasionally amazed that any of the big chains even deal in guns and ammunition anymore, given the risk-to-reward ratio. It's one thing for a specialty store that can (at least theoretically) train its employees in the intricacies of federal and state gun laws, but it's another thing for some giant retailer who stands to take a fiscal bath if some kid from the infant sleepwear department gets transferred to sporting goods to cover a vacation shift and makes a mistake. What percentage of a suburban Box-Mart's sales come from ammunition? What percentage of its legal exposure comes from same? It's no wonder that so many have dropped firearms and ammunition sales like a live grenade.

Oh, sure, they make pious noises about it to try and make some PR hay out of what was a calculated business decision, but the fact of the matter is no Mart-Mart chain is as much "anti-gun" as they are "pro-money" and "anti-risk".

There is no word in the German language for "fluffy"...

...and there is no word in Russian for "ergonomics".

In an epiphany that I'm sure will interest about three of my readers, while I was reading a book yesterday, I was looking at a cutaway of the Russian T-34-85 tank and it suddenly hit me that they sat their loader on the right side of the gun's breech. Either they have a lot of left-handed young men in Russia, or the guys that designed them didn't actually spend much time riding around in them...

(For those unaware, the loader's job is to, in a cramped space, pick up a fairly long, bulky, heavy shell, stick the nose of it in the breech, ram it home with one arm, and then quickly get that arm clear of the breech mechanism. Ideally, this would be the stronger and more... er... dexterous of his two arms...)

QotD: ΒΑΚΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!

Jim at The Travis McGee Reader on food prices and possible long lines at the bacon counter:

As bad as 2010 is, next year looks worse for the two basic food groups, i.e., (1) bacon and (2) everything lese.

We need to tap the national strategic pork belly reserves in that salt cave in Louisiana.

Commandos are not exempt.

Posting may be light; Call of Duty: Black Ops just arrived for my Nintendo DS. Looking at the cover illustration on the box, I thought I was seeing a classic video game error before I realized that the gun on the right was an XM-177 and therefore it actually shouldn't have a bayonet lug. Props to Activision for getting that detail right.

I always get a smile when the models in a video game or book cover or advertisement are posing with ban-compliant rifles. I've seen "Rangers" with no bayonet lugs and "SWAT teams" stacked on a door with AR carbines and nary a flash hider in sight.

You'd think in the era of airsoft that this would no longer be a problem.

Well, speaking of airsoft, actually one of the funniest was Dick Marcinko on the cover of Rogue Warrior posing with an "MP5K" that was obviously a Daisy Model 15 airsoft gun, although that may have had something to do with the felony convictions...

Hoosier jihadi?

So they were interviewing one Kathie Smith on local TeeWee this morning. At least I assumed it was her. They said it was, but your average bank robber is more identifiable than someone wearing a burkha.

Anyhow, apparently a video of her had gone viral on the net. Said video has her posing with her husband, Salahudin Ibn Something-or-other, while they wave rifles and yammer on with the usual "Allah this" and "Jihad that" and "Yay, Osama" and praise the freedom fighters for killing the evil American soldiers, and now she's upset because... get this... she's getting death threats on the internets. Imagine.

I'm sure that when she and her snookums were yelling "Jihad" in the video, they meant "Internal spiritual struggle. With AK-47s." She's obviously being persecuted for her Muslim faith; I bet this never happens to Reverend Phelps.

The new iThingy...

The built-in video camera in the G5 iPod Nano has got me wanting to scoop it up and take footage of nearly everything, but that wasn't the feature that most surprised me. No, the feature that most surprised me is this:

Yesterday, when driving home from the grocery store, an orchestral piece came on that I didn't recognize. Engaged in the act of driving, I blindly reached over to the passenger seat and punched the button in the middle of the click wheel to bring up the video display so that I could lift the screen to eye level as soon as I made my next turn, and before I could do so a ghostly voice wafted over the car's speakers, saying "Untitled. Guns and Roses."

Huh! Robbie the Robot will tell me what I'm listening to without me even having to look at the screen. This modern Jetson's world of yours is fascinating!

Ghosts of the past.

I'm busy reading Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe, and in it he describes an interesting archaeological dig.

The Romans patrolled their river frontiers with vessels called lusoriae. A lusoria was like a brown-water patrol boat; a miniature version of the seagoing warships of the period, down to the ram on the prow. In an archaeological dig along the Rhine near what was the Roman town of Civitas Nemetum (modern-day Speyer in Germany) archaeologists came across the wreckage of some Germanic rafts that had apparently been caught by a squadron of lusoriae in the late Third Century while bringing some wagonloads of booty back across the Rhine.

Now, bear in mind that the Rhine river during the first half of the First Millenium was a microcosm of modern globalization: On one side of the river was a wealthy and sophisticated civilization, complete with plumbing, coinage, literature, the rule of law, and what-have-you. On the other side of the river were the have-nots: clans and tribes run by strongmen, whose primary industries were amber, raw materials, slaves, and plots for how to get across the river and get a slice of la dolce vita waiting on the other side.

The booty the archaeologists uncovered contained the contents of a wealthy Roman villa of the late Third Century. And by "the contents", I mean the entire contents: silverware, cooking pots, gardening equipment, the works. Everything but the hinges from the doors.

For some reason, the image that sprang to mind was that of scientists in the year 3700 AD digging up a sand bar on the Rio Grande and uncovering some john boats with the entire contents of a ranch house: Not just the 52" flatscreen TV and the good silverware, but the coffee maker, vacuum cleaner, and the weed-whacker, too...

He's a growing boy.

The way Huck reacts when I open the cabinet with the food in it, you'd think we were starving him to death.

He dashes into the kitchen, then jogs back to the office, weaving between my ankles, hoping I'll trip. As I start pouring the food into the bowl, he will thrust his head forward and start crunching, oblivious to the stream of kibble pouring onto the back of his head and streaming off his ears.

I will then go out into the dining room, where the other food bowl is, and top it up, too. It's usually still more than half full, proof that he wasn't particularly hungry, but as Huck hears the sound of kibble being poured, he comes running out of the office to try and get some of the fresh chow out here. Once I'm done pouring, he's done eating. It's not so much the food he gets excited about, as it is the act of being fed.

He's growing like a weed, and still rangy; he has yet to grow into his snowshoe feet and he's already only a few inches away from being able to grab doorknobs between his paws. I'm afraid I'm going to wake up one morning with him trying to get my head in his mouth so he can drag me up a tree on the Serengeti...

The ingredients of gun school...

In an effort to warm myself up in the depths of winter, here's a photo from a sunny day in August:


That's your three basic ingredients of gun school right there:

1. Sunscreen. This is so you will not be cindered and start sprouting tumors on Day One from being out in the sun all day. Do not say to yourself things like "It's October. What do I need sunscreen for?" When you're standing out in his rays all day, Mr. Sun will burn you as happily in October as he will in July.
2. Water. Lots of water. And drink that stuff. It's hard to learn stuff when you're lying flat on your back, everything's fuzzy around the edges, and everyone's voice sounds like it's echoing down a tunnel. Besides you really can't learn anything when all anybody says to you is "Are you okay? Hello? Quick! Call 911!"
3. Ammo and mags. Lots and lots of ammo and mags. Check with the course requirements or contact the instructor for a recommended minimum. The more mags you bring the less time you'll spend loading, and you'll still spend enough time jamming rounds into mags that your thumb will be sore for a day or two afterward.

I forgot my sunscreen and didn't drink enough water at Blackwater and darned near made a heat casualty out of myself. I didn't get everything I could have out of day three because I was just flat hanging on my chinstrap. Don't be like me. Hydrate and stuff.

Ammunition and mag requirements vary from instructor to instructor, and by the type of class you're taking. At Louis Awerbuck's three-day carbine/pistol course, I burned up something like 450 rounds of carbine ammunition and maybe 200 for the pistol, whereas the 2-day Aim Fast Hit Fast course with Todd Green used up nearly every bit of a thousand rounds of .45ACP.

Magazine requirements are usually more vague, and will vary based on how much time you want to spend stuffing rounds in magazines. Todd helpfully suggests to bring enough magazines to AFHF to allow you to bring fifty rounds up to the firing line. On the other end of the spectrum, I've watched a guy taking Handgun I with only the two mags that came with his Walther PPS. It seems like literally every second he wasn't shooting, he was pulling loose rounds from his pockets and thumbing them into magazines; it's gotta be hard to listen to the instructor when you're doing that.

Synchronicity...

As the car was rolling pleasantly down well-cleared College Avenue, the iPod was playing the dreamy, tranquil title cut from the Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas. Literally just as I turned off onto the side streets near home, just as the slipping and sliding began, the soundtrack switched to Ministry's "You Know What You Are" off The Land of Rape and Honey.

How does it know?

Overheard in the Hallway:

Roomie was in her bedroom getting stuff together for work as I was exiting the bathroom. Huck the cat came trotting down the hall, dragging a pink striped knee sock like a freshly-killed squirrel.

Me: "Uh, you should see what your boy has caught here. And, come to think of it, you probably shouldn't be leaving your makeup all untended on the vanity with him around. I know how you feel about it."

RX: "'Feel about it'?"

Me: "Yeah. That stuff costs money. If Huck were to leap up on the vanity and knock it to the floor, you'd..."

RX: "Be peeved?"

Me: "Well, I was going to say '...lose your $#!+', but the judges say they'll also accept '...be peeved'."

Phoenixes, Helldivers, and Flying Circuses.

On this date in 1922, the Imperial Japanese Navy commissioned the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, the Hōshō. Prior to this, the few carriers in service with other navies had been conversions built on battlecruiser hulls; the Hōshō, which means "flying phoenix", was designed from the keel up as a floating airport.

By the time the Second World War was well and truly under way, the Hōshō was a little long in the tooth; small and cramped for the latest generation of high-performance monoplanes, she carried a squadron of eight obsolescent Yokosuka B4Y biplane bombers into battle near Midway. In the American order of battle at Midway, the star of the show was the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber operating from the famous US Navy flattops. Relegated to the background, on the island of Midway itself were a few of the "Speedy D's" predecessors in the dive bomber role, the Vought SB2U Vindicator.

The Vindicator was an older aircraft, old enough that one of the planes it had competed against in trials was the Curtiss XSBC-3, which was adopted into service as the USN's last combat biplane, the SBC Helldiver. The "Helldiver" name, along with the "Hawk" moniker, was used by Curtiss for a whole range of military biplanes and monoplanes, which they shopped to nations around the world during the Depression years of the Thirties. The SBC's immediate ancestor, the BFC-2, was sold overseas as the "Hawk II".

Fighter-pilot-turned-sycophantic-junkie Hermann Göring allegedly enticed his old Jagdgeschwader 1 squadron-mate Ernst Udet, the highest-scoring WWI German ace after Richthofen, into joining the Nazi party by dangling the purchase of a couple of these hot ships in front of him. One, still in the colors it was wearing when Udet flew it in aerobatics over the 1936 Munich Olympics, was found in a field outside of Kraków. After Udet's suicide, it had become part of Hermann's personal collection, which had been moved to the remote site to escape the Allies' aerial leveling of Berlin. It can now be seen at the Polish Aviation Museum.

Just not getting that 1337 vibe, man...

Apparently Yemen is trying to stand up some elite counterterror units to go after the Al Qa'eda tangos that infest the back country.

The linked article shows a Yemeni troop riding in the back of a DShK-equipped pickup, looking like an extra from Black Hawk Down, and I'm just not getting that whole elite vibe, man. Has there been an Arab army worthy of that designation since... well, the fall of the Umayyid Caliphate? And don't give me Saladin, he was a Kurd.

Twistmas Carols!

Jennifer sings some of the various silly carols folks have been putting on their blogs over the past week!

(I'm one of those people whose singing sounds like a sack of cats being beaten with a tennis racquet, and so people who can really sing always make me feel a little awestruck.)

It is awesome! And I'm not just saying that 'cause one of them is from Bobbi and I...