Snow? I wish...

One thing that I thought I was getting away from by moving to far-off frozen cold north yankee land was that perennial wintertime peril of Appalachia, the ice storm. Surely up here it would be cold enough during the winter months for precipitation to fall as good, honest snow.

Unfortunately, it appears that the same weather system that is set to dump a cheerful, fluffy foot-and-a-half of snowman ore on Mordor and points east along the Great Lakes is going to leave Greater Indianapolis coated in an inch or so of tree-toppling, powerline-dropping ice. We are not amused.

I'm off to the grocery store to stock up on French toast fixins.

Helping the cause.

Oleg suggests taking that ten or twenty bucks you were going to spend on your next box of ammunition and donating it to support ongoing 2nd Amendment litigation. Not a bad idea, really.
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It's getting positively Rawlesian over there...

With the civil unrest still going strong in Egypt after almost a week and the police having largely abandoned the streets, private militias have taken to guarding neighborhoods, gated communities are manning checkpoints and barricades, and food is running out with deliveries disrupted by rioting and curfews.

Meanwhile, before everybody goes patting themselves on the back over this big victory for freedom and democracy, let's remember what happened last time we saw this movie: Dithering jelly-spined US president who speaks in platitudes, tottering aged strongman, rowdy mobs demanding democracy, global economy in the toilet... All we're missing is the angry-looking fundamentalist exile with the beard and the turban, and it's time to break out the old ELO albums and dust off Kramer vs. Kramer on Betamax, 'cause it's 1979 all over again.

Asked and answered...

"In what situation do you think you would need a 30 bullet magazine clip?"

Oh, I don't know... You tell me.

The picture of the three young Egyptian men standing watch in front of their block while armed with nowt but rakes and broom handles is especially significant to me since, being a slightly-gimpy, middle-aged woman, I'm just not really Bruce Lee with a stick, you know? It would certainly not be my preferred instrument for keeping a mob off my lawn.

Of course, there hasn't been a riot involving water cannons and dogs and armored vehicles and tear gas within fifteen blocks of this house since 1995, so obviously it can't happen here...

Mea culpa.

Sorry for the lack of posting Saturday, but yesterday was Internets Sabbatical Day for me.

I have to confess that I have not been making use of my Happy Sunshine UV Lamp like I should have been, and as a result the level of depression and lethargy I've been suffering of late has been hovering somewhere between "crushing" and "clinical".

Yesterday I tried to spend some time outside, and this morning I washed my multivitamin down with V8 and clicked on the synthetic sunshine; this funk has got to lift, because whimpering under a blanket is no way to spend your afternoons.

For my younger readers...

I bought my first gun in nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-six, so I understand that if you only came into the shooting hobby in the last six years, the following might sound a little weird...

I was a casual gun owner and occasional shooter up until the time I got my first job at a gun store some seven years later, about the time the Brady Bill became law. When the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (better known as the "Assault Weapons Ban") passed, I picked up a couple of extra magazines for my Glock 23 and SIG P-228, the only firearms I owned that would be affected. Conversely, I remember ordering a whole case of Ram-Line 10/22 mags for a customer who had a Ruger with an auto-sear in it. I thought he was being paranoid.

Boy, was I un-psychic...

Since then, my interests and preferences have shifted. These days my primary handgun doesn't hold over ten rounds, and the only weapons I own that do are various AR-platform carbines. But every time I go to a gun show, I buy at least one 1911 or AR mag. Any time I'm in a gun store and see that they have cheap ex-GI M16 magazines in their "Used Stuff" box, I pick one up. I keep replacement magazine springs and followers in my spare parts box. When I made my order from Brownells earlier in the week, I made a point of having them toss a carbine mag and a pistol mag in the box. Sure, maybe I seem as kooky as your great-grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and hoarded rubber bands and string until the day they died, but what's a little cheap insurance?

Magazines in self-loading firearms are wear items.

Q: How many mags should you have?
A: More.

QotD: The king's shilling edition...

"Once legalized theft begins, it pays for everyone to participate. Those who don't will be losers." -Walter Williams

You want the deficit reduced. You want budgets brought under control. You want your federal, state, and local governments to live within their means... but you sure don't want your government paycheck/subsidy/benefits slashed! Take the money from the other guy, I perform a vital service! They promised me that! I already paid in, and I just want what's rightly mine!

Here we all are, sitting around the cannibal pot.


(H/T to Gunrights4Us.)

Physical jerks.

Indiana is implementing a comprehensive plan to get Hoosiers in shape. No surprise, much of it has to do with eating better and getting more exercise.

How about implementing a comprehensive plan to mind your own business, there, sport?
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Mmmm...

Brigid brought over some cookies for my birthday the other day. One thing and another intervening, the ziploc baggie with the cookies in it sat atop the microwave 'til yesterday morning, when I pulled one lonely cookie out and brought it into the office to nibble while typing.

As soon as I finished it, I went back into the kitchen and got all the rest of the cookies out of the bag and carried them back in a double handful and devoured them, too, except for one, which I will make heroic efforts to not eat until lunchtime today. I'm not sure what the primary ingredient was, but I'm thinking it may have been crack cocaine or something with similarly addictive powers, because I want that cookie the way the white rat in that experiment wanted to push the little red bar.

Facebook for nothin' and your 'net for free...

The tizzy some folks are getting into over finding that their "likes" on Facebook are being turned into what is, in effect, on-the-fly ad copy is amusing.

What did you think was going to pay for this futuristic new way to stay in touch with your friends and family, to keep everyone you know updated on your every meal and movie and micturition? Did you think some kind philanthropist had donated the code and the server space and the bandwidth out of the kindness of his heart?

Here's an important tip: If you want to keep something private, don't write about it on somebody else's hard drive!

How quickly it all becomes an entitlement!

Well wishes appreciated.

For those that hadn't noticed, my roomie is blogging from waiting room of the hospital where her mom is undergoing heart surgery.

Fingers crossed while the docs work their voodoo.

UPDATE: Thank you everybody. Everything went well, or at least as well as these kinds of things go. Roomie is now home and napping, and I'm going to do likewise, because I'm tired to the point where the curtains look like they're moving when I know they're not.

They only ever play the one note, and it's sounding ♭.

So some guy named Thomas Hardy is out of prison on parole, gets picked up on theft charges, is released on bond(!), and then gets pulled over while driving a hot car and shoots the officer in the face. The police officer subsequently dies of his wounds and the finger-pointing in the halls of government has barely gotten started.

Meanwhile, the local professional hand-wringers are blaming the gun, of course. I guess the pistol must have messed up the Department of Corrections computers before secreting itself in the goblin's pocket...

Fuzzy around the edges.

I tried to set the internal alarm clock last night (that's where you drink a big, tall glass of water right before bed) but it backfired on me and I woke up at 0200 or so and couldn't get back to sleep until 4:30... just in time for the actual alarms to go off at 5AM.

Went downtown and had breakfast with Shootin' Buddy and now I'm home and feeling the effects of sleep dep. I can see the music. At least today's posts will be interesting to come back and read later...

The little engine that couldn't.

Apparently "high speed rail" is the new shibboleth.

The whole issue makes otherwise smart people say dumb things, like Jonah Goldberg, who tweeted last night:

"I hear the Roman Empire kicked ass because of high speed rail."

which wasn't maybe the best analogy, since "Via Appia" is how you say "Shinkansen" in Latin, and it sure wasn't private enterprise that laid that roadbed...

Anyhow, fast choo-choo trains are currently high on the SWPL list because foreigners have them, especially cool foreigners like the Japanese and the French, and who doesn't want to be more like a foreigner? They have exotic-sounding accents and know more about sushi and wine than we do!

Meanwhile, to prove that you are a libertarian or conservative, you have to hatehatehate fast choo-choo trains right down to the very marrow of your bones, since the only obvious use for high speed rail is to lose money while towing cattle cars to the concentration camps at face-distorting accelerations.

Me? I have no strong opinions one way or another on choo-choo trains, whatever their speed. If someone wants to build a railroad and drive their trains really fast on it, more power to them. If they have reasonable rates and are going somewhere I want to go and they promise to treat me like a paying customer or even just a dignified human being and not like livestock or an airline passenger, I might even purchase their services.

But I don't see where it's any of the Federal government's business how fast choo-choo trains go, or even whether or not we have them at all.

Something I don't understand...

At some point in American history, the first clause of Section 3 of our CEO's job description,

"He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient..."

came to be interpreted as "Our Dear Leader shall, once per year, commandeer all our airwaves so that He might make the Divine Will known to us all. And then all the networks shall read the entrails of a goat. And there will be much rejoicing."

Thomas Jefferson, lor' bless him, thought that having the prez stand up and declaim in front of Congress was a bit too Ave, Caesar! for our young republic, and so he established the tradition of sending the annual report over to Congress in written form, the same way that I.N.C., Inc. lets shareholders know how things are going every year.

Then Woodrow Wilson, never one to miss a chance for a bit of public demagoguery, preferably draped in bunting, revived the practice of entering the House chamber in pomp and circumstance and laying down the law in person. With few exceptions, such as Silent Cal, the addresses have been public spectacles* ever since.

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*Chastened by his recent drubbing at the polls, Jimmy Carter, a humble man with a great deal to be humble about, sent in a written outgoing address in '81, but it's been Speeches From The Throne from then on.

More violent rhetoric...

Via CNN:

President Obama is planning to mention the Tucson shooting tragedy near the top of his State of the Union Address Tuesday in order to press members of Congress to "lower your tone and raise your sights"...

Haven't we had enough violent firearms analogies in political speech lately, Mr. President?

Oh, and what happened in Arizona wasn't a "tragedy"; it was an "outrage". There's a difference.

Last batch of SHOT vids...

Kyle Lamb of Viking Tactics apparently has a new book coming out on pistol fighting, called Stay In The Fight. I very much liked his earlier book, Green Eyes and Black Rifles, and so I'm looking forward to this one.

This is cool: Primary Weapons Systems T3 Summit toggle-action rimfire rifle. Oh, and a long-stroke gas-piston AR carbine.

Does it make me a big ol' pretentious elitist...

...if I was overwhelmed with a feeling of smug superiority for not having the foggiest notion of who this "Snooki" person was until I clicked on Marko's link?

If someone had made me guess, I probably would have gone for "Pop or R&B singer"...

(The Amazon "reviews" at Marko's link, by the way, should only be read if you are someplace you won't get fired for sudden gasping shrieks of laughter.)

I don't like guns in pockets...

...which is odd, considering that I usually have one in mine.

It's just the handiest place for me to keep a backup, and in wintertime, a J-frame in an outside coat pocket is quicker to access than the pistol on my belt, buried as it is under a parka and a fleece pullover.

Some people carry in a pocket for dress code reasons, and for them, there is the Executive holster from The Holster Site. Unc, who helped inspire the design, reviews it for Shooting Illustrated here.

The best line in the article?

"This would clear out a slot in the holster drawer and reduce the number of times I handled a loaded firearm."

Emphasis mine, because I can't tell you how warm and happy it makes me feel inside when people say that.

:(

No blog for you. You come back later.
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