Sometimes I don't know why I even try...

Within arm's reach of where I'm sitting now, there's a Mauser 1910, a Remington 51, a Savage 1910, an H&R Self-Loading Pistol, a Colt M1903 "Pocket Hammerless" (from the second year of production!), and an FN 1922. Not counting the Smith M&P 9 on my hip...

...and I've got some goober on an internet gun forum trying to tell me about the realities of the viability of off-brand semiautomatic pistols in the marketplace.

Sigh.

Hey, didja hear Remington's back in the pistol business again?

Today In History: Won't Take A Hint.

On this day in the Year of the Consulship of Marius and Asinius, 815 ab urbe condita (that's 62 AD for followers of that weird offshoot Jewish cult), the prosperous Campanian city of Pompeii was hammered by an earthquake measuring approximately six on the Richter scale. Compounding the damage from the quake were fires caused by toppled candles and lamps. It was easily the worst disaster to befall the city since it had been hit with landslides a couple hundred years earlier.

Showing no more common sense than your average Los Angeleno, the Pompeiians immediately set about repairing their scenic little town, right there in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. They had it all spruced up again by the Year of the Consulship of Augustus and Vespasianus, as many a tourist can attest.

Overheard at the Grocery Store:

I had a wonderful dream last night that some horrible plague had wiped out 90% of the people on the planet, but when I went to the grocery store today, it was obvious that my dream hadn't come true, because all those people were jamming up the checkout lines halfway down the aisles...

Butcher: "So, who do you think is going to win the game tomorrow?"

Me: "Uh, the team that gets the most baskets?"

The last time I really paid attention to a pro football game, Steve Bartkowski hit Wallis Francis on the numbers in the fourth quarter to stifle the Eagles in the Wild Card game. We were watching it on the TeeWee at my grandparents' house, and I still wasn't old enough to sit at the grownups' table...

(Incidentally, Wallis Francis attended our church when I was growing up, and so I got to hear about how God had taken the Falcons and the point spread, ad nauseum.)

Overheard in the Office:

RX: "Phhtt. Ann Coulter."

Me: "What's she doing now?"

RX: "Defending Romneycare. She just toes the Republican party line."

Me: "Of course she does. She's a Neocon, and I don't mean that in the way it's usually used, which is 'Someone with whom I disagree', but in its original sense, which is 'A big-government Democrat who doesn't like abortion or Muslims'."

RX: "She would approve of aborting Muslims."

I'll bet you he knows how electrical sockets taste.

So I'm watching NatGeo teewee this morning, because it's that, infomercials, Nazi ghosts, Fox & Friends, or Jennifer Granholme's new show. I tried the latter, but when that woman tries to be bubbly and personable for the camera, she falls headfirst into the uncanny valley. I think it's the weird bobbing motion, like she's sitting on one of those little grocery-store coin-operated horsies just beneath the camera's view.

Anyhow, like I said, I'm watching NatGeo. A couple of insane Australians are swimming around catching sea snakes bare-handed. Then one of 'em grabs a stonefish, also bare-handed. You know, a stonefish: the fish with the venom that causes a wound so painful that sting victims beg to have the limb amputated, allegedly even after being morphined to the gills? It gets worse from there:



0:15 Is he standing in the tank with the fish, barefoot?

0:35 For Neptune's sake, man, those are your fingers!

1:05 Wait, and now they're not even wearing gloves in the lab while they poke at the thing! Did you not just hear the narrator and all that "most venomous fish in the world" stuff?

1:35 Oh. My. Gawd. They are squirting streams of neurotoxins all over the room like silly string at a birthday party, and there's not so much a paper mask in sight.

The next segment had them standing waist-deep in water, playing with a box jellyfish while explaining that it was okay to hold the bulbous bell bare-handed, since all the stingers (which can kill you dead in minutes) are in the tentacles.

No wonder they're afraid to let people have guns in Australia! Judging from accumulated video evidence, Aussies have absolutely no sense of self preservation whatsoever.

Archrival storage.

So I'm nosing about the blog's control panel this morning and notice that VFTP has 8,393 posts stretching back over the last six-and-a-half years. That's a lot of writing. And add to that the 116,458 comments... Well, there's a lot there I don't want to lose.

So I need to back it up, which Blogger will do as an .xml file, but that's not permanent enough. I want to find a way to print this thing for archival purposes, at least the posts. (And before you give me any of that multiple redundant backups to the cloud thing, I mean archival, like the Domesday Book, not "archival" like that box of Iomega Zip discs I have upstairs, with Steve Jobs only knows what backed up on them, at least until I consolidate a couple of old Macs into a functioning unit to find out.)

News Flash...

I don't feign concern for the poor, either. Well, unless you count myself; I'm pretty concerned about me, after all.

I don't expect Mitt to be concerned about me, since he doesn't know me from Adam's housecat. Heaven knows I'm not concerned about him. I doubt I've spent a picosecond worrying about the well-being of Mittens over the course of my entire life.

It's the concerned people that I worry about. They're never happy just standing around being concerned; they're always getting all up in your business, trying to "help" and generally only succeeding in screwing things up even worse.

Now that I think about it, it's a little creepy and stalkeriffic when that Harvard lawyer from Hyde Park claims he's concerned about me.

More dentistry yesterday.

Three hours in the chair, only half of them under the drill. They've bumped me up to the grad student floor, which is more expensive, but faster. So Almost-A-Doctor Katie and Almost-A-Doctor Mandy are now assisting Joy, who is driving the drill.

In the same manner that someone who stands seven feet tall has a natural advantage when it comes to being a center in the NBA, Joy has a gift for dentistry in that she is a tiny thing with hands to match. She could be up to her elbows in your mouth and you wouldn't be terribly uncomfortable.

You might be a gun nerd if...

...you call out the brands of holsters on-screen.

There's a reason Galco calls that one model the "Miami Classic", and it still sells today. That's the power of product placement, baby.
.

Boberg update.

I took advantage of the nice weather yesterday to head out to MCF&G and bust a few caps in the early afternoon. Boy am I rusty. I put a hundred rounds through my 22/45 and three mags through the M&P, mostly to make sure I still remembered which end the bullets came out.

I also put a magazine of 147gr Federal Hydrashoks and six magazines of Remington UMC 115gr FMJ through the Boberg. No malfunctions. So that's no malfunctions of any type with any ammunition except those three Speer Lawman rounds that disassembled themselves: Don't use Speer Lawman in the Boberg.

I still can't get over how mild this gun is to shoot. Tiny, lightweight nines tend to be vicious; the Kahr PM-9, for instance, is not the kind of gun with which you'd want to spend an afternoon plinking soda cans, but you could shoot the Boberg all day.

The trigger takes some getting used to for me. All the shooting I do is with single-action or striker-fired type triggers or conventional double-action revolvers. While the Boberg is a true double-action, the trigger feels a lot more like one of those "LDA/LEM"-quasi double action triggers in that there's a long, light takeup that stacks quickly towards the end and then breaks without any real warning.

This little thing is growing on me. It's smaller than the Airweight J-frame in my coat pocket, just as light, and no matter how you slice it, seven rounds of 9x19 beats six of .32 Magnum.

So much for me being Smart.

I took the Smart People test at RWCG. I are not Smart. Especially because my answer to number six ("What's there to do in K-town?") was "Go to a Vols game."


(H/T to Borepatch.)

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n...

Not here. At my roomie's blog, where she shows off another one of those revolvers with cylinders that turn the wrong way. At least this one's in a normal caliber†.

Silly roomie! Everybody knows that Colts are flat and Smiths are round‡!

† This is ironically funny, in that part of the reason she decided it was okay to buy the Colts in .32-20 and .38 S&W was that I assured her I had plenty of each caliber on hand.
‡ This is also ironically funny, given the Smith autochucker on my hip..

Today In History: Trading Up.

On this day in 1327, 14-year-old Edward of Windsor was crowned king of England, replacing his no-count dad, Edward II.

Ed the Deuce had a problem with keeping his trousers up in the presence of handsome, dashing French knights, and was eventually forced to abdicate; according to popular legend, he was eventually disposed of by means of a red-hot poker up the poop chute.

His son, Edward III, seemed interested in French knights, too, judging by his favorite hobby, which was to go over to France and kill them in job lots.

Off the shelf...

Currently, I'm reading White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery And Vengeance in Colonial America. I saw it at McKay's and thought "Friend Jenn would want me to read that," and so I bought it and put it on the To Read pile at home.

What an ugly little war was fought in the backwoods of New England! (And what an ugly little war in command tents, headquarters, state houses, and the editorial pages of nascent American newspapers...)

What's shockingly familiar is the whole "Big Army vs. SpecOps" fight between the established line regiments and the overpaid, underdisciplined colonial rangers, where a private made double the daily wages of his line counterpart, was frequently AWOL, and knew that if he got busted for something, his buddies would take axes to the flogging post. There's even an incident where a garrison commander complains about the attached ranger company's incessant target practice being a waste of ammunition.

If I ever get back up New Hamster way, I've got a new list of places I want to see...

Infranoir.

Occasionally I've noted hits in my site meter coming from the blog Kick Him, Honey, the web digs of writer Benjamin Whitmer.

After a good review of his debut novel, Pike, by friend Marko, I'd been meaning to read it myself, and Sunday noon-ish I Kindled up a copy...

...and didn't put it down 'til I finished that evening, feeling like I'd just taken a good shot to the jaw. Wow.

Was No Country For Old Men too relentlessly cheerful and bubbly for your tastes? Dirty White Boys too morally unambiguous? Then this is your feel-good family hit of the summer, right here.

Words like "bleak" and "gritty" don't really do it justice. At the same time, it is beautifully written and deftly paced. There are times when he paints a picture with words right on you, so real that you want to go and shower it off, but you have to stay and turn the page, as stuck in the story as the characters are in their lives, drawn on by the faint hope that maybe there'll be a happy ending to this mess after all.

Be aware that the book is rated R for... well, pretty much everything for which you can get an R rating.

Buzzkill.

In comments to Marko's post about pedal pubs, Joat linked to an interesting news story:

Almost the instant they stopped at a red light, a crowd of "25 to 40 young African Americans" suddenly materialized and surrounded the pub, as Ranney told police later. The teenagers jumped up on the bar, shaking the whole contraption and screaming indecipherably. Ranney says a couple of the kids tried to grab purses from an overhead storage compartment...

Here's some ofay suburban types looking for a leisurely, if somewhat boozy, tour around their fair city, and instead they get a pedal pub trip through downtown Minneapolis as envisioned by Joseph Conrad, and it's not like they were pedaling through the 'hood, either: Nicolette Mall is right in the commercial heart of downtown, analogous to Circle Centre here in Hoosieropolis.

Look, folks, the whole "social contract/rule of law" thing is based on good citizens receiving a modicum of protection from stuff like this in exchange for not driving the wrong way down the freeway while snorting fat lines of coke off the dashboard and shooting anybody who gives them the finger for it. If you can't deliver the former, where's the margin in refraining from the latter?

Overheard in the Office:

I may have mentioned before that one of the more entertaining parts of my morning is overhearing the rambling chatter that comes out of the shower while my roomie is alone in there with nothing but her inner mental dialogue, which occasionally burbles over into outer mental dialog. For example, this is what just wafted over the metaphorical transom:

RX: "Today on Battle of the Bands, it's The Dave Clark 5 versus SEAL Team 6! Oh, no! Dave is down! It looks like a headshot..."

Oookay, then...
.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

D.W. Drang has a pretty interesting piece mulling the utility of a computers in various disaster preparedness situations.

I agree that a little netbook could come in handy in a lot of scenarios, and the hardened USB thumb-drive is rather clever. I'm wondering if that wouldn't be a good way to store scans of important documents, as well?

Tools required for disassembly...

Colt's little M1903 pocket pistol field-strips pretty easily, no tools required. There's even a handy arrow etched on the slide showing you exactly how far back to withdraw it to take the piece down.

Elbert Searle's Savage pocket pistol is similarly simple, at least as regards field-stripping, while the H&R is a little more complex, requiring a tool like a screwdriver (although the lip of the magazine floorplate is shaped for this) to pop down on the trigger guard while you're holding your mouth just right...



The Remington, on the other hand...

"Don't try taking it apart 'til you come down here," said Gunsmith Bob over the phone, and not in a "Ha-ha, get it? It's complicated," way, but in a "No, really, I'm serious: don't," sort of tone.

See, what you do is you push the muzzle against something hard, causing the slide and barrel to retract a bit and then use a small screwdriver to poke and pry the slide stop out. Then you retract the slide a bit again, by itself this time, and pull forward on the barrel, using the grooved ring.

And then nothing happens. So you pull a little more while holding your mouth different, maybe with your tongue out the corner so the gun knows you're concentrating. And there's a sort of *click* but nothing else. This is the part where the NRA Manual says the slide should come off, so you say "Shannon, what am I doing wrong?" and hand him the gun. Then Shannon, who can crack walnuts without the aid of a nutcracker, tugs at the barrel a bit with no result before hucking it up in the padded jaws of a bench vise...

This is not something you want to be doing around the campfire.

"No wonder it wouldn't come apart," says Shannon, "this thing's drier than a popcorn fart," and hands it to you in two parts, frame and slide. As you examine the underside of the slide, looking at the interplay between the barrel, the moving breechblock, and the very serious-looking recoil spring, wound concentrically around the barrel and of a size and thickness more usually seen pulling screen doors to, the whole assemblage wobbling under very obvious spring tension, Shannon mutters over his shoulder "...and be careful in there, those things'll pinch up a blood blister."

So you decide to just oil it up and reassemble it without further disassembly while listening to Shannon tell about the guy who got the bolt out of his Remington 742 by prying the receiver open until it dropped out the magazine well, and then brought it in to see if it could be fixed.

I'll take it apart next time.

If you want to get smarter...

...on using carbines to mess up people who are trying to hurt you, F2Sconsulting has a class in the NoVA area at the end of February. There may be some spots left. The instructor knows a thing or two about using a carbine...

Wisht I was closer.