Movies From Inside the Bubble

Pauline Kael Syndrome strikes again: "But everyone *I* know would love to see a political thriller about gun control!" https://t.co/eMCOltFRtv

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 13, 2016

"Why won't you ignorant cousin-humping rednecks vote for us?" The Motion Picture

And nothing else big opened this past weekend and it still couldn't draw a crowd. This coming weekend the box office is going to get hit by Rogue One like a tricycle getting hit by a semi, while art house viewers (the Right Sort of Smart People most likely to want to see this movie) will have the Must See La La Land and Manchester by the Sea, all of which means that Miss Sloane is going to sink without a ripple.

Day Forty-Three:

Awakened before the alarm by roommate bustling about and Huck beating on Rannie in hopes of being fed. Should have just got out of bed then, but tried to sleep through 'til the alarm went off at 0600.

Got out of bed, found that the Clean Long-Sleeved Shirt situation was grimmer than expected, as was today's weather forecast. Wore the shell jacket and Asolos and took the ten pound pack. Legs are on fire between the weather and the boots on concrete. Next paycheck that shows up in the mailbox, I'm buying some walking shoes.

1.02 miles in 19:15 at an average heart rate of 133bpm.

Sale...

Amazon has their Echo Dot on sale for $39.99 again. If you were wanting to try a voice-controlled doodad in your house to see if it's useful for you, it's almost a no-brainer at that price, especially if you're already an Amazon Prime member.
.

Sorry.

Bobbi's had to work the weird shift the last couple days, and that's resulted in the usual time displacement. I stayed up last night until after her alarm clock went off and had some of the "breakfast" she started cooking at a little after midnight.

This means that by the time I finished eating and headed to bed, it was about half past one in the morning, and Huck started his "feed me!" shenanigans shortly after five. I locked him out of the room when it got too annoying, dozed until the alarm went off at six, fed the cats, and tried to get some more sleep.

It was not really to be, and so I dragged myself out of bed at close to ten AM, got dressed, donned the backpack with the 10# kettlebell in it, and went for my morning walk. 1.02 miles in 18:38.

I got home from my walk, gathered stuff, and headed over to the range to start a new project.

There was a bottle of Snake Oil Prime on my desk, so that's what I used to lube up this brand new, unfired Gen4 Glock 19...

I'll be doing the 2,000 round thing with it, starting this morning.
.

Friday Morning Shooting...

Took a couple of test guns to Indy Arms Co. on Friday morning. One is nearing the end of its testing and the other is still in early days.

East Bloc primers are always a good test of how robust the ignition is on a striker-fired gun. The Wolf Polyformance caused some issues in the Honor Guard 9.

The Ruger American Compact went through fifty rounds of the Winchester Q4318 124gr NATO ammo without any malfunctions.

I found a tiny torx wrench to tighten the front sight on the Honor Guard 9. It held through the fifty rounds of Wolf Polyformance 115gr. Four rounds took two strikes to ignite, one took three, and one took four. All fed, extracted, and ejected properly.

If you can't answer the question, make up a question you can.

Jesus, Priebus just thoroughly beclowned himself on MTP. I haven't seen a horror show like that since Pelosi got shoved in front of the cameras to take a stammering fall for the farcical Obamacare rollout.

Here's video:


I don't even like Priebus and I felt kinda bad for him, there.

On a side note, that's two RNC chairs in a row that you watch on TV and think "How did this midwit paper-shuffler wind up with the chairmanship of one of the nation's two major political parties? This guy doesn't have the suave command presence of the night shift assistant manager of the grocery store I worked at in high school."

I don't know exactly how the party's inner workings function, but I do know that most organizations favor the ability to rules-lawyer over any other form of competence, and it would not surprise me if both Priebus and Steele were excellent rules lawyers. Steele also seems a gregarious and likable sort, at least superficially, and those guys tend to do well until they Peter Principle themselves, which he clearly did.

Incidentally, I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I think every adult ought to spend some time in a parliamentary-type body, on a board, or some other similar situation. Get involved in your neighborhood organization or the board of your local gun club or something like that for a year or two. I think this is especially valuable for the more anarcho-aspie among us. 

Day Forty-One:

Bobbi's working the weird shift. Got to bed around midnight-ish. Huck's frantic food cravings started around 0510, and resulted in him attacking Rannie every five minutes. Rannie was trying to sleep curled up against my legs. Shut Huck out of room @ 0540. Stressed-out Rannie promptly threw up.

Fed cats at 0600, laid in bed til 0700 watching local news, and then slept 'til 0900 when I woke up, got dressed, and did my three laps in the Adidas snow boots and winter coat. The snow that was happening barely rated the descriptor "flurry", and there wasn't any on the ground to speak of.

1.00 miles in 18:39 at an average heart rate of 126bpm.

Saturday

From a conversation elsewhere...

"I love the way people get so invested in internet arguments. Is he still at it? What a way to spend a Saturday. You get 3,640-ish Saturdays in your life, and a certain number at either end are spent gurgling nonsense and shitting yourself. Why would you waste one of the good ones in the middle arguing with a perfect stranger on the internet?"

Lessons from ECQC...

I've been to classes before that really changed my shooting. I'd say that the first Aim Fast, Hit Fast class with ToddG and last year's Advanced Tactical Pistol Skills class with Ernest Langdon were pivotal moments in my skill with shooting a handgun.

ECQC changed my life.

For instance, since ECQC I've finally started practicing something I'd long preached and began carrying a can of Fox Labs OC around with me. It's become more important to me to have a solid middle ground option between "harsh language" and "bust a cap in someone's ass".

It's made me think a lot more about deescalation, how persistence does not automatically equal threat, that presenting a weapon (or even revealing its presence) without the space or time to employ it correctly can cause a lot more problems than it solves. Letting a guy who's within a dozen feet of you know you have a gun doesn't necessarily deter him; it just lets him know you have a gun. It's up to him whether that's a deterrent or not.

Physical fitness has become more important to me, too. All tangled up under someone who's beating your ass and about to pull your gun out and shoot you with it isn't the time to find out you're completely out of breath, too.

That gets me out the door every morning, and I'd about ready to look into adding some simple calisthenics to what's already become a routine mile walk. Baby steps, but I'm already healthier now than I've been in years.

Lots and lots more in this vein, but I just wanted to dash some thoughts off this morning.
.

It must be masochism...

I had a 200-round pack of Winchester USA .380 ammunition lying around and before I could think better of it, loaded it into my range bag to take to Indy Arms Co. to fire the Bodyguard 380 and Ruger LCP II head to head again...

...this time firing a hundred rounds through each gun in one sitting. It was easier with the BG380, since I had seven magazines for it, while I only had the two mags for the Elsie Pea Too. Further, because they hadn't gotten any LCP II magazines in yet at IAC, the second magazine is an original LCP magazine. The two are supposedly interchangeable, with the only real difference being that the original LCP mags won't lock the LCP II's slide open on the last round.

It turns out there was another difference...

Apparently there's just enough difference in the geometry of the follower or feed lips that the 95gr round-nose flat point FMJ rounds would stall out on the feed ramp in a classic failure-to-feed. This happened with the second and third rounds in the LCP mag twice before I realized what was causing it, and so for the rest of the range session I loaded the LCP II mag with the full six rounds and only four in the LCP magazine and the problem never reoccured.

I've been using that magazine for hundreds of rounds of other ammunition and never noticed it, so it's obviously some combination of cartridge overall length and bullet profile that triggers it.

The Bodyguard 380 had a failure to extract on round #26 of the day (#1,429 through the gun). I will note that, while the gun has needed to have the trigger pulled twice to set off some primers (9 out of 100 times on this trip), this is the first FTF or FTE to occur in almost a case and a half of ammo. To say that this exceeded my expectations for an inexpensive plastic pocket pistol with a MIM barrel is an understatement.

The Ruger experienced the aforementioned four Failures-to-Feed, although I wouldn't necessarily count them against the gun, due to the fact that they occurred with a magazine that is not even really for this pistol. There were also four instances of failures to return to battery, on round #20, #55, #91, and #99 of the day (#816, #851, #887, #895 of the test.)

At this point, I am going to give the LCP II at least a cursory cleaning and lubrication. Pocket pistols are not designed with the sort of rigors in mind that service pistols are. It's interesting though, because running bone dry is something a pocket pistol is very likely to have to do. There are literally hundreds of thousands of LCPs in the pockets, purses, and sock drawers of America, coated in dust bunnies, that haven't been lubricated (or fired) in months or even years.

For the LCP II, this makes 896 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with twelve failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245, #600, #628, #630, #697, #704, #816, #851, #887, #895) and one failure to feed (#540), plus four failures-to-feed-with-an-asterisk out of the LCP magazine (#798, #799, #809, #810). 1,104 rounds to go.
.

Torque monster

A diesel engine with ladders in the crank case so you can go inspect the innards. Each cylinder has a bore a little over three feet and a stroke of, like, eight and a half feet. Being that undersquare, you know it's got a low redline...

Housekeeping...

Doing a little straightening up around the house yesterday, I came across a balled-up plastic grocery sack that clanked when I picked it up. "Was ist los?" I wondered, and dumped it out to find a few Bodyguard 380 magazines and a complete BG380 top end with XS Big Dot sights that Marko had given me on one of my visits up there.

So, hey, here's a chance to put the gun together and see how it runs heads-up against the LCP II, heir apparent to the previous sales champ of this class of pistol. So I grabbed a box each of Armscor FMJ and Speer Gold Dots (courtesy of Lucky Gunner) and headed for the range.

When we left off the BG380 test at 1,335 rounds, it was having light strike issues. Since then, it had fired three magazines of the Armscor in an attempt to track down why that ammo was giving the P250 fits.

In firing 25 rounds of Armscor, the Bodyguard experienced four light strikes. All four popped with a second pull of the (true Double-Action Only) trigger. The 25 rounds of Gold Dots, with their softer CCI primers, went off without a hitch. Even after 1,405 rounds, the trigger pull remains too heavy for my RCBS fish scale to measure, since it only reads to eight pounds.

The Ruger's trigger, on the other hand, breaks at 4.5# now on the same scale. It fired all fifty rounds without any malfunctions of any kind to report.

The difference between the sights on the guns was night and day, pun only moderately intended. While I'm not a huge fan of the XS Big Dots, since there are much better high-visibility solutions on the market now, they were still perfectly adequate for dropping in solid hits at five yards. The sights on the Elsie Pea Too, while an improvement over the ones on the original, are still kinda small, and were lost against the all-black target in a black-on-black-on-black muddle.

For the LCP II, this makes 796 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated with eight failures to return to battery (#128, #158, #245, #600, #628, #630, #697, #704) and one failure to feed (#540). 1,204 rounds to go.
.

Meta.

My head snapped upright from dozing at my desk. I was sitting in front of my computer in the dining area of the apartment. It was December. Everybody was still in a tizzy from the recent election and had been internetting furiously about it.

I started to turn my chair around to face Marko's desk and say "Dude, I have had the freakiest, most detailed dream about the next sixteen years. You will not believe..."

And then I woke up in my bed here this morning.

That was just some freaky Inception-type stuff right there. I was disoriented for the first fifteen or twenty minutes out of bed, that dream felt so real.
.

Day Thirty-Eight:

Woke up five minutes before the alarm. Got out of bed and did not wait for alarm. Loitered watching local TV news to see if it would get warmer. Time/temperature reading in the corner of the screen dropped from 24°F to 21°F during that time.

Ate slice of bacon and downed small can of Spicy Hot V8 and headed out. Swaddled my noggin in the shemagh John Shirley brought me from A'stan. Shit got anaerobic pretty quick with mouth and nose covered in shemagh, so I risked nose/lip frostbite for the final two laps and contended myself with keeping my ears warm.

1.00 miles in 17:20 at an average heart rate of 133bpm.

Tuesday morning at the range...

So, like I wrote in the previous post, I decided to bring the Sistema along to the range on a lark. I had work to do putting rounds through the Mk.IV, and I figured why not see if the Sistema would run? So I grabbed a couple 1911 magazines from my Box o' 1911 Stuff...

...and forgot them on the kitchen counter.

When I got to Indy Arms Co., I asked if I could borrow the magazine from the rental 1911.

It turned out to be a tired factory Metalform whose feed lips were so badly spread that if more than five rounds were loaded, you couldn't get it into the Sistema's magwell.

Still, it managed to fire ten rounds without any malfunctions, even with the godawful mag. ("You guys need to pull a 47D off the shelf for that rental gun, dudes; this thing's shot," I informed them on returning it.)

I need to get some sights on that gun and Cerakote it.

The Loctite has cured the sight screw problems on the Mark IV, and there were no issues in the hundred rounds of mixed .22LR I fired yesterday.

The gun now has 1,100 rounds through it with one failure to eject (#714).
.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #153...

The Sistema project gun I pretty much abandoned ten years ago. I decided on a whim yesterday to take it with me to the range...
.

Time flies like an arrow.

My beloved Z3 is as old now as a '68 Charger was my senior year in high school.
I am not sure how I feel about this.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 7, 2016

December 7th, seventy-five years ago...

From conversation elsewhere, an observation...

"The percentage of people doing special snowflake Open Carry march RKBA cosplay who sport special snowflake "Look how different & unique I am!" guns is telling.

 I pity the unit armorers for the 165th Mom's Basement Ranger Battalion; keeping all those Tavor and Kel-Tec and aftermarket Mosin replacement parts in stock come the revolution is going to be a bitch."

Yeah, I'm feeling more than just a little catty this morning.

I'm sore and grumpy from my walk. I need to look into some nice, cushion-y specialized walking shoes if I'm going to be pounding out my walks on pavement. Keep the shin with the steel in it from hurting so much. Spread the wear from my fave pair of wintertime Asolos, too.

Overheard in the Office...

Me: "I'll tell you what, it doesn't take long with a voice controlled appliance that you start resenting ones that aren't voice-controlled."

I mean, to change channels on the television I have to find the remote control and mash buttons like some primitive savage with a bone in my nose.
.