Overheard in the Office...

Me: "Oh, man... This is just my jam." 

RX: "What is?" 

Me: "This. 'Parked Cars Under Streetlamps in 1970s New York City'. This is cool. I'd love to do this." 

RX: "You could do this. You'd just have to go to New York City..." 

Me: "And come up with a time machine!" 

RX: "Oh, it's New York City; surely somebody there has a time machine!"

Some people's kids, I swear...

What kind of nasty-ass sonofabitch does this? I'm normally not in favor of starting unnecessary confrontations in public, but it turns out I have a line, and this dude's on the wrong side of it. https://t.co/o7PiAYCqpS

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 1, 2020

Do you want to get pepper sprayed in Fresh Thyme? Because this is how you get pepper sprayed in Fresh Thyme.
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Random Numbers "Rannie" Wu, 9/11/2001-2/29/2020

Originally, Marko and I were just stopping at Pet Smart to pick up supplies for Mittens, but we stopped and looked at the little play pens full of adoptable kittens, and one little calico with a collar around her neck that read "Mary" decided that my hand would be a great thing to fight.

She came home with me that day.

She buzzed around that apartment like a calico tennis ball with a slightly bent pipe cleaner sticking straight up in the air. She never really befriended Mittens, but they tolerated each other.

At first she resented being dragged from The Only Home in Knoxville to Indianapolis, but she came to terms with it. She went from being standoffish toward Bobbi to sitting next to her on the futon and cuddling a little to, here in the last year or so, preferring to sleep nights curled up in the crook of her arm.

Over the last year, the progression of chronic kidney disease, bane of elderly cats, started catching up with her. She'd get dehydrated, nauseous, and stop eating. She'd be taken to the vet and be given subcutaneous fluids and a vitamin shot and it would perk her up to where she'd be acting like her normal self again, but the episodes kept coming closer together. First in January of last year, then again in July, then again in October, January again, and finally this month. She was always a good patient and the vet techs fussed over her and praised her for being a trooper.

This time around she couldn't shake it off and I just couldn't bring myself to force her to fight anymore. She stopped eating days ago, and started refusing water yesterday morning. It was time.

Good bye, little Miss Rannie. You were a very good cat for a very long time. I choose to believe that there's some place for good little cats with plenty of slow mice, lots of toys to sing to, and no annoying bigger cats to pester them.

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Huit Chevaux

Citroen announced a cute little almost-a-car electric runabout, a sort of 21st Century 2CV successor. Supposedly it's going to retail for under seven grand, and because of its low horsepower and maximum speed, it'll be treated like a scooter in several Euro countries.

It's unbearably twee and would make an awesome around-Broad Ripple inclement weather grocery fetcher.
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Not feeling it today.

Normally, subcutaneous fluids, a vitamin B shot, and antibiotics perk Rannie back up, but that hasn't happened this time, and I'm afraid I'm not dealing with it very well.

Posting will likely be light for a bit.
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If you like your alternate history, you can keep your alternate history!

Blah blah, universal healthcare but if you like your insurance you can keep your insurance blah something end the divisiveness yadda yadda move forward...

*record scratch noise*

What did he just say? That he led NYFC through 9/11?

Dude, you can't even remember when you got elected mayor and you want to be president?

If you like your alternate history, you can keep your alternate history!
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That word again...

loophole

loop·​hole | \ ˈlüp-ˌhōl \
plural loopholes
n.
1 : Something legal and normal that the speaker doesn’t like.
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Sniper no sniping!

Stayed up too late watching the first third or so of Battle for Sevastopal last night. It's modern propaganda (intended to generate good feelings between Russia and Ukraine because "Hey, tovarisch, remember when we shot all those Nazis together? Good times, eh? Why do we fight now?") and it's based on a star of WWII Soviet propaganda, but it's a good enough movie that I don't mind.

Overheard in the Dining Room...

I'm not wearing a seatbelt because when Western Civilization crashes, I'm hoping to be thrown clear.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) February 26, 2020

Jraphical Image Format

Although Jif is obviously pronounced with a "soft G," people often mispronounce the word "GIF," which is short for Graphics Interchange Format. It's said with a "soft G like the peanut butter and not a "hard G." That's according to creator Steve Wilhite, who made the declaration in 2013 while accepting a Webby Award.

Poor guy. Imagine being wrong about the pronunciation of your own creation.
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Watching the Wu

View this post on Instagram

Miss Rannie Wu got subcutaneous fluids, a vitamin B shot, and was sent home with a fresh antibiotics scrip and an appointment for next week. 🤞🏻🐱 #poorkitty #catsofinstagram

A post shared by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Feb 25, 2020 at 8:16am PST

Poor Miss Random Numbers J. Wu is, according to the chart the vet had taped inside a cabinet door in the exam room this morning, the equivalent of 92 years old in people years. Here at Roseholme Cottage, the practice is to assign birthdays to cats that both fit the rough time when they were born (if unknown) and which match their personality. Huck, for example, gets his birthday feted on Independence Day, because he moved in in December/January as an already large and rangy kitten.

Miss Wu came home in November of 2001, a buzzing calico tennis ball with a vertical pipe cleaner of a tail. She only ever reached the most casual of detentes with Mittens (and the war was back on if Mittens left the house for an hour to go to the vet).

Because Rannie was adopted in November of 2001 as a very young kitten and we needed an "anchor date" for her birthday, the feted date is on 9/11, which is not inappropriate for a cat who is sometimes the four-legged equivalent of Wednesday Addams...

Just a Shoplifter

I'll occasionally run into people who think that carrying a gun somehow empowers them to be...I don't know, society's hall monitor or something. Like they feel that, now that they have this ability to defend themselves if need be, they're free to go inserting themselves into situations that are none of their business.

This occasionally manifests in the toter deciding to get involved in a shoplifting incident, which rarely turns out well for the gun carrier. You don't get to skin your smokewagon on fleeing shoplifters.

What those folks don't seem to be considering is that sometimes a shoplifter is more than ready to shoot back.
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Lost in the Woods

A Steller sea lion was found wandering in the woods, miles away from the nearest body of water big enough for it to swim in. Apparently it had gone for a bit of a flopabout on the beach and taken several wrong turns, each one getting it farther and farther away from the river.



You can tell it was a sea lion and not a sea lioness because it never stopped and asked for directions.
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This guy gets it...

Chris over at Lucky Gunner groks the purpose of gel testing, and what it does and doesn't tell us:

"I’ve said it before, but keep in mind that 12 to 18 inches of penetration in gelatin is not the equivalent of 12 to 18 inches in living tissue. The gel is a consistent test medium that lets us compare one bullet to another. Historically, bullets that penetrate at least 12 inches in gel have a higher success rate in the real world than those that don’t. Service caliber bullets that go past 18 inches might over penetrate. With a .32 ACP, that’s not as likely."

I will add only that the correlation is higher in regular 10% ordnance gelatin than it is in synthetic gelatin; in synthetic gel, bullets don't expand quite as well and therefore tend to penetrate more*, and this effect increases with the velocity of the bullet to the point that with rifle bullets there's next thing to zero correlation. This is a gross rule of thumb and you can get answers as to the why of it in the math-y posts of a thread at p-f, like this one.

(This is why I personally like to see something more like thirteen to slightly greater than sixteen inches in synthetic gel. My idea of an ideal synthetic gel performance, going off the bullets with good real world and ordnance gel performance, would be getting found, fully mushroomed, in the denim layer on the far side of a 16" block, or maybe an inch or so into the catch block if there's no denim on the far side.)


*Also, this difference between synthetic and ordnance gel is why trying to interpret yaw cycles or temporary cavities from synthetic stuff is bordering on tea leaf reading.

"Paradise"

It's basically Denmark with palm trees and life rafts made out of 1958 Edselshttps://t.co/abbcaf7Fra

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 24, 2020

When people risk their lives in shark-infested waters to leave your "paradise", it doesn't make it sound very paradisical.
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And So It Goes

Twenty years ago on internet gun forums, before 9/11 and the GWOT, before Bravo Company and Daniel Defense and Noveske, before everybody and their brother made an entry-level AR for six bills or less...well, most of us knew nothing about AR-15s.

You think it's derpy out there now with "jUsT aS gOoD aS" and "wOrKs fOr mE"? Well, it was like that pretty much everywhere in the Before Times. Even the smart people who knew a lot about the AR family of weapons didn't know as much back then as they do now because, frankly, we've learned a lot over nearly two decades of endless war.

Anyway, back then when J. Random Newb showed up on a gun forum asking about AR-15s, the advice he'd be given, in between AK shooters saying dumb stuff about "poops where it eats" and he-man M1A fans crowing about "poodleshooters", would be to "stick to the ABC's". In this case "ABC" meant Armalite, Bushmaster, and Colt. Sometimes a "D" was added for DPMS.

The middle one was mine, early '03. Derpeste. ("Derpeste" is like "namaste". It means "The derp in me recognizes and acknowledges the derp in you.")

I guess Armalite's still in business, or at least their website is up this morning, but I haven't really checked in a few years. Colt is still thrashing around, stubbornly refusing to let the bubbles stop. Bushmaster and DPMS got swallowed by Cerbe...Freedom Gro...Remington Outdoors and were quietly shuttered recently, and I'm not surprised. I literally can't remember the last time someone I personally know bought a "Bushhamster" or a "DerPMS", as they're sometimes derisively referred to by AR snobs.

They suffered from being priced almost as high as an actual Colt while having a rep for occasionally indifferent QC that made the extra cost over an entry-level Smith or Ruger hard to justify. That, and half everybody builds rather than buying whole these days. If I'm going to shell out for a complete gun, it's going to be the aforementioned Colt, or a Bravo Company or DD. ("But Tam!" says the informed consumer, "The AR business is so incestuous that most of those manufacturers are drawing parts from the same pool!" This is true, but the BC or DD rifle will be properly assembled and checked. If I wanted to roll the dice on needing to finish the assembly at home, I'd buy PSA and be happy. I've done it before.)

Although there's one side effect of Remington closing down some of their tacticool labels that I hadn't anticipated. Tapco is one of the brands that made the go-aways, and apparently they are...or, were, I guess...one of the only sources of reliable aftermarket Mini-14 magazines. Not doing a lot of A-Team cosplay, I was unaware of this fact. But if it means never having to see an SKS in a janky pinned "folding" stock or hear Cletus talk about how he made his WASR into a "Dragon-off", it's a small price to pay.


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Did you know there's no entry in the dictionary for "credulous"?

New Jovian Thunderbolt almost got me with this one. I actually commented, but part of my comment was to go see if Maxine Waters had been elected to congress before I started working in gun stores (she had, by two years. One of us has been working one gig for too long.) Then I wondered why the tweet was just a copied screencap image, a .jpeg rather than a link to the actual tweet or, even better, an archive.is link. (ARCHIVE EVERYTHING, PEOPLE! Embarrassed people delete embarrassing things.)

Then came a hot minute of more checking ("Why doesn't Maxine have a blue checkmark?") which showed that quote is bullshit.

You've been weaponized.

But doesn't it make you feel good to know your foes are so dumb and prove you so right? Give you that little dopamine hit? Mm-mmm... that feels good.


ETA: If you just want to get your dander up at Maxine, you could go straight to the horse's mouth and get plenty of idiotic quotes.
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Ugly Duckling

Watching that episode of Danger Man with Bobbi the other night, I had my belief reinforced that the English only make two kinds of aircraft: gorgeous ones and ones that should only fly under a brown paper bag.

Toward the end of the episode there was a smallish, twin-engine, tricycle gear aircraft that featured the same trim, vertically-oriented engine nacelles as the Dragon Rapide (one of the most attractive airliners ever).

That was all it shared with the Dragon Rapide, though, because the slab-sided hydrocephalic fuselage looked like it had fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Guessing from the engine nacelles that it, too, was a de Havilland, I looked on Wikipedia and sure enough, it was a de Havilland Dove, the more modern, and uglier, replacement for the Dragon Rapide.
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From an Away Game...

"Incidentally, the prevalence of portajohns at ranges is the biggest argument against carrying baller custom 1911s.

If I drop a Glock or an M&P in the shitter, then f$&k it. I'm pulling a fresh one out of the range bag and the honey wagon driver can have himself a new gun if he wants it. I'm not dyeing my hands blue for $400.

If I drop a $3500+ custom blaster in there, however, I gotta glove up."

Space Oddity

If Nikon's Pronea 6i looked like a prototype of the future consumer-grade DSLR and Canon's EOS IX looked like a Nineties sci-fi movie prop, Minolta's Vectis S-1 looked like...well, it looks normal now. If I'm walking around with the Hasselblad Lunar or the Fuji X-E1, someone inevitably asks "Oh, is that a film camera?" Despite it actually being a film camera, it's unlikely anyone will ask that about the Vectis.

It looks pretty much like a generic digital MILC or Bridge Camera from about ten years ago, not a film camera from 1996.

The lens this one shipped with was Minolta's V-mount "travel zoom". At first blush 25-150mm sounds like a super useful focal length range, but remember that shooting in "H" mode with APS film results in a crop factor of approximately 1.25X, so you have a field of view equivalent to about a 31-180ish lens.

It's a slow lens, too. Maximum aperture at the wide end is only f/4.5, and that falls off pretty quickly as you dial in the zoom and past about 55mm you're looking at a maximum aperture of f/6. The lens is also unusual in having no provision for manual focusing. Shooting the Vectis S-1 is a reminder that autofocus was still fairly new in 1996. It hunts a bit and is slow to focus; the 25-150mm is no sports lens, but that's okay, considering the camera's motor drive might deliver a single frame every second. It may look more modern than the EOS IX or the Pronea, but shooting it is a trip back in time.

The test roll, which is at Roberts now, was Fuji 100 that came in a sleeve of five, and the seller claimed had been cold stored. I manually set the ISO to 64 to compensate for the age of the film and, combined with the pig-slow apertures, exposure times on a sunny day were getting slower than 1/90th any time a small cloud crossed the sun. This camera, of course, predates any kind of stabilization in the lens...

Despite the off-center viewfinder, this is an actual single lens reflex camera, it just uses a rather more exotic arrangement of mirrors than the usual pentaprism or pentamirror. Despite that, the finder is crazy bright and features about 98% coverage, at a time when a Canon EOS Rebel gave you a dim 90% finder.

The film loads in that little trap door on the side of the camera. You press the blue "eject" button and the camera sort of whirs and chortles to itself for a second and then pops the hatch open to receive film. (It came with a manual so I need to read what you do if the two CR2 batteries give up the ghost while you have film in the camera...)

The thumb wheel will alter the aperture if you're shooting in aperture priority, shutter speed if you're shooting in shutter priority, and if you want to shoot in full stick-shift mode, the thumb wheel controls shutter speed unless you hold down the exposure compensation button while spinning it, and then it changes the aperture and leaves you longing for the dual control wheels on Nikon's Pronea 6i.

Minolta rated the camera as "splashproof" but I have yet to risk my $20 investment by splashing anything on it.

When it launched, it was not $20, but closer to $300. This was half the price of the Nikon and a third the cost of Canon's stainless EOS IX, which was so expensive it was only on the market for two years before being yanked in favor of something dumber and plastickier.

Minolta's V-series lenses are currently completely useless without a Vectis. There's no point in making adaptors for them because even the ones with "manual" focus use a focus-by-wire ring and the lens needs to be communicating with the camera for this to function. (Minolta and Nikon were the only ones to make APS-specific lenses, although Nikon's used the company's standard F-mount. Minolta engineered an entirely new mount for the Vectis...and collapsed and was absorbed by Sony in seven years. "Vectis wrecked us.")
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