Don't look down, little goat!

Watching them just chill out halfway up the dam is wild, but there are definitely some high pucker factor moments in there, at least if you're cheering for the goats and not gravity.

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That's certainly very carefully worded.

The WaPo notes this morning:

Which is technically true, I guess, since the African American senator from formerly Confederate South Carolina, Tim Scott, is not a Democrat.

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2020 Strikes From Beyond the Grave

It was a lot easier to hoard ammunition when I didn't shoot as much.

2020 was a slow year, and I still burned up a little over six thousand rounds of my own 9x19mm, not counting the couple of times I was lucky enough to get a class with Other People's Ammunition. These days it's a situation of "Beggars Can't Be Choosers" and so my favorite brand of range ammo has been whatever's in stock. For test guns, I only shoot factory ammo for a number of reasons. If I pull components out of storage and set up the reloading press, it's going to be for recreational use only. Or because zombies are in the wire.

Anyway, this year has seen me buying steel-cased TulAmmo at prices that would have been a little high for premium jacketed hollow points in 2019. I've found myself shooting Scorpio, from the Czech Republic, which is a brand I'd never even heard of in the Before Times. (My friends in the EU assure me it's good stuff and a number said it was their preferred brand of range fodder.) And just before Christmas, on December 20th, I ordered some Sarsilmaz 124gr FMJ from AmmoMart.com at near sixty cents a round.

It shipped from Findlay, Ohio on the 22nd. A couple days after Christmas, I got an email from UPS letting me know that there were weather conditions causing my ground shipment to be delayed in Minneapolis, which seems rather a roundabout way of driving to Indianapolis from north-central Ohio, but okay.

The package finally arrived yesterday morning with a corner of the box stove in. The resulting hole was enough to have let one of the rounds get away, so my 250-round order turned into a 249-round one.

Gotta say I'm not super-impressed with Sarsilmaz's packaging. The material of the boxes is closer to construction paper than cardboard, and the plastic cartridge trays are brittle and flimsy. We'll see how it does when I get to the range with a chrono today or tomorrow.

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Changing of the Guard

The Year of Carrying Double-Action didn't work out the way I wanted it to. Initially I was going to tote the Langdon Beretta for a month or two at the beginning of 2019 while I sorted out which plastic double action I'd finish out the year with. One thing led to another and I wound up toting the LTT for the whole year and doing all my schooling and gaming that year with the Spaghetta. I didn't settle into carrying the Grayguns Sig SP2022 until the start of 2020...and then 2020 happened.

What little gun school I managed to get in this year was incidental to various product launches and therefore used whatever guns were provided there. While I toted the Sig for the whole year, between ammo shortages and 'Rona, it just didn't see much work. After Thanksgiving I just put the SP2022 away and finished out the year carrying a 1911 in a Milt Sparks VM-2, waiting for the calendar page to flip...

And now it's 2021 and time for my next CCW gun project. Like I said, I didn't get to much gun school last year, but what little I did all involved shooting dot-sighted guns. Plus, early last year I wrapped up a 2,000 round test on the FN 509 Compact MRD with the Trijicon SRO. I was intrigued by the little gun, only slightly larger than a Glock 26, but with an optic, a usefully-sized accessory rail, and a 12+1 round capacity (15+1 with the 'stendo).

So the plan is for 2021's carry gun to be the little peanut butter colored FN with a mounted Trijicon SRO and a Streamlight TLR-7. I'm initially carrying it in a Spark holster generously provided by Henry Holsters. For now it's strong-side IWB until I shed the COVID nineteen (probably closer to COVID twenty-five, but the bathroom scale's on the fritz).

Whatever classes I manage to enroll in or matches I manage to shoot this year will be with the little FN. The idea of a subcompact pistol with a reasonable mag capacity and a usefully-bright WML is intriguing. I'm not a believer in the necessity of a WML on a carry gun, but I think they're very useful on a firearm used for home defense. Traditionally, this meant either carrying a bulky light you didn't need, or using separate pistols for carry & home, or mounting and removing a WML on your carry gun every morning and evening...none of which are what I'd call optimal solutions. So this is kind of a workaround for all that, a "have your cake and eat it, too" thing.

We'll see.

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"If Batman did meth..."

Seen on the bookface:

Now I want to write "Trailer Park Bruce Wayne". Instead of a hidden garage in a hillside, the "Bat Cave" is a carport and the Batmobile is concealed under a tarp. Bruce's buddy Al is this guy who rents the spare bedroom and keeps the Batmobile's smoke screen tanks topped off with Winstons and drives down to the Circle K to swap out the propane tanks for the flamethrowers.

It looks like someone was making a Jack Daniels-fueled attempt at cloning the Cooper Markette, although why someone would want to clone a hideous failed Seventies kit car is beyond me. Were the people who laid all that extra fiberglass drunk at the time or what? Notice how the badge on the faux Continental hump doesn't center with the bar in the back window, and the taillights aren't either of them centered?

There was a story from Car and Driver back in the day... 

One of the writers had a Ferrari test car at home, I think it was a 275GTB. One of the magazine's photographers came over and they parked the car in the writer's front yard, pulled out a couple lawn chairs, and spent the afternoon drinking, talking cars, and contemplating the Ferrari from various angles. 

It wasn't until the photographer got the car for the technical three-view photos to publish with the road test that anyone noticed the Scaglietti bodywork was a hot lopsided mess. "Not a square corner or plumb line on the car." 

The writer joked in his review that two pairs of trained eyes had spent an entire afternoon ogling the car without noticing this, so maybe all the asymmetries were intentional, like the Parthenon. 

This is like that, but ugly instead of beautiful.

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Misplaced Childhood

Just watched the last ep of season 2 of The Mandalorian. All the feels. I was laughing and clapping and crying and all that stuff. 

"That was just fan service!" 

"Bitch, this fan's been waiting for that service since 1984." 

I mean, I liked The Force Awakens just fine, since it was basically Star Wars All Over Again, but it was just returning to the well of the original. And the ending of Rogue One had me ooh-ing and ahh-ing and nodding my head at the slickly done symmetry... 

But this? This was just a straight-up tug at my middle school heartstrings.

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An odd request...

Hasn't been much in the way of snow so far this winter, and I'm pretty ambivalent on that. It's pretty, but it can be a pain to shovel and it pretty well grounds the Mustang and at least puts a damper on driving the Bimmer until they have the main roads cleared. I'll slither a couple blocks to College Ave, but driving for a few miles with a wary eye on the traction control is a pain and there's just not enough snow in an Indiana winter to make a dedicated set of winter tires/wheels a worthwhile proposition.

What I am kind of annoyed about is that we haven't gotten any really good sustained cold snaps. The kind where the daily high doesn't get above freezing for a week or so. I'm looking at the ten-day forecast right now and we're going to be a third of the way into January with the daily high temps getting into the mid/high-thirties if all goes as predicted.

The reason I want a good stretch of cold weather is that that's what makes March bearable around here. When you've had some brutal cold spells in January and February, a mid-March day where the temps get up to 34º or 35ºF feels like sunbathing weather by comparison. When it's a couple degrees above freezing you can walk to 20 Tap without feeling like you need an extra undershirt, and stroll to Fresh Market in sneakers rather than winter boots, at least if you've been dealing with really cold temps for the last couple months.

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A recurring theme of late...

From Reason magazine:

"As with far too many public policy disputes (over climate change, criminal justice, health care, etc.), it is not enough to merely observe that the opposing team has different ideas about how best to address a problem. No, the bad guys are either intentionally trying to make things worse or just too blinkered to admit there's a problem in the first place. The more partisan you are, the more likely you feel surrounded by murderers and denialists."

It's a good piece and worth reading. Also, I swear I hadn't read it before tweeting this:

Modern American is all about polarization. Half everyone is wearing masks while riding alone in their Teslas with the HVAC on Recirc while the other half is joining in mass “Lick a doorknob for Trump” rallies.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 2, 2021

When I was a kid, we had Choose Your Own Adventure books, and now we have Choose Your Own Reality. 

Don't like the world you see on regular old network news? Go to Fox News or MSNBC. If you're not getting the same buzz you used to from those outlets, you can always slide over to OANN or FSTV. 

On social media you can surround yourself with like-minded people, in groups where social capital is accrued by one-upping those around you in expressing the group's shared values more stridently than the next guy. If you do bother to take in media from the "other team" or tread in spaces where they congregate, it's not to understand them; instead, it's only a swift dip in and out, to copy/paste something for a fisking in front of your amen chorus, or maybe to count coup in the other side's comment section.

The insidious part is that modern social media, in a never ending quest for "engagement", is designed to foster this. "Oh, you like thus-and-such? Let us show you a bunch more stuff very much like thus-and-such. Just please stay online and clicking."

I have no idea what the end state of this looks like, but I'm not optimistic.

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I can't believe this made it to production.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Caleb Giddings (@radicaleb_)

I get that this is some graphic designer trying to make their hastily-ginned-up social distancing floor marker both racially- and gender-inclusive but, uh, minus several thousand points for not thinking through to the optics of the finished work, dude. 

Your sticker could be used in some alternate-history sci-fi flick where 21st Century South Carolina still has anti-miscegenation laws.

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Ah, the heady optimism of last spring...

"I'll take 'Memes That Aged Poorly' for 400 Alex...er, Ken."https://t.co/xMPMuZJn1j

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 2, 2021

Yum!

Bobbi cooked a corned beef brisket & cabbage, with some taters, onions, and carrots for New Year's Day feasting. We enjoyed the meal while watching the third episode of Season 5 of The Expanse.

Other than that, it was a slow day around Roseholme Cottage. It was icy out when I woke up and stayed overcast all day, although it warmed into the forties in the afternoon and melted off the dusting of snow from yesterday.

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All's Unquiet On New Year's Day

Went out front to pop off some bottle rockets tonight because I wanted to see 2020 off proper-like...

The lack of gypsy fireworks stands in the neighborhood here in the year of the 'Rona meant that the horizon was not as colorful as usual...but it was still very noisy. The decrease in the number of fireworks means that the people cranking off pistols and rifles into the air are much more noticeable.

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Zoom Zoom

So, 'way back in early 1995, I traded a 1979 Datsun 280ZX 2+2 and a thousand bucks for a Guards Red 1987 Porsche 924S. I thought this seemed like a really sweet deal...until I noticed a funny clunking noise from the Porsche's gearbox after a couple days.

See, the clutch on the 924S/944 used elastomer rather than springs to damp the clutch, and they tended to disintegrate the rubber over time. My shiny new Porsche needed a clutch replacement. And because the 924/944 family have a rear-mounted transaxle, this is a more complicated evolution than normal.

I ended up taking the car to a local shop, JMC Racing, that did import street car repairs as a sideline to fund their main work in open-wheel racing.

When I went to go pick the car up, they asked if I wanted to test drive it first. I allowed as how I wasn't qualified to judge if the repair was any good or not, so John McCracken jumped in the driver's seat and gave me a drive around the nighttime back roads of Forsyth County that looked something like this:

I had no idea a 924S could haul ass like that...

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Very Wary

"Oh, thank heavens 2020 is over," we'll say to each other, as we clutch our machetes and stalk giant carnivorous locusts through the radioactive bramble patches of summer 2021...

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 31, 2020

This is only the third worst possible outcome. Second worst, of course, is that at midnight all our devices will automatically tick over to December 32nd.

The worst? Waking up to find the calendar reads "1/1/2020"...

I did not know that...

They're everywhere at this time of year, these bright red leafy flowers. Somehow I'd made it this far in life without noticing that they were spelled "poinsettia", since I'd always heard them pronounced "poyn-SET-uh", which is also apparently a correct pronunciation.

Another thing I didn't know was that the name isn't some derivation of their scientific binomial nomenclature or anything like that, but rather a reference to the man who introduced them to the U.S. from their native home to the south of us. That's right, the first US ambassador to the fledgling Mexican Republic was a former South Carolina Congressman and enthusiastic amateur botanist, one Joel Roberts Poinsett.

His career arc was fascinating, with visits to Moscow, a trip through the Khanate of Kuban all the way to Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea, a bit of derring-do in South America during the War of 1812, and serving as Secretary of War during the Van Buren administration.

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Clone Wars

At some point in my teenage years, I developed something of a crush on the Heckler & Kock MP5K. I mean, the regular MP5 was cool, and so was the integrally-suppressed SD variant, but it was the chopped-down kurz variant with its stubby foregrip that really lit my fuse. I have no idea why. Probably some combination of it looking very cool and being a diminutive fully-automatic machine pistol. Maybe it had good stats in a role-playing game I was into, or something? Anyway...

Owning anything like the real thing is onerous and kinda frivolous. Full-auto ones are stupid expensive and I still have flashbacks about trying to keep our knackered hangar queen of a rental MP5K-PDW running back in my days at Coal Creek Armory.

You can get an old HK SP89 pistol or its newer SP5K replacement, but to make it an authentic-looking MP5K or MP5K-PDW clone would require NFA paperwork. You'd either need to get a tax stamp to add the vertical foregrip, making it an AOW, or a stock and foregrip, making it an SBR. And then you still have a big, clunky semiautomatic 9mm pistol.

So the MP5K is one gun that I tend to be plenty happy with sticking an airsoft copy on the shelf and foregoing buying the real thing.

For that matter, an MP5K copy was my first experience with airsoft, back in the Eighties. At the time, airsoft wasn't really a thing in the US, so Daisy imported a handful of guns, most from Maruzen, and sold them under the "Daisy Softair" label. Their realistic appearance caused a bit of a stink, and so they were only sold for a couple years, '86-'87, before being discontinued, making them kind of collectible now.

The only one not made by Maruzen was the Model 15, an MP5K copy, that was made by Falcon Toy Corporation. Naturally it was my favorite, and I bought one from Service Merchandise back in the day, along with clones of the Intratec KG-9, Luger, and Smith Model 59. Recently I stumbled across one on eBay, and couldn't resist buying back a chunk of my misspent youth.

I'm not super-hip to airsoft terminology, but I believe these would be called spring-powered blowback shell ejectors? To operate them, you'd load the BBs into the plastic dummy shell cases and load those into the magazine. Chambering a round would cock the weapon, and when you fired, the slide or bolt would lock to the rear after ejecting the empty shell.

Modern AEG (airsoft electric gun) MP5K copies tend to have more faithful lines than the old manually-operated Daisy.

On the Model 15, this was done by cycling the vertical foregrip, and this meant there had to be space on the front of the receiver that the original MP5K did not have, giving the Daisy Model 15 a rather...er, distinctive appearance.

"Hey, that gun looks familiar..."

Produced for the US market, the Model 15 was careful to avoid any references to H&K, who are fiercely protective of their branding and trade dress. The Tokyo Marui AEG in the photo above was a gray market import from Hong Kong back in '02 or '03 and all HK markings are carefully covered up to avoid imperial entanglements. Nowadays, of course, you can get a licensed high-quality full auto electric MP5K clone straight from Amazon without having to worry that customs is going to jack up your transpacific shipment.

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Sometimes a picture is worth several thousand words

While writing to Slate's parenting advice column on the topic of practical firearms safety would seem to make about as much sense as writing to Soldier of Fortune for advice on potty-training or getting your toddler to eat broccoli, someone apparently has done just that.

Actually, they don't want gun safety advice, they just want some validation and asspats for ruining family gatherings with their anti-gun outbursts, and I guess Slate seemed like a good place to go for some of that.

"My brother and I both work in law enforcement and have service weapons. I lock mine up when I’m at home. My brother has taken to carrying his all the time, including around his small children in his home. I’ve had to refuse him entry to my home due to his unwillingness to come without it..."

The stock photo Slate used for the column was, um...illustrative of how much weight I'm going to give their advice.

A Springfield XD with a Hogue Handall (for bonus points, positioned too low, since it has to clear the grip safety, thereby forcing the shooter's pinkie into the worst possible place!) in a Serpa on a department store belt not designed to support a gun and improperly sized for the loops. It's like a layer cake of fail. A failcake, if you will.

"You wanna know how I know not to take anything you say seriously?"

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I'll second that.

Bobbi just recommended watching Counterpart, and I have to second that. 

It's a little bit sci-fi, a little bit Cold War spy drama, a little bit police procedural, a little bit corporate machiavellian infighting, with enough shoot-em-up and gun fu sprinkled through here and there to keep it action-y. Lots of guns, lots of tradecraft.

And the acting, cinematography, and writing is superb. This is one of those shows that was too smart for its own good, literally.

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Deflecting...

Louis Awerbuck had an interesting "final exam" for his firearms classes, a time pressure enhanced shooting drill on a target he called his "South African Computer" (Louis was a vocally proud Luddite).

Louis dispensing wisdom, this time on mechanical offset.

Said target consisted of a clothed torso mannequin target, surrounded by several other clothed torso mannequin targets, all of which were on hinged, pivoting arms so that Louis could control their bobbing gyrations by tugging on lines. Students went through this in pairs and, at the "go" signal, there was a very limited amount of time for one student to step off at an angle and the other to stay on the start line, and one or the other to neutralize the moving "Bad Guy" in the middle of the bobbing, weaving crowd of "No Shoot" targets with a single shot.

During that first handgun class back in 2009, one of the students took their shot, the baseball cap on the "Bad Guy" went flying, and the range was called cold. On going downrange, the head of the "Bad Guy" target was unmarred, although when the baseball cap was picked up off the berm, there was a distinct divot in the bill of the cap from the student's .45ACP pistol bullet.

"Heeer's a cloo for you," said Louis in his broad accent, and proceeded to relate the tale of the same sort of incident...in a shotgun class...with a 12ga slug.

Yes, the brim of a ball cap can divert a 12ga slug or a .45ACP pistol bullet enough to turn a hit into a miss.

A twig...or a furring strip...can do the same with a rifle bullet.

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One Night in Lexington

Bobbi was watching The Queen's Gambit last night and I remarked on how a particular scene seemed a subtle nod to Murray Head's "One Night in Bangkok" and it turned out she wasn't familiar with the tune...

Incidentally, the Wikipedia article for the musical Chess is practically an event horizon for any number of hours-long wikiwanders on topics ranging from chess to musical theater to Eighties pop rock to Cold War nuclear strategy. Click at your own risk.

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