Because the Internet Likes Dog Pictures...

Neighborhood puppers posing for the Canon EOS 7D & EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS.

The 17-55/2.8 is maybe the best lens Canon ever made for its APS-C sensor cameras.

QotD: Attention Economy Edition...

"Whether something is true—or, again, even plausible—is an afterthought. What matters is what will boost engagement, traffic, eyeballs. It’s the Ka-Ching theory of Truth.

Because truth and falsehood look equal in two-dimensional space, the incentive structure is all screwed up. Repeating boring truths doesn’t pay. Spewing transgressive, shocking, attention-grabbing falsehoods that get people riled up and confirm their angriest or darkest passions is where it’s at." -Jonah Goldberg

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Automotif CDXL...

For a GM product of this vintage north of the Ohio river that appears for all the world to be a daily driver, the fact that this thing's not a rusted out hulk is a wonder.

If I'm reading the tea leaves of the grille inserts correctly, this Light Blue Metallic Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale Brougham coupe is a 1980 model.

The eighth generation of the Oldsmobile 88 ran from the 1977 through the 1985 model years. Sharing the same platform as the Buick LeSabre, Chevy Caprice, and Pontiac Bonneville, it represented the first round of downsizing for General Motors full-size cars, losing eight inches of wheelbase relative to their '71-'76 predecessors. 

The 1980 model year represented the first styling refresh for this generation, and was one of the last model years to feature brand-specific engines, as GM was gradually homogenizing their powertrain lineup. (The first steps in this direction caused a bit of a stink in 1977.)

For the 1980 model year, the base motor was a 110 horsepower Buick 3.8L V6. The next step up was the 260 cubic inch (4.3L) version of the Olds Rocket V8, with 307 cid and 350 cid versions also available. These were rated at 120, 150, and 160 horsepower, respectively. 

Also available as an option was the disastrous Olds 350 diesel V8, which put out 105 SAE net horsepower when you could get it to run at all.

Alas, the 185-horsepower 403 cubic inch 4-barrel Rocket V-8 was discontinued after the '79 model year. It had been a sluggish seller due to fuel economy concerns.

You could get the 1980 Delta 88 models in plain, Royale, and Royale Brougham flavors, with each one having a more deluxe list of features as standard. The Royale Brougham was crowding basic Cadillac models when it came to included features.

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The Political Horseshoe, Autumn 2023

Found here.

It's funny 'cause it's true!

If there's one thing Tik-Tok Democrats and 4chan Republicans can agree on, it's Israel Bad.

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On the Rebound?

Indiana State Fair attendee with a Canon EOS 80D & Tamron 18-400mm zoom lens.

Something I noticed at the State Fair this past summer was that there were a lot more people carrying actual cameras... you know, the kind you hang on a strap around your neck ...than there have been for the last several years. I probably haven't seen this many serious cameras being used in the entire time I've been attending the Fair.

A shutterbug friend attending a Highland Games event out east last month also noticed an unusual number of cameras, real cameras of the interchangeable lens variety, relative to what he'd been used to of late.

Heck, on the random street corner I picked to stake out the Monumental Marathon here in Indy the other day, among the people waving cell phones, was a young shooter with a Canon Rebel T7 and kit lens.

Canon's last consumer DSLR, the Rebel T7. Only 479 clams at BezosMart, with lens!

That got me to wondering why this is, and here’s my theory:

Up through the end of the film era most people had some sort of camera, but unless they had photography as a hobby, it was generally only used to document special occasions: holidays, parties, holiday parties, vacations, sports games or concerts...that sort of thing.

This was because of two things. The first was that each photograph had real physical monetary and time costs, in film and processing and printing. The second was that in order to share those images with anyone, you had to be in the same place with them and get them to look at your physical photo.

That changed with three innovations that became increasingly common toward the end of the Nineties: Digital cameras, the World Wide Web, and broadband connectivity that could transmit images to your screen at something other than a snail's pace. (One of the first web fora on which I was a moderator would close and lock threads once they went over 100 kilobytes in size so that they wouldn't load too slowly for people on dialup connections.)

With the ability to share photos over the internet, the reasons to purchase a digital camera began to multiply. I remember on my first AOL home page what a pain it was to take physical photos and then get my then-roommate to scan them so they could be put online.

The new horizons of eBay and Craigslist gave normal folks who'd never consider photography as a hobby or pastime a reason to buy a digital camera. How are you gonna sell that sofa or old Honda unless you can upload some photos of it?

In fact, the need to sell my old '84 Trans Am was the impetus for the purchase of my own first digicam, a New-Old-Stock Sony Mavica FD-88 in October of 2001. The fact that I could use it to take pictures of S&W revolvers and upload them to internet forums was just a bonus. Ironically, I picked the Mavica not only because it was on sale, but also because it stored photos on floppies. Back then, there was no standard storage medium for cameras: Memory Sticks, SD and CF cards, SmartMedia, xD cards... they were all vying to be The One. I picked the Mavica because computers would always have floppy drives, right? Ell. Oh. Ell.

Over the next few years I upgraded digital cameras twice, first to a Nikon Coolpix 990 in 2003, and then a Kodak EasyShare V1073 in 2008. I was still using the Kodak when I got my first smart phone in 2011, an LG Optimus V, whose 3MP camera was no threat to the supremacy of the EasyShare with its 10MP sensor and sharp Schneider-Kreuznach 3X optical zoom lens.

My next phone with a camera was a Samsung Galaxy SII and, to be perfectly honest, if I hadn't gotten back into photography as a hobby, that's where I would have stopped buying cameras. The Galaxy's camera had an 8MP sensor and turned out perfectly adequate snapshots.

Here's the thing, though: That generation of smart phones... the Galaxy SII and the iPhone 5 ...put perfectly adequate snapshot cameras into the hands of millions of people, some percentage of which eventually wanted more. Being on Instagram or Flickr can expose a person to some pretty cool imagery of the kind that can't exactly be duplicated with a fixed 24mm lens and a 1/2.3" sensor.

Just like back in the film days, some people got their start with a Brownie or an Instamatic and decided that they liked taking pictures and wanted to be able to do more, a certain percentage of folks are using the modern-day equivalent of those ubiquitous snapshot cameras...and deciding that they want more.

Will digicam sales ever return to what they were? No, but only if you count the standalone inexpensive general purpose digicams. People don't need those anymore, because there's already one strapped to their phone.

But cameras for the specialized activity of photography are still with us, and maybe having a bit of a revival. After all, it's never been easier to share your photos than it is right now.

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Automotif CDXXXIX...

Here's a remarkably unscathed '92-'96 Buick LeSabre Custom in Dark Mahogany with all four fake alloy wheel covers matching and intact.

The seventh generation was the second iteration of FWD LeSabres, and the second-to-last one before Buick axed the nameplate after its 46th birthday in 2005.

Powered by the 170bhp pushrod GM 3800 Series I tuned-port injected V6, and sharing a basic platform with the Olds 88 and Pontiac Bonneville, the 1992 LeSabres were a curvy departure from the sharply-creased sixth generation cars.

The Olds 88's and LeSabres of this era have mostly emerged from the garages of Silent Generation and Baby Boomer oldsters and begun their gradual descent into hooptie-dom, but this one's still in Only Driven to Church on Sundays shape.

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QotD: Pot Of Message Edition...

From an article by George Packer at The Atlantic:

"Art that tries to give political satisfaction is unlikely to be very good as either politics or art."

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Message Fic

A critique flung at authors of fiction who get too polemical, first recorded in use against H.G. Wells, is that they'd sold sold their artistic birthright for a pot of message.

There're right ways and wrong ways to write a philosophical tome disguised as a novel. Nobody comes away from, say, Atlas Shrugged thinking "What a great action romance novel, and oh how subtly did she slip her message into the plot!" Instead it feels like you've just been harangued by ol' Strident Ayn for what feels like two thousand pages (which is nonsense, since the Kindle edition is only 1188.)

Meanwhile, ask someone about Starship Troopers and they'll be like "Oh, that Military SciFi novel?" without it crossing their minds that the majority of the book took place in classrooms of one type or another.

Having just re-read 1984 as a followup to reading Julia*, I was struck how much closer Orwell's novel is to Heinlein than Rand in structure. It's tightly written and steps along pretty smartly and in retrospect it's hard to think that maybe as much as half of it takes place either as the main character reading a political treatise or getting interrogated by the Thought Police. (I don't mean to spoiler 1984 for you, there, but yeah, Winston does get busted by the Brain Fuzz and given a cerebral shampoo.)

*What was also neat was realizing how the author of Julia had picked up a few little details from the original book and spun them into much more significant plot points when seen through other characters' eyes. The scene in 1984 where Winston passes the site of a recent rocket bomb attack and kicks a severed hand off the sidewalk into the gutter takes on a whole new tone, for instance.

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A Jog Around the Blogs...

• Now we're cooking with gas... or oil.


• On writing for the pleasure of writing.


• Anatomy of a motorcycle robbery.

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Automotif CDXXXVIII...

Here's a Chrysler LeBaron convertible with an almost miraculous lack of dents and rust.

The V6 badge on the fender combined with the hidden headlamps mark this Flash Red ragtop as a 1990-1992 model.

For '87 and '88, you could get the LeBaron, based on the K-car platform like virtually every other Chrysler product at the time, in coupe or convertible form. The original engine choices were the normally-aspirated SOHC 2.5L Chrysler four-banger, or the 2.5L turbo or intercooled 2.2L Turbo II. 

The former were gutless and the latter two needed to be revved more than the typical Chrysler buyer was likely to do in order to develop any power, to say nothing of the fact that a peaky turbo four and a three-speed automatic transmission go together like chocolate and onions.

So for the 1990 model year Chrysler offered the SOHC 3.0L Mitsubishi 6G72 V-6. While its 141 SAE net horsepower didn't match the 150hp 2.5L Turbo... to say nothing of the 175hp 2.2L Turbo II ...the greater usable torque at suburban cruising speeds more than made up for that for the car's target audience.

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QotD: The Hottest Of Takes Edition...

Alas, it's behind a paywall, but this bit from Nick Catoggio is too good to not pass along:

"In many cultures, holidays are celebrated in tandem, on consecutive days. Halloween is followed by the Day of the Dead; Christmas is followed by Boxing Day; Thanksgiving is followed by Black Friday; New Year’s Eve is followed by, uh, New Year’s Day.

There’s a special pairing for pundits: Election Day is followed by The Feast of Hot Takes.

On The Feast of Hot Takes, you gather piecemeal results spread across different regions from the previous evening and arrange them to form a mosaic that perfectly matches your priors."

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Automotif CDXXXVII...

The Mercury Cougar, over its 35-year run, was the Car of a Thousand Faces.

It started life in 1967 as a more highly-optioned, Euro-feeling Mercury alternative to the original pony car, Ford's Mustang. The Cougar and Mustang shared a platform and bloated right alongside each other until the 1974 model year, by which time the duo had reached almost Torino-esque proportions.

At that point the Mustang got shrunk back to something like its original small sporty coupe size while the Cougar leaned right in to the bloat, becoming a midsize "personal luxury coupe" that shared a chassis with the midsize Ford Torino and Mercury Montego. Now competing with the Olds Cutlass Supreme and Chevy Monte Carlo, the big cat from Mercury added plushness and, well, flab.

For the '77 model year the Cougar was moved to the same platform as the LTD II and Thunderbird. Now there were sedan and wagon versions offered, while the Cougar XR7 coupe was basically a Mercury-badged T-bird.

Downsized in 1980 to use the then-new Fox platform, the fifth generation of Cougar retained the sedan and station wagon versions (based on the Ford Granada) while the two-door XR7 remained a rebadged Thunderbird.

The '83 Cougar finally shed the brand-diluting sedans. It was now only offered as a coupe on the Fox platform, with all-new rounded lines, albeit with a roof-ectomy in order to give it a jarringly vertical "formal" rear window. This was to distinguish it from the cheaper, sportier Thunderbird and spendier, sportier Continental Mark VII, with whom it otherwise shared underpinnings.

The Cougar in the picture is from the penultimate iteration of the nameplate. Based on the new independent rear suspension MN12 platform, which it again shared with the T-bird and Lincoln Mark VIII, the Laser Red 1996 coupe in the photo would have either had the base 145bhp 3.8L pushrod Essex V6 or the 205bhp 4.6L SOHC Modular V8.

After the 1997 model year, the Cougar badge was moved to a little FWD hatchback coupe based on the European Ford Mondeo. It was something of a consolation prize for Mercury, as it was originally going to be the next Ford Probe, but Ford was axing all the coupes from its lineup other than the Mustang and Escort ones.

The Cougar was discontinued after the 2002 model year, followed nine years later by the rest of the Mercury division of FoMoCo.

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Gauging the Pull

Back when I got asked to do my first for-pay gun review I picked up an inexpensive RCBS trigger pull gauge, the spring-loaded kind that's like a fish scale. It read up to eight pounds, and so I'd occasionally have to borrow some calibrated trigger weights if I was testing a pistol or revolver with a double-action trigger...or an unusually crappy single-action one.

A...uh...recent test pistol's trigger made me think that the eight pound scale might not be enough, so I finally broke down and splurged on a modern digital Lyman trigger pull gauge from BezosMart.

It has the advantage of giving output in pounds and ounces, rather than the eighth-of-a-pound hashmarks on the RCBS unit. Further, it can do a string of ten pulls and spit out an average. Handy!

Another bows out...

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina surprised even his campaign staffers last night by announcing that he was suspending his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

With Mike Pence, that makes two big-name Conservative Quixotes who've ridden their Rocinantes back to the barn after failing to dent the populist windmill.

Normally when a candidate exits a campaign there's a flurry of punditry about which of the remaining contenders they'll throw their support behind, but Pence and Scott's poll numbers have been so tepid that there's a distinct lack of speculation as to who they'll ask their twenty or thirty loyal boosters to rally behind.

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Automotif CDXXXVI...

The Eldorado debuted in 1953 as a sporty convertible coupe with show car styling at the pinnacle of Cadillac's lineup.

From then on, it remained as Caddy's sports-luxury coupe, and often debuted new tech for the company. The '53 had been the first Cadillac with a wraparound windshield, and the '67 Eldo was the first front-wheel drive Cad. The '76 Eldorado was the first with the fuel-injected 500, and the last Cadillac convertible until 1984.

The Eldorado in the picture, I think a '95 in Ruby Red, would be from the twelfth… and final …generation of the Eldorado. While the sportier Eldorado Touring Coupes had the 300hp version of the 4.6L 32V DOHC Northstar V8, this base model would have had the lower-revving 275-horse LD8 variation of the Northstar, with better low-RPM torque that didn't require so much pressure on the gas pedal from an orthopedic loafer to summon up. 

While 275 horsepower may not seem like a lot by modern standards, or by those of the ‘60s Muscle Car Era, the LD8 Northstar was a big bump over the ‘93 Eldo’s 4.9L pushrod L26 port fuel-injected V-8 that only put out 200hp.

The Eldorado nameplate went to that Great Country Club Parking Lot in the Sky after the 2002 model year.

Overheard in the Living Room...

Bobbi and I were watching S:2, E:9 of Bosch: Legacy over dinner last night. Right at the end of the episode a heretofore-suspected baddie turns out to in fact be a baddie.

RX: "I knew it! Didn’t I call it?"

Me: "Well, she was Chekov's floozy. There wasn’t much other reason for her to be in the story. But yes, you did call it out right when she first showed up on screen."

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Testing, Testing...

This Avidity Arms PD10, the single-stack 10-shot 9mm specced out by Rob Pincus, just arrived. I'll be wringing it out for a writeup in a forthcoming issue of RECOIL: Concealment.

It's been ten years in the making, so it'll be interesting to see if it lives up to expectations.

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Crazy-Eyed Crossovers...

On the one hand, I lament the ever-dwindling number of really cool sports sedans (as well as the practical disappearance of station wagons, sporty or otherwise) in this, the Age of the Crossover SUV.

On the other hand, there are crossovers and then there are crossovers. Probably my first experience seeing a crossover that really made my eyes cross was back in 2015 when I was visiting Kathy Jackson in Washington state. We were driving up to the Johnston Ridge Observatory overlooking Mount St. Helens and a Porsche Macan S pulled out of the scenic overlook just ahead of us and then proceeded to zip out of sight up the windy mountain road in a very un-trucklike fashion.

Above is a '22-'23 BMW X3 M40i, with a 3.0L DOHC turbo inline six pumping 382bhp to all four tires through an 8-speed auto. Car and Driver says it'll go 0-60 in 4.1 seconds and do the quarter in an eyeball-flattening 12.8 @ 108mph. And it'll circle a skidpad at .88 g's, which is as good as my Z3 2.8 on its best day. The idea of pulling those kind of g's in a station wagon on stilts that weighs most of two and a quarter tons is mind-boggling.

And then there's this Audi SQ5, the grandnephew of that Mount St. Helens Macan. It's a little less hairy than the M'ed-out X, but only a little. 

It's also got a 3.0L turbo six, although its cylinders are arranged in a vee, rather than lined up straight. With 354hp and an 8-spd auto with faux-manual capabilities, it'll tear off 5.1 second 0-60 sprints and 13.7 quarters at 102mph.

What gets me is the braking on the SQ5. It's a 4400-lb truckette and it'll stop from 70 in 148 feet. My Z3 will stop from the same velocity in 171 feet and that feels like you just drove head-on into a sand dune.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The Work-Life Diet. That reminds me of how I lost a ton of weight while working at CCA, between being on my feet all day and only eating anything like supper a couple nights a week.


• Prof. Yamane's book is finished and in the hands of his publisher. Hooray!


• Setting boundaries, big and small. (And enforcing them.)

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QotD: Poly-Ticks Edition...

Bobbi watched most of the GOP debate last night. I'm getting the vibe she's not feeling the Vivekmentum...

"I watched some of the Republican runners-up debate last night, the Island of Misfit Toys, and even in that group, Vivek Ramaswamy stands out as a jerk. Yes, in a profession of largely jerks, in a party that has embraced boorish jerkness, amid a collection of alpha jerks, he was still an outstanding jerk."

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