Super New

The more mature a technology is, the harder it is to release a really jaw-dropping product:

So even if the engineers manage to improve an already near-perfect model, the new camera will not really be all that different.

That is exactly what happened in case of the Nikon D6: Like the D5, it still is a lighting-fast camera, it still has incredible high ISO performance and it still is indestructible. On top of that, the autofocus was improved significantly, but no one really took note of that, as the D5 was already practically infallible.

It is important to understand that major breakthroughs in physical engineering are far less likely to happen and if they do happen, they often go relatively unnoticed.

Always keep the Pareto-principle in mind: An improvement of 20% requires 80% of total development resources and is neither needed nor noticed by 80% of all users.

Meme Dump...

A penny saved is a pain in the ass.

People save pennies, but don't spend them. They pile up in coffee cans and pickle jars around the country and once in a blue moon someone gets arsed to roll all theirs and take them to the bank, or go dump the jar in a CoinStar machine.

So the government has to keep minting a jillion of the things so that retailers can make change for every purchase which totals up to a number that doesn't end in a 0 or 5. It costs three cents to make a penny. We're flushing money down the toilet and we've known it for almost my entire life.

But when it comes time to get serious about eliminating the penny, the legislature and the Treasury Department, and the general public make like that Spiderman meme.

The one thing I do know is that there's a particular flavor of conservative who absolutely lose their tiny little minds anytime you change anything about the money.

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Automotif DXLI...

I've been trying to get a shot of this mirror-wrapped Maserati Ghibli fo-evah, and finally got some good ones.

Automotif DXL...

1970 was a watershed year for Buick's Electra model. It was the last year of the third generation of the model, which had launched as a '65. Further, it was the final appearance of an Electra convertible in showrooms.

It was the first year of Buick's newest iteration of its big block V-8, the 455, created by boring out the older Buick 430 V-8. It was also the last year of high-compression motors under the hood of Electras. The 455 in this Burnished Saddle Iridescent 1970 Electra 225 Limited convertible had a 10.0:1 compression ratio and was rated at 360 SAE gross horsepower, but for 1971 it would be reduced to 8.5:1 so that it could run on regular pump gas, giving it a horsepower haircut to 315 SAE gross.

1970 would also be the last year for finned aluminum brake drums on all four corners on the Electra. The 1971 model year would see power front discs appear as standard equipment up front on the big Buick.

What was unchanged for 1970 was size. The 1970 Electra 225 Limited still stretched a hair longer than 225" between the bumpers and pressed down on the earth with just shy of 4500 pounds of road-hugging weight.

It still showed off the classic Buick styling elements, too. On the front fenders are the four Ventiports proclaiming its status as a top-of-the-line Buick, and stretching down the flanks is a chrome styling line echoing the classic Sweepspear.

This one was photographed in August of 2024 with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and a Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

Hey, Look!

Always be learning!

The first few times at the range with a handgun are a real big deal for most folks, and you’re likely to imprint pretty strongly on the first pistols you tried, the words of wisdom from your dad/cop friend/whoever took you to the range that first time and the coaching from the instructor at your first concealed-carry class.

For most people, that’s about as far as it goes. Shooting isn’t a hobby, nor are guns a lifestyle for most firearm owners. They’ll get to the range a couple times a year, maybe, and 20 years from now they’ll still be shooting the same way they were when they started out. They may retain some of the basics, or they may not.

The fact that you’re reading my column in this magazine indicates that you’re probably a little more into shooting than the statistically most common handgun owner. Like the music enthusiast who seeks out new bands to listen to, you’re probably more open to broadening your shooting horizons than Joe and Suzy Average. Perhaps you seek out coaching from different instructors in order to learn new techniques. I know I do.

Haven't we seen this movie?

Interesting choice of words for its headline from The Economist, there. I'd say this is pretty well-charted territory, actually.

The elections in the two states in the former East Germany were being closely watched in Berlin as a measure of the rising strength of extremist parties, left and right, as well as of the weakening position of the centrist parties that make up the current federal coalition. It was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had won a state election.

The returns were seen as a worrying indicator of the health and future of German democracy, and they were likely to intensify a quandary over whether and how mainstream parties can isolate extremists and keep them from entering government.

Well...

Automotif DXXXIX...

The second generation of the Toyota Camry, dubbed the V20 internally, launched in the North American market in autumn of '86 as a 1987 model. Available as either a sedan or a wagon, and in base, DX, and LE trim levels, the Japanese-built sedans were soon joined by ones built at Toyota's new U.S. manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. All Camry wagons sold in the American market were imported from Japan, however.

This Dark Blue '88 DX wagon could have been equipped with either Toyota's 3S-FE 2.0L inline four, rated at 115 SAE net horsepower, or the 156hp 2VZ-FE 2.5L DOHC 24V V-6. While a five speed manual was theoretically available, manual wagons were already vanishingly rare by '88, so this one's likely sporting a 4-speed automatic, but one never knows. I'd do bad, wrong things for a longroof Camry with a stick.

Despite being dull as dishwater, these things were phenomenons of reliability, doing as much as any other model to help establish Toyota's reputation in the US for boring longevity. The fact that this 36-year-old car is still out there tooling around as a daily driver attests to that fact with a positively Camry-esque blend of blandness and eloquence.

When the rats and cockroaches are doing drive-bys on each other in the post-apocalyptic wastelands with Glocks and AKs, they'll be driving Camrys like this one.

This one was photographed with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 in August of 2024.

Yowza

How in the heck can it be September already? It was April only five minutes ago!

Time has gotten so wonky since March of 2020. Things that feel like they happened just the other day actually happened a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, the last three weeks of this election season have dragged on for months.

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Meme Dump...

Shrinking knife...

I love the Emerson wave opening feature on Spydercos, but I don't use them for any sort of tactical reasons. It's just handy to have a knife that pops open automagically when you yank it from your pocket, without having to operate any buttons, flippers, thumb studs, or whatever.

As a result, over the years the one I carry has gotten smaller and smaller, starting with the big ol' Endura on the right, and then the Delica in the middle (which shows the wear of nearly a decade of carry) and finally the little Dragonfly, a gift from a friend, which I've been carrying for something like a year now.

Blade lengths: 2.3", 2.9", 3.8"

BezosMart appears to have them on sale at the moment, maybe for Labor Day or something. The current price on the Endura at the link is less than I paid for it from Amazon in 2013...

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It makes sense, in an evil sort of way...

Som information is being released regarding the planned terrorist atacks in Vienna that would have included the Taylor Swift show there:

“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said Wednesday. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”

If you're a bad guy who wants to kill thousands of people, first you gotta find someplace where thousands of people are gonna be. Sounds like the playbook was going to be similar to the one at that Ariana Grande concert in England.

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Meme Dump...

Automotif DXXXVIII...

By the early Nineties, the 3rd Generation Mustangs, known to enthusiasts as Fox Body cars, were getting long in the tooth. A replacement was already in the works, and it would be another front-engine rear-wheel drive car with an optional V-8; fan outcry had saved the Mustang from being re-cast as a Mazda-sourced FWD coupe. (That car was instead being sold as the Ford Probe.)

Sales hadn't been strong in the recession of the early '90s and so ambitious plans for the next generation 'Stang were shelved in favor of a much more modest upgrade. In the meantime, the Fox Body would need to soldier on for another couple model years.

For 1992 the only really new external visual cue was the black rubber strip in the side molding and bumpers was replaced with one in body color, as can be seen on this Bright Calypso Green LX ragtop.

The LX came from the factory with a 2.3L SOHC inline four; Ford's Lima motor that had been around since the days when it was found under the hoods of '74 Pintos. Now sporting electronic fuel injection and dual spark plug heads, it was rated at 108 SAE net horsepower. The only optional motor was Ford's 5.0L H.O. V-8. Either engine could be had with a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic.

The pony fender badges, rather than prominent chrome "5.0" ones, tell us this is a four-cylinder secretarymobile, like roughly half of all Mustangs sold that year. No race car, but certainly a pleasant cruiser with the top down on a sunny summer day. Besides, the fuelie OHC twin plug Lima probably made as much juice as any six cylinder available in a First Generation 'Stang.

This one was photographed in September of 2023 using a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

Ink on Steel, Old and New

Issue number 40 of RECOIL: CONCEALMENT is available, and I've got two pieces in it: A Classic Carry piece on the Harrington & Richardson self-loading .25 and .32 pistols from ye olden tymes, and a 400-round review of the new Bersa B1911.

The data box David Merrill did for the H&R .25 made me spew soda out my nose...

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Ugh.

I had intended to go to the outdoor range today, but it's going to be swamp-ass hot, like Gulf Coast levels of heat and humidity, and neither the Mustang nor the Zed Drei have any refrigerant aboard currently.

If I were faced with a week- or month-long stretch of this, I'd just cowgirl up and go, but when you can look ahead to Thursday and Friday and see it's going to be more bearable, it's easy to just punk out for a couple days. I'll maybe hit the indoor range on Thursday and Friday.

The next three days are supposed to have highs in the mid- to upper 90s and dew points in the low 70s, and it's those dew points that'll take the starch out of me. Bicycling and walking around the neighborhood will be bad enough, but 30 minutes or more in a car with no A/C? Nah. I'll skip that. Next week is supposed to return to more normal late summer weather.

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Lever-age

At the range last week I helped Michael Grasso dial in his .44 levergun with some .44 Special loads, just because having a gun in the house with an unsighted optic is anathema to all right-thinking people.

That mount for the Aimpoint Acro was pretty groovy. I hadn't gotten a good look at one before. I also dug the Magpul ELG furniture, although I'd expected to. I remember being skeptical of their shotgun stock before it came out and winding up having to eat crow, so...

Some people are skeptical, but I think a levergun has its uses, although it's possible to get carried away with one. 

I remember back at TacCon '19, Lee Weems made a pretty good case for why he used a .30-30 as a patrol rifle...

Punch Buggy

Commercials are some of the best movies out there these days. Also, the ID. Buzz is adorable as dammit.

One of the globe's historically bad neighborhoods.

The AP news headline reads thusly:

At least 13 people have died after a boat carrying migrants sunk off Yemen’s coast, UN says

It says something about how messed up that part of the world is that, not having read the story yet, I'm not 100% sure which direction the boat was going.

Odds are that it was full of people fleeing the Sudan and/or the Horn of Africa and hoping to get to the Gulf States, but given Saudi atrocities at the Yemeni border and the hot mess Yemen's been for years now, maybe they were going the other way and hoping to get to, I dunno, someplace reasonably stable like Egypt or Kenya.

*goes and reads story*

Yup, it was the former. Ethiopians hoping to get work in the Gulf States.

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Automotif DXXXVII..

Unable to compete at scale with the "Big Three" in Detroit, especially in the recessionary economy of the late Fifties, Studebaker decided to pivot toward the other end of the market.

The compact Lark, launched in 1959, actually shared a lot of the passenger compartment & roofline of the full-size Studebaker models, but had the front and rear overhangs shortened considerably. The wheelbase got a section taken out of it ahead of the firewall, too, shortening it to 108.5".

It was available in two basic trim levels. The Deluxe, which was the cheaper of the two, came as a two- or four-door pillared sedan or a two-door wagon. The fancier Regal could be had as a convertible, hardtop coupe, or wagon.

The trim on the cars, even the Regals, was quite restrained for a late-Fifties American car, and the Lark emphasized thriftiness.

The Alaskan Blue 1959 two-door pillared sedan in the photo would have sported a base MSRP of only $1,925, or a couple hundred bucks shy of $21,000 in today's dollars. While the glitzier models could be had with Studebaker's 259 cubic inch OHV V-8, the base Deluxe two-door sedan was only offered with the somewhat dated 169 cube flathead inline six, rated at 90 SAE gross horsepower.

While performance of the V-8 cars was reasonably peppy... the Lark's main competitor, the Rambler American, could only be had with a straight six ...the six cylinder Larks were torpid. The flathead Studebaker "Champion" inline six dated back to the 1930s, and the performance numbers reflected that.

Road & Track tested a '59 Lark Deluxe with a 3-speed manual and clocked a best 0-60 time of 21.0 seconds with a quarter mile run of 21.4 at 61 mph through the traps. A sufficiently determined driver who wasn't facing a headwind might eventually coax the thing up to a heady 80 mile per hour top speed.

People shopping at this end of the car market aren't generally looking for race cars, however, and they'd likely be more interested in the fuel mileage, which R&T recorded as ranging between 17 and 22 miles per gallon, which was quite parsimonious for the era.

Judging by the wheels and tires on this Lark, though, I doubt that the engine compartment bears much resemblance to the way it looked when it left the plant in South Bend, Indiana sixty-five years ago.

It was photographed with a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens in August of 2024.