Tab Clearing...

• The original (and best) reportage on the 24 Hours of LeMons...


• "The China the World Sees Is Not the One I Live In"


• AI slop videos of phony ICE raids clog social media.

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Middle of the Week Memes!

Meme Dump!

Happy Birthday, Devil Dogs!

"Here’s a joke about the U.S. military services that you may have heard: The Army and Navy are branches, the Air Force is a corporation, and the Marine Corps is a cult."

Would you like to know more?

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What fresh hell is this?

Minding my own business over lunch yesterday, having watched the Colts pull off a nail-biter against the Falcons in Berlin and engaged in watching the Bears hold off the Giants, I glanced out the window to notice that winter had rather abruptly arrived on the scene.

This morning there's an inch or so of snow on the grass, it's still coming down in fits and starts, and it's starting to stick to the roads.

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Memes to Make it Through Monday!

Automotif DCI...

Saturday afternoon was warm, with highs in the mid sixties, quite breezy, and partly cloudy. Sitting on the patio at Fat Dan's with the Pentax K7 and 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens, I spotted a pair of yellow Corvettes: That '77 C3 L82 car in Corvette Yellow, and also a Velocity Yellow C6 Z06.

Tab Clearing...

• Why did they used to dye pistachios red?


• The internet is full of sick fucks.


• FBI warns of crooks posing as feds.

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Holy Memes, Batman!

Meme Dump!

It was almost inevitable...

With the discovery that the number one engine and pylon assembly had departed the aircraft just before the aircraft departed the runway, UPS grounded their MD-11 fleet, followed shortly by FedEx, who is the other big operator of the type.

The last passenger flights of the MD-11 occurred in the mid-'00s, with the remaining flying aircraft converted to cargo haulers. The USAF retired its McDonnell-Douglas KC-10 Extender fleet, also based on the DC-10, last year, replacing it with the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus.

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Guns, curiously.

Professor David Yamane has sold a fair number of copies of his book, Gun Curious, via traditional sales channels like Amazon (and I'll make a couple cents if you use that link!) but is planning on making autographed copies available directly.

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #260...

So, it's been ten years since I first messed with a P320, when I bought that full-size 9mm back in 2015. I put that one through a 2,000 round test. I also won that P320 compact at a Friends of the NRA banquet up in Lafayette, and reviewed the P320 X-Carry for Shooting Illustrated in 2017.

I guess this X-FULL makes the fourth P320 I've put in serious trigger time with now. It's an April of 2020 production gun that was bone stock (this seems important) with low miles on it, and thanks to the current brouhaha it was sitting in a used gun counter of a suburban Indianapolis gun store for four bills. Further, thanks to the flat demand for anything P320 these days, I got fifteen percent whacked off the price of a TXG tungsten-infused grip module at my local gun store.

Considering that the gun sells new with the regular module for seven hundo, I'm six bills into almost a grand worth of pistol.

Wednesday at the range I put a hundred rounds of American Eagle 115gr ball through the pistol, and with these powder puff loads and the heavy frame, it shoots stupid flat. That's 370 rounds total through the gun so far with no failures of any type to report.

"Before you leave for the weekend, I'm gonna need you to check out these memes."

Air Disaster Repeat

So it turns out that the cause of the disastrous crash of UPS Airlines Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky was that the number one engine... the one on the left wing ...fell off the plane on takeoff.

The UPS aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, a cargo variant of the old three-engined widebody Douglas DC-10 airliner. In fact, this one was originally delivered to Thai Airways International as a passenger DC-10 back in 1991 before being bought by UPS and converted to a cargo hauler in 2006.

If you're old enough to remember 1979 and are any kind of aviation geek, then the first thing this should remind you of is American Airlines Flight 191, which was a DC-10 that had its left engine fall off while departing Chicago for Los Angeles in October of that year. To this day it remains the deadliest commercial aviation accident ever in the continental US.

I still vividly remember that the cause of the crash was traced to the procedures used by American Airlines to remove and replace the engines. The Wikipedia article goes into a lot of detail on it. 

I wonder if the cause of this crash will be the same?

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Meme Dump!

320 to 270

Everything I've put through it so far has been domestic brass-cased ball ammo, so yesterday I went to Indy Arms Co and put a fifty round box of steel-cased Magtech FMJ through it. It continued to function normally.

This makes 270 rounds then.

Memes for the Mid-Week!

Automotif DC...

For when you need to fetch the groceries in a big hurry, the Ferrari GTC4 Lusso is the car for you. It's an all-wheel drive beast of a shooting brake with a 680 horsepower 6.3 liter V-12.

This one was photographed with a Pentax K20D and 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens.

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Memes, Dumped!