Some days are more interesting than others.
Bing Crosby is a famous singer and actor to people of a certain age, performing from the mid 1920s to the mid 1970s. He was a number of musicals and comedy shows, both movies and TV. Very talented guy.
This is his 1943 rendition of the then-well-known song, singing with the Andrews Sisters, a popular trio from the era.
I took the boy sprout to the range for the first time today. It was beautiful, warm and sunny, the other sprout was off with a friend, the spousal unit was wanting some alone time, and it’s near the end of summer vacation, so it seemed like a good day for it. In some ways, he’s a totally typical boy – anything with water or dirt is great, and every stick is a sword, everything else it a gun, a tank, a bomber, or something that makes explody sounds for some reason. He’s always been interested in guns, and we have gone over the basic safety rules any number of times. So, off to the range it was.
From the movie soundtrack of Last Action Hero. It was an interesting movie. It absolutely tanked at the box office, got really lousy reviews, and generally totally trashed. It had all the “right” ingredients for a hit: Arnold Schwarzenegger, pithy lines, explosions and action, hot chicks, crazy villain. But it flopped. I agreed with that assessment. It was just so over the top, it was really wrong.
Then, a couple of years ago, I read a review of it that said it wasn’t a “serious” action movie; it was Arnold making satire, and we all just missed it. Arnold was spoofing the whole genre that had trapped him. Suddenly it made a LOT more sense. In that context, it’s pretty not bad. Lots of metaphors and such, when that’s what you are expecting.
AC/DC, of course, needs no introduction, so I’ll just post the link.
Just realized I failed to post a gun song last Friday. Arg. Oh, well, I guess I’ll make a two-fer today. Cash and Kilmer Continue reading
My brother was in town with his lady-friend. She’s from Chile, and had never shot a handgun before because guns are VERY strictly regulated there. As far I know, she’d never even held one in her hands, which are tiny. Her hands are even smaller than my ten year old daughter’s. So I offered to take them to the range, of course, as part of her “experience” of America. But what to shoot? Well, .22 LR, of course, but what else that would fit those tiny hands? The S&W 629 and other large revolvers seemed right out. So I grabbed a selection for the range bag and a few hundred round of ammo, and we headed for the range.
She tries the little S&W 22 AirLite first – fits her hand well, low recoil, but a long, heavy, rough trigger. She struggles a bit with the dry-firing as she gets the feel for it. I put the target at 7 yards, and she puts first round in the black. OK, good start. I load another round, and she puts it in the ring just outside the black. The next eight rounds all are inside the rings, and generally centered. Off to a good start!
We try the Ruger 22/22WinMag interchangeable cylinder next, but it doesn’t fit her hands well when dry-firing, so we skip it and go to the Ruger GP100 with 6″ barrel, shooting 38 Special. Dry fire for a bit, load one, shoot one in the black. All righty, then. Looking good. Try some more, all inside the rings. I do some coaching on stance and grip throughout, but she is starting to get the hang of it. She try some more 38s, does well.
We move up to 9mm, trying a Sig and a Glock. She likes the Sig more, but does fine with both. She doesn’t like the Glock trigger much, but the doesn’t like the Sig single-action double-action change of pull feel, either. Eh, pretty typical, I think.
So I got out the 1911 in 45 ACP, and her first three shots were all on the bottom edge of the paper… Hmmm? Night sights, maybe? We explained lining them up properly, and the next three hit much closer to the middle.
I demonstrate some heavy .357 loads (125gr hp with 16 grains of 2400 – they do about 2150 fps in a lever action, and produce a serious THUMP and flame in a revolver), and she says she’s like to try them, so she does, and again they are all in the rings.
She said she’d like to try “bigger,” but I didn’t have any because I didn’t even think the 1911 would fit her hands, so we just tried whatever she liked the most. She mostly moved back and forth between the .45 ACP and the heavy 357 Mag loads, which surprised both me and my brother. But, as I keep telling people, I don’t care how it looks on paper, or what it feels like at the gun-store counter, until you actually try it, you just really don’t know what’s going to float your boat when it comes to shooting handguns. Try a bunch, buy a couple, practice. All in all, another good day at the range introducing a person to the realities of shooting a gun.
The UPS guy showed up the other day. I didn’t remember ordering anything recently, so I briefly wondered what the spousal unit bought. Then I saw the box, and I had to chuckle. It was a MidwayUSA box. With some ammo. That I had ordered last year. Now that’s a backorder.
I bit the bullet, as it were, and grabbed the name www.TheStarsCameBack.com, through NameCheap.com. With Barron from http://www.the-minuteman.org/ hosting it I got things up and operational. I’m working on getting some content going, so that by the time I get cover art and editing all done, I can have some extra stuff there as part of the “marketing push.” I’m getting pretty close, now, I think, maybe, hopefully. I’d like to get things fairly well fleshed out before launch, so anyone that’s been following the story and waiting for the final release so you can watch Helton die in a blaze of gory glory… (Oh, wait, no, that DOESN’T happen. Sorry. That was the original ending) I mean, anyone that wants to make comments over there on things they like to have, see, or find out about the story. The better the site is, the more likely the book will be a success, and the more likely I can talk the other half into letting me write another instead of getting a “real” job.
Anyone know of a canonical list of “Liberal Canards”?
Catch-phrases like “it’s for your own safety,” “let the [trained] professionals handle it,” and “you shouldn’t fight back” are what I’m looking for. Things that sound good at first, and appeal to an “emotional common sense,” but fail to actually work or be correct as applied in real life. If there are no lists, comments are welcome, trying to build a list.
Time for something lighter. “Weird” All Yankovic has been doing spoofs and take-offs almost as long as I’ve been listening to popular music, and I’ve usually likes his versions as good as the original. And, he plays a mean accordion. If the embed below doesn’t work, try this link to Trigger Happy.
If you like spoofs, and making fun of artists who take themselves way to seriously, Weird Al is you guy.
August 4th, 2013. The Non Sequitur cartoon strip has “the birth of ideology.” Fundamental denial of reality, then parsing words in really silly ways to “prove” you are right. Yup. Pretty much. Comments are interesting, too. Shows some serious ideology.
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2013/08/04
GAK! Been fighting a sinus infection, and forgot my Friday Gun Song! Better late than never, I guess.
A song from a long time ago, found a recording of it with a classic blues guy from the 1930’s playing it (Robert Johnson). Like many gun songs, it’s not all fluffy and light. Gov’t Mule is a pretty rock’n blues band by the sound of this recording.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq0_LjALQYU
For those not familiar with it, a 32-20 Winchester is like a scaled down .30-30, with the same sort of nomenclature, i.e., 32 caliber, 20 grains of black powder.
Over a month ago, I stopped posting daily installments of The Stars Came Back. I said it would be a week or two to finish and go live. Oops. About three weeks ago, I said it was going, but slowly – editing is tedious. The story is done, now. I’ve gone over it several more times, end to end, tweaking it here and there, but also fixing basic grammar and word selection goofs. And I’m still finding them. It’s amazing, really, how many basic things slipped by not only my first reading, but my second, the several wonderful volunteers that have sent me a lot of corrections and questions. I had a long conversation with Sean about some big picture things, some of which he had some great criticisms on, and some of which he had questions about, but the choices made were conscious decisions on my part because I was trying to do something specific with the story. And yet, there are still minor errors cropping up here and there. Cover art is being worked on. Paul very generously created some much nicer drawings of Tajemnica from my sketches. It will be a much better story for the effort being put into it now, but it will still be at least a few days, maybe a few weeks if I hire a professional editor to give it a good thrashing, er, I mean, a going over, but I hope the final product will be worth the wait.
In the mean time, I’m giving it a few days rest, so I can let my eyes uncross, and think about what stories I could write in the same universe. So far, my main ideas are Lag’s komenagen, Allonia’s past, further adventures of Taj in the future, or a series of stories about Tajemnica’s past adventures; the downside of the last one is that they’d tend to be downers at the end of each installment. (for example, how did she win a battle but lose her entire crew?) Going in a different direction, there are doing things like looking at the life of a terraforming platform crew on a new planet.
On the civil-rights side, we keep saying that the there is a slippery slope that the anti-rights people want to push us down as fast as possible, and things like registration serve no purpose other than to confiscate. On the other side, the anti-rights bigots keeps calling us paranoid, saying that it’ll never happen, etc. Except for when it does.
Chicago Firearms confiscation BeginsThose that have their FOID card lapse are making pols worry that their guns are not taken away that very moment. But, because of the change in IL law recently, the number of FOID applicants is up, WAY up, so waiting times after application for renewal are also way up.
It’s not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you. It’s simply recognition of reality. On the flip side, I think delusional is a term that can be applied to the antis.
Got a gun question: What’s the best and most readily available .22 LR pistol that comes with a threaded barrel as a standard item? It seems like there should be a lot of options, as suppressors and various barrel do-dads become more common, but I don’t see a lot of models out there. The Ruger 22/45 and Ruger Mk III both have that as an option, as does the Sig Mosquito (but I’ve not heard a lot of good things about that one). Any other options I should be looking into?
Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix was more an idea than a tightly written song. It is one of many Vietnam protest songs of the era. He was a famous and talented guitar player / singer in the 1960s, and he died in 1970, likely from complications from booze and drugs (“aspirating his own vomit”). While well known, he didn’t have anywhere near the production of other well known groups and singers of the time, and most of his albums were actually released posthumously, with only three studio albums and a pair of live albums released before his death. Continue reading
Why would someone push an agenda that is wrong? Lots of reasons that most of us are familiar with: ignorance, their parents did it, being reactionary, people like to feel they are part of a bigger group (there is strength in numbers, and strength is comforting), misguided principles, etc., etc. But things like ignorance can be cured, IF the ignorant person doesn’t have a significant vested interest in maintaining their current belief.
A related but different question: why would someone push something they know is wrong? Usually, it’s because they profit from it personally in some way, via research grants, accumulation of political power, they own the “alternatives” being pushed, it is a structural part of a larger belief system, or whatever.
Most global warmists / climate-change pushers can get binned into “profit from it” or the “scaring people is good for pushing more / larger government controls and regulations” view. You know the type. So here are a couple of very short, simple things about it all.
Cause MUST come before EFFECT. This isn’t even scientific method 101, this is toddler-learning-about-gravity level stuff. And if you graph CO2 and temperature, temperature change leads CO2 change. Ergo, CO2 CANNOT be driving temperature.
OK, a warmest replies, then what alternatives are there? Answer: The sun.
But, they say, the sun is constant. Ahem. No, it is NOT.
So how does it change that we can test or measure, the smarter ones counter, what’s the mechanism; it’s 93,000,000 miles away? (yes, yes, I know – it’s a darn small percentage of them that goes here, but let’s go there anyway).
Answer: Sun-spots. Sunspots, they reply, you must be joking.
Nope. Sunspots are indicative of magnetic field activity. The stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more Galactic Cosmic Rays it deflects from Earth. You see, GCR passing through the Earth’s atmosphere interact with it in a way and at a rate that they act to seed cloud nuclei. Clouds are white and reflective. So:
Lots of sunspots -> few GCR -> less cloud cover -> lower albedo, -> more energy absorbed from the sun -> planet warms.
Few sunspots -> more GCR -> more cloud cover -> higher albedo, -> less energy absorbed from the sun -> planet cools.
In the 400+ years of actual sunspot observation, the correlation between long-term sunspot patterns and climate is well established. Now we know HOW. We’ve tested it in the lab. (Svensmark at CERN) And hey, what do you know – 700 million years ago, the sun was in a part of the Milkey Way that had much higher levels of GCRs – and it was an ice-ball, pole to pole.
Bond movies. We’ve all seen them. Most of us have laughed at more than a few of them, too. Like them or not, just about everyone knows OF them. This one is a classic.
Lulu has been around for a while, since the 60s.
It’s easy to get bogged down in all the political stupidity and garbage going on in DC, as it slowly infects and infests the rest of the globe. But sometimes, you just have to get away. So, the other half, sprouts, the mutt, and I climbed into the minivan, and went out into the deep weeds. Continue reading
My eyes are starting to go buggy. Been spending a LOT of time recently working on editing The Stars Came Back. The story is done. I’ve addressed some of the issues people had, like the attempted rape scene (ubu), the no-alarm airlock (Sendarius, I think, or was it Defens?), the “sudden pile of bodies” shortly thereafter (several people), the poker game (ubu), the multiple planets in one system L3/L4 issue (forget who, but thanks, it helped later, too), etc. Also think I got all the to/too, breath/breathe, clothes/cloths issues. Still a few things to work on, and now awaiting to hear back from a few of those brave souls that said they’d be happy to look it over and see what errors they can find in it. (If you asked to do so, and haven’t heard from me, drop my a line, because apparently my email to your email address you use when posting isn’t working for me). Not sure on the going live on Amazon date. Still awaiting to hear back from a couple of people on possible cover-art things (still entertaining suggestions on that front, actually), and want to go through it at least once and not find another error of some sort.
