The first Sunday after the first...yeah, yeah, I know...

On what date have Christians celebrated Easter:

"The Encyclopedia Britannica states: 'There is no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament or in the writings of the apostolic Fathers. The sanctity of special times was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians.'"

Here's a short but interesting article on various ways that Easter has been calculated throughout the centuries.

By the way, here's a neat Excel formula for calculating the date of Easter (western Christian tradition). I picked this up from J-Walk a while back.

=DOLLAR(("4/"&A1)/7+MOD(19*MOD(A1,19)-7,30)*14%,)*7-6

I was born on Palm Sunday in 1964, and I had always been curious if my birthday would ever fall on Palm Sunday again. Using this formula, I found that the next time it happens will be 2054, so I will have to live to be 90 years old to see it. That would be cool.

Hymns

link deleted

Block this!

A great comment over at Resistance is futile!:

"Typical liberal moonbat pap; they'd rather be 'aware' of a problem than actually do anything about it. People are starving? Let's record a pop album! That's much better than overthrowing the fascist regimes that control the food supply and allow millions to starve! People are dying of AIDS? Let's all wear ribbons! That will stop the problem faster than teaching people to be responsible about sex. So what to do about FoxNews? Let's sell a redundant device that no one needs to raise awareness, rather than encourage CNN and the other FoxNews competiors to improve their quality, thereby lowering the people's demand for 'Fair and Balanced' programming. Yes siree, Bob, that will do it!"

Read the whole thing. Just once I'd like to somehow understand why liberals think the way they do, like this guy with his channel blocker. I find it especially dumbfounding because any cable service there is allows selective lockout of any channels you wish for no extra charge. Oh, I get it. He's not really a liberal, he's just a plain ol' capitalist, out to make a buck. Now I understand.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...

I will never buy Diamond brand strike on box large kitchen matches ever again. I bought a case of these a while back (yeah, I know, that's 1,500 matches, but at least I wasn't buying 30,000 paper matches). They do not strike reliably and are dangerously prone to snapping off during a strike, which causes a flaring match head to fly into ones clothing. I like to use matches to light my pipe when at home, and the best matches, in my opinion, are Ohio Blue Tips (the strike anywhere kind). These are apparently available locally only at your friendly neighborhood H.E.B.

H.E.B. is also, by the way, the only place I have found (other than ordering it online) that sells Sontava habanero sauce. This is my favorite general-purpose hot sauce. Be sure and get the XXX version, the XX isn't hot enough.

Irons in the Fire: Makarov tryout

Irons in the Fire: Makarov tryout: a nice range report on the Makarov. I got one of these Bulgarians myself about 4 years ago, and recently used it for my CHL qualification renewal. The place giving the class is a range where Glock is king: all the employees wear Glock t-shirts, there are Glock posters everywhere, and fully 50% of their retail shelves are stocked with Glocks. I hadn't practiced in a long time, so my score was significantly down from my first qualification back in 2001 (238 out of a possible 250), but I beat the pants off the guy next to me who was using a Glock. There was one other man there who had one of the original Russians with adjustable sights, and he was complaining about having a hard time finding ammo. He showed me the box he had purchased at a gun store, $21.99 for 50 rounds, to which I replied with a consternated "holy !@#$." I advised him to visit the monthly gun show and buy boxes of Sellier & Bellot or Wolf for $6 to $7 per box.

At my original qualification I used my Ruger P95 in 9mm, which is a great gun but doesn't function 100% with anything but 147-grain ammo (previously mentioned). The Makarov has been 100% with anything I can shove in the chamber. Also, being a lefty, I sometimes have to consider ejections. The Ruger will usually bonk me in the right shoulder with its empties (a minor annoyance), but the Mak throws the shells into a beautiful arc that drops them at about a 45-degree angle 3 feet behind me to my right. As I expected, I got every shot into the 5-ring at the first two lines, but due to lack of practice my pattern opened up considerably when I went back to the 15-yard marker. The S&B ammo functioned flawlessly, as always, and the Mak performed perfectly.

I don't like the original Mak grips, though. The thumbrest is impossible for a lefty, and the plastic non-thumbrest grips are very skinny and uncomfortable. I bought some padded grips for it that are great. I also advised my fellow Makarov shooter to visit Makarov.com and get himself a thumb-saver to help in loading the magazine.

The Makarov is utterly reliable, the only real drawback being its fairly low-powered ammo. This is why for the past few years, when I have carried, it has been a Ruger SP-101 loaded with 125-grain Remington Golden Sabres in .357 magnum.

First Things and First Principles @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Gerard at American Digest has been hitting the nail so squarely on the head lately that even if his blog weren't alphabetically at the top of my list, I would move it there anyway.

Odd weather

When I checked the thermometer at 7:00 AM today it was already 75. It is now 62, with only 64% humidity. I wish we'd had this kind of weather yesterday, when it was in the high 70's by midafternoon with a humidity around 90%. Beautiful spring day, indeed. According to the radar and the purpling sky outside, it is going to come a real thundering rain any minute now.

Blogroll revisited

Okay, forget about blogrolling.com. After many searches through the Bloglines help system, the tip-o-da-day finally showed me how to get the blogroll code from Bloglines. This makes it much easier. You may occasionally notice that blogs on this roll come and go with alarming rapidity. This is because, when I find a feed that I even remotely think is interesting, I will throw it into the list so I can check it out for a few days. I might delete it after a couple of days if I think it's not worth spending time on. I have seen some bloggers who display a blogroll of a couple hundred other blogs. Where do they find time to read all those things? If I find myself ignoring a blog for too long, I will delete it just to cut down on clutter. I don't have time to read everything.

and while I'm at it...

News from February 11, 2005:

This is the latest in a long string of cases at both the trial and appeals court levels holding that manufacturers of lawfully-sold, non-defective firearms are not legally at fault if these products are subsequently illegally acquired or misused by criminals.

Good news for law-abiding, gun-owning citizens, good news for law-abiding gun manufacturers. Bad news for the googooheads.

and speaking of which...

Here's some news from last December about an Army contract with Ruger. I have a P95D (blued slide). The only gripe I have about it is that it functions with 100% reliability only with 147-grain ammo. The 115-grain sometimes fails to feed or stovepipes. I haven't yet tried any in the 124-125 range, but I did recently purchase some so I can give them a shot.

Just in case...

...you get jumped by a 10-foot tall, 1500-pound, fur-bearing mugger. I'm a big fan of Ruger firearms, especially their revolvers. I guess somebody has a practical use for this gun. I think this is one of those things that they built because they could, and people will buy it because they can: the new Super Redhawk Alaskan snubby in .454 Casull.

Blogroll

I'm working on building a blogroll using blogrolling.com. I don't know why blogspot can't just provide their own blogrolling gadget--probably some techy reason beyond my comprehension. Anyhoo, the Twyllyp Blogroll is not every blog I read, at least not yet. I use Bloglines for my aggregator.

Email just received...

Just received the email about the stupid criminal who tried to rob a gunstore. I knew this was a lot older than the email said (I sort of keep up with this kind of thing) so I had to check Snopes. I suppose his ".38 caliber semi-automatic" was a .380. The only other gun I can think of to fit the bill would be a .38 Super. As for the store owner, he grabbed the right gun. I'm surprised the crook lasted 4 hours if he was hit by a .50AE.

File under what are you going to do with that?!

One last post for the day. A few days ago, while standing in the check-out line at Walmart, I noticed the guy in front of me was purchasing six cases of matchbooks. I am a compulsive reader (have I mentioned that?). So it only took me a few seconds to read the fine print on the cases and do the numbers in my head. Six cases, five boxes per case, 50 matchbooks per box, 20 matches per matchbook. The guy was buying 30,000 paper matches.

At least he wasn't like the guy in front of me at H.E.B. one time who was buying 16 boxes of the store brand of sudaphed. After he was gone and I told the checker what was probably going to happen to the stuff, she paled a little and wondered if she should have called the manager.

One answer...

I don't usually make these kinds of comments because I don't consider myself knowledgable enough on most issues. I am a habitual listner who rarely speaks. But...I have heard some people ask, "Why are Terri Schiavo's parents so desperate to keep her alive?" My question has always been, "Why is her (ahem) 'husband' so desperate to see her dead?" Gerard Van Der Leun at American Digest has an idea.

How not to handle a Glock...

...or any other semi-automatic handgun, for that matter. Keep your finger off the trigger when releasing the slide. Snopes has the scoop.

Dragons

The folks at Animal Planet seem mighty proud of themselves to have come up with "scientific" reasons why and how dragons could breathe fire and fly. Only problem is, the problem was already solved by Peter Dickinson in The Flight of Dragons 24 years ago.

The Blog is back, more or less

Back to the original url and site name, with another change in direction. It's hard to believe I've began this blog more than a year ago and have been updating it off and on (more off than on) since December 2003. However, I think I will try to add something at least once per week, knowing that it may be some time before anyone reads it. I am a regular reader of several other blogs, but I have to pick and choose and limit the blogroll because I just don't have the time. Soon I hope to purchase a notebook computer which will allow me to read and post more conveniently and more frequently. Don't expect anything controversial or mind-shattering from this blog, it's just not that kind of blog. You shouldn't expect much of anything really, except observations of the behavior of humans that I encounter.