With her dad's old .38

First, go read this one at Shooting the Messenger. Fits quotes the Brady Campaign:

While there are still many unanswered questions about the circumstances, one fact is undeniable: Sean Taylor’s tragic, untimely shooting death is the latest example that in America no one is safe from the scourge of gun violence.

Now let's tie this in with this post from The War On Guns.

The rejects suspected of being maniacs with murder in their evil hearts will, however, still have full unrestricted access to utility knives, fuel oil and fertilizer, and gasoline and matches, as well as be allowed to move freely throughout society.

Here's the truth: no one on Earth is safe from the scourge of violence. The medium used to commit an act of violent aggression against another human is irrelevant.

Keeping in mind the previous two links, examine now the case of Maria Pittaras (scroll down to "Man Shot Dead...").

Robert J. Metz made it a point to know most everyone in his neighborhood, beeping his car horn whenever he drove by anyone who was outside.

If somebody was building something, the 47-year-old construction worker was there to offer advice and often lend a hand.

But his happy-go-lucky demeanor masked a mental illness that was slowly consuming Metz, relatives say.

Maria Pittaras, 28, was something of an enigma in the neighborhood. She moved to the Turtle Lakes subdivision at the Pasco- Hillsborough counties line about a year ago, just around the corner from Metz and his wife, Carolyn, Pittaras' father recalls.

Neighbors didn't see her outside much; she did most of her real estate-related work from home. She kept her yard immaculate and occasionally entertained friends with outdoor barbecues, neighbors say.

[...]

Sometime before 2 a.m., Metz donned a dark mask and gloves, grabbed a knife and crawled into his neighbor's home through a window, sheriff's spokesman Kevin Doll said.

Metz crept into the bedroom as the woman slept, jumped on top of her and held the knife to her throat. She grabbed her .38-caliber pistol and fired two shots, striking Metz in the neck, Doll said.

So what do we have here? We have a man with a mental instability who tragically stopped taking his medication. However, he still had the mental capacity to wear a dark mask, disguising himself. He even had the forethought to wear gloves so that he would not leave fingerprints. It is not hard to speculate that his choice of a knife--rather than a gun--shows careful planning, because a knife makes no noise that might awaken the neighbors late in the night.

We can't say for sure what would have happened if Ms. Pittaras had not been armed with her father's gun, but it isn't hard to imagine that she would have been murdered, or raped, or both.

But she did have a gun, and she is still alive.

By the way, the weekly newsletter from USCCA is free for everyone to subscribe to, not just members. Follow the link above to read the latest issue and sign up.

The last great act of defiance

This one from LOLTHULHU cracked me up. Not because of the caption, but because of the picture itself. We got the tough guy poking itty bitty holes in something with his .38 (or possibly .32) revolver. And you know, preternatural entities are like icebergs: the biggest part is what you don't see. The girl in the back is probably better off, since she's about to cast a spell so there's a good chance her sanity loss will render her unaware of the coming doom. Poor Jimmy Olsen in the front is already caught--if he's lucky he'll be dead before that shantak comes sweeping down from the moon.

This is a perfect example of not carrying enough firepower. But then you never really can, in these situations.

Phone problems

I'm not using phone problems as an excuse for lack of blogging. I've actually been occupied with something else. However...

It would have been 14 years ago or so, when my old dog Baloo (r.i.p.) was a puppy, and he chewed things. One 0f the things he chewed were the phone wires outside the house. I repaired them myself, and the phone has worked fine since then, until a few days ago. Today the phone was totally dead so I checked the wires and the repair has finally fallen apart. I just spent about an hour working on it again but there was still no dial tone so I gave up and called the company on my cell phone to request a tech to come out here and fix it for real. My cell doesn't work in the house, so I was outside making the call. As soon as I walked back inside, the phone rang (WTF?).

Well, a tech will be here tomorrow anyway to replace the line with some new stuff, hopefully. But right now it's working, and I got connected at my usual 40K+ speed for dial-up.

UPDATE: Pretty good service from Verizon. They got here when they said they would, and did the job. The technician they sent cracked me up. He told my wife the problem was due to "exposed wires." No, you big dummy. I exposed the wires when I made the first repairs. I needed it to work so I could use the internet and my wife could handle her Avon orders. It would have been stupid for me to wrap everything back up just so you could unwrap everything the next morning.

Technicians. Just because they get paid to fix things, they think they're experts or something.

I guess they didn't care for the slide show

The Department of Justice visits for 39 seconds.

A white sports coat, and BRRAAIIINNNSSSSS!!!!

From San Antonio Daily Photo.

The miniature art of David Kucer

It is important to place David Kucer’s work into an historical perspective. Miniature firearms were the invention of the Renaissance. Their appearance coincided with the acceptance by the aristocracy of the wheel-lock. Wheel-lock arms were complex and costly, their manufacture requiring highly specialized and advanced technical skills. What was true of full scale firearms was equally true of miniature wheel-lock guns which were made in the 1500s and early 1600s. Miniature firearms were the most extreme test of the abilities of the virtuoso metal-smiths. They equaled in their demands upon the abilities of their makers the most intricate and delicate achievements of goldsmiths and jewelers. In addition, they were an extension of Late Renaissance and Mannerist fascination with small scale works of art such as the bronze statuette, plaquette, and medal.

In his notes for the catalogue of the Kucer exhibition at the Royal Armouries of H.M. Tower of London, Howard L. Blackmore refers to Michael Mann of Augsburg (he died c.1630), who made both miniature caskets and miniature firearms. For artists like him, the careful making of miniature arms was an extension of a whole, complex field of decorative arts and applied technology. There was in a sense no real separation of art and science; they were part of the same phenomenon of human development.

It is appropriate that in the Royal Ontario Museum, David Kucer’s miniature firearms were put on display contiguous to masterpieces of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque silver and goldsmiths’ work, to which they are in no way inferior.

Lots more info and pictures at David Kucer Miniature Arms.

Cthulhu Christmas

A fuzzy tree ornament for $39 from NifNaks.

Too much money for a stinkin' tree ornament, but cool anyway.

Via Under Vhoorl's Shadow.

Top of the G00gle again

For what does "Murolces odro suvon sitpeoc tiunna" mean?

A while back I saw a meme somewhere about posting five phrases that can be G00gled that shows one's blog for the first reference. I thought it was interesting, but didn't feel like spending time hunting down these hits for this blog. So I've just been cataloging them as they turn up. Next time that meme goes around, I'll already have some fodder.

So this is what "progressive" means

Investigate the Media busts the San Francisco Chronicle and their practice of covert censorship:

Suspicious, I then took the following steps: I deleted the "cookies" that SFGate installs on users' computers to identify who they are, then logged out of my account, and then revisited the same thread on my own computer. As I suspected, the comment was no longer visible, replaced by the moderator's notation "This comment has been removed by SFGate." Then when I logged back in to my account, and viewed the thread as "me" again -- the comment was once again visible.

I also confirmed this by viewing the comment thread using a different browser (Firefox) which did not have any SFGate cookies installed yet, and on which I had not logged in to my account. Sure enough, the comment appeared as deleted; while exactly simultaneously, using my original logged-in browser (Safari) the comment was not deleted.

In other words, whenever I viewed the comments thread as "myself" (i.e. logged in under my account name, which in this case was "jimjams"), my comment remained visible; but whenever I viewed the comment thread either anonymously (i.e. not logged in) or from a browser with no SFGate cookies or (most importantly) from some other computer, then my comment was gone -- deleted by the moderators.

Sounds bad enough, but it gets worse. Read the whole thing.

Here's something I never thought I'd see

One of my poems translated into...er...Finnish? Norwegian, maybe? I'm not sure.

You have to scroll down, at Fordításaim.

UPDATE: It's Hungarian. See comments.

This is the school my kids attend

From Wilson County News:

Students at La Vernia Primary School raised more than $2,000 to help send care packages to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan this holiday season.

The school’s Parent-Teacher Organization held a penny drive from Oct. 24 through Nov. 7, with a goal of raising $1,000. Students donated more than $2,000 to support the troops.

La Vernia Primary School teachers used the experience to practice their students’ math skills. Students counted pennies, worked with place value, and graphed their totals. The class on each grade level donating the most money won a prize from the PTO.

Yes, it's a public school, and far from perfect, but when I read things like this I am thankful that I haven't had to deal with some of the public-school-crass-stupidity horror stories I've heard about schools in other parts of the country.

And now I know where my pocket change kept disappearing to.

That is certainly odd...

Cryptomundo posts a trail camera photo that appears to show a raccoon atop a wild hog. Looks like another coon is in the background. Maybe he's waiting for the hog bus to pick him up.

Follow the link to also see a photo of the world's worst hunting dog.

Authorized journalists doing research

With G00gle, of course.

Thursday night Winamp

Yes, I like Annie Lennox's voice. I also liked Eurythmics back in the 80s.

Four-day weekend this week. Nothing to do for a couple of days now but take care of the kids, so I might get some extra blogging in.

The newest version of Winamp (5.5 beta) is pretty cool. It has a new function that automagically retrieves the album cover art and displays it in a special little window. If it can't find the cover art, you can still put it in manually. It saves the cover graphic in the folder where the file is that you retrieved it for. Here's a screen-cap of what it looks like, on my machine anyway. I collapsed a bunch of the windows that I don't use.

So far I haven't found any bugs in this beta version.

Work this week was...interesting. The most interesting part was that it was so hot that I nearly ran out of water two days in a row. Tuesday was pretty tough, because I did two routes in the Five Palms/Old Pearsall Road area, and down there the meter lids are these big, heavy oval things instead of the the smaller round ones that are found almost everywhere else. I have to put them back in with my hands, instead of just kicking them back into place, and my right hand especially (which did most of the work) was really hurting by the end of the day. But of course, that kind of work helps increase my grip strength, which is always a good thing.

Wednesday I got kind of peeved. I did a route and a half around Burbank High School. I had never done the meters at the school before, and they were right at the end of everything. Schools are always bad places to have to hunt down meters; usually the maintenance staff there don't even know where all the meters are (and this place was no exception). So I thought I'd be finishing up and starting my weekend at about 1:00 PM, but it took me until 1:40 to find all the meters (40 minutes to hunt down 6 meters). I finally found the last two on the back side, and by that time I was, shall we say, quite cross. My crossness was exacerbated by the handheld trying to tell me that they were located in "front." So changed it to "rear" and then spray-painted the full address right next to the meters so the next poor newbie who gets stuck with that route can find them more easily, in theory. So if you drive down Burbank Loop and see "1002 Edwards" written on the pavement in neon blue spray paint, that was me.

Thanksgiving

Somehow I find myself far out of line
from the ones I had drawn
Wasn't the best of paths, you could attest to that,
but I'm keeping on.
Would our paths cross if every great loss
had turned out our gain?
Would our paths cross if the pain it had cost us
was paid in vain?

There was no pot of gold, hardly a rainbow
lighting my way
But I will be true to the red, black and blues
that colored those days.
Would our paths cross if every great loss
had turned out our gain?
Would our paths cross if the pain it had cost us
was paid in vain?

I owe my soul to each fork in the road,
each misleading sign.
'Cause even in solitude, no bitter attitude
can dissolve my sweetest find.

Thanksgiving for every wrong move
Thanksgiving for every wrong move
Thanksgiving for every wrong move
That made it right

--Poi Dog Pondering

Hard to believe

KDKA in Pittsburg reports:

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

He finds solace in the hundreds of boxes he loads onto a truck in Carnegie. In each box is a care package that will be sent to a man or woman serving in Iraq. It was in his name Operation Pittsburgh Pride was started.

Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.

A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

Horrendous. Somewhere out there is a bureaucrat who desperately needs a severe beating.

Via Nobody's Business.

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus got some airtime

On NPR this morning. Only a couple of minutes, but they were focused on the movement going on at nearby Texas State University in San Marcos (previously known as Southwest Texas State University). Just thought I'd mention it.

Check out their website, if you haven't yet, at ConcealedCampus.com.

UPDATE: Here's a news report about it, via NRA-ILA.

A recipe even I can't screw up

Someone at work gave me this recipe and said it was from Weight Watchers or something. She had made the low-cal version for our Thanksgiving meal at work and it was great. I made a non-low-cal version tonight and it's also great. But if you don't like pumpkin, then don't bother.

Pumpkin Fluff

One can of pumpkin filling (15 oz.)
One tub of Cool Whip (12 oz.)
One box of Vanilla Pudding mix (small box that makes "4 servings")
Pumpkin spice to taste

Mix all ingredients together and whip them thoroughly. Allow to set in refrigerator for a couple of hours, if you can wait that long.

You can get the "lite" or "sugar-free" versions of the Cool Whip and pudding if you want.

Slather the resulting stuff in a graham cracker pie crust and serve like pie, or use as a dip with graham crackers, or just eat it out of a bowl like pudding.

Aiko

Project Aiko:

Aiko is the first android to mimic pain, and reacts to it. This technology can be beneficial for people born with or who have undergone amputations. This is the first step toward a life-like mechanical limb that has the ability to feel physical sensation.

There's also a Project Aiko blog. Aiko was designed and built by a robotics enthusiast in his basement.

(And the answer to that is no, you perv).

"It's worthless as a forensic tool."

For 40 years, the FBI used a "forensic" technique which has now been discredited as completely worthless.

Evidence of Injustice:

Aside from eyewitness testimony, some of the most believable evidence presented in criminal cases in the United States comes from the FBI crime laboratory in Quantico, Va. Part of its job is to test and analyze everything from ballistics to DNA for state and local prosecutors around the country, introducing scientific credibility to often murky cases.

But a six-month investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post shows that there are hundreds of defendants imprisoned around the country who were convicted with the help of a now discredited forensic tool, and that the FBI never notified them, their lawyers, or the courts, that the their cases may have been affected by faulty testimony.

The science, called bullet lead analysis, was used by the FBI for 40 years in thousands of cases, and some of the people it helped put in jail may be innocent.

[...]

For years, the FBI believed that lead in bullets had unique chemical signatures, and that by breaking them down and analyzing them, it was possible to match bullets, not only to a single batch of ammunition coming out of a factory, but to a single box of bullets. And that is what the FBI did in the case of Lee Wayne Hunt, tying a bullet fragment found where the murders took place to a box of bullets the prosecutors linked to Hunt.

Emphasis mine. And this is pure fantasy.

It's a long article, but worth reading the whole thing.

Via The Real Gun Guys.