I think of you, and let it go...

A long time ago I bought this thing called an iMic. I played around with it a little but never did anything serious with it. Today, in a task that was way more strenuous than it should have been (still kind of woozy from that flu shot), I dug out some patch cords and messed around with an old Zenith stereo and my computer and got everything to work.

Now I can begin digitizing my vinyl collection. This is a very time-intensive job, but what the hey, I need something to do when I get burned out on blogging. Also, I have a lot of records that I haven't listened to in a long, long time.

So I record the records using Gold Wave, which I also use to normalize and filter the pops & clicks, then break the big one-side-of-an-album .wav file into the individual songs, save them to mp3, and set the tags with MP3 Tag Tools. No, it doesn't have sparkling digital clarity. But who needs cold, brittle digital when you can have that warm, fuzzy analog?

Today I just grabbed one off the shelf that was easy to reach to start with. Considered a one-hit wonder in the United States, Nena is nevertheless an international (and especially German) star who continues to record music and, if I recall correctly, writes children's books. And besides, 99 Red Balloons is not my favorite song from this record. My favorite is one called ?, which makes it quite difficult to Google lyrics for. I could understand everything she sang except one line that I wasn't sure of, but I finally found it. The English translation of the German lyrics is not the same as the English lyrics of her English version, if you can follow that.

My mind makes up ideas
That I forget too fast
How do I know when it begins
No one can tell me
What could be the best
Hey that's one thing I'd never miss
I look around and try it out
I don't know which way to go

Today I'm coming
Today I'm leaving too
And tomorrow it's gonna be all over
Maybe I'll stick around
Come bother yesterday
Today I need a love that never ends

You drive your car too fast
You're just traveling around
I haven't seen much of this world
No one can tell me
Who the greatest is
Hey, that's one thing I'd never miss
'cause I really know so well
What will be the best for me

Today I'm coming
Today I'm leaving too
And tomorrow it's gonna be all over
Maybe I'll stick around
Come bother yesterday
Today I need a love that never ends

And it ends with a one-and-a-half-minute saxophone solo of such wistful joy that it always chokes me up a little. One of my aborted projects from days gone by was to put together a mix tape of pop songs I liked featuring the saxophone. This song would have been on it.

When I get around to putting together my mix CD of The Official Soundtrack of the Blogonomicon, this will definitely be on it.

Lyrics thanks to Nena Fanwebsite.

Nice pumpkins

From BBC.

Mini Texas Blogmeet!

El Capitan has organized a mini-blogmeet in the burgeoning metropolis of Lockhart, Texas. Just a hop, skip and a jump from my home QTH. I plan on being there. Follow the link for details & location.

I'll be sure and bring a pipe (or two), in case some of y'all start firing up the stogies.

Argh...

Now that I'm a real employee of an actual municipal utility company instead of a red-headed bastard step-child of one contractor, my life is apparently more valuable and I rate a free flu shot.

(Note: This is not a stab at my current employer. It is a stab at my previous one).

Free for me, anyway. I suppose ultimately the rate-payers of San Antonio paid for it. So, thanks.

I've never had a flu shot before. I've heard it can sometimes make the recipient sick.

Well, guess what.

The Omnipotent Rudy G.

Seen at Shooting The Messenger:

R. GIULIANI: "Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city, she's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people."

Amazing. Rudy made himself personally responsible for the safety and security of millions of New Yorkers who he had a large part in disarming--ensuring they could not be responsible for their own safety and security. So he personally watched over each and every individual to make sure they were safe and secure.

Or did I misinterpret something here?

Joining the Tribe

UPDATE: Email I just sent to Jeff.

I had sent in a photo to be included on the site. However, I would now like to request that it not be added. I don't want to appear in the same group with that idiot with the red bandanna.

For what it's worth.


Just sent this pic in to People of the Gun. I don't do poses well, but I guess it gets the message across.

I couldn't come up with a decent stance that would both show the gun and the "Republic of Texas" logo on the t-shirt.

My daughter took the picture.

The Unbelievable Rudy G.

Anyone can make flash movies with Toufee.com

Having problems getting this one to work right. The music keeps looping even though it's not supposed to. Right click to stop the music when the show is finished, or mute it while the show is still going. Otherwise, if I can't fix it I'll delete it.

url

Technorati Tags: guns, giuliani, second+amendment, rkba

Crazy Sam

I think I have been somewhat remiss in not mentioning that my favorite (or should I say "favourite") Canadian blogger Samantha Burns has begun blogging again, after taking some time off for other pursuits.

She's taken a new direction from her previous blogging. She's now trying her hand at editorial cartoons. Her artistry may not be super-spectacular, but seeing as how it's infinitely better than anything I could draw, I don't have much room to complain. Anyway, I like it.

Roundups and Carnivals

The newest Government Tyranny Roundup is posted at New Liberty Creation.

And the new Second Amendment Carnival is now online at Free Constitution.

Falling behind...

I am getting behind in keeping up with blog reading. I still check all my most tip-top favorites, but I'm having a hard time keeping up. Real life, and all that. Also, I've been putting together some raw materials for another slide show. It takes me a lot of time, even though it's going to be short. I might make two versions, one "wide screen" with sound and another "tower" style to fit a sidebar, with no sound. I'll have to see how they come out.

The most onerous part of this one is that I've been extracting audio sound bites from videos. Which means I've been doing some sound editing and listening to freakin' Giuliani's monotonous drone over and over again all morning. Yeesh. I think I need a nap.

The Party of Pragmatism

Joe Carter writes on The Pragmatic Party of Death:

Still, I am shocked that Republicans are willing to signal their utter disregard and disrespect for social conservatives by considering Giuliani as a tenable candidate. They used to think we were a force that had to placacted. Now, they have gauged our resolve and realized they can treat us with impunity since we will set aside our principles in the name of pragmatism.

His article centers around abortion, but all the points he makes could be equally applied to the so-called pro-rkba movement.

An interesting acquisition

An aunt of mine found a shoebox full of gun stuff in her garage that she thought she'd gotten rid of years ago, after her husband had died. She took it to my dad, who is one of our two family gun nuts. He said he had no use for it (except for a couple of boxes of .22 shells) so he passed the box on to me.

Inside is about 100 plastic practice shells and projectiles in .38. This is the kind of practice ammo that is loaded with only a primer. I actually bought some of these a while back but never got around to buying the primers for them. Said shoebox also contains several hundred such small pistol primers as are required. They're old, but they were kept in a fairly controlled environment and should still be good.

Also inside was a smaller box of 30-40 .30 carbine cartridges, and what I assume is a magazine for an M-1 Carbine. What is it, a 30-rounder? 25? I didn't load it fully, just put a few shells in the top to confirm that the .30 ammo went with the magazine. The magazine was left unloaded, and the spring seems to still be in perfect condition.

I have no use for the magazine or the .30 ammo. I suppose I can sell the magazine for a few bucks, and I'll just give away the ammo since I have no idea if it's factory or reloads--also it's probably nearly 30 years old. It should still be good enough at least for someone to use as reloading components. (Not that I think ammo has an expiration date. It's just that, although my uncle was a very intelligent, even wise man, and I don't think he would have created any dangerous reloads, I can't personally vouch for how this ammo may have been loaded).

If you're wondering what happened to all my of uncle's guns, well, they were sold after his death. The only one that I know of now is the Ruger old model Single-Six with a 10-inch barrel that my dad bought from my aunt, and which he still has.

Where all those lolcat jokes really come from...

Michigan man with pellet gun saves skunk

A skunk who got his head stuck in a salad dressing jar was saved by a Michigan police officer - from a safe distance.

The skunk, head in jar, wandered into a police station parking lot and was spotted by Officer James Kellett.

Kellett wanted to help, but was wary of the skunk's spray, The Saginaw News reported in its Friday edition.

So, naturally, he grabbed a pellet gun used in hunters' safety courses and shot at the jar from a safe distance.

The shots cracked and shattered the jar, leaving a glass collar around the skunk's neck. With its head free, the skunk ran off.

'I didn't want to use deadly force, and it is a residential area,' said Kellett. 'The way he was when he took off, he was able to eat, breathe and spray - and do anything else skunks like to do.'

Via Metro UK.

The Copycat Effect

Those of you who faithfully--or even agnostically--read this blog probably recall me linking to Cryptomundo on occasion. The blogger there, Loren Coleman, is a foremost authority on one of my sub-hobbies, cryptozoology. What you may not know is that Mr. Coleman has published a book (at least one that I know of) and has another blog on an entirely different matter.

The Copycat Effect keeps track of exactly what it says: the copycat effect in serial killings and mass murder. His observations on the most recent school shooting in Cleveland is here.

Disgusting

So today I bought myself a Mountain Dew so I'd have cold drink while waiting for the bus to drop off the kids. I took about two swallows and realized that something was horribly wrong. It was all I could do to keep from running around the parking lot shrieking, "The aftertaste! The aftertaste!" Instead, I steeled myself and trepidatiously inspected the label. It was as I feared.

I had purchased diet Mountain Dew by mistake.

I honestly don't know how people can stand to drink diet soft drinks. Every one I've ever accidentally sampled (this has happened before--the most notorious instance involving diet 7 Up), every one, I say, tastes like some kind of toxic by-product from a glue factory. With bubbles.

P.S. "Trepidatiously" is apparently not in the dictionary, but it should be.

It's who you look like, not who you are...

They missed Rosie.

not much

Thanks to everyone who left comments on the slide show. I'm going to stick with Toufee and try to make more of these things (it's easy and it's free). They have some pretty good upgrades to their service coming down the pike.

Also, I noticed the white screen problem on some other slide shows, so it's not just me. I did email their support about it, but haven't heard back.

There probably won't be much activity here for a couple of days. Long days and being worn out from work just makes me want to go to sleep watching TV.

Skelamingos

I've never understood why anyone would want to put plastic pink flamingos in their yard. But I could go for these.

Seen at Seventh Avenue.

Force

Flash movies are fun to make at Toufee.com

Special thanks to Armed and Safe for plenty of link references and the Tench Coxe quote. Also thanks to The War On Guns for the slideshow idea. I didn't use slide.com because there didn't appear to be a way to upload custom music for the slideshow, but I'll take another look and see if I missed something.

I'm seeing a minor problem with this slideshow. I get a white screen that flashes very briefly between each slide. I don't know if this is because I'm on dial-up or what--in any case, I can't figure out how to fix it. If anyone else sees it too let me know. I might try making this slideshow again with off-line software that I recently downloaded.

url

UPDATE: On 15 November this post was noticed by several other blogs, and the hits are just pouring in. I just want to say thank you to everyone who has linked to it.

Technorati Tags: Ladd+Everitt, force, rkba, second+amendment, violence

Hunting safety concerns in Wisconsin

Brian Dorrington, spokesman for Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital (Milwaukee) says:

This year is no exception, and the need for practicing hunting safety cannot be over-emphasized.

So he's talking about hunters negligently shooting themselves or each other, right?

No. Apparently their primary concern for hunter safety is that hunters keep falling out of trees.

In one sense, this amuses me a little. In another sense, I realize it is deadly serious. I spent more than my share of time (in my opinion) in rickety tree stands when I was younger. As I grew older and came to suspect that I was not as immortal as I had previously thought, I swore off tree stands. Fortunately, I never fell out of a tree, but there were times when every creak of the wind made my stomach churn a little bit.

Send Conoco a message

Conoco-Phillips "Pleased" to Have Federal Judge Disarm YOU at the War On Guns.

In the "property rights vs. civil rights" argument, I realize some people are torn. Some people think property rights trump all other rights.

They are wrong.

The ultimate right is the right to life. If the right to preserve your own life is taken from you, nothing else matters. Many libertarians say that eventually, if enough people refuse to be employed at such a workplace, the problem will work itself out. The employer will have to change his discriminatory policies to continue to exist.

In other words, if the best job you can get--or the only job in your small town--prohibits you from defending yourself, and you work there anyway, then you deserve to have your rights stripped from you.

Employers should not have legal authority to strip their employees of a fundamental right.

2007 Ig Nobel Awards are out

The BBC has a list of this year's Ig Nobel Award winners.

FYI, this award was created by a science humor magazine called The Annals of Improbable Research to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology."

Among this year's award-winners are chemist Mayu Yamamoto for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavoring from cow dung, a team of linguists from the University of Barcelona for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards, and a team of...somethings or others...from the National University of Quilmes, Argentina, for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

Note to the authorized journalists at BBC: AIR is a science humor magazine, not a science magazine. I think there's a big difference.

Full details at AIR.

Been working

Did a little more fence work this morning.

But mostly I've been using an online service called toufee.com to create a Flash slide show.

I didn't want to say anything much about this project in case I decided it was too much work and gave it up. But it looks like I've done about as much with it as I can and I'll be posting it pretty soon. Seeing something like this come to fruition is exciting, and I'll be trying to think of topics for further such projects in the future.

Blog evolution meme

So Hammer tagged me for this meme. I guess he assumed (correctly) that I this is a meme I would enjoy being tagged for. I'm supposed to pick out 5 posts that chart the evolution of this blog.

When I first began this blog, I had no idea what to do with it. At the time I thought I'd just do a clip-blog of things that I thought were interesting or important. An all-linky-no-thinky kind of blog. For the first little while I did pretty well, making 52 posts in about a month and a half.

In looking back at the old archives, I have surprised myself. I was doing then about what I'm doing now. For example, here's one about NASA doing some apparently under-handed data mining, followed by a post linking to the Michael Moore debunking site Bowling for Truth and another about how guns are mis-portrayed in movies.

But then I ran out of steam. I was languishing in obscurity and it was no fun just writing for myself. The rest of 2004 saw sporadic and sparse posting. I did continue to read other blogs the whole time and my blogroll was constantly growing. I just didn't say anything myself. Sometime during this hiatus I discovered the gunbloggersphere. Wow. People were using their blogs to advocate the right to keep and bear arms. Why hadn't I thought of that? Suddenly I had a focus and a reason for doing this.

This post definitely marked an evolution in my blogging, because it was the first time a post of mine was noticed and linked to by another blogger: Lest Darkness Fall. This was also the first time I saw myself on someone else's blogroll. I had arrived. By the way, LDF has been silent for a long time now. I hope you're doing okay.

(This is a two pipe post). I just noticed that in June 2005 I posted twice about anti-self-defense stuff going on at Virginia Tech, here and here. They are not pertinent to the evolution of this blog. I just thought I'd mention them.

Somewhere in here I started contributing to the Carnival of Cordite (RIP). I think this was the first such post.

Things kept plugging along pretty much the same for some time. I moved over to Eponym. And then...

The Guns of Hellsing. I could not then, and still can't believe the traffic this single post generated. It was part of the Carnival of Cordite. Several other bloggers and discussion forums linked to it. Numerous anime websites linked to it. Every single person in the whole world who Googled anything having to do with Hellsing checked it out. Since I had limited bandwidth at Eponym (5 gigs per month), it was wiping me out. I went through two weeks worth of bandwidth in about 3 days. I got a huge rush from all the traffic, but it was going to take me offline for weeks if it didn't stop. I finally resorted to deleting the post from Eponym and reposting it over here. This is still the king of all my posts. Nothing else has ever even come close to touching it.

The next notable evolution in this blog came with my first photoshop. This kind of thing is, for me, the most fun I have with this blog. I wish the muse would visit me more often so I could do this kind of thing more frequently. My p-shopping skills are not that great, but I have a lot of fun with it.

So that's four posts. I should do one more to fit the meme. Uh...well, sometime in there I started trying to do more humorous/satirical stuff like this. I also started recounting some personal experiences, like this.

And then I had to come back to Blogspot. It seems that everyone bailed out at Eponym, and left the lights on. Occasionally a bulb burns out, but there's no one there to replace it. So it seems that I've not changed all that much since I started this thing. Blogging about things that I think are interesting, important, or just plain weird, to include RKBA and other fundamental rights, strange stuff, humor, H.P. Lovecraft and pipe smoking.

So what does the future hold? Probably more of the same, but I do have a couple of new things in mind. Just this week I started on something that will be new for this blog, but it could be several days or even weeks before I finish it because it involves another learning curve.

I never tag anyone for these memes but if anyone reads this and wants to join in, leave a comment and I'll link to you.

I was sure it would be the middle finger...

You Are the Thumb

You're unique and flexible. And you defy any category. Mentally strong and agile, you do things your own way. And you do them well. You are a natural leader... but also truly a loner. You inspire many but connect with few. You get along well with: The Middle Finger Stay away from: The Pinky

What Finger Are You?

That's actually so right it's spooky. The "natural leader" part is a weird thing. I seem to somehow keep getting myself into leadership positions even though I don't want to, and I think I'm terrible at it.

Seen at Tall Cool Drink of Water.

Digital Forensics

Here's an interesting interview with Hany Farid, Proving That Seeing Shouldn't Always Be Believing:

Q. Why do scientists need to know about this?

A. Because not long ago, researchers from South Korea had to retract papers published in Science because the photographs used to prove that human stem cells had been cloned were effectively Photoshop-cloned, and not laboratory-cloned. There have been other recent cases, too. And today, in science, more and more, photographs are the data. The Federal Office of Research Integrity has said that in 1990, less than 3 percent of allegations of fraud they investigated involved contested images. By 2001, that number was 26 percent. And last year, it was 44.1 percent.

Mike Rossner of The Journal of Cell Biology estimates that 20 percent of the manuscripts he accepts contain at least one figure that has to be remade because of inappropriate image manipulation. He means that the images are not accurate reflections of the original data. Rossner estimates that about 1 percent of the papers have some piece of image data that is downright fraudulent.

Doom, I say

JPFO's Innocents Betrayed is part of a college course

A letter from a teacher at JPFO:

This fall all classes have seen the film in its entirety. One student who believed people should not own guns is now challenging that notion. She was amazed that genocide and defenseless citizens = murder and oppression. When juxtaposed with Susanna Gratia’s tale in that tragic day in Killeen, Texas- this student saw the light that people have the right to defend themselves. She is not comfortable with wholesale gun ownership, but she is now at least listening.

What has amazed me are the numbers of students who see me at the end of class who are comfortable with the message that self-defense is a right. Further, women seem to get it. Two young ladies (18 years old) in class this week believed they had the right to protect themselves. One young man thanked me for showing a film that didn’t malign gun ownership. The rest of the class commented about the somber tone and how it made them think about our government in comparison with other nations.

The letter was written by a college professor who has made the DVD part of the Global Issues course at Georgia College and State University.

Another unexpected search hit

Someone Googled the entire subject of this post.

FYI, it's from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.

In the convoluted pathways of my mind, it seemed appropriate for the post.

Computer ignorance from Hollywood

CRACKED has a hilarious list of 5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do:

The aliens in Independence Day were not only thousands of years ahead of us technologically, but also were an entirely different species. Therefore, Goldblum’s feat was the equivalent of colony of baboons in the Congo hacking into CitiBank using tree bark and clumps of their own feces.

And they're dead-on about Sandra Bullock.

The not-so-noble savage

Child mummies 'fattened up' before Inca sacrifice:

Their deaths were terrifying, and Dr Wilson believes they were meant to be. "The logistics of getting the children there needed imperial organisation," he said. "We believe there was some measure of the Incas demonstrating their power to the colonised: obey, or this is what will happen to you."

No revolver, though

JPFO is marketing Goody Guns, a cookie cutter shaped like a semi-auto pistol.

Each one comes along with a few other goodies. I think I'll have to order one of these.

Taser Registration

As far as I'm concerned, since the Taser is a self-defense device, it is an "arm," and therefore should be protected as an arm under the Second Amendment.

Apparently the Taser company doesn't think so. This page can't be linked to directly. To discover this fine print, you have to go to the Taser website, click on the appropriate page to go to the C2 (the "civilian" model, since "civilians" don't deserve the same level of protection as "law enforcement"), click on "buy now," and then click on the text description. Here's the screen shot of what turns up. Look toward the bottom for the bad news.


So, not only are you forced to register it before it can be activated, you have to pay another $9.95 for it. After registering, the customer is given an activation code which will enable the device.

No, I'm not planning on buying a Taser. But this is something people should know.

And if you think this registration information isn't going into a permanent database, you're fooling yourself.

P.S. I've been instructed that this is an "extreme right viewpoint." I don't see it, myself. I thought it was more of an "extreme ability to defend oneself without ending up in a database" viewpoint.

It's funny because it's true

I don't know how many times I've done this very thing.

Summer of Lovecraft

A website to help generate interest in a geek Lovecraft movie at Summer of Lovecraft:

This site is dedicated to the feasibility of developing, financing, producing and distributing a feature film aimed at the "geek" market. The themes of H.P. Lovecraft are echoed in “Summer of Lovecraft”, a feature-length sci-fi/horror film that explores (and satirizes) rebellion, rural dystopia, intolerance, atavistic guilt, the inevitability of fate and the arrogance of humanity. The screenplay is based in part on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and in part on the lives of its authors. The intent is to produce an feature film and series of comics based on the characters and situations in the screenplay. This website is here to prove to the people with the money that project has 'legs'. "Summer of Lovecraft" has been shopped around to several different studios, investors & distribution companies, all of whom have shown interest... but none has ponied up the cash so far. Problem is, none of them seem to think there's a market out there for a film like this. We're here to prove them wrong. If we prove there's a market, they'll invest, plain & simple.

Well, I would watch it.

"If Erlenmeyer flasks are outlawed, only outlaws will have Erlenmeyer flasks"

Wulf of Atlas Blogged has accidentally found a really stupid Texas law.

Psychedelic Crick

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago [2004-07-28], aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD, then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy, to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Full story here. Old news, but I just discovered it. Interesting, if true.

That's dope, man...

Say Uncle has been documenting Google's anti-gun discriminatory practices (more here), which don't make sense anyway because they sell gun-related ad space.

If you can get past the irony of the top-most ad without spewing your favorite beverage on your screen, look down at the bottom-most item. You can see that they have no problem selling ad space for drug paraphernalia. Look at this animated gif of the device in action. That's a dope pipe.

I personally would not hold their running such an ad against them. If someone wants to toke the sacred herb that's their business. But running such ads, and running perfectly legal gun-related ads, and then blocking gun-related websites from displaying such ads, is not only "Evil," it's stupid. It makes no sense. It also smacks of misrepresentation. They sell gun-related ad space, but they don't allow websites to use adsense if that website's text would cause such ads to actually be displayed. That's dishonest. More than that, it's crooked.

I'll be honest, my adsense balance is up to about $50, and when it gets to $100 I'll get my first payout. I've been running them for several months (starting on the other blog) and I don't want to waste what I've accumulated thus far. Once the payout happens, I'm out of it unless they change their policies by that time.

If anyone has any non-discriminatory alternative to adsense, let me know. I would still like something on here that would generate a few pennies so I could occasionally buy an extra box of ammo or a pro-RKBA t-shirt or something.

Cool

I'm going to have something at LOLTHULHU. The webmaster over there said it might be a while, because he has a big backlog of submissions and he's been "spacing them out." I'll have to see if I can think of another one before then.

Her real favorite Bible verse...

This one's for David Drake.

A sobering morning

UPDATE: Here's the news report. Which, knowing the Express-News, may or may not be entirely accurate.

UPDATE 2: And here is the report from our local county newspaper. See if you can spot spot the bias between the two. Hint: our county newspaper is more accurate.

---

Arrived at church services this morning and the first thing I learned was that an elderly member of our congregation went to the aid of his neighbors, who were victims of a home invasion. This gentle, quiet elderly man was forced to use lethal force with a firearm to protect himself and his neighbors from the invaders.

One of the home invaders died. The other escaped, but was caught later and is now in custody.

I realize that in some parts of the country, such actions would have been frowned upon, but not here. It was obvious that this man was heavily preoccupied and more quiet even than usual, but he was there. It was up to his wife to let everyone know what had happened, because he wouldn't speak of it.

A prayer was led. Some parts of it: "We thank you, Lord, that [name redacted] had the courage to help his neighbors, and that You kept him safe and unharmed. We pray for the grieving families of the one who died, and we pray that somehow, somewhere, this will be a lesson that there are consequences for choosing a life of violence and thievery."

It was the first time I had ever heard such a prayer. I only pray that if I am ever forced into such a situation, my heart is not so hardened that I don't feel grief for the one who died, or for his family. And I hope I have the courage to pray for them, not to curse them.

I think I can help on this one

I got a search hit for "shocked and stunned script monty python." The phrase "shocked and stunned" was used by a Python, but it was not on Monty Python. It was Eric Idle on The Rutles.

Sunday Vintage Pipe Ad, 1906: The Everklean

Another example of the gimmicks people go to to sell pipes. This one had an aluminum tube inside the shank/stem to prevent the smoke and moisture from contacting the actual inside of the pipe. Disassemble, clean the tube, and reassemble. Many years later Falcon, Kirsten and others would drop the pretense and simply create an aluminum-stemmed pipe.

The Gate and the Key

In keeping with my unannounced custom of posting some Cthulhuian graphic every weekend, here is an artist's rendition of Yog-Sothoth. I don't know who the artist was, since the site I found it on didn't credit him/her either.

Yoggy is one of the more interesting Outer Gods, to me. It is the only one besides Nyarlathotep to have more than one form. It's other form is known as 'Umr at-Tawil, or Tawil at-'Umr. In this latter form it appears to be humanoid and is capable of interacting with humans in a not totally malevolent way. It is also said to be "coterminous with all time and space." It seems ripe for use in Lovecraftian sci-fi, yet seems to me to not be exploited for such use as often as it could have been.

The above graphic is not entirely accurate to Lovecraft's original description of it as being "a congeries of iridescent globes." Still, it's a pretty good picture, I think.

This is nitpicky...

But we gunbloggers are always picking out errors made by the MSM regarding guns.

Everyone has (I'm sure) already read about the guy who was walking around a college campus with a Wolf .50 caliber in-line muzzle loader.

I have read a couple of other gunblogs already in which this rifle is referred to as a "musket." I feel compelled to point out that this gun is not a musket. It is a rifle. A musket is a smooth bore--the barrel has no rifling. The Wolf muzzle loader is a modern in-line rifle--with a rifled barrel.

If we are going to be nitpicky about gun errors in the mainstream press, we should be wary of making the same kinds of mistakes ourselves.

The longest ride

From APEM - World Student Press Agency:

It was the last ferry back from the island to Mackinac city. Nearly 100 Ron Paul supporters were waiting on the dock when they were surprised to see Mayor Giuliani appear with his bodyguards walking toward the ferryboat. The crowd started cheering Ron Paul’s name and Mayor Giuliani’s smiling face suddenly turned thunderstruck. Informed that it was the last ferry, Giuliani ended up boarding with those Ron Paul supporters and took the “longest” ferry ride in his life.

The ferryboat was going like the wind, cleaving the waves on the Great Lakes in the inky darkness, as if the Black Pearl in the movie Pirates of Caribbean. Giuliani was “hiding” beneath the window in the captain’s cabinet, with bodyguards standing around him to block the sight. The crowd kept cheering Ron Paul’s name again and again all the way, for almost 20 minutes, many of them were calling their friends and family to give them the play-by-play.

When the ferry reached Mackinac City, Giuliani went out of the captain’s cabinet with a cheering face and offered to shake hands with passengers sitting in the first row but they were reluctant to do so. Afraid of Ron Paul supporters’ enthusiasm, Giuliani got off the fore of the boat, instead of taking the normal path at the stern.

Also on board were FOX News reporters who covered the whole ride with their vidicon, but it wasn’t put on air.

Pretty funny. He has to hide behind his bodyguards because the other passengers were chanting a different candidate's name. What a wimp. And he thinks he can be President?

Via New Liberty Creation.

People of the Gun

A photo I've posted before on the other blog, but I thought with the current meme running around the gunblogosphere it would be a nice time to repost it. The gun is a Hi-Standard 9-shooter in .22.

One of us is an...

Turned up at a reptile center in Pennsylvania. Two heads, six legs, and a combined tail. I suppose it must be excreting its wastes from somewhere, or it would be dead by now.

The people there are trying to think of a name to give it, but they are all really lame. The obvious name would be Pushmi-pullyu, but then I doubt that any of them have actually read Doctor Dolittle.

Via Metro U.K.

Dream blogging

Occasionally I have very realistic, detailed and sometimes what I would even call "epic" dreams. I've never talked about them in public before, but since I don't have anything else to write about, this is one I had last night.

Most of the dream was very confusing and disjointed, as if something had happened to cause me to have amnesia. I understood that I was no longer where I was supposed to be. Something had happened. I was found by a friendly good Samaritan wandering the streets with a small box tucked under my arm. He took me in and took care of me. Through the haze I had the idea that I was in a foreign country, but fortunately this man could speak English.

My condition slowly improved and I started putting some pieces together. I understood that I had somehow been shifted through space and time because of something called the "Deely Incident." I don't know exactly what this was, except that this "incident" is what had put me out of time.

One day the fuzz in my mind finally seemed to clear up, and I picked up a newspaper that my benefactor had brought home. I couldn't read it, but I could tell that it was written in German, and the date on the front page was 1938. I was in Germany.

I was immediately overwhelmed with fear and sadness, not for myself, but for the man who had looked after me. He was young, and looked like a very young Dennis Hopper but clean-shaven and with short hair. I apparently knew who he was, or more accurately, who he would become. I checked my little box that had been found with me to make sure everything was still in it. It contained a Bible printed in 1981 and a checkbook with modern dates written in it, along with a few other items that would have been anachronistic in 1938. Since I knew what was going to happen for the next 70 years, I was pretty sure I could fend for myself, but I was leaving for the States.

I told my care-taker I was leaving. I didn't tell him any details about what I knew would be happening in the next several years, but the last thing I said to him was, "Look, you have to get out of here--out of Europe--and go to America. If you don't, you will die." I walked out of the house, and that's when I woke up.

I wonder if anyone else ever has dreams like this. Maybe I'll try recounting one or two others, if I can remember them well enough and if anyone is interested.

If you write it, they will come...

The Blogonomicon second rule of blogging: No matter how absurd, nonsensical, or obscure you might think something is that you have written, eventually it will be a search hit.

I just got a search hit for "zombie pumpkins."

"What is it to die, but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun."

This is just utterly mind-boggling. It seems some people aren't satisfied with standing atop the world's tallest mountain. Some of them must do it buck nekkid:

Nepalese mountaineering authorities are reportedly outraged that people were ditching their clothes on Mount Everest, which is worshipped by some villagers.

President of Nepal Mountaineering Association Ang Tshering told AP that following last year’s record by a Nepali climber, who claimed the world's highest display of nudity while standing on the 8,850m summit in temperatures about minus 10 degrees Celsius [emphasis added--ed.], restrictions should be implemented.

“There should be strict regulations to discourage such attempts by climbers,” Tshering said.

Tshering also said that villages had also complained to the government about the “obscene” behaviour.

Thousands of climbers had reached the mountain’s summit since it was first conquered by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.

I say let 'em do it. And then usher them directly toward Darwin's Queue.

Restrictions? Man, that's funny. If negative 10 degrees C doesn't discourage people from disrobing, will a new law? BWAH HA HA ha ha ha...(choke, sputter). And who's going to enforce it? They're going to have to find a whole new breed of bureaucrat who is tough and/or stupid enough to stand at the top of Everest and hand out nudity citations.

The law of the slippery slope demands that eventually mere nakedidity will not be enough. I can hear it already: "Hey baby, want to summit with me?"

UPDATE: To respond to comments. Climbers start out in "groups," more or less. However, by the time they leave the last camp to try and make the summit, the men are getting separated from the boys, so to speak, and the groups tend to straggle out. It's just about an imperative that summiting occurs no later than about 2:00 PM (IIRC). Any later than that, and the climber won't be able to make it back to camp before dark. Get caught out on that mountain that high up after dark, and you are dead. At this point, climbers can't afford to do anything but get their butts up and back down. Anyone who needs help will likely only get it from their guide and their Sherpas. If the guide and/or the Sherpas can't get to them, it is very unlikely that any other climbers will have the experience and fortitude to help anyone else. By midday the line of climbers is so spread out that most of them hit the summit alone.

Also, "help" doesn't always mean help. There isn't a whole lot that can be done for someone who is running behind, except to catch them and turn them around before it's too late. If they stay out too late, like I said, they are dead.

I was being completely facetious about having sex at the summit of Everest. That high up, the body ceases to function correctly because of lack of oxygen. At that point, oxygen bottles keep you alive and conscious, but that's all. There's no extra oxygen for doing anything besides going up and coming back down. Your metabolism can't even work correctly, and for the last couple of days you probably haven't eaten anything other than a few pieces of candy because your body simply can't process food due to oxygen starvation.

Any slight bit of extra weight is discarded. That's why the path to the top is littered with empty oxygen bottles. The weight of an empty bottle or two or three could slow you down enough to get you killed. There has been a movement (of sorts) to discourage this to reduce litter. Some of the more experienced climbers will pick up an empty bottle or two to try and reduce litter, but a large-scale clean-up of the summit is just about impossible. It's the most extreme environment on earth, and any little thing can get you killed. A very few, very experienced climbers have summited without oxygen, but it is not possible to do so for the average climber.

No one is going to "steal" someone's clothes to prevent them from getting naked at the summit. It would mean more weight to whoever took the clothes, and it would be a certain death sentence to whoever was left exposed. No one is likely to want any "reward" because taking the clothing from someone would certainly cause one death (the naked person's), and possibly two (your own).

For plenty of details about what it's really like to climb Everest, I recommend Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

Huh

I just had to look up "defenestration." I've read the word before, but I was never clear on what it actually meant, except that it must be something bad.

It only means, "the act of throwing someone or something out a window."

That's one word that sounds a lot worse than its definition. I always thought it had something to do with disembowelment.

Something for cat haters

Cat math:

And for cat-haters who also hate bagpipes:


Both from The Second Official I Hate Cats Book by Skip Morrow (published 1981).

I am not a cat hater, in fact I like cats (I like bagpipe music too), but this book is funny. My wife picked it up at a used book store yesterday. It took me only a few minutes to flip through, but I was laughing the whole time. I'll probably post more of them sometime when I run out of anything else to say.

Wednesday Vintage "Gun" Ad, 1947: Beech Bonanza

Actually an ad for the Beech Bonanza airplane, it uses the comparison with the Colt revolver as an "equalizer." I snagged this one from the internet, and whoever uploaded it cropped it too close--that's not my crop.

Oh yeah, and Walter Beech was obviously a pipe smoker.

Where's my cash?

Why didn't the rest of y'all tell me we were supposed be getting paid for this? That's what Laura Washington says:

Through organizing, the Internet, and plunking down plenty of cold hard cash, the gun lobby has proven it is ready for primetime. Meanwhile, its opponents are languishing in the wee-hours of late-night local cable.

I know I'm small potatoes, but man, I figure my "lobbying" should worth at least a couple hundred bucks.

Saved by the cell phone

More about Giuliani and his cell phone escape technique at Red Pills:

Last April 9, NewsMax reported that Giuliani was attending a roundtable discussion with heavy-hitter Republicans at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. Two of the three co-hosts were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

One participant started to ask a question about Iraq.

“In the middle of the question, Mayor Giuliani’s personal cell phone rang, and he answered it,” a participant said. “At first, I think people thought he was kidding. But then he just started talking, and without looking up or saying anything to us, he just got up, left the room, and never came back!

Everyone waited about 20 minutes, and then the room started to break up. It was bizarre behavior.”

Genes no longer the center of the genome universe

At The Boston Globe (might have to use BugMeNot):

For half a century, the core concept in biology has been that every cell carries within its nucleus a full set of DNA, including genes. Each gene, in turn, holds coded instructions for assembling a particular protein, the stuff that keeps organisms chugging along.

As a result, genes were assigned an almost divine role in biological "dogma," thought to govern not only such physical characteristics as eye color or hair texture, but even much more complicated characteristics, such as behavior or psychology. Genes were assigned blame for illness. Genes were credited for robust health. Genes were said to be the source of the mutations that underlay evolution.

But the picture now emerging is more complicated, one in which illness, health, and evolutionary change appear to be the work of almost fantastical coordination between genes and swaths of DNA previously written off as junk.

...and...

"The picture that's emerging" of how living cells actually operate and evolve "is so immensely more complicated than anyone imagined, it's almost depressing," Rigoutsos said.

The more we know, the more we don't know. A pattern that will continue, I daresay, until we finally realize that what we don't know is indeed infinite.

As usual, read the whole thing.

Got your papers?

Read the whole thing at Papers, Please!:

In a series of recent publications in the Federal Register, the Department of Homeland Security is proposing a comprehensive new system of surveillance and, perhaps more important, control of both domestic and international travelers.

The proposed new rules, which are currently open for public comments, would require that:

1. All would-be international travellers to or from the USA (even US citizens crossing the U.S.-Canada border on foot) would have to have government-issued ID credentials

2. All would-be passengers on international or domestic flights to, from, over, via, or within the U.S. would have to have both government-issued ID credentials and explicit case-by-case prior permission from the DHS to the airline to allow each passenger to board a plane.

The proposed rules would enforce the requirements for papers and permits through default provisions that would:

1. Require all air travellers to show their papers (”government-issued photo ID”) to airline staff on request of the DHS, under penalty of denial of transportation.

2. Forbid any airline from issuing a boarding pass to anyone, or allowing them to baord a plane, unless and until the airline received individual permission (a “cleared message”) authorizing that airline to allow that specific person on that specific flight.

Got that? It goes from "anyone can fly unless they pop up on the 'no fly list'," to "no one can fly unless they are on the 'allowed to fly list'." Read it all for more details and even more bad news.

Via The Club Above.

Caves on Mars

From NASA:

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has discovered entrances to seven possible caves on the slopes of a Martian volcano. The find is fueling interest in potential underground habitats and sparking searches for caverns elsewhere on the Red Planet.

Very dark, nearly circular features ranging in diameter from about 328 to 820 feet puzzled researchers who found them in images taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor orbiters. Using Mars Odyssey's infrared camera to check the daytime and nighttime temperatures of the circles, scientists concluded that they could be windows into underground spaces.

Run across the entrance first, and see if any fireballs come out.

Sunday Vintage Pipe Ad, 1932: Kaywoodie Drinkless

The Kaywoodie Drinkless was the bottom of the ladder in the Kaywoodie hierarchy. It was the cheapest, and therefore billed as "the everyman pipe," because it was cheap enough that every man could afford one. If it wasn't good enough to become a Drinkless, it became a Yello-Bole. I have some Kaywoodies, and they are good pipes, but I must say that this ad is playing somewhat fast and loose with the "facts."

To begin with, the "secret alloy" is aluminum. It may have been slightly alloyed with something to harden it up just a little, but basically it's aluminum. As for the "460 degrees centigrade at the bowl," this is a little misleading. The only place where the temperature is going to approach that high is at the exact point of the char: a very thin line where the tobacco would be glowing red if it were not covered by the already spent ash higher in the pipe. Even only a matter of millimeters lower at the bottom of the bowl where the air hole comes in, it's much cooler than that already. The fitment does not have any magical temperature reduction properties, except that it does trap some moisture.

"Rock Ambera" is Bakelite that was colored to vaguely resemble amber.

The best thing about these old pipes is that they had a screw-in stem so it's safe to remove the stem while the pipe is still hot and run a pipe cleaner into the shank to sop up any excess moisture.

And if you get hold of an old Kaywoodie, don't take a hacksaw to the fitment. Leave everything intact. Some people complain that it's impossible to run a pipe cleaner down the stem during a smoke, but like I said, it's perfectly safe to unscrew the stem while the pipe is still hot. Cutting off the fitment is just mutilation.

Saturday Night Poetry: Nemesis by H.P. Lovecraft

Nemesis

by H.P. Lovecraft

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear,
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

"A mountain walked or stumbled..."

The Giant Cthulhu, another one by Cyril Van Der Haegen. Follow the link to see how the painting was developed. Inspired by N.C. Wyeth's The Giant.

Excellent perspective on this one. The impression of overwhelming height is something I attempted to capture in words when describing a form of Nyarlathotep in my story Nyarlathotep's Lament.

I cannot describe what he looked like. Part of my mind went into hiding, refusing to witness what stood above and before me, towering into the sky, scraping its topmost parts against the stars, howling soundlessly into the void of outer space. Another part of my mind whirled with a bizarre reverse vertigo from the intense height of the thing. The earth shuddered beneath its weight, bending to fit strange dimensions that it was never meant to fit. Rainbows of unearthly hues rippled through the air as the titanic alien violated reality. My mind was utterly consumed with the awesome immensity of the thing.

Successfully describing such awesome immensity is something I've tried in more than one story. I don't think I've adequately succeeded in doing so just yet.

And I've re-written that story about a dozen times. I still am not really satisfied with it.

I'll just keep the coin in my pocket

Tam put it very well:

This is the sad impasse your party has come to; if the best thing you can offer me on election day is the gun-grabbing mayor of NYFC or the governor of Taxachussetts, I don't see any reason not to stay home. Don't ask me your tired "Would you rather see Hillary as president instead of Rudy?" questions because the answer is that between the two, you might as well flip a coin from where I sit. This ain't a high school football game, sport; I'm not waving pompons for the guy just 'cause he's wearing the jersey.

Exactly. There was a time, a long time ago, when I considered myself a conservative, although I never thought of myself as a Republican. I don't think of myself as a conservative anymore, although that may be because the Republicans have hijacked the term and it no longer truly means "conservative" any more than "liberal" truly means "liberal." I'm just the crank who everyone rolls their eyes at when I go off on something.

Let me tell you something. If it turns out to be Guiliani against Clinton MkII in the general election, I hope Hillary wins. If she does, it's going to be terrible. It's also going to wake a lot of people up. It's going to be either the worst or the best thing that's happened to this country in a long time.

Compromise and "settling for the lesser evil" may be how politics works, but that doesn't make it right--only accepted. And I don't accept it anymore.

Blogging note

The reason I have two adsense things in the sidebars is because the one on the left was installed with Blogger's widget. The one on the right I installed manually. I just want to see if the ads feed any differently between them. Curiosity, that's all.

The case for open carry

Spanish fashion designer Andres Sarda has unwittingly made a very strong argument for open carry.

See what I mean?

(Since I don't post these kinds of pix on my blog, you'll just have to follow the link).

Not a joke

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate.

From Voges Chocolate. Bacon and chocolate is probably not my thing, although I'd try it if the opportunity arose. However, I am quite fond of dipping bacon in honey. I'm also very partial to ham dipped in honey. In fact, I'll dip meat of any kind in honey unless I'm physically restrained.

Via meine kleine fabrik.

Public Service Announcement

Cowboy Bebop is back on Cartoon Network.

Click for the big graphic, sized for wallpaper.

The right place at the right time...

Worked a rough neighborhood today, on the west side. Not a bad route, except for the dogs. I was working my way down Romero street when I came to a house where an old lady was lying on the ground and when she saw me, she said, "I fell down..."

It was one of those "I've fallen and I can't get up" things. It might seem funny on television, but it's not funny in real life. She was lying in direct sunlight. It wasn't as hot today as it has been, but it was still plenty hot enough to badly dehydrate someone who was lying helpless in full sunlight.

I reached over her fence, took her hand and pulled her to her feet. She thanked me profusely, and I just said "you're welcome" and went on my way.

But it made me think. So many little things can affect where you are, when you are. If I hadn't had trouble working my way up General McMullen earlier that morning, I might have been going a lot faster and already passed her house before she needed help. Or if I had managed to leave the office a little earlier, or...lots of other little things.

I just said a little prayer of thanks that someone was there to help her when she needed it.

Later on someone else gave me a cold Big Red when I got to their house, so I guess my karma was working.

And I only had to stare down two loose pit bulls, so it wasn't a bad day.

Also, I found a house with a Dogo. Man, those suckers are huge.

Zombie Pumpkins

Yesterday my son was drawing pictures of jack-o-lanterns. He starts celebrating Halloween early, which I can understand.

So up he came, walking one of these paper pumpkins across the desk like a kid does, and making some kind of weird roaring monster noise.

"Look, Daddy! It's a zombie pumpkin!"

"A zombie pumpkin?"

"Yeah, see--he's missin' a eye!"

A weird kid after my own heart.

Tainted Science

An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal claims "Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis":

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.

Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. "People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual," Dr. Ioannidis said.

Read the whole article. Lots of thought-provoking stuff.

The Cult of the Global Village

So what do you do when most sane people have dismissed you as a bunch of communists, socialists, victimization apologists, dhimmis, and enemies-of-freedom-in-general?

This group can speak freely and boldly, working both publicly and behind the scenes on whatever actions need to be taken. Together we will work to support courage where there is fear, foster agreement where there is conflict, and inspire hope where there is despair.

Answer: you declare yourself an "elder of the global village" and wait for all the other authoritarian nannies and their mindless sycophants to gather.

"Support courage where there is fear." Yeah. Take a look at the list of "elders." Is there anyone on that list who advocates actually empowering individuals to fight back against those they fear?

"Foster agreement where there is conflict." By doing everything we're told. End of conflict. Right, Jimmy?

"Inspire hope where there is fear." Guess what. I have plenty of hope, and you bunch of goons aren't part of it.

As for "working both publicly and behind the scenes on whatever actions need to be taken," well, there's not much I can add to that.

Yo ho ho, he took a bite o' gum-gum!

Cowboy Blob reminded me it's Talk Like a Pirate Day.

So here's a couple of One Piece pix, me hearties!

I have studiously avoided the entire lolcat phenomenon...

But this is more like it.


See more at lolthulhu.com.

Thanks to both Baboon Pirates and Cowboy Blob.

Wednesday Vintage Gun Ad, 1940s: Marlin .30-30

Another old ad with a brief hunting tale included. From World War 2 when this ad encouraged the reader to turn in old brass to help the war effort.

Click for a larger version that is readable.

Lovecraft and guns

Lovecraft liked guns. He cherished the collection of rifles and pistols he had inherited [from his grandfather, Whipple Phillips--ed.] and added to it a series of .22 rifles, which he took into the country to shoot. Laws against carrying and shooting firearms were fewer and laxer then than now. Lovecraft later said that he had become quite a good shot until, around 1910, eye trouble forced him to quit. "The lore of hunting allured me, and the feel of a rifle was balm to my soul; but after killing a squirrel I formed a dislike for killing things which could not fight back, hence turned to targets..."

Later, Lovecraft sold or gave away the entire collection piece by piece, save for one flintlock musket, which he kept as an antique.

from H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography
by L. Sprague De Camp

A fate worse than death

The author of the blog Nobody's Business recently tried to adopt a dog. He was not allowed to because he has two children under the age of 12. Since no one else wanted to adopt this dog, it was killed. Full details at The SPCA Killed My Dog.

Apparently the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals doesn't know the definition of "the society for prevention of cruelty to animals."

Sometimes odd things happen

I had a route today that finishes at the Alamodome. It was grueling. A mere 322 meters took 5 1/2 hours. Sheesh. But the last meter was in a big vault, and it was too deep for me to reach in and clean it by hand. Yes, it was too dirty to read. Rubbing at the dirt with the meter hook didn't work, and although the vault cover wasn't hot enough to fry eggs on, it was way too hot to touch. It was starting burn me through my jeans, even. So I thought to myself, man, I really need a tissue or cloth or something. I was just about to walk back to my truck to get a Kleenex when I suddenly noticed...something.

A used-up fabric softener sheet was sticking out of my pants leg. What the...? Apparently it had gotten stuck in there when the pants were last washed, and didn't come out when I put the pants on this morning. It had slowly been working its way down the pants leg all day. So I stuck it on the meter hook like a cleaning jag and cleaned off the meter so I could read it. That was pretty weird.

And if you're thinking I still got off light because I was done in 5 1/2 hours, no. I still had another 200 to do on another route right next to that one. This was the hardest day I've had in a long time. So now, counting my last job, I have read gas, electric and waters meters all in that same area. I hate that place. No matter what you do there, it sucks.

Where can I get one?

The "Reuger 9mm" with a "75-round clip." "Fresh hollowpoints" not included.

It would make concealed carry slightly difficult, I'd guess.

"...something was amiss..."

Caracas, Venezuela:

A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy.

Carlos Camejo, 33, was declared dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue, where examiners began an autopsy only to realize something was amiss when he started bleeding. They quickly sought to stitch up the incision on his face.

"I woke up because the pain was unbearable," Camejo said, according to a report on Friday in leading local newspaper El Universal.

His grieving wife turned up at the morgue to identify her husband's body only to find him moved into a corridor -- and alive.

Reuters could not immediately reach hospital officials to confirm the events. But Camejo showed the newspaper his facial scar and a document ordering the autopsy.

Sunday Vintage Pipe Ad, 1934: Granger Tobacco

Like other Granger ads of this era, pipe smoking is portrayed as something that is enjoyed by the entire family. See other examples here and here.

I've never tried Granger, and I don't plan to. Since it's an old-fashioned burley with some unidentified "flavor" added, odds are I wouldn't like it. This is still a great example of magazines ads from a bygone era, the like of which will never be seen again.

If anyone ever sees me holding a pipe like that, you have my permission to slap me.

So that's how it happened...

The Birth of Cthulhu by Cyril Van Der Haegen.

Seriously, check out his site. Especially if you're into macabre and fantastic artwork. Or should I say "phantastic."

Oh yeah, and parts of the site are probably NSFW.

A corny tribute

A corn maze of the late Gerald Ford at Gull Meadow Farms.

Amazing (hee hee).

The Grotesque and Sublime

Art by Kris Kuski. More at kuski.com.