Archive for the ‘Clothing’ Category

Happy anniversary!

Sunday, June 4th, 2023

Today is the 49th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.

If you happen to live in the Cleveland area, Collision Bend Brewery is offering ten cent beers from 2:00 PM to 2:48 PM Cleveland time, with a maximum of two per customer. So you’ve got about two hours to hie yourself over there.

While we look forward to reliving an epic TEN CENT BEER NIGHT, we have all seen how terribly things can go with one too many ten cent beers. Please note, this will not be a bench clearing brawl… there will be no bottle throwing, no chair tossing, and no fists flying. Let’s leave that to the replays on the television. Please drink responsibly and leave your fighting pants at home.

Sadly, I don’t have any fighting pants. Anyone know where I can get some? 5.11 makes good tough pants, maybe those will work. Or some of those fire hose pants from Duluth Trading Company?

I won’t be able to make it for this year’s celebration, anyway. But the thought of going up to Cleveland, visiting relatives, and being there for next year’s 50th anniversary is tempting…the month of June is going to be jam-packed with activities, however, and I’m not sure if that’s something I can afford yet.

Obit watch: March 29, 2023.

Wednesday, March 29th, 2023

Bill Zehme, noted biographer.

Mr. Zehme’s biography of Mr. Sinatra, “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’” (1997), was a best seller. He also shared the author credit on best-selling memoirs by Regis Philbin (“I’m Only One Man!” in 1995 and “Who Wants to Be Me?” in 2000) and Jay Leno (“Leading With My Chin” in 1996).
His other books included “Intimate Strangers: Comic Profiles and Indiscretions of the Very Famous” (2002), “Lost in the Funhouse: The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman” (1999) and “Hef’s Little Black Book” (2004), a stream-of-consciousness collaboration with Hugh M. Hefner, the founder and publisher of Playboy magazine.

“Bill didn’t dig around for dirt or comb through the proverbial closet hunting for skeletons,” David Hirshey, a former deputy editor of Esquire magazine, said by email. “What interested him was more subtle than that. Zehme looked for the quirks in behavior and speech that revealed a person’s character, and he had an uncanny ability to put his subjects at ease with a mixture of gentle playfulness and genuine empathy.”

Mr. Zehme provided tips from Mr. Sinatra about what men should never do in the presence of a woman (yawn) and about the finer points of his haberdashery: “He wore only snap-brim Cavanaughs — fine felts and porous palmettos — and these were his crowns, cocked askew, as defiant as he was.”
“Mr. Sinatra’s gauge for when a hat looked just right,” Mr. Zehme wrote, was “when no one laughs.”

George Nassar is burning in Hell. The name might ring a bell for some of you: he was Albert “The Boston Strangler” DeSalvo’s cellmate, and DeSalvo supposedly confessed his crimes to Nassar.

In 1995, Mr. Nassar recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe that Mr. DeSalvo had described the killings 30 years earlier as they walked along a concrete hallway at Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts, where both men were incarcerated and undergoing mental health evaluations. Mr. DeSalvo was being held on unrelated charges of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses involving four women.
“He began describing a crime and watching my reaction to see if it was too abhorrent to listen to,” Mr. Nassar said. “Some of it was horrible, particularly the crimes of stabbing a woman under her breasts in Cambridge. But I wasn’t there to condemn.”

Mr. Nassar told his lawyer, the famed criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey, about the confession and recruited him to represent Mr. DeSalvo.“We were setting it up,” he told WBZ, “saying, ‘Al, you’re going to confess, you’re going to trial, you’re going to do your book, we’re going to take care of your family,’ and he was saying, ‘OK, OK, OK.’”
Mr. DeSalvo subsequently confessed to Mr. Bailey and gave his account to psychiatrists, a state investigator and the Boston police, but for reasons that are unclear he was never charged with any of the killings. He later retracted the confession.
In 1967, Mr. DeSalvo was convicted of the robbery, assault and sex offenses he had been charged with and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, another inmate, Stanley Setterlund, testified that Mr. DeSalvo had confessed to the murders “and laughed.”

This is one of those odd obits: Mr. Nassar actually died in December of 2018, but for various reasons, his death only became public knowledge recently.

NRA Annual Meeting day 2: short quick impressions.

Saturday, May 28th, 2022

On second impression, while I still like the bag from SAR USA, the Brownells bag was a little more comfortable to use. It has more of a shoulder strap, and proved to be fully capable of carrying the weight.

Best swag of the day: the grips side of Hogue (not to be confused with the knife side, which was across the aisle) was giving away thick heavy rubber gun mats. You know, the kind of thing that your local gunshop puts on top of the glass display case before they get out that vintage Smith and Wesson. Or the kind of thing you put down on the kitchen table at home before you start tinkering with your own gun.

Still haven’t found anything that grabs me, but the Cimarron people let me handle one of their Wyatt Earp Buntline Specials: it is a nice looking gun. Sadly, they did not have a Billy Dixon Sharps reproduction, for reasons related to being unable to secure them at night. However, they are up in Fredericksburg, and have a storefront there…

Something else that makes me go “Hmmmmmm…”: Walther has a new line of auto pistols, the WMP, chambered in .22 Magnum, which has not been a very common auto pistol caliber. And the price does not break the bank.

Guns are not sold at the show. But other items are (or can be) and I have picked up a few things.

Wilson Combat Zippo and Gun Guy from Wilson Combat. CEO from Columbia River Knife and Tool. Coffee mug from Eley.

I also picked up a t-shirt that should make Robert Francis O’Rourke cry.

There seems to be a little less swag this time around, and what there is, is of somewhat lower quality. But I have picked up lots of free hats and bags, some pins, lots of stickers and key chains, a few screwdrivers, and even some lens cleaning cloths. (One vendor was even giving away lens pens, which I thought was nice. Unfortunately, I can’t lay my hands on that item right now, but when I do dig it out, I’ll update.) Eley also let me have several sets of foam earplugs when I bought my mug from them. And, of course, more morale patches than Carter had liver pills.

(Once I sort through everything and take out the stuff I want, the rest of it is going to my brother’s children. Generally, if it’s something I like, and a fairly small and inexpensive give-away item, I try to get at least three of them: one for myself, and two for the nephews and nieces.)

Mike the Musicologist and I actually bailed on the show early today. By 3 PM, we’d seen the entire exhibit floor, and we’d revisited specific vendors we wanted to come back to. The plan for tomorrow is still to use it as a targets of opportunity day. (Speer had something else I want, but didn’t want to try to lug back to the hotel today.) Also, folks may be more willing to make deals if it means not having to lug stuff back with them…

It does seem like a smaller show than the last one we went to. And there were some vendors we would have expected to see that didn’t come: SIG and Crimson Trace being two that we specifically noticed.

We also noticed a very strong law enforcement presence, including a lot of folks running around the exhibit hall in full battle rattle. But I can’t tell if they were supposed to be between us and the protestors, or if they were attending the show on their own time (in full uniform, complete with tactical gear), or if they were there in case we all spontaneously rose up and started a mass insurrection against Brandon.

I report, you decide.

Edited to add: Walking distance today: 4.9 miles.

’twas the night before Christmas…

Friday, December 24th, 2021

Chartwell Booksellers sent this over, and I thought I’d share it with everyone:

Winston Churchill’s Christmas Eve message, December 24, 1941.

Slightly longer version (Chartwell dropped the opening paragraph) from the International Churchill Society.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

(Ugly Christmas Beanie from Magpul (affiliate link). I don’t know that you’ll be able to get one on or before the 25th: but as all people of goodwill know, the Christmas season runs through January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany, and thus your ugly Christmas beanie (or sweater, if you live someplace that cold) is appropriate wear at least through then.)

Things I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly agree with.

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020

The first two panels of today’s “Dinosaur Comics”. Having extensively studied listened to the first 112 or so episodes of “The History Of Rome”, I am confident in stating that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire began when the Empire proscribed setting off fireworks whenever you felt like it.

All of this Babylon Bee op-ed. (Hattip: MtM.) Yes, I am aware that they are a satire site, but everything in that piece is correct: everything did start going downhill when men stopped wearing hats.

“The best thing about kids’ soccer being canceled this year”. Although I quibble slightly with this: the best thing about kids soccer being cancelled isn’t the renewed socialization, it is the fact that kids aren’t playing soccer.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 139

Sunday, August 16th, 2020

Science Sunday!

I’ve been doing a lot of space history, so I wanted to change things up a bit. And I promised some abstract math, so here you go.

From the Numberphile channel (of which the Computerphile channel is an offshoot): “Hat Problems”.

Come on, you know I had to do that. Okay, bonus videos.

Number 1: “Fermat’s Last Theorem”, with Simon Singh (who as you may recall, wrote a book on FLT).

I actually didn’t know about The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, and I generally look sideways at these TV tie-in books. But I might take a flyer on that if it shows up used.

(All links are affiliate links.)

Number 2: “The Riemann Hypothesis”.

Quickie.

Tuesday, August 11th, 2020

If you had more money than sense…you probably bought Fyre Festival tickets.

If you still have more money than sense, you may be interested in this auction of Fyre Festival branded merch.

Or you could just buy The Merch merch.

Or you could just sent your money on fire. At least that would keep you warm. Briefly.

($510 for a hat?)

Obit watch: June 3, 2019.

Monday, June 3rd, 2019

Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.

I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:

Mrs. Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica B. Harris, who is an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who said Mrs. Chase treated her like another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

I love this, too:

During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.

Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.

And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…

(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)

Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.

(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)

Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.

Richard M. Roberts, who led the prosecution of Mr. Lucas in New Jersey, had befriended him in recent years but was under no illusions about what he did long ago. “In truth,” Mr. Roberts told The New York Times in 2007, “Frank Lucas has probably destroyed more black lives than the K.K.K. could ever dream of.”

Random notes toward an after action report: Dallas.

Tuesday, May 8th, 2018

This is a catch-all for random and undifferentiated thoughts that didn’t make it into my previous NRAAM reports. I’ll put in a jump, since this is running long…

(more…)

Three days straight.

Sunday, May 6th, 2018

And I ain’t been doing what I should.

Swag of the day: probably my signed Jerry Miculek hat.

Yes, I am rocking the “Archer” shirt that Lawrence bought for me and dared me to wear to the show. Only one person commented on it, and that was to ask me if I had kids who played lacrosse. When I explained it was an “Archer” reference, he got it.

And that person was…American Rifleman editor Mark Keefe, who gave a pretty good presentation on John Garand, the M1 rifles, and the touchy relationship between the military and AR when the rifle was first introduced. He was also kind enough to speak with me for a few minutes about some research I may be doing in the near future, gave me his card, and said “email me, I’ll see what I can do”. I saw him do this for a couple of other people, too. Good guy.

Purchased: a snazzy “tactical backpack” from Viridian. Don’t know quite what makes it “tactical”, but it’s a nice design. I may try to use it as I ease into long range shooting, or I may just use it as a backup for my existing pack.

I also bought one of the KR Training endorsed TUFF prodcuts iStow packs. I like the idea: I want to see how it holds up in the real world.

Speaking of KR Training, you should go read Karl’s blog post, especially for the part about concealed carry clothes. I have some thoughts quasi-related to his about Carry Guard, too, but I want to wait until I can put them into better form.

Someone who isn’t me purchased an EFK Fire Dragon barrel, so I hope to have some feedback on that soon. It seemed like they were doing a land-office business, which just goes to show: quality swag bags work.

At this point, I’m hungry, exhausted, and my feet feel like the soles have been beaten for three days by Nazis trying to get the plans for the M1 gas system out of me. (That’s a subtle joke for those of you who attended Mark Keefe’s presentation.) As soon as I hit publish, I’ll probably think of something I missed. Updates to come. Maybe.

Update one: Forgot about food. I thought the buffalo sirloin at the Uncle Buck’s Steakhose and Brewery was kind of disappointing. It seemed tough and it, and the sweet potato with it, should have been warmer. We did have a pretty good breakfast at Commissary, which was packed to the rafters.

Update 2: Junk on the bunk?

No, swag in the bags.

Also: Royal China is a pretty good old-school Chinese restaurant. Recommended if you’re in town.

Obit watch: April 17, 2018.

Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

Mike the Musicologist and I have a running joke: the decline of Western civilization began when men stopped wearing hats on a daily basis. We’re both doing our part to bring back the hat era.

I bring that up now because one of the great hat wearers of our time passed away yesterday.

Harry Anderson. Asheville Citizen-Times (more of a retrospective than an obit)

Of course, he wasn’t just a guy in a hat:

While he earned critical acclaim and amassed a devoted fan base on “Night Court,” Mr. Anderson never fancied himself an actor. “I’m a magician, or a performer, by nature, and that’s always what I’ve been,” Mr. Anderson told WGN-TV in Chicago in 2014.
“I was never really an actor,” he said. “I was a magician who fell into a part on ‘Cheers.’”

He was a good one, too. And for what it’s worth, I loved “Night Court” then, and I love it now. (I wish I could find video of Harry Stone revealing his custom bowling ball. If I could find someone to make me a bowling ball like that, I’d take up bowling.)

In honor of the late great Harry the Hat, why not go out and pick up a nice hat for yourself, or someone you love? Not a ballcap or a gimmie hat: I mean a real, genuine, honest to God hat, like a fedora or a porkpie or something. Let’s bring hats back, for Harry, and for civilization.

Random notes, philosophical asides, bookmarks, endorsements, and other things.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2016

Some things I think are interesting, some I want to bookmark, some I want to plug, something for everyone, a comedy tonight! I am going to try to put these in some kind of rough topic order…

“Introduction to GPU Password Cracking: Owning the LinkedIn Password Dump”.

I Sea, “a mobile app that claimed to help users locate refugees adrift at sea”, appears to be a complete fraud.

The developers swapped information, including screen shots of a static image and a weather tool that one person claimed was used to mislead users into thinking they were looking at live images of the sea. Others noted that the app had been coded to tell users that their login credentials were invalid.

Bonus: the NYT mentions my third favorite security blogger, @SwiftOnSecurity. (Sorry, SecuriTay, but I’ve had my photo taken with the Krebster, and I know Borepatch. Third is still good enough for a medal, if this was the Olympics.)

And it isn’t just that the coding is screwy: PopSci makes a pretty strong argument that what I Sea claims to do is physically and logistically impossible.

To provide images of 1 percent of the total area of the Mediterranean would run over $1 million. And that’s just for one set of still photos. If the app were to provide up-to-date imaging, as it claims, the images would need to be refreshed regularly, at $1 million each time. And that cost is for unprocessed data, Romeijn says. Processing will cost more, as will the licensing fees required to make those images available to the public.

And those satellites make one pass a day, so you’re not getting “real-time” imaging, no way, no how.

The Oakland PD mess, summarized. Yes, I’m linking to an anonymous person on Facebook, but much of the information in this summary has already been reported in the media: this is more of a handy round-up if you haven’t been following this mess from the start. (Hattip: Popehat on the Twitter.)

And speaking of Popehat: the guys get shirts! Women, too. I just ordered mine: not only is $23 very reasonable for a shirt these days, and not only do I like Popehat, but I think Cotton Bureau does good stuff. (You may remember them from the BatLabels “Henchman” shirts, which are back in print! Hoorah!)

Flaming hyena #32: Democratic congressman Chaka Fattah.

In addition to racketeering conspiracy, Fattah was found guilty of bribery, bank fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, making false statements to a financial institution, and falsification of records.

A bunch of other folks took the fall with him, including Herbert Vederman:

Through cash payments to the congressman’s children, college tuition payments for his au pair and $18,000 given to help purchase a vacation home in the Poconos, prosecutors said, Vederman bought Fattah’s support in seeking appointment by the Obama White House to an ambassadorship.

(Hattip on this one to Mike the Musicologist.)

Prominent (well, in Chicago, anyway) Chicago journalist Neil Steinberg decides to pull the old “look how easy it is to buy an assault rifle” trick. So he goes to a gun store…

…and they deny his purchase because he’s a drunken wife-beater. (I have seen other versions of this story that state BATF first issued a “delay”, then a “deny” (BATF doesn’t have to give a reason for “deny”), Steinberg threatened to write that they were “denying” his purchase because he was a journalist, and the gun shop then decided to point out that he was a drunken wife-beater. However, this version seems to me to be to be the best sourced, and it doesn’t mention any BATF verdict.)

But at least he had the good taste to go with a Smith and Wesson M&P 15.