What does C.W. McCall have in common with Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, and Ernest Hemingway?
All of the above were prematurely reported dead.
(Hattip: Jimbo.)
It was the dark of the moon on the 6th of June…
June 21st, 2010Is knife! Is not safe!
June 20th, 2010I originally wasn’t going to blog this, since Sebastian was on it like a fat man on a Chinese buffet:
…
Most of what I see in the photo with the linked article appears to be, not switchblades and not gravity knives, but assisted opening folders along the lines of Spyderco and others. It is interesting that the photo caption refers to “some of the 1,300 illegal knives”, while the investigation turned up 43 allegedly illegal knives over an unspecified period of months.
What did make me decide to blog this, though, was a conversation I had with Mike the Musicologist at the gun show yesterday about the linked video. Fast forward to about 1:05 in: “Are they dangerous?”
Of course it’s dangerous, you fracking moron! It’s a knife! It’s sharp! It cuts things! Including flesh! What is wrong with you people?
(Subject line explained for the benefit of M the M and other friends of mine who haven’t heard the story.)
Edited to add 6/22/2010: A thought that came to me this morning: can I order this
Rules of the Gunfight.
June 18th, 2010Rule #1: Have a gun.
Rule #1a: Not a caulk gun.
Milestone.
June 18th, 2010My ratio of spam comments to non-spam comments is now exactly 10:1, according to my WordPress dashboard.
(This is skewed somewhat, as the non-spam comments count includes trackbacks.)
Red Adair, call your office, please.
June 18th, 2010In order to save other folks the difficulty I had finding the actual paper (as opposed to references to it in the NYT and elsewhere), here’s a link to Milo Nordyke’s paper, “The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions“, which includes discussion of the Soviet use of nuclear weapons to extinguish gas well fires (pages 34-36).
Random notes: June 18, 2010.
June 18th, 2010Our long national nightmare is over. At least, for the next couple of months.
Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed early this morning in Utah. By firing squad.
Friday loser update: Baltimore is now 18-48, for a .273 winning percentage. That works out to a projected 44.246 wins over the 162 game season.
Edited to add: I wanted to link to this gun blogger glossary the other day, but lost the link. Thanks to Snowflakes in Hell for the repost. And I was previously unfamiliar with the Zoot Shooters: darn, that sounds like fun, especially if you throw back a bottle of beer after the match is over and the guns are put away. It turns out the Green Mountain Regulators are up in Marble Falls, which isn’t that far away…
A large black cherry for me, please.
June 17th, 2010Today’s outrage from the Statesman: a local vendor of snow cones is upset that the health department has shut down his stand.
I’ve stated before that I’m a libertarian. Thus, I think in an ideal world, it would be up to the customer to make the decision on purchasing snow cones, or bacon wrapped hot dogs, or tacos, from whatever trailer they want to purchase from. I figure people can make their own decisions based on how sketchy the trailer looks.
But.
The health department makes a good point, further on in the article, that they’re trying to enforce the same rules for everyone; food vending trailers are supposed to be readily mobile. I know something about this. My folks owned a snow cone trailer for a while, so I’ve gotten an earful on the restrictions they had to obey.
In addition, it isn’t like they ran the guy out of business. This particular “trailer” sits in the parking lot of the restaurant owned by the same guy. As the article notes, now that the “trailer” is shut down, he’s serving snow cones out of the restaurant itself.
I know this area very well; this is where Tex-Guns is located. As the Statesman notes (buried in the second to last paragraph of the article) there’s another snow cone vendor – a real trailer, on wheels, which can be moved – within 50 feet of this guy’s establishment.
Why does Zapffe deserve a break, when South Austin Sno doesn’t?
Edited to add: And in LA, one councilman is trying to restrict food trucks on city streets. Let me just say this: “kimchi quesadillas”? I think I just threw up a little.
Edited to add 2: No, not NYC as well! Could this be the end of the schnitzel truck? Say it isn’t so!
Also, I somehow managed to miss this NYT article on the new wave of shaved ice.
Delicious tears.
June 16th, 2010Apparently, I have been out of the loop, as I was unaware until today that Smith & Wesson has introduced a pistol version of the M&P15-22 which uses the standard M&P15-22 magazines. I guess they’re trying to compete with things like the GSG-5.
After handling one, I really can’t see the point; the gun is too big and heavy to shoot like a handgun, and can’t really be fired effectively like a rifle. It looks like it’d be a fun gun for plinking and other putzing around, except for size and bulk considerations.
Other than that, the only purpose I can see is making Sarah Brady and her ilk scream and cry and wet their pants. That’s a pretty good purpose, but I’m not sure that it would be worth $400+ to me.
(I will add that Austin Gun Liquidators is a very nice store. They don’t have quite the used selection Tex-Guns has, but they’re about five minutes from work and open until 6 PM Tuesday-Saturday. Their price on M&P15-22 magazines was pretty reasonable as well.)
And the head coach wants no sissies…
June 16th, 2010Happy Bloomsday, everyone!
Use your freedom of Joyce!
For some reason, I started thinking about food, and stumbled across these two links to Bloomsday Breakfasts. Enjoy. As for me, I think I’ll stick to some Gorgonzola and a glass of Burgundy; I’m not much for the inner organs of beasts, with or without relish.
One of these years, I’m going to get it together enough to do my own Bloomsday greeting cards.
(Subject line hattip, for those of you who didn’t get enough Dr. Demento as a child.)
Eyes Wide Shut.
June 15th, 2010L’affair Rodenstock.
June 15th, 2010Mike Steinberger has an interesting article in Slate about Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin, two prominent NYC wine dealers who specialized in very old and very famous wines (for example, 1945 Mouton Rothschild in magnums).
It seems that their dealership may actually have been a major source of counterfeit wines; this ties into the Koch/Rodenstock affray, previously noted in this space, and well summarized in the article.
Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters (part 4 of a series).
June 15th, 2010By way of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, we have discovered The American Scholar‘s reprint of a speech given by William Deresiewicz at West Point in October.
Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
…
Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
Go. Read.
Eye on the Killer Guy.
June 15th, 2010David Lee Powell’s latest appeal has been rejected at the state level.
Barring intervention at the federal level by the Supreme Court, his execution is scheduled for sometime after 6 PM tonight.
Edited to add: Powell has filed a new appeal, based on allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Edited to add 2: Denied.
“This isn’t the sort of job that rewards competence, you know.”
June 15th, 2010The Hidden World of Girls.
June 14th, 2010I’m a day late and a few bucks short on this (somehow I missed it the first time around) but I did want to put up a link to this story from NPR’s “The Hidden World of Girls” project, featuring my friend Pat Cadigan.
(Lawrence and I discussed this: I get the Pat Cadigan beat, he gets the giant spider beat. Seems like a fair split to me.)