My 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.)
Milestone.
June 18th, 2010Red 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.)
Why does a Yugo have a rear window defroster?
June 14th, 2010Quick thoughts on Jason Vuic’s The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
- This is almost as much a biography of Malcolm Bricklin as it is a history of the Yugo. I’ve hung around with enough car people to have heard of Bricklin, but not at the level of detail Vuic provides. One might say that Bricklin is a “colorful” character. One might also say that some of his business dealings pre-Yugo, Yugo, and post-Yugo, were…well, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits, let’s just say “a touch irregular”.
- Vuic makes an interesting argument that the Yugo wasn’t actually that bad a car. The short summary of his reasoning is: it was sold in the United States, therefore, it wasn’t that bad. A more elaborate summary of Vuic’s reasoning is that any car sold in the U.S. has to meet a certain minimum set of Federal standards; any car that can meet those standards is, almost by definition, not that bad a car. He goes on to argue that the Subaru 360 (a car I’d never heard of, but I was three years old when Subaru started importing it) is actually a much worse car. (I think Vuic undercuts his argument when he points out that the 360 was not sold as a car; it was actually sold as a “covered motorcycle” to get around U.S. safety standards. And guess who imported the 360 into the U.S.? Bricklin.)
- Vuic also manages to make Yugoslavian geopolitics somewhat interesting.
- He has a good sampling of Yugo jokes.
- And his endnotes show that he did his homework; he’s got citations to things like Composite World magazine and biographies of obscure Canadian (wait, is “obscure Canadian” redundant?) politicians. Reading the endnotes, I often found myself wondering, “Where did he dig that up?”
I was expecting, based on the reviews and excerpts I’d read online, that this would be at least a halfway decent book. The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
I heartily endorse this event or product. (#6 in a series)
June 14th, 2010When I first started shooting, I needed ear protection. So I bought a $20 pair of no-name passive ear muffs, and have been using those for the better part of the past nine years.
There were two problems with the passive muffs:
- They were less than comfortable. I found myself slipping them off (sometimes at very bad moments) to adjust the fit or give my ears some relief.
- I had problems hearing things, like range officer instructions, when I was on the line. I sometimes found myself slipping off the passive muffs so I could hear the range officer, then slipping them back on and trying to get them adjusted and get my head back in the game before I shot.
After I shot the USPSA match in April, I decided it was time for a change. Karl recommended the Pro Ears line to me, so I ordered a pair. I didn’t actually get a chance to use them until I took Karl’s “Competition Pistol” course at the end of May. Now that I have…
Wow. The difference between the Pro Ears and the $20 passive muffs is like night and day. I had no trouble hearing range instructions; at the same time, the active muffs actually seemed (and this may just be a subjective perception on my part) to do a better job of muffling gunshots. I probably wore the Pro Ears for close to four and half hours without ever feeling the need to remove them.
I won’t say the Pro Ears are perfect. They are not cheap. (The set I purchased was the Predator Gold
If you’re serious about shooting and haven’t tried active hearing protection, like the Pro Ears, I strongly recommend that you do so. If you’ve had good experiences with brands of active hearing protection other than Pro Ears, you’re welcome to post recommendations for those brands in the comments.
Monday loser update.
June 14th, 2010The Astros are no longer in last place in the division? What the heck!
Baltimore is now at 17-46, for a .270 winning percentage. That’s a projected 43.74 wins over the 162 game season; or, to put it another way, they’re on a pace to lose roughly 118 games.