Rockstar Supergoober

Some overly tattooed, tongue-pierced, eye-makup lispers scream and argue about a bunch of classic-rock dinosaur coprolite, while a smirking bunch of health-insured rock dweebs on the Gaussian curve look-on, awaiting their next poser rock-victim.

Convalescence II

With respect for my wife's wishes and family privacy I have removed this post, we deeply appreciate all your condolences, concern, and very thoughtfull comments.

Karnival des Kordites Nummer Siebzig!

Hey it's the Carnival of Cordite #70!
And just to piss-off any Vegans and such, a picture of a proper dinner entree, something beefish I cooked Saturday evening.

My favorite is Liberty News' .45 of the Week.
And don't forget the Gun Blogger Rendezvous, it's happening in Reno on October 6th., 7th., and 8th.
I wish I could go, but unfortunately I don't anticipate it happening.


Update:

Happy Friday

The Lake is still reminiscent of some terrible Myers's Rum Factory accident.


The Magma grills a little hot (a lot damn hot) so I added some ceramic briquettes to defray the direct blast.


I'm gonna go get some steaks and start the marinade, and limes to mix a rum-drink.
Have a nice weekend all y'all.

60-45-70-182-2X

Here's my goofy setup and that was my final score on target #1. The cart is a former golf-cart thing from my Dad's garage that was taking up space - my Dad doesn't golf anyhow. The slow-prone 182-2X is a personal best so-far, more X's are always better though! It's some redemption after a poor start that had my sights drop (again). There was one visible miss that occurred way-out of the picture top-left when the shooter next to me fired just as I was squeezing the trigger. I blinked at the muzzle blast and let mine go too, damn! Oh well, the handloads are doing their thing and going to the teeny-tiny black spot waaay down range.

Primers

Did I mention that I was prepping cases for another match? The third Saturday is always a Match.

I'm still using what my buddy gave me to get started, Remington #9-1/2 Large rifle primers for the Garand. I've made the primer-pockets uniform and deep, so they seat well-enough below the cartridge rim that there's no slam-fire danger on closing the bolt.
That's like Primer Rule #1 as far as reloading for Garands are concerned, though some go as far as using a harder primer (CCI I believe) - which brings me to the general question, besides Always Use the Correct Size for Your Application, and Keep Away from WD-40 (it kills primers) - what are the other Primer Rules?

West-Nile Waste-Treatment?

Where I live there's a pond...

Take THAT, you pesky West-Nile mosquitoes! There's no "brown" odor of death, maybe they're just trying to kill the grass in the bottom. Maybe they should try to mow it?
It's been an interesting summer. It was green and a bit algae-smelling just a few days ago - of course it's hard to tell the difference when the scent of the Bay wafts in. A week or two before green neglect it was a purple, and earlier in the Summer a brilliant azure blue, like a bottle of Blue Curacao.
It's a fun little lake and softens all the background noise, but I think the pool-guy turned the setting to "Autumn" a few months early.

Update: Ok, now it smells of chlorine bleach...

Albion's Sapling Orchard

I'm on page 345 of a pretty amazing book, astonishing in many ways and revealing at the same time. I'm about a third of the way through Albion's Seed, a cultural history of the settling of America by several distinct British migrations, each with distinct and unique patterns of behavior and culture. It's quite remarkable and shows that certain "folkways" are strong, resilient and persist through time, from architecture to language, down to the way words sound. Quite interesting actually, how the "Southern Accent" came to be - it was already, but refined and quickened by the folks who brought it along, as distinct from the East-Anglia nasal twang that the Puritans brought with them, not things that gradually evolved slowly much over time here, as something that disappeared fairly quickly over there. The Persistence of Memory, carried intact and clung to with more fervor by those who left than cleved'to by those who stayed.
I have British ancestors from two migrations, the most recent was my Grandfather who came here post Klondike Gold-Rush and was one of four brothers who went abroad - a part of another British Migration away from Blighty. One went to Australia, one to India to work for The Raj, and two came here. But much earlier than that, on my paternal grandmother's side the family tracings that made her a member of the DAR go back to an earlier ancestor - a General William Lee Davidson who was killed in the American Revolution. He was shot through with arrows by Creek Indians fighting on the British side, while fording a stream. (I think)
Anyhow, the book is a good read so far. Check it out.

Convalescence

We visited my father-in-law yesterday, he was in kinda rough shape. It's hard to tell if it was just a bad day when we don't see many good days. Getting old isn't for sissies, the smells of the convalescent hospital alone are enough to inspire nightmares. He had a look of worried distress and fright on his face, and I don't believe he recognized me. He sat up for a while, trying to register his location.
My wife showed him the shirts and socks we had brought, he handled the cloth and didn't say much, just nodding a bit. She gave him a card and helped to open the envelope. He turned the card over in his hands to read the back. He can't really read, the strokes have left him unable to complete a paragraph before he loses the thread. My wife held her dad's hand while he tried to sleep, he fidgeted and kicked his feet now and again through the thin sheets.

We were joined in the room by a spry old lady who thought that I was her son. She came into the room confidant that I was there to visit her. Sure, why not? The orderly at the desk said her son doesn't come to visit often - like at all. These people need visitors if anybody does. She asked me my name and who each of the rest of us were. She didn't really care what my name was, and asked it again. She was just making polite conversation of a sort, the kind she remembered from a long time ago. Then she asked my name again, and where we lived. I told here and listed the names of surrounding cities, she didn't recognize them. She hugged me and was genuinely delighted to see her "son" again, sure that she finally had a visitor too. I didn't mind, how could anybody object to that. Later a nurse led hear away to visit with "A friend outside the door."

When my Father-in-law finally rested quietly, my wife kissed him on the forehead and we said our goodbyes-for-now, and we left quietly too. He may not last much longer. I put another card in the mail so he'd get something this week.

Carnival de Cordite Soixante-Neuf

Gullyborg has unleashed another marvelous carnival sensation, including my favorite Prom photo.
Growing up gun-less in a gun-fearing community of Hypereducated University Wussies I sadly had no conceivable expectations of such a prom-event or personality. Some young man is a lucky dude indeed. Go check it out.

Free Speech

Following Say Uncle and the Constitutional Atrocity post:

This is a free-speech blog. Any organization* that wants to run a political ad criticizing any politician can do so here.

Actually since I don't run ads, whatever - maybe I'll start running ads to see if there's any money in it. I advise other bloggers to offer the same.

* The organization must pass the Anthroblogogy Sanity Test, i.e., no NAMBLA, Peta, GreenPeace, or other weirdo extremists.

Carnival of Cordite #68

Gullyborg is back in action with Carnival of Cordite Nummer Achtundsechzig - Check out the "pinned and recessed" post by Les Jones, and the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno.
Good Stuff Maynard.

Pictures at an Exhibition, Words on Parade

Hat Tip Maggie's Farm - Pictures at an Exhibition is a famous piano suite by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky(1839-1881), and more recently famous as a rock album by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Another musical example of painting with sound is a "tone poem" or symphonic poem made famous by Franz Liszt, a rock-star personality of the mid 19th Century. These examples bring attention to the fact that words and musical notation has been called upon to make images, possibly longer than images themselves. We forget about history in today's rush of short-attention-span drama and the immediacy of spoon-fed TV micro-editorial snippets.
Reuters' motivation to use an obviously doctored photographs and fabricated casualty numbers raises the latest questions about Mainstream Media culpability - and their own answers fall short.
Let's go back to the beginning, shall we? WHAT ABOUT THE WORDS?
I thought this was worth repeating and remembering. From having made a livelihood with it for some time as a graphics-guy I readily acknowledge that I like to use Photoshop for creative and dramatic effects. It's a good tool, the Industry Standard for all kinds of illustrative purposes, and I like to add to the profusion of my Blog-words something demonstrative and concrete - but as Hendrix said, Castles made of sand melt into the sea, eventually.

WHAT ABOUT THE WORDS?

You remember words don't you? They are those things that have been accompanying those misleading pictures since before there were pictures to accompany, and the words had to try to give you the wrong impression all by themselves.

The obvious folderol with the images in question only shows that the suppliers are getting brazen. They have reported barefaced falsehoods and misrepresentation with such impunity for so long they don't feel the need to simply choose the angle they wish to portray anymore. They're not picking cherries, they're chopping down the media cherry trees now.

The "reporting" in the media --what is said and what is written -- is every bit as "photoshopped" for effect as those pictures. Events are seen only through the prism of the desired effect. And the words are carefully chosen to achieve a desired result at the la-di-da outlets like the New York Times, and hamfistedly filigreed at the other end of the media dial, the internet. But the idea is the same: What used to be "news" is replaced with editorial. What used to be "editorial" is now the journalistic equivalent of a streetcorner rant from a deranged lunatic. And the streetcorner lunatic? He's not talking anymore. He's got an entry level job for Reuters, and AP, and the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and CBS, and TruthOut! and all the others caught red-handed every day either making stuff up and reporting it as news, or convoluting the reportage so profoundly that it no longer should qualify as even vaguely factual. And you're dreaming if you think that getting caught is going to change their outlook. They are not very very sorry they did it. They are very very sorry they got caught. The method will improve. The approach will stand.

Go read the rest...


Addendum: From Sigmund, Carl and Alfred we are reminded, If we can't trust the pictures, can we trust the numbers?

Even the numbers of dead and wounded need to be scrutinized. Arab media this morning declared yet another 'atrocity' that claimed 40 dead.
As is turns out, there was only one casualty.

Pictures, Words, Numbers - Mainstream-Media Peoples, it's time to face the music.

Look Homeward, Oatmeal!

The hallway is only about seventeen-feet, six-and-a-half-inches long, so it shouldn't be too bad.
Step One is the Main Job, and that's spelled: preparation. For me this is playing with scissors, tape, and plastic. There's a bit of fussiness as I have to take off the light fixture and deal with the smoke-alarm, and there's a skylight too. The smoke alarm is hard-wired in place with tiny little twisted-pair phone-wires, and each unit is wired in series.
About the alarm-system, uh yeh, some Brainiac did this in series. To make up for that miscalculation they made it extra sensitive - it tracks microns of particulate matter suspended in the air, not just smoke! Don't go and leave the bathroom door open when you're taking a shower because steam water molecules will set-off the interior unit-klaxon and the exterior bells. Ask me how I know. After seventeen years here I know everything, just like when I was Seventeen-years old. Right, so it's wired in series and environmentally sensitive, oh great. A newbie owner inevitably sets-off the system, sometimes several times before the clue-bat descends to strike them. Often the first thing they do is yank the sending-unit from the ceiling, turning off the interior noisemaker that tells them that something is wrong (and turning-off everybody in every other unit downstream). Good thing we mostly always have false-alarms, but I wish the realtor or somebody would give the Newbie an alarm-system key and show them how it works.
The main work is actually preparation - taping the walls with plastic and covering the floor. I do the bottom first, side to side up a foot or so, bagging it in a "U" that it catches the water and afterwards you can just roll it up and toss, leaving the sides in place for the finish texture and the paint that follows. My life is thrilling.
Then you attack the crap. First you dampen it with a garden sprayer filled with HOT water and some kitchen soap. But not the whole sprayer, it just helps to have a sprayer filled because the water doesn't go cold as fast. The detergent or kitchen-soap is a surfactant that helps spread and penetrate the water into the oatmeal crud. Don't go crazy with water and have the sheetrock come down though, you only need to dampen the cheesy-whiz crap so you can scrape it. Give it a few light sprays and rest in between. Let it do the job of absorbing water, when it gives up it falls down. This is recent construction after all the laws and lawsuits - there's no asbestos in this junk, it's vermiculite like they put in plant-mix to hold water.

After scraping the junk you're gonna need some mud and a trowel or taping knife to smooth the places where it all went horribly wrong - tapers are good at hiding boo-boos and carpenters rely on them for such expertise. Since there's a skylight that means vertical and horizontal joints coming together, so expect some construction screw-ups to be hidden in there that scraping will reveal. Mud is fun to play with so enjoy it.
I always wonder if I should texture first and then prime, or if texture sticks better to primer? Last time I tried it (in the master-bathroom entry) the primer-paint rolled-up the spray-on texture and stuck it to the paint-roller. The texture didn't stick well to the unprimed surface - but it's light and cheesy stuff too and might roll-off anyhow, so it's almost like you need to do it both ways. Or fuggeddaboudit and just do it whatever - maybe you need two coats of paint anyhow.

Brian's back

In a happier note, Memento Moron is up and running again.

Fedelio Mortatus Expeditious

Moments of human frailty can lead to tender feelings of imminent mortality, however The Beast of Cuba needs no tenderness in his final walk down the garden path. Given his history of thuggery and oppression, his barefoot way should be strewn with broken glass and razor blades, his garden blooming with bloody photos of all the people he murdered, imprisoned, and caused a families' grief. It will come as it does for us all, relentlessly - but we are impatient for the fall of tyrants and murderers. Babalu leads us.