Trick or Treat

The clanging and ringing alarms have been silenced, the firetrucks have driven away, the thick gray and woodsy smelling smoke that filled the old couple's unit has been driven out and their door closed. The aluminum pot that held some kind of now ash-black and crisp substance sat half-melted -ALUMINUM HALF MELTED!- on an adjacent space. It could have been worse, somebody elderly might have been inside overcome by the smoke and lying on the floor - it was thick enough. Nobody had to call The Ambulance Driver for this one.
Folks, don't ever leave the house with anything heat-generating turned-on, or on the hot stove-top.
I heard the insistent ring-a-ding of the alarm when I went out to refill my coffee cup, after finishing a graphic conversion project and taking the clothes out of the dryer. The alarms thropughout the complex are kinda sensitive and we get a lot of false positives - and I have an alarm key to turn-off the boo-boos that other people make - like stacking-up two (2!) Duraflame firelogs one on top of the other...
See with those wax-logs-o'-fun, the burning fibrous gaaky under-log cannot take the pressure of the one on top and collapses, rolling the top log out into the living room. In that instance used a shovel and carried the clotted mass of burning crap over the low railing, dropping it onto the ground by The Lake. My neighbor across the way had to get a new carpet, I think. They supposedly have a College De-freakin-gree so they should apply for a refund, but I don't suppose there's any hope for that.
The alarms are sensitive and measure tiny particles of particulate-matter suspended in the air so that even steam, like a bathroom door left open during a hot shower, can set them off. (Ask me how I know...)
Everybody at some point or the other sets 'em off. Once that happens the Unit affected by the alarm has a loud and obnoxious interior klaxon-type horn that signals the inhabitants inside to get their asses out of danger. Simultaneously a big red dinging-bell rings at the building itself, notifying the other inhabitants - and a light flashes at an annunciator indicating which specific unit is affected.
It's all very comprehensive, but sometimes a Moron and Fool who leaves the chimney damper shut creating a cloud of smoke and triggering the response, will yank the klaxon off the interior wall just to silence it so that he can ignore the rest of the dinging-bells and go blithely about his brainless way, doing more moronic things - and since the wiring runs in series he's cut the chain of the building's alarm system endangering the rest of the folks with his completely selfish moronic stupidity. That was another neighbor.


Anyhow we don't get trick-or-treaters around here, haven't seen one in the past seven years. Get your own candy, I'm gonna go have a beer.

The Left's Fanstastic Utopian Architecture of Non-Reality Based Magical Thinking

Ok, so it's a long title for a short subject that can be truncated to this: M.C. Escher can't be built on Earth. The illusion can be painted or otherwise laid out in a flat, dimensionless aspect and appraised by the mind, but it exists only in Dream-state - which is coincidentally where the Left happens to also reside.
In reality you get Mugabe and the horrific state of affairs in Zimbabwe. What emerges from the fatally flawed though-process is the Taliban and female mutilation. You have the decrepit boil-covered Marx and his poisonous revenge on the middle-class devising a system that exalts the lowest-common denominator and lifts up the base, venal, stupid, and uneducated to crude power.
With all the self-righteousness of the religious fanatic you have an architecture of belief that relies on complete fictions and absurdity for its execution. To achieve the Utopia envisioned, it is required that its leadership, the above-mentioned base and venal, exercise their political behavior at a level of of Saintliness that would dwarf Mother Theresa, at it is expected that the low, stupid, and uneducated operate at the highest Post-Graduate level of intellectual detachment. Reality is that you get a murdering thug and failed medical-college dropout like Che with grandiose fantasies of status and personal achievement, murdering his way across a region of desperately poor campesinos in an effort to impose his totalitarian will.
The grotesque results of such twisted political imaginings populate the planet with further boils and pustules like Hugo Chavez, and more dreams turn to nightmares and a once stable and thriving country becomes a Halloween dictatorship that follows the Politics of the Morgue.
Happy Halloween Leftists, you sow the seeds of suicide.

Rock'n Roll! 5.6

Hey that was fun!
I'm sitting down enjoying a gun magazine while She Who Must Be Obeyed snoozes on the couch, when with a bit of rumble a troll grumbles through and kind of wracks things around for about seven seconds. A picture in the bedroom fell down off a shelf, but nothing else.
5.6 north of Alum Rock, about 20 miles down the road. We're epicenter material! I need a bigger stockpile of ammo for the real BIG one. We have water and coffee and a stove and other "shelter in place" items - but I need more ammo...

I Feel the Need for Speedloader

Go Speedloader, Go! Federal 129 Grain +P .38Special Hydra-Shoks.

Click to Biggit

On Monday the Crushing Wheel of Time Juggernauts Along...

There's some guys outside with chainsaws brrapping, taking down the old dead trees, and I'm so busy with splined paths in a graphic that I totally forgot my Dental appointment. The washing machine is sloshing laundry around - it's Monday, past noon and I need to get some lunch.

Friday afternoon we attended the memorial service of an old friend's wife who passed away suddenly. He awoke one morning and she didn't. Back when I was a squid I used to ride my FZ600 up in the hills with him and the rest of the Squid Hunters. We did Highway 9 until we could ride it blindfolded, the backside of 25 on the wide-open King City Run, and trips up the Feather River Canyon to Quincy. We even did a Fugawe Trip (wheredafugawe?) with Doc. Wong on dual sports, from Oroville up to Quincy and back on dirt. Repair costs for metal and plastic, speeding ticket-points, and the frequency of (other peoples') accidents finally got to me - I had called in the helicopter twice and that was enough. I had been moving away from asphalt with the dual-sport and sold the street-able Earthquake-Bike ('94 XR650L) for the pure-dirt '97 XR400, and couldn't very well participate anymore after that.
My old buddy looked older now and red faced. He was surrounded by family and friends and the hall was jam-packed with several hundred in attendance - his wife was well loved and dearly missed. After the service I got in line and I gave him a sad hug and he smiled with delayed recognition and said, "Long time no see." It's been around ten years I guess...

Saturday I finally finished cleaning the hand guns; the petite little .22 target the brawny 1909 Long Colt, the '44 1911A1...but I've still got the rifles to clean.

Where does time go when it leaves?

They Keep Saying it's Impossible...

From Rudy, to Radio pundits (*cough* Medved *cough* Hewett *cough*), to Democrats, Illegal Alien Amnesty keeps rearing it's ugly decaying head like a zombie whack-a-mole game. We smacked the Dream Act down with cloture but you can bet the people who gain votes by selling-out will play that hand again, they can't help themselves - with nothign to offe in the way of ideas or progress they offer your tax-dollars as their goodwill. Because it makes them feel good about themselves.

From SondraK at Knowledge is Power in comments we have the insight of Jack:

Just one thought—if California can evacuate 1,000,000 people with only a day or two of advance notice, and do so in an orderly fashion, can someone please explain why we can’t export a few million illegals?

Bueller? Bueller??

Take the Tribe and Run

Apply the wet-and-stick tattoos, we are tribaloids, we are Peeps of the Gub. My thanks to Jeff for posting our pics, and for poor, myopic, narrow-minded, hopelessly conventional, orthodox, and blinkered Laura Washington for Naming the whole Family - and Yay! to be on the same page as the Gunbloggers out there.

Happy Ruger Rimfire Day!

It's 10/22 is all I'm saying, go shoot a happy brick of LR!

Match Results

Whoo-wee! I think the GunBloggerRendezvous lit a fire under me. It was a nice day that cleared from some overcast to bright sun. Shot in the second relay on target #7 again and shot well, finishing as top Sharpshooter with a personal best of 427-6X. Not enough to make Expert, but getting there.
Not so great Offhand with a 73-0X, better in Rapid-Seated (same as last Practice actually) at 84-2X, much mo'betta in Rapid-Prone with a 93-2X, finished up with a 177-2X in Slow-Prone for my best score yet.
I think I like shooting on #7 not out of any notion of Luck but because it's got a white target label between two black ones, and it's a sharp angled shape between two curvacious ones - the 6 and the 8 - so I can pick it out better.

Gun Style

On the Islands last trip, I switched solar-blast protective headgear from the rugged, Jeep-drivin' sweat-absorbin' bandanna, to a thin-brim chapeau with a flash of blue which better suited the Mustang convertible we rented this time. It was a decision of some subsequent karmic substance. A few months ago while passing-through an outdoor terrarium in the Ginormous Spendy-Mall, we noticed a travel shoppe with interesting wares that immediately recalled to me a childhood adventure - The Day We Left America Behind for Exotic Heathen Lands and Detestable Smells. As a Seven-Year-Old I had one of these little square bag like that for my notebooks, pens and colored pencils, and Instamatic camera - I had it for The Trip. We departed from our down-Peninsula little town airport in a roaring big Sikorsky Helicopter, up to SFO and then flew away on a 727. We would not return to the same place as we left, everything would be different, and us different too. That little bag now looks Yikes! like a purse - which for a kid doesn't make any damn difference but as an adult I can choose better than my Mom when she handed-around the travel-kit - so I bought the bigger duffel-shaped one. As a bag it makes a great gun-carrier.

So with the hat and the Pan-Am bag I'm suddenly getting a tingling spider-snesation and a cool-guy Mid-'60's Frank Abagnale Jr. vibe - and I sense something silvery -- the big question is what gun goes with such a vibe? Thanks to The Unforgiving Minute, here's a stunning stainless Hi-Power. At a nearby shop is a shiny PPK. And then there's the always the classic Model 66 with a 3-inch tube. Silvery seems right, and goes with the light blue...not that I can afford something quite as marvelous as that Hi-Power right now, but maybe it's time to move a bit past 100-year old Victorian era antiques to the simply retro.

UPDATE: Found in comments, added here: Mmmm...Oh jeeze! Ed Brown Bobtail Kobra Carry Stainless .45 - freakin' Cabelas drives me crazy.
...

Gunblogger Blogroll Additions

I preformed an update that includes a whole bunch more folks, see for yourself! ;-)
Some folks I surprised myself (shocked!) weren't already there - how'd that happen?
Anyhow, welcome. Anybody else want-in, let me know.

UPDATE: I put a Project Valour IT link a the top of the sidebar.

"I Govenator" - Herman Munsternegger

Apparently while I was away in a Free State exercising my 2nd Amendment rights, the Californoodilia Disney-Governator revealed that his originally deep-implanted Euro-wetware bioprogramming favors the Rise of the Machines over the Rights of People.
For some reason, despite all the widespread evidence and obvious burdensomeness of the addition of an infantile pseudo-technology on Polizei efforts, he hopes that by signing the Magical Mechanical Microstamping Fantasy Act   The Only Ones will be given a new tool in solving violent Hollywood-style CSI crimes in under 40-minutes, as seen on TV.

In a backhanded way his signing of this ridiculous legislation validates the Constitution's Article 2, Section 1, that sets forth a requirement for serving as president that of being a "natural-born citizen." Some people want to amend the Constitution to allow a Euro-programmed steroidal Cyborg to become President - evidently they welcome our new robot overlords.

In other news Cyborg-Governor Herman Munsternegger also signed the Mechanical Magical Perpetual Life-Support for Dead and Extinct Animals Bill, preventing the use of lead ammunition for hunting in the supposed range-area in which an extinct species once lived - including areas where it might have once lived.
Attempts to broaden the species "historic range" even further and limit lead ammunition entirely are characteristic of the proponents of such a measure who rely on artificial life-support funding for their own existence, and no doubt will begin forthwith.
Actual scientific evidence that such an effort or that lead-ammunition has had any impact whatsoever on the extinct species has not been conclusively proven except by the ingenious, academically questionable efforts by the Center for Pseudo-Biologically Diverse Fundraising and Wilderness Self-Support Society, 99.9% of whom also believe in Nobel-AlGore's BiblicalAnthropogenesis of Globular Warmening, 73% in UFO's and Dennis Kucinich, and 83% in Homeopathy.
Oh great.

UPDATE: Thirdpower at Days of our Trailers finds out that,

Apparently there is a section in AB1471 that makes the law ineligible until there are no patent restrictions...ID Dynamics is currently claiming total rights over the technology so this might invalidate the law for decades.

HT Arms and the Law.

Gunblogger Rendezvous

Mr. Completely orchestrated a fine gathering of gunnies. Man that Eotech of Say Uncle's is outstanding, and the outrageously high level of smarts as JimmyB commented, was mighty humbling. Fodder is ahead of me in what I need to be doing next - gun cleanup, I got a mess of GSR to remove from steel.

My drive up to Reno was uneventful, on a beautiful, clear, autumn day in the Sierras.

Arriving at the Casino I spotted a couple of gun-cases, and at the Reception Desk I met U.S. Citizen from Traction Control (who had brung a .50 BMG to shoot, and the ne plus ultra super-articulate blogger Snowflakes in Hell's Sebastian.
It was just a real treat for me to meet all these great folks and their wives (those who came).

I brought along my usual collection of antique crap, the 30-40 Krag and the M1 Carbine in a rifle case, and the handcannons separately.
At the Range we were greeted with a brilliant day and the Mountains of the Moon (seemed like it anyhow) as a backdrop and shooting gallery. Amazingly there was a gong out there, up on the hill at 953-yards. It was up on a trail next to an old 55-gallon steel drum below a boulder towards the top of the mountain.
It was almost impossible to see with the naked eye until several "looks" were taken. Even then it was hard to find.
(click to embiggen)
With Joe's (another mind-bogglingly smart-guy blogger) insanely accurate .300 WinMag guys were reaching out and giving it a loving tap.

But out in the desert some stuff is just plain hard to see.
We shot and shot and shot s'more, and many more GunPorn pics are here.
Kevin revealed that my '43 1911A1 wasn't broken and actually shot well, and how to properly hold it in order to discover the same. He also enjoyed my old 1909 Colt in double-action mode. I tried to keep up, but there was a lot going on all around me and the targets rapidly accumulated a lot of holes until they were unrecognizable. I missed out shooting the .300WinMag, the .50BMG, and the Thompson. The 6.8SPC was way-kewl.

I had the Krag out and many said that the 1900-manufactured piece was the oldest rifle they had shot. Yay! My antiques are good for something at least.

That evening we had out banquet-dinner and heard Guest Speaker, a MilBlogger who was blown-up by an IED in Iraq, tank commander "T.C. Override" of From My Position. This year's fundraising effort was (and will be in the future) for Soldier's Angels and Project Valour-IT that provides voice-controlled software and laptop computers to wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at major military medical centers. Chuck's story was incredibly moving, frightening, painful, and redemptive. The value of this project is immeasurable. I strongly urge everyone to consider a donation of any kind and at any level to this group - it is fantastically and absolutely worthwhile.
Chuck was also at the range and in our meeting room each day, and is just a lot of fun to be around. To see him before you with his spirit and attitude intact is really inspirational - and he's also a damn lucky guy in the rest of things! Read his blog and realize what he's been through and continues to have to deal with. Make a donation to Project Valour-IT.

Sunday morning after breakfast I couldn't stand the casino environment any longer, said good-byes and loaded up the truck. I drove away at 10:25AM and got home at 1:56PM. That's 253.0 miles in three hours and thirty-some minutes with no stopping for gas! It's supposed to be like a four+ hour drive but I had the pedal down. Woot, I love the dual-tanks on my F-150 that puts my range at 500+ miles (I didn't stop for gas on the way up, either). :-)


And I want an Eotech...

UPDATES:

• We were privileged to have Brownells as an event sponsor supplying such swag as gun-oil, hats and t-shirts, and lanyards - besides even more importantly being represented by longtime Brownells good-guy, Larry Weeks.
• Charlie Brown, head of MKS Supply and Hi-Point Firearms, very generously donated a Hi-Point pistol to be raffled off. The winner was JimmyB's lovely wife Terri, who donated the gun to Chuck.
• Ko-Tonics of Mebane, NC supplied the Rendezvousters with an incredibly sexy 6.8SPC upper for us to wear-off the "new" (hand-carried by Say Uncle), and with which I had a very satisfying experience hitting the 300, 400, and 500-yard gongs - something I'd never done before. Wow! Silver State Armory shipped 400-rounds of 6.8SPC to launch down the tube and prove its worth, which indeed it did besides delighting everyone who squeezed the trigger on it.
• My round-trip odometer usage was 512 miles and the 3.9-liter straight-six burned 29.94 gallons of Global (Sierra anyhow) Warming carbon-fuel for an average of 17.10 MPG, with the return trip downhill-speed average was 72.28MPH - carbon and friction!

Che Is Dead Day! Hooray!!

What should be an International Holiday but is not for various reasons (stupid students mislead into the grasping clutches of CommunoSocialism), here is Another Great-Day -- alerted to us by the indomitable Tam at Calendar HQ: View From the Porch.
For the very many of us who are bad at keeping the lesser holidays like yesterday this is one to remember as the grotesquely self-inflamed egotist murderer, some bitch who shot bound, innocent women, men, and children in the back of the head, finally got his reward - dead. Dead! Dead! Dead!
Rot-in-Hellfire, Communist Bitch-boy.

Happy Columbus Day!

The Medieval World ended on the 3rd of August, 1492, when Columbus sailed from Palos de la Frontera. The ship Santa Maria was only around 75 to 85-feet long - no one's sure of her dimensions and she didn't stick around. She had 52 men aboard - sounds crowded - and that's also not a lot of guys to go crossing a couple thousand miles of open water. It's a lot of hard work to manage a ship's rigging and to keep it pointed in the right direction. She was capable of holding 100 large casks of wine called toneladas, from which we get the reference that she was about 100-tons. A fat little rolly-polly coastal cargo hauler headed off into the endless blue... As an off-roader I've often heard the answer to the question, "What's the perfect off-road vehicle"? is, "A rental car!" The Santa Maria was a rental-ship, owned by Juan de la Cosa who sailed with Columbus as the first officer. Did he make it back? Dunno, the she ran aground off the north coast of Haiti (near Cap Haitien) and was lost on Christmas Eve, 1492 - she hardly made it all the way.
The second largest was the Pinta (70-feet) with a crew of 26 - including Captain Martin Alonso Pinzon who deserted Colombus and discovered the island of Babeque (Great Inagua ). I hope he liked it there. The Pinta made several more voyages across the Atlantic until 1500 when she was caught in a hurricane and went down in the vicinity of the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Finally the Nina was only 66 feet long with a crew of just 23 men. The original Captain during the first voyage was Vincente Yanez Pinzon, but after the loss of the Santa Maria, Columbus became the captain. The ship carried 10 breech-loading swivel guns called bombardas (yay guns!!) and made four more voyages to the new world after the 1492/93 trip. In 1499 after her odometer turned over she was sold at the Diego-Lorenzo-Fernando de Triana-Rodrigo-Monge Used Boat Lot to a Vato from San Jose who lowered her and added bitchin' wire-wheels and whitewalls among other custom touches.

Christopher had some brass, "Dudes, we're going to Barbados! Rum and hot chicks! Whooo!!"
Thanks buddy.

Dead Tree Edition

Trees are in an offset from Man's short natural cycle, and because their lives are frequently measured in multiples of Man we often show individual trees regard and some veneration. Some we cut in swaths for housing lumber, and we plant many more for various purposes including growing them for paper. But trees don't live forever, they do have a life cycle and rather than go to "Tree Heaven" their final resting place is integral with replenishing the earth. And last but not least we have to get rid of the dangerous ones that might suddenly seek to replenish the earth with you and your pretty little house in a high wind. These two big Alders are literally on the chopping block - they're dead. They croaked. When they go there will be a big, branches-shaped hole in the sky where they used to be - and more sunshine getting through this Winter.
Meanwhile up across the Bay in Berzerkely a bunch of young, mis-taught, and intentionally stupified Hippiespawn are currently sitting-up in a circle of Oak trees that was planted some sixty years ago and that are dying. They lie about the age of the trees - probably genuinely believing what they think rather than knowing what they might know - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Especially a LITTLE knowledge that is incomplete and seen through the knothole of an outhouse. The Hippiespawns want to save the trees, and see in them the content and value that they lack in themselves. They have spokespersons and issue statements, accusing others of misdeeds - and shit in a bucket. This is what the Teachers Union has produced in California, utter morons. Perhaps the trees are the smart and wise ones and have used their Ancient and Secret Tree-Zombie Power to take over the melted-brains of the hapless fools, causing them to do what they do by tree-puppetry. Yeh that's it.

Samizdata.net Quote of the Day

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

- George Orwell

If you havn't been to Samizdata.net before, give it a look. There's intelligence, insight, and wit in both analysis and the comments that is a sight to behold.

3rd Annual Mike Campbell Memorial Carbine Match

I think this is one of the most fun shoots we do, mainly because it's so dynamic. The brass is flying all around, we move, and everything is done in rapids. We shoot prone rapid, sitting rapid, and standing rapid - two strings of ten shots from each position in 90-seconds.

We move from 100-yards Prone to 75-yards Seated, then to 50-yards for the Offhand, so the elevation is also changing constantly but not such as you might think - the hold has to change because the sights have limited flexibility. But it's such a flat-shooting cartridge at 50-yards you just hold on the X and bang rapidly away and have a great time.
I had to remove the Aimpoint red-dot from my National Postal Meter, even though those were allowed last year - so the rules are constantly changing besides. Some things don't change though, and my buddy the Distinguished shooter won again, but this time he didn't "clean" the target. Ha! The guy who barely made it last year however came in Second, while I got Seventh with seven X's. Out of about fourteen guys, that's my mid-range style...

On the road to Mandalay, where the flyin' fishes play

...And the temple monks lie all dead about, in a jungle far away.

Terribly sad about Burma's collapse - from an incipient Socialist state the decline to Militarism is quick, but as history shows a natural and inevitable progression. A Socialist state tends to fail much faster and more dramatically than others, since a one-party system's natural tendency is towards the lowest common denominator - which includes the component of competency and intelligence - and it's authority is carried out vigorously.
With finally only the Military as its remaining real investment and constituency, it falls into their hands - and then gives us this sad result of civilian slaughter. Cambodia with Pol Pot was a prime example, and Mugabe is doing it to Zimbabwe right now also.

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be --
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!