Water Like Glass

Someone caught an Ono, just not me - but we got a bite of it to take home.

I am so off-line it's crazy, and good. Making a on-line post like this is a party-foul.

Eleven miles out is all you can see at sea, the arc of everything is so sub-scribed, the circle of the food-chin is short.

Politics-Free Friday

Thanks go to Alan at SnarkyBytes for this Friday feature.
Let's try a different topic besides the drenched-in-nauseating "News," and go to a Happy Place. There that's better, and better yet it's a Happy Place in the Past:

Romping across a dewy and lush meadow beneath stately trees, I fall down in green pastures.

Riding athwart cool mountain waters, my cup runneth over. I miss dual-sporting in the Sierras, the long Don Ivan rides. I need to get back on a bike with a plate on it.

UPDATE: These pictures on The Iron Pig, my '93 XR650L are about ten years old...I found my scanner is all. :-)

My first NEW bike was an '88

Bought with my own money in '89 it had languished at a dealership unsold while more popular models superseeded it. The must have seen me coming from a mile away.
It was new for all of about three months - the typical newbie arc of ownership-to-breakership - and the first time I met another "real" motorcyclist who shared the same fate, in the same corner, on the same icy patch -- precipitated by the same guy who was jumping up and down, waving his arms and hollering "Slow Down!!" so we both obligingly hit the brakes and did just that in an unexpected way.

50mph impact scratches. It would only be (too) much later that I began to appreciate dirtbikes, flexible plastic, and lack-of-traction as a condition assumed as "normal."

When I finished bumping and sliding I looked around for Panic-Man - and met him as he struggled to climb up out of the weeds.
Apparently my angle of flight, direction of impact, and subsequent bike-slide was in his exact direction - so after helping cause two other riders to crash he had dived off the edge of the mountain road to avoid the oncoming missile.
Great. I was a bit bruised but unbroken, the handlebars were torqued but the bike rideable - and the fun was over for the day so I had to ride home. Streetbike plastic is damn expensive on a petty administrative-assistant's salary. I would get it fixed back to snuff, and ride the Sierras and have some adventures.

Pictures From a Mild San Mateo Exhibition

Since I figured the MSM will ignore this I had to go Tea Party.
While the sun was bright, the wind was brisk and brought cold and runny noses with it. The kids were standout stalwarts.

Among the drivers going past there were some middle-finger gestures and minor attempts to shout idiotic slogans from a moving vehicle. None seemed very convincing and most seemed unpracticed besides unmannered.
To that nonsense I just yelled back, "Fight the Power, Man!" using their own tired rhetoric that I hoped might make a dent in their predictable semi-unconsciousness. In some cases I replied, "It's Your Money Too!"
Most of the response was overwhelmingly positive, with a lot of horn-honking and waving.
One wizened little old lady held a sign saying "95 Years Old, Survied the Depression, FOR THIS?" She was a dear.

There were beside me other dears too, and one definite cutie handed me a flag to wave - sucj a clear advantage being in this camp over the scabrous Lefty hair-shirt cross-eyed nose-pickers. These wives and mothers of America you would do battle for.
Clearly the Socialists best bet is to simply sell themselves to some higher authority and hope to gain cover by doing that, like a Sheik's hare - and that explains their love for Lusty Bill Clinton - it's all slavery to them anyhow.


Both sides of the street got a pretty built-up and very amiable crowd that grew as the day progressed. Now that's a "progressivism" I can get behind - not sure about the other junk.



Our political leadership is firmly ensconced behind jerrymandered walls of voter-proof protection, clenched firm to a greedy political power-ideology.
I despise them

Buy-A-Gun Tea-Party Day

April 15th is Wednesday, Buy-A-Gun Day - just forty-six-something hours from now.
It's also Tea-Party Day all across America - something the MSM will likely ignore as hard as it can.
I'm stuck on the Buy-A-Gun part due to finances - and I already got the Sig as an early celebration of that. So I encourage everybody to just do what they can, and take the time they have. If I had a job I would take time-off and call in a mental-health day for the Tea Party since attending it would support my well-being. :-)
If you are able to, buy something old... (1943)

or something really old... (Happy Birthday 1909)

Or even something strange and Olympian. (1913)

Juniors Day

The second Saturday of each month is a chance to help-out with the Juniors program, sometimes I'm able and sometimes I've got other things planned - this time I was able.
We had a smaller turnout than expected, maybe due to other Easter weekend commitments, so there was an excess of help available.

Some of the 4-H kids practiced position shooting with the goal of improving their competitive scores and going up in ranking, but mostly it was our own system of kids training and shooting on itty-bitty targets from the bench.

Learning and practicing the protocols of safe-handling and sight-alignment.

And dad's shooting with their kids.

At the end of the day we set up spinning, reactive targets at the 50-yard line - and the kids enjoyed whacking them and even hitting the tiniest ones that I can barely see without a new glasses prescription.

Practice Last Saturday

Friday night's memorial service for my Aunt was interesting, and very small with a brief reception afterwards - and I saw cousins from the side we never see and it gave pause for reflection.

Saturday's weather dawned bright and clear - and the good news is that I remembered to bring along my computer glasses so I could get a good, in-focus fix on the front sight - and it worked!

The bad news is I still suck, but the good news is that sometimes I get lucky, and also if I bear-down I can make a bit of my own luck.

I managed to catch a break offhand with one X, but was unable to repeat it.

My rapids were spread in too-generous a group-size but I managed the magazine change and manipulation better.

In slow-prone I got more X's but also more crap.

April 1st - a day late

I showed this to David and Derek and they said I HAD to blog it, so I fired up the scanner and tried to overcome some underexposure in Photoshop.

(Los clicquos et los Gigantificos)

It's a pillbox guarding a Military base in Guatemala outside Lake Atitlán (where I was about to become violently ill from bad food), taken in 1988 semi-discreetly from a bus as we passed by.
Simultaneously on the bus was some covert anti-Governmental rebel type spreading small tissue-paper leaflets on the wind that blew out the open windows of the old school-bus. In the helmet's slot were a couple M1919 .30 caliber air-cooled machineguns.
They were similar to ones we saw a few days prior, at a main junction in the road that went up to the famous and colorful Mayan-highland market-town of Chichicastenengo (where I had my pocket picked).
Where the road forked off to the town of Quetzaltenango, in the middle of the road piled up on a small roundabout was a bunch of sandbags and behind them sat another couple of M1919 machineguns pointed towards Quetzaltenango. The road was blocked to traffic since that's where guerrilla and government troops were fighting and dying in fairly intense ways and numbers.
We had intended to go to Cozumel and the Yucatan, but our plans got derailed by the massive hurricane Gilbert that smashed the region, so we switched to a former area of study - and apparently a war-zone.
Other stories abound - like the blond Guatemalan Army pilots in the hotel at Flores with German surnames, and the Generals at the restaurant who drove up and got fed first (absolutely, go right ahead, no problem) - But Tilkal was the highlight and earliest part of the trip, and just freakin' incredible.
It was a good thing we had Tikal early on our itinerary too, because violent amoebic dysentery from bad food plagued us the rest of the time and made it less than optimal and enjoyable, besides some other "social" encounters on our return to Guatemala City...

Alan Gura at Santa Clara University

Alan is a cool guy and he signed my Heller Kitty t-shirt and I'll never wash it again. He also stayed at the same place we did on Kauai, the Kiahuna Plantation - and he went to Stevenson's Library at the Hayatt - which is named for the great-grand-uncle of a guy I used to work for. I'm name-dropping like crazy aren't I? I wonder if he surfs too?

We asked him if he wanted to come to the Gunblogger's Rendezvous IV in September, and suggested he might be a guest of honor. Maybe we can get some frequent-flyer miles together and make it happen? He also signed RNS David's copy of the Heller Decision, and The Packing Rat, Derek's. They came over to my place and parked because parking at Santa Clara U. is Teh Suck.
We took the train down and walked across the street right to the building where Alan was scheduled to talk, where we met him in the hallway and I asked for his autograph.
He's a Libertarian Civil Rights attorney who sees grave damage done to the 2nd Amendment and also to the 14th - as a Constitutionalist the 14th has been hosed badly and practically read-out - it also needs revisiting and restoration.
And her believes we can beat the other bans - the "scary guns" bans, the "cheap guns" bans, the ban-by-list, and other onerous and illegitimate ordinances - with Heller we won something significant.

UPDATE: I want to extend grateful thanks to the sponsors who brought Alan to speak, Santa Clara University Law's Federalist Society and the Libretarian Civil Society Institute of Santa Clara University.