A Great Day

I went to the NRA in Fairfax this morning. Put 40 rounds through the Garand and a dozen mags each through the Kimber 1911 (45 ACP) and the Springfield 1911 (9mm).

Then I spent a couple of hours in the museum.

A beautiful cased 1911A1 with a .22 LR conversion kit.

Hermann Goering's Merkel shotgun.

Julian S. Hatcher's Colt single-shot in .22 LR.
He wrote "Hatcher's Notebook".


A Fabbri O/U shotgun with bulino-engraved nudes.

A unique double-barrel bolt-action rifle, magazine-fed!

A beautiful FN 1910.

A Browning B-25 shotgun.
The engraving on the receiver shows The Man Himself, sitting at his drafting table.

My photography skills do not nearly do it justice.

Some movie guns: Nathan Fillion's gun from "Firefly".

Javier Bardem's silenced shotgun
from "No Country For Old Men".

Colt 1911, serial number 4.

Savage 1907 in .45 ACP, serial number 1.

And serial number 2.

Catch As Cat Can

She's a professional cat catcher.

You'll Put Your Eye Out!

Airgun is designed so that you have to point it at yourself to check the pressure.

Boing-boing.

Best Granny Ever!

I can't vouch for this but it's funny. It's making the rounds on the Internet, not for the first time, perhaps.

Sound Check

Miranda Lambert with a pink Stratocaster and a mike stand made from a double-barrel shotgun.

WaPo.

Now THAT's A Typewriter!

And it's real!

Boing-boing.

The Fifth Amendment

A judge has ordered a Peyton, Colorado woman to furnish the password to decrypt the files on her laptop, the better to prosecute her for what's in them.

The story is in Cnet.

The suspect should negotiate for complete immunity from prosecution for any offense disclosed by decrypting the laptop. The decrypted contents of the laptop could then be used as evidence against others, but not against her (the original suspect).

If prosecutors offer her such a deal, and she refuses, then she can be charged with contempt of court and given a lengthy prison sentence.

But as it stands now, prosecutors want to have their cake and eat it, too: they want the contents of the laptop AND they want to use it as evidence against the suspect.

They can’t have both.

The fifth amendment allows a defendant to just go limp and dare the prosecutor to convict him (her).

Really, people! Have an auto-destruct password ready. C’mon! A fake password that would erase the password file and wipe it out permanently, rendering the laptop inert. A brick.

These defendants are hardly sympathetic; the current one is charged with mortgage fraud. In 2009 and 2010 there were two cases involving child pornography.

But the next victim could be Claire Wolfe, or David Codrea.

As H. L. Mencken said, "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

More Rifles On The Wall

Picture on the front page of the Washington Post yesterday.

Top one's an M1 Carbine. On the bottom is a side-by-side hammer gun.

Can anybody ID the others?

Rule No. Five: Keep Your Foot Off The Trigger

Comic book cover, from Boing-Boing.

It's A Rifle With A Tiny Cannon On It

Well, duh!

Neatorama.

She's God's Girlfriend; You'd Think She'd Be Happy

What chance do the rest of us have, mere mortal men?

Funny story by Simon Rich.

Welcome To America!

Boing-boing.

Gun Control - A Movement Without Followers

In the WSJ.

h/t Joe Huffman.

P.S. Ooops, you're right. It's not in the WSJ, it's in Bloomberg Business Week.

Daphne Oram

Interesting lady.

From Boing-Boing.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Drambuie!

Female Co-Pilot, too!

There's a GIRL flying this plane!

Not Gonna Set The Alarm Clock

I have tomorrow off.

My second day off in three months.

My first Saturday off in eight years.

The New Chevrolet Trabant

Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Link.

Obituaries

I make obituaries for TV now and then, so when a particularly good one comes along, I take notice. I hope that you will not think me too morbid if I admit to a small collection of my favorites.

The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday brought this to mind. A famous (or infamous) atheist, he was once asked if, as he breathed his last, we might expect a deathbed conversion.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

And on Tuesday, the advertising executive Edie Stevenson passed away. She wrote the well-remembered TV commercial for Quaker cereal, "Three Brothers" in which the older boys conspire to use the youngest brother as a guinea pig when their mother serves a new breakfast cereal. “Let’s get Mikey. He won’t eat it. He hates everything.” Then the best line, "He likes it! Hey, Mikey!"

And from Ms. Stevenson's obit in the NYT:

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her longtime partner, Gordon H. Price; two sisters, Daphne Stevenson Penttinen and Adelita Stevenson Moore; three sons, Steven, David and Donald Mann; and five grandchildren.

She also leaves a cat, Mikey.

But my favorite obit of all is Madeleine Pelner Cosman, a medieval studies expert and professor who passed away on March 2, 2006. From her obit in the NYT:

Ms. Cosman's husband, Bard, a plastic surgeon whom she married in 1958, died in 1983. Survivors include a daughter, Marin, of Scarsdale, N.Y.; a son, Bard, of La Jolla, Calif.; and four grandchildren. Information on other survivors could not be confirmed.

Ms. Cosman also leaves behind a vast library of illuminated manuscripts and a large collection of handguns.

And Just Over The Border...

...is the peaceful village of Moyock, NC.

On The Border

Thanks to reader Bob, we have one more Wullenweber. This one on the Virginia/North Carolina border (the horizontal gray line is the border.)

This one looks like it's been converted into a secret squirrel site.

Or a Walmart.

Wullenweber Antennas

Sobe, Japan

These are very large arrays for high-frequency reception and direction-finding, mostly by governments. Here is the Wikipedia article.

All of the installations were originally super-secret, but most have been dismantled and only a few are left, all of them inactive.

In addition to RAF Credenhill in the previous post, these Wullenweber sites remain:

Chicksands, UK

Elmendorf AFB, Alaska

Misawa, Japan

Imperial Beach, California

This one has an interesting history. Built in Karamursel, Turkey, it was dismantled by the Turkish government in 1977 in retaliation for a U.S. arms embargo. That was 34 years ago and it's still easy to spot.

They're anachronisms now, but as this 1955 snapshot shows, security at Misawa was serious.

What Color Is The Boathouse At Hereford?

There seem to be many different possible answers to that time-honored question.

But first, what is this Big Round Thing?

And what is this Little Round Thing?

They've got their own orchard, we know that.

And some sort of Big Square Thingy. Avec flagpole.

Nice antenna.

What say you, Bobbi? Appears to me to be a broadband ten-element high-frequency Yagi. I'd love to own one.


There's a double fence around the whole place, with camera towers every hundred meters or so.

And a bit farther down the road we see the antenna in the distance. More like twelve to fifteen elements, I'd say. Like the one at the Pentagon. Maybe they talk to each other: "dit-dit-dit-dit-dit..."

They've got lots of stuff, but I don't see a boathouse. Musta been one of those trick questions.

Hey, what's that weird tower on the horizon? How'd I miss that?

OK, there it is. Maybe that's the mysterious boathouse.

"'ello, 'ello, 'ello! What's all this, then? That's as far as you go, Yank. Nothing to see 'ere. Just turn your fancy camera car around and get yer arse back to Cupertino."

"You think we're barmy? Get lost!"

"Um, Constable, is there a boathouse around here?"
"Bloody git!"

See for yourself here.

Marines vs. Rome, The Movie

It's the 35th MEU against the Roman Legions. My money's on the Jarheads.

From Boing-boing.

Great License Plate!

Spotted parked outside the telephone company.

And here's one of Steve Wozniak's original Blue Boxes, on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.