Rural Bicycling

Started at the eastern end and worked my way west, then returned. A 14-mile round trip. Very hilly; about 1200 feet of elevation at the eastern end and 743 feet at the western end.

In the upper left corner you can just see one of the many bends of the Shenandoah River.

At about the mid-point of the trip there is a very sharp hairpin turn. It's a lot of fun on a bike because it's sharply downhill on the way out; not so much fun to climb it on the way back.

I'm thinkin' about puttin' a still in my back yard. But how to keep the revenooers away? Any suggestions?

Foreigners And Their Crazy Laws

This time it's Israel.

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew.

Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left....

It seemed like a case of religious prejudice to me at first, but apparently this "rape by fraud" crime is applied even-handedly:

One such case was that of Eran Ben-Avraham, who told a woman he was a neurosurgeon after which she had sex with him, and was convicted of three counts of fraud.

Lying to a woman about being a doctor?

I suppose as he was taking off his pants he said to her, "This isn't exactly brain surgery..."

I'll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.

P.S. Suggested line of defense: "Your honor, I admit that I told her that I was a doctor, but she told me those were her real boobs!"

My Son The Comedian

He got hired this summer (actual paycheck!) to write and appear in a made-for-web comedy sketch show aimed at middle-schoolers. He'll be a college senior this year himself, so it's a great gig.

In this trailer, he appears as a wizard, a mime, a student and a guy trying to make a deal with a tomato.

The actual trailer is 15 MB, so here's a link:

http://fridaynitebytes.com/files/2010/07/Final-Trailer2.mp4

P.S. I think that's him in the crocodile costume, too.

The Evolution Of The American Popular Song...

...can take you by surprise if you, like me, haven't been paying attention for awhile.

Take last night. I hosted a group of six college girls, rained out of a camping trip, and gave them a place to stay for the night. Wipe that disgusting leer off your face; one of them is the daughter of friends of long standing and I've known her since she was a baby. The others were perfectly nice young ladies.

They arrived about ten o'clock carrying several cases of beer. They settled in the living room upstairs, set up a laptop to play music, and seemed to be behaving themselves. So I went downstairs to watch a DVD of "No Country For Old Men". Every now and then I could hear them singing along with their music.

At 2:00 AM, just as the movie was ending, they began to sing, at the top of their lungs:

Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
I f***ed your man.
Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
I f***ed your man.
Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
I f***ed your man.
Boom! I f***ed your boyfriend!
He put it in!

You know, when I think of popular songs, I think of Lennon & McCartney, or even Burt Bacharach...

Anyway, my choice of a movie was an ironic comment to the evening.

Well, this morning they cleaned up all the trash and beer bottles and took it away with them and the house is spotless.

But if their mothers had heard them last night, those girls would be grounded 'til they were 25!

Good News!

“The last two years have been a disaster for us,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat and a longtime advocate of increased gun control.

New York Times

Five Months Ago

So I'm not complaining about the heat.

The Gun Show Loophole Has Vanished

The New England Journal Of Medicine has just published another article on gun shows ("criminogenic pumps", according to the abstract) by the ever-industrious Garen Wintemute, in which he manages to make this startling revelation:

Concerns about private-party gun sales and the importance of gun shows as a source of guns used in crimes have led to repeated calls for closing the "gun show loophole" — by which advocates usually mean requiring that private-party sales at gun shows be routed through a licensed retailer who will do a background check and keep a record of the purchase. President Barack Obama endorsed such a measure during his 2008 presidential campaign, as did President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Legislation to close the loophole has been introduced in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but no hearings have been scheduled.

In fact, there is no gun-show loophole as such. Federal law is silent on the issue of gun shows and permits private-party gun sales to occur anywhere. As a result, such a limited measure might well have no detectable effect on the rates of firearm-related violent crime. Gun shows account for a small percentage of all gun sales in the United States — between 4 and 9%, according to the best estimates available. Similarly, they account for just 3 to 8% of all private-party gun sales. Legislation to close the gun-show loophole would not affect the great majority of private-party sales, and motivated illicit buyers could simply find private sellers elsewhere.

The abstract is only a half-dozen paragraphs and is worth a read, if only as a masterpiece of using statistics to dress up an editorial. And vague statistics at that!

[I thought criminogenic pumps were a kind of women's shoe.]

I Wish I Had Said That!

From a wide-ranging discussion of the Second Amendment, McDonald, Sotomayor, Kagan, etc. on the Volokh Conspiracy:

Owen H: Can any of the originalists out there point to where the Constitution specifically enumerates a right of armed self defense? I mean, the 2nd doesn’t say individual self-defense, it talks about defending the nation.

Allan Walstad: This has been gone over so many times on earlier VC threads over the years. 2A says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The language “shall not be infringed” explicitly indicates a pre-existing right, not one in any way created by the Constitution. The security of a free state, mentioned in the preamble, surely includes the security of the people, not just the borders or the organs of government. Even such a twisted anti-gun propagandist as historian Saul Cornell doesn’t aver that 2A is about defending the nation, rather his joke of an interpretation is that it was a bone thrown out to the states, that their militia units could not be disarmed by the feds. Shall we believe that 2A simply means you have a right to a gun while serving in the military?? Is there some sinister likelihood of the government sending troops into battle without arms? So are we to believe then that 2A means you can have a gun locked up somewhere for when called up by the government to defend the borders and the organs of government, but if brigands invade your community or home, attack you and your neighbors, rob your property and rape your kids you can’t use the gun for defense because the “security of a free state” has nothing directly to do with the security of the people in it?

Wow!

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The second book of the trilogy is as good as the first.

What an unforgettable character! I want a T-Shirt that says "WWLSD?" (What would Lisbeth Salander do?)

I'm Lovin' It!

I'm sure I'm not the first with this pun, but it's the best I could come up with.

Otis McDonald and Dick Heller.
Two winners.

P.S. As I recall, Mr. Heller is pointing because he was saying, "Can you email me a copy of this picture?" Which I did.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

There's a story in publishing that the author William Makepeace Thackeray picked up Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo one morning at 6 AM and couldn't put it down again until 11 PM that night. Maybe Thackeray was just a slow reader; we're talking about a 1300-page novel. But it does have quite a reputation as a compulsive page-turner.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is another. I just finished it in two sittings. It has elements of:

The Silence Of The Lambs - horrific, sadistic serial killer (or killers?)
Psycho - who's that in the basement?
Laura - is the victim really dead?
Klute - two badly mismatched investigators are played for fools by Mr. Big
The Big Sleep - fabulously wealthy old-money family has secrets to keep
Pulp Fiction - say hello to Zeke

Quite a read and highest recommendation. Fantastic.

Must Carry

A court case in Massachusetts deals with the question of what constitutes safe storage of a handgun. The cops charge a guy because his Glock was found in an Igloo cooler. Now, within that cooler, the Glock was locked up in its original box with a cable lock, nice and safe. But in gun-phobic Mass., that's not enough: they wanted the locked box to be locked within another locked container, not an Igloo cooler.

Fortunately the Appeals court seems to have decided that the locked box did satisfy the Mass. statute for safe storage of a handgun.

Two commenters on the Volokh Conspiracy ask, in a state that is as hysterically frightened of guns as Massachusetts, what constitutes safe storage?

Avatar: The question is, what responsibility is incurred by a gun owner to make sure unauthorized people don’t gain access to their gun?

G.R.Mead: This is perhaps the best argument to make carry — MANDATORY ?!?!?

I cannot think of more secure way to keep the weapon from unauthorized persons ...

Yes! If you buy a handgun, you MUST carry it at all times. It's the only way to be sure.

When Hippies Collide

Electric cars are so quiet that blind pedestrians could unwittingly step into the path of these ultra-quiet cars, such as the Nissan Leaf. So advocates for the blind have demanded that electric cars be equipped with noise-makers to warn of their approach. Problem solved? Not quite:

Anti-Noise Activists Oppose Sounds for Electric Cars

New Harris Poll: Large Majorities Support Second Amendment

A new nationwide poll finds that:

Large majorities of Americans feel that they should be allowed to have guns. At the same time, pluralities of Americans favor stricter control of guns, particularly hand guns, although this number has decreased significantly in the past few years.

These are some of the findings of a Harris Poll® survey of 2,503 U.S. adults surveyed online between May 10 and 17, 2010 by Harris Interactive.

h/t Say Uncle.

Love Quadrangle

Robert Wone

Ripped from the sordid pages of the Washington Post:

From the beginning, this has been the most unusual of cases because no one is charged with killing Wone. But prosecutors tried to prove in D.C. Superior Court that Joseph R. Price, 39, Dylan M. Ward, 40, and Victor J. Zaborsky, 44, who allowed Wone to stay with them on the night of his death, know who killed their friend and conspired to stage the crime scene and cover for the killer.

It boils down to this: Did an intruder kill Wone, as the defendants say, or was it someone the housemates know? Prosecutors say the killer was someone the three men know, probably Price's younger brother.

The housemates, who say they are in a committed three-way romantic relationship, waited 17 minutes before calling police so they could plant the murder weapon, alter the crime scene and scrub Wone's body of blood, prosecutors say.

Words fail me.

Do It To Larry!

Or Aaron, or Philip, or Alan.

Tough call. What would Heston do?

And what next? It's a slippery slope. License journalists?

Not many have the stones to stop sliding.

Toilet Paper

There's a meme rattling around, "What reading matter is in your bathroom?"

Here's an actual photograph:

Now Playing: One-Hit Wonders

Bow Wow Wow, Flock Of Seagulls, Barry McGuire, Chantays, Chumba Wumba, OXO, Haddaway, Frankie Goes To Hollywood (saw them in concert!), AHA (ditto - no shit!), Mike And The Mechanics, Human League, Kajagoogoo, Billy J. Kramer, The Vapors, Unit 4+2, The Buggles, Pet Shop Boys, The Troggs, The Hues Corporation, Bent Fabric, Barbara Lewis, Walter Egan, Devo, Soft Cell, etc.

Oh, the picture: remember Martha Quinn from MTV? Early Eighties. A friend of mine dated her in college (NYU). I forgave him, but it wasn't easy.

Thunder In The Mountains

During a bicycle ride this afternoon, a brief thunderstorm appeared. It's two miles to the nearest mailbox.

Fog-shrouded Skyline Drive.

This looks like the famous shot from
Gone With The Wind.

Thunderstorm well and truly coming in now.

Beyond Eleven

My new home is on four acres in Warren County, Virginia. There are a few neighbors, but their houses are hundreds of yards away, hidden by large stands of poplar trees.

Today I hooked up my sound system to my computer for the first time since the move. It's an Altec-Lansing gadget given to me by my brother. There's a big floor unit with the power supply and subwoofer, plus two little computer-like loudspeakers. The volume control is a free-spinning digital shaft encoder, and today, for the first time, I spun it fully clockwise.

I kept spinning it until it stopped getting louder, and then I ran.

Wow.

The furniture is creeping across the room under the influence of the vibrations.

I gave the Rock 'n' Roll collection a couple of hours, now it's time for the 1812 Overture.

Wish me luck. I'm goin' in.

[Fifteen minutes later] Good lord, I'm soaking wet!