Another Hot Ride

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When I got on the bicycle it was 104 degrees.
At the end of the ride it was 106.
On the way home, the car's outside temperature reading briefly ticked up to 108 degrees.

I took lots of water, and ice cubes, in a Camelback, plus four frozen water bottles.

Hot Weather Ride

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And not far away:

Meet me at the corner of Browning and Garand.

There really is such a place, at Quantico MCB.

I Put A Spell On You

1967: Civil Defense Club

I'm second from the right. I was more or less drafted into this august body of men due to my recently having acquired a General Class amateur radio license. This allowed me to operate all of their radios. There was only one other ham in this picture. Can you spot him?

No, not the guy with the pocket protector; good guess though. It's the guy in the lower left. As I recall his father and mother were chauffeur and housekeeper to some rich family. This was in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was fifteen, nearly sixteen.

Short Ends

Tossed into a rural field, several miles of fiber optic cable.

Where I Work

Cosmo Girl...

...of 1913.
And her pillow gun:
Boing-Boing.

There's One Less Bozo On This Bus

Firesign Theater's Peter Bergman died yesterday.

A close friend encouraged him to write his autobiography:

"Pete, you're the 'Zelig' of the rock era! You've been in a film with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Farrah Fawcett. You coined the term "love-in." You smoked a joint with Bob Marley and the Wailers when they were your opening act [True, the Wailers opened for Procter and Bergman in Boston. Pete told me the joint was "arm-sized"!]. You guys gigged with the Buffalo Springfield. You've worked with Spike Milligan, and now here you are with Albert Ayler, for god's sake! I mean, come on! You have to do this!"

You Learn Something New Every Day

Most days, anyway.

Today's bon mot is callipygian.

Definition: having well-shaped buttocks.

Usage: "Gwyneth Paltrow is an outspoken fan, and the famously callipygian television personality Kim Kardashian makes frequent requests for free Spanx. "It just really smooths everything out," she told me."

From an article in the New Yorker about Spanx.

Sent from my iPhone

Couch Gag Thrills Nation

The Simpsons' 500th show open, in slomo.

Neatorama.

Super PACs

The emergence of super PACs shows once again that “campaign finance reform” has failed abysmally. After nearly four decades, it has achieved none of its goals. It has not purged politics of big donations, nor cured public cynicism about the influence of the rich, nor made elected leaders more trusted. What it has done is compromise basic First Amendment rights, clutter politics with baffling laws and regulations, and actually deepen cynicism.

Robert J. Samuelson in WaPo.

Atomic Dueling Pistols

Retronaut.

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?