With any luck, this weekend, it will be mine — the Rock Island Armory Tactical 1911 (click to embiggen):

This gun is primarily to be used as a base for the currently useless Pachmayr Dominator .308 upper. However, I might overcome my distaste for single-action defensive handguns and actually use it in .45 configuration from time to time — handling Phil and Dave’s tricked-out 1911s at Boomershoot was pretty exciting. (Unfortunately, I was so entranced during our initial “show and tell” session I forgot to take pictures of all their toys).

(Push the button … )

ID thinks so. Hat tip: Belmont Club.

That would be really alarming. Traction Control spotted it..Check out the red dot on Obama’s ear at 00:20 seconds in.

Seems way too big a red dot to be from a laser sight to me (although I don’t own any laser sights and have never used any). Recalling Ockham’s Razor, perhaps it was an accidental triggering of a red-filtered spotlight in the arena rafters? Seems more likely to me.

UPDATE: Okay, take a look right before the red dot shows up. There’s some smaller red reflections that can be seen flashing. And the red dot itself seems to be coming directly from the little camera shoved into Obama’s face. I think this is just a really BIG red-light exposure check coming from the cameras.

Jeez, this sort of thing must give the Secret Service heart attacks.

I meant to start this last week, but getting caught up at work after the Boomershoot trip was kicking my ass and it slipped my mind. Oh well, this should be worth the wait.

As a general announcement for those out there who have not yet met me, I have a serious lack of social skills. The customs and cues that most folks take for granted are, for the most part, completely lost on me. I’ve got the “Please” and “Thank You” items down, in a number of languages even. However, I laugh at the wrong parts of jokes, or mistake serious conversations as jokes, or will sprach jokes that no one else on the planet will find funny and could quite possibly land me in The Hague, and have no problem saying “Tough Shit” to nuns.

The Wife finds this “cute”. Most of the time. Which is nice because I find her cute all of the time. But those who don’t know how to translate generally just find it annoying. While this makes me prime blogging material, going grocery shopping is not something I should be allowed to do alone. Not even at the Super Wal-Mart.

During my 36 years on this planet I’ve most likely insulted more people accidentally than I have on purpose, which is saying something. Events like Boomershoot are a test as to see how long I can behave “normally” before I get into trouble. As an example, it took both David and Dave to explain to me why bringing strippers might not be seen as humorous or entertaining by everyone in attendance.

So, if you’d like to be accidentally or even purposely insulted by me and cannot wait until the 2009 Boomershoot, I’ll be on general display in Reno, NV at the Gunblogger Rendezvous this October. I’ve been told that I won’t have to bring strippers to Reno with me because they have a number of them there already.

One place that I have found where I can hopefully at least seem somewhat normal is in the realm of tunage. Though at times even there my fanaticism gets me discounted because there is just some shit I refuse to bother my ears with. This can also be prime blogging material, because turning someone onto something they might not have heard otherwise is one of the nicest things one person can do.

David and I exchanged a number of items during Boomershoot. One of the items I gave him was a fat stack of CD’s that I’d made up to try and help make his 11+ hour drive home more enjoyable. I understand that the effort was successful.

Until somewhat recently, due to the suckitude of his previous home PC, David was unable to listen to these Soundboard postings and was having to search out these tracks on his own. A number of the CD’s I handed him contained the tracks he might not of been able to track down.

For the foreseeable future (aka: the next few weeks) David will be spinning the discs and making the selections for the Soundboard. If he gets a few minutes to write something up on it, I’ll post it with that and you all won’t have to deal with as lame an intro as this one. We hope you enjoy.

Today’s selection is off the first Weapons of Mass Creation album, put out by the UK’s Hospital Records. You can find it here.

Goldfinger - LaRoque

That anyone can step over it

Who is to blame when students fail? If many students fail — a majority even — does that demonstrate faculty incompetence, or could it point to a problem with standards?

These are the questions at the center of a dispute that cost Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. Today is his last day of work, but on his way out, he has started to tell his story — one that he suggests points to large educational problems at the university and in society. The university isn’t talking publicly about his case, but because Aird has released numerous documents prepared by the university about his performance — including the key negative tenure decisions by administrators — it is clear that he was denied tenure for one reason: failing too many students. The university documents portray Aird as unwilling to compromise to pass more students.

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students.

Sadly for Mr. Aird, universities these days don’t seem to be so much about “learning” as they are self-esteem promotion facilities.

Please note that these temperatures are in Celsius

Every day the government sends out an news report via SMS text message. I can’t read it, of course, it’s all in Chinese, but at the very top they have the weather forecast. Today I learned a valuable lesson. When the SMS weather report says 27° and sunny, but the Weather Channel forecast says 27° and raining, bring a jacket.

Lee in China

Hmm, it is almost as if everything the government says is either a lie or is completely incorrect.

Oh, wait.

Celebrated my 39th birthday yesterday in part by taking myself to a cherished haunt for lunch: a well-stocked used bookstore next to a Straw Hat Pizza to which I can retire to read my new acquisitions with a favorite dish: pineapple pizza, light on the sauce.

Found this gem:

(Push the button … )

The Mayor of Portland, OR gets to the nut of the problem of having “homeless” folks camp out at City Hall in protest of the city’s anti-camping/loitering laws

Both the mayor and protest leaders seem to be feeling the pressure and the tension of a struggle that has now stretched into its third week with no obvious compromise in the making.

Rios came out of the mayor’s conference room to complain that Potter’s staff had written a response to the meeting in advance and forced protesters to turn off tape recorders given to them by reporters at the Portland Mercury, an alternative weekly, after Potter refused to open the meeting to the public. Still, Rios later carved a path through reporters to shake the mayor’s hand and thank him for the time.

Potter didn’t take kindly to a question about how he could have allowed a large group to camp outside City Hall for two weeks without expecting public safety problems.

He stared at the reporter for a moment before responding. “That is a really dumb question,” he said. “Would you like to rephrase it?”

Potter said the city has opened 102 extra shelter beds since the protest began, and that 18 sat empty Monday night. He also noted that the crowd outside City Hall now includes a number of people who aren’t homeless. Perhaps, the mayor suggested, those people could take a few homeless men and women home with them overnight during the protest so they don’t violate the law.

If all the people who claim to care about “the homeless” would actually take care of the problem themselves instead of demanding that my tax money be used to pay for some asshatted scheme which only attracts more of “the homeless”, the problem would be licked in short order.

Which is to say, the “homeless” advocates would stop feeling sorry for the bums and we wouldn’t have any more “homeless advocates” to complain about the existence of “homeless people”, thereby, the only whining about “homeless people” I would have to endure is how there is a shortage of them since we put them to work along the interstates picking up trash for their room and board.

A reporter from The Hill has asked the 97 Senators not currently running for the Executive Office how they’d react if offered the VP spot

I plan to stick with my current job until I get the hang of it.

Ted Kennedy (D-MA)

I do believe that his current job entails pissing me off, attempting to remove my civil rights via legislation and drinking as much single malt scotch as humanly possible.

Being somewhat successful at the first two, I’m taking it that he’s currently stuck on getting that last part perfected. Let’s hope it stays that way.

That you would read a story of this nature in a Seattle newspaper is if the editor wanted to mock the person confused over the cans.

A council refused to collect rubbish from a 95-year-old war veteran who is nearly blind - because he put a ketchup bottle in the wrong bin.

Lenny Woodward, a former Desert Rat who has lived in the same house for 58 years, was confused by a new regime of fortnightly collections and rigid recycling rules.

Residents have a blue wheelie bin for cans and cardboard, a green box for glass and a black bin for other waste.

Mr Woodward made the mistake of putting the ketchup bottle and a coffee jar in the blue bin when they should have gone in the green box.

When binmen inspected the blue bin, they refused to empty it and attached a tag to it warning him not to break the rules again.
And when his daughter rang Norwich City Council to explain that he was baffled by the new regime, she was told that “rules have to be obeyed”.

I’m already waiting for the first round of confusion over the new foodwaste rules. Rules that lead to fines for not putting your chicken bones and apple cores in your yardwaste bin.

Though, even if my employer took those calls, my bosses aren’t dumb enough to have me answering them. I have no time to waste telling people about some ignorant rule a bureaucrat pulled out of his ass.

The city itself takes those calls and I know for a fact that their highly qualified representatives will issue forth with their own version of the “rules have to be obeyed” line.