Remember

Once you pull the pin, Mr Grenade is no longer your friend.

While making sure I'd remembered that M26 is the correct designation for the "lemon" frag grenade I checked Wikipedia because there's a different designation for the M26 when it's got a safety clip.

M61.

The very familiar M67 is, in fact, an M33 with a safety clip.

What I learned, though, was there was an impact fused version of the M26, the M26A2.  It's kinda neat.  Throw it and it goes off when it hits something.  If it doesn't hit something hard enough, it goes off in 4 seconds.

The problem is the "hits something."

Like a branch or heavy brush.  Or if you fumble and drop it...

Oh, the M26A2 with a safety clip is an M57.

The impact versions of the M33 are the M33A1 and M59.

Is this confusing?  The way I've presented it, yes.

Lemon Grenade:

M26 fragmentation with 3-5 second fuse.
M26A1 fragmentation with 3-5 second fuse.  Improved fragmentation over M26.
M26A2 fragmentation with impact fuse.
M56 an M26A2 fragmentation with 3-5 second fuse.
M57 an M26A2 with a safety clip.
M61 an M26A1 with a safety clip.

The M26A2 is L2A1 in British service; DM-41 in German service. 

Baseball Grenade:

M33 fragmentation with 3-5 second fuse.
M33A1 fragmentation with impact fuse.
M59 fragmentation with impact fuse.
M67 an M33 with a safety clip.
M68 an M59 with a safety clip.

The M67 is C13 in Canadian service. 

PS: I've covered this ground before, but forgot. 

Life Doesn't Give Lemons

It's been surprisingly hard to find a dummy M26 frag grenade for photo purposes.

Easy to find some that won't past muster for the picture I wanna take.

Many of the links to good looking, affordable, ones are dead or out of stock.

Want virtually any other historical hand grenade?  No problem.  Even French, English and Soviet stuff!

No 'Nam reinactors out there?

Kinda related is the lack of dummy rounds for 40x46mmSR that pre-date the Gulf War. 

If They Don't Find You Handsome

Moxie has a new upstream O2 sensor.

The old one failed at 140k miles.

Not bad.

Turns out to have been very simple compared to a couple of O2's I'd done before.

Remove all the plastic shit off the top of the motor, reach over the top to the sensor's location on the exhaust manifold.

I didn't even have to crawl in the dirt!

I am happy that I got an O2 sensor socket years ago, because there's no getting a normal wrench in where it lives. 

After the test drive:  Closed Loop on bad O2 < Open Loop < Closed Loop on good O2.

Instant mileage is better than the last time I looked too! 

Somehow This Is Racism And Sexism

I'm a proponent of equal rights.

I have discovered that this makes me either racist, sexist, or both, depending on whom I'm talking to.

Why?

Because I'm talking about actual equal footing.

Not leveraging gender or race to get an advantage.

Not reversing the sexism and racism of the past.

Want the better job?  Get the education and training to land it.

Want that promotion?  Work hard, work well.

There's lots of specific examples that end up hurting women and minorities in the work place.

Things that make hiring them a negative for a place hoping to make a profit.

Remember, a job exists as a side effect of a successful business.  The benefit of the employee is a secondary reason the job exists.

Employees who disappear for months at a time and cannot be replaced are a detriment.

Unqualified employees are a drain on the qualified ones at best. 

The soft bigotry of low expectations is rampant because we're not treating people as equals. 

Shiny Let's

I'm reading an article about how a Japanese city council member is advocating that no social support go to non-citizens in his city.  Regardless of their legal status to be in that city.

That sort of article always gives me "King for a Day" ideas...

America is a lot more complicated than Japan for immigration, granted.

We have some solvable problems, though.

An issue that a lot of people have is the large number of foreign nationals on our various welfare programs.

A significant number of those people are here because they have a relative who is legally here and working.  H1B gateway to bringing in the entire extended family. 

A small change would fix some of it.

Just make the people brought in under the family reunification portion of the statute ineligible for all the programs they're currently abusing.

YOU need your family here?  Fine, YOU support them.

I know this method works because we've done it before.

We used to pay $x per child to American Indians living on the reservation.  Said Indians started having large families until it was getting to be a budget problem for the agencies tasked with administering the reservations.  So a two-child limit was imposed on the payment.  Suddenly, it was rare to see a third child...  Notice that nothing banned them from having more than two kids, just that there was no stipend for #3.

I also don't have a problem taxing into oblivion foreign nationals living here.

You cannot be a second class citizen until you are actually a citizen.

I want strong incentives for people to become Americans once they land here and to just as strongly encourage those who cannot to leave. 

Do You Own It?

If you can't run it offline, you don't own a copy.

If the failure of someone else's computer takes it offline, you're renting it.

A good sized chunk of the nation got an object lesson in this today! 

Second Class Citizenship

There are fucking metal detectors to go into the Florida Aquarium in Tampa.

Because someone might hijack the aquarium and force the fish to swim to Cuba?

I am increasingly sick of the proliferation of gun-free victim zones.

It's especially galling that they were giving free admission for Veteran's day.

I have yet to reconcile that I can be trusted to carry gun virtually any place but somehow it's more dangerous to have legal conceal carry in aquariums, museums, amusement parks and convention centers.

Trust me, I am WAY more angry at the people in Target or Wal Mart than I am at anyone at the zoo!

But nobody gets shot, despite that, because irritating me is not something that rises to the level of requiring a lethal response.

I might sigh.

I might grumble.

I might complain.

I might rant.

But I am not shooting my fellow customers unless I'm shooting back.

That's the deal we make when we carry.

I keep seeing the justification that this is for the "safety" of everyone so that they can "feel safe."

I'd rather be safe than feel safe.

There's a lot of people in Florida alone that felt safe right up to the moment they were killed.  Too many died because they had been deprived of the means to defend themselves.

Gun owners are, indeed, still the new CENSORED of society. 

Why We Fight

 

Veteran's Day

Today is Veteran's Day!

It is not Memorial Day, even if it is Remembrance Day in the rest of the English speaking world.  Easy to get them confused.

It it not Armed Forces Day.

Today is for those living people who no longer serve.

Not those still in service.

Not those who've gone ahead of us down that last path.

Those groups have their own days.

So take your favorite veteran to a movie, buy them a meal, get them a drink, get them laid, say, "thank you," like you mean it!

Go with them to the places where they get free grub and pay full price and thank the restaurant for doing it. 

Dammit

Stacy Keach has passed on.

I lost track of the number roles he played that I enjoyed.

Mike Hammer and Papa Titus loom largest. 

It is of note that I have no idea what his politics were.  That's so refreshing! 

Happy Birthday Jarheads!

Even though the modern form of the Marines is actually from July 11, 1798, we celebrate their birthday from today in 1775.

Happy Birthday to the Men's Department of the Navy. 

I Have To Say That I Agree

I Have Not Betrayed His Teachings

David Freiburger has a saying, "Don't get it right, just get it running."

The idea is that a running car is one you will drive and if you're driving it, you will be motivated to work on it until it is right.

The AC fix is a running example of "getting it right."

I hope he forgives me doing so on my mobility blob®.

A 2012 Caprice PPV is too new for his tastes... 

Update:

I just realized that I kept it running for a year and a half without fixing the AC and, thus, followed his philosophy.  A running car with a problem gets you motivated to fix on it.

I remember The Biscayne SS being relegated to it's spot and decaying away because I didn't feel like working on it when I had The Precious to drive.

Menagerie Restored!

The Beast has a collection of beasts!  With the windows down, they'd fly around and there was a distinct chance of losing one overboard.

With the AC fixed, it shouldn't be a problem now.

I am a whimsical creature!

Y+ 37

Thirty seven years ago the Berlin Wall came down.

So did I.

This is also the anniversary of me jumping, not to the back deck as planned, but into a ditch next to the tank.  Or it might be tomorrow.

We were awake and over-alert for too many hours and I had a bit of trauma going on, so I don't remember the exact day.

Hell, I didn't remember it was associated with the Berlin Wall for years. 

Happy Birthday

Happy Heavenly Birthday to our dear, departed, Neptunus Lex.

I will drink my toast later this evening. 

Political Violence

I've been observing for a while.

One side is using violence.

The recent report that Dave Chappelle is pleased that Charlie Kirk was murdered made me think of something.

We don't don't say, "boo," to Muslims because they've a propensity to be violent.  They, also, tend to get their way.

The left is screaming about using more violence against the right.

They're missing something very critical.

What happens when The Right notices that violence works better than obeying those silly laws and cultural norms?

What happens when the right begins to murder right back?

It's called civil war.  Sometimes revolution.

It's rarely fun and rarely comes out how anyone wanted it to. 

A Reminder

If you're trying to comment anonymously, you must sign your comment.

If you don't sign it, I don't publish it.

Someone or several someones are making good comments that are getting flushed for a lack of attribution. 

Gaming With Scientists And Engineers

I ran a, successful, Twilight: 2000 converted to GURPS campaign for several years.

I lived in Ames, Iowa and we played at the Memorial Union on Iowa State University.

The player pool was full of STEM students.

That means they're familiar with the metric system.

Twilight: 2000 is in metric because the US military uses the metric system.

GURPS does not use the metric system.

The "conflict" doesn't really come up very often.

T2K uses real world items that we could get real world weights for, so the kg vs lb thing was nullified. 

Ranged combat in GURPS is given in yards, not meters.

The problem happens when I, keeping in the style of the setting, said that a target was X meters away and then using that same number on the range chart in yards.

I had two players doing the math on their calculators and demanding that since I said 100m, we should use the range band for 109.3613 yards.

That changes the range penalty from -10 to -11, so it was screwing them.

It was a little squabble, but it was persistent.

I think it was the first time I invoked the concept that π = 3.00 in GURPS, therefore 1m = 1 yard and 1 lb. = 0.500kg.

It's strange how that made the engineers happy, but the scientists still chaffed.

What finally got them to stop grumbling over it was to hand them my hoary old SMART book and show them the section on range estimation.  It's not what you call, "highly precise," which means that, "the target is 100m away," suddenly means 80 to 120m away and 100 yards fits in that range, so they finally accepted when I gave a range penalty lower than they calculated. 

I just realized that this NEVER came up in any of my conversions of Traveller to GURPS.  Traveller is even more metric than T2k! 

Monkey See

Back when I did my map-light mod I focused on the mechanical process of getting the right wires in the right position on the new connector.

Recently, the driver's map-light would stick in the on position.  Most of the time, the switch would eventually shut it off, but the other day...  Nope.

I had to unscrew the bulb.

I thought, "no biggie, I don't really use that one anyway."

There I sat until Marv started his own map-light mod and, unlike me, he's looking at WHY it works instead of just HOW it works.

He noted that there's a lot of voltage sensing circuitry in there and I remembered that the passenger side was stuck in the on position when I first did this mod!

So I put an incandescent in the driver's side and the switch appears to do what it's supposed to do again!

I'm not going to declare it fixed because it would work fine for decently long periods of time when I checked to see if it would stick. 

I Know I'm Sick Of It

While I did vote party-line, I remain unhappy about it.

They ask what we want and resolutely do what they were planning on doing to do before asking.

My vote is essentially picking which party is going to ignore what I want.

I don't know why I should be happy with that.

I definitely agree with the philosophy that the government needs to be small enough that it doesn't matter if an idiot gets elected to run it.  This is government smaller than that required to not matter if the malicious get elected.

I am increasingly convinced that there be no laws regarding the safety of devices and let Darwin loose upon the unwary. 

It Needed To Get Done

You can spend all your time making money
You can spend all your love making time*

I am a believer in comparative advantage.

That's where, despite knowing how to do something and doing it yourself is cheaper than hiring someone, the opportunity cost of doing it is higher than hiring someone to do it.

In other words, you make more while someone else does it than it costs to pay them.

The AC project really did save money, even if you count buying some of the parts twice.

I bought the parts to rebuild the HVAC box for $170.

I bought a new HVAC box for $815.

I bought another $150 in sundries.  I don't count buying tools because they're reusable.

$1,145 is still less than $3,000.

I spent almost 50 hours doing the job.

To make spending $3,000 on the job with the parts I bought worth it, I need to make more than $37.10 an hour, or $77,168 a year.  I do not make, and have never made, that much a year.

So it's worth my time to do this job because it doesn't cost me more than my time is worth. 

*"I hate the Eagles man!" J. Lebowski

Strange

I've been working steady on The Beast for three weeks and, while I was tired, I wasn't sore.

TODAY, now that I'm done, my leg muscles are sore.

Go figure. 

Make Note

With El Niño going on the local weatherman was asked when we'd be seeing some cooler weather.

I realized that now that my AC is fixed, we're pretty much guaranteed snow. 

A Red Letter Day In The History Of Science

Today, 71 years ago, a prominent inventor from California was inspired to create the flux-capacitor.

This simple device is what makes time travel possible.

Sadly, Infinity Unlimited snipped this branch from our timeline.

The Brown Timeline got time machines, dehydrated pizza, and flying cars.

Our timeline got iPhones and 9/11. 

CHARGE!

Added 17ish ounces of R134a to The Beast.

Temperature at the vent and the pressures on the gauges are close enough to what the book says I'm going to say I did that part right.

That's with the temp to 'C', fan on max and recirculate set to 'off'.  Got the required 52°F at the vent in idle.

Took it for a drive with the climate controls set to 'auto' and 67° dialed in.

I did not die in the 82°F, 86% humidity drive around the area.

Vent temps were a bit lower driving around...

I am very hopeful that it stays fixed! 

Cat Fight

Shadow is getting braver.

Beeper is not less aggressive towards her.

What this means is Shadow is more willing to be in the same space as Beeper, which has increased the frequency of conflicts.

The increased bravery, however, has resulted in more draws for Shadow rather than constant losses.

Only took her three years... 

Style Guide

Drier = less moist.

Dryer = thing that makes something less moist.

I have used both spellings incorrectly frequently. 

Almost Got Away With It

You can get the cap off the filter / dryer capsule without taking the condenser out of the car.

You cannot get the old bag of desiccant out because you can't get the angle to get a grip on it.

Happily, the condenser isn't THAT hard to get out.

I have the car completely buttoned up now.  New seals on the condenser.

15 ml of PAG oil added to the condenser to replace what was soaked into the old desiccant.

30 ml of oil added to the LP line to replace the oil lost with the old evaporator.

30 in hg has been pulled and is currently holding. (fingers crossed).

Tomorrow we see if it will take r134a and if the compressor survived a year of not being used. 

RIP RKB

Robert K Brown, of Soldier of Fortune Magazine fame, apparently shuffled off the mortal coil back in August, but his wife waited until what would have been his 94th birthday to let the world know.

I was a subscriber of SoF for a while.

I think the reason I dropped my subscription is a common one.  IYKYK. 

Falling In Love Again

Things that have been getting progressively fixed and upgraded on The Beast are really paying off.

My Lords she's smooth and surefooted now.

I am not sure how I will act with working AC, but I am poised to start the last step there. 

I Have Exercised My Solemn Franchise

If you don't vote you don't really have a right complain about the outcome because what you chose was, "let someone else decide."

Elections go to the people who show up.

Don't like the candidates?  Did you vote in the primaries?

Lots of you didn't because something like 2% of the eligible voters where I live voted in the primaries.

Again, if you don't show up and have your vote counted, how will anything ever change to your liking? 

Is That Really News?

One of the news reports about the Palm Beach Learjet crash made a point to tell us that one of the passengers was wealthy.

Um...

Us poors don't charter Learjets.

That's wealthy people stuff.

File under "duh!" 

Found The Nut

The missing windshield wiper nut was located sitting on top of the washer tank just behind the bumper.

It'd ridden there for two test drives and a trip to the shop to get the alignment. 

Weiẞe Rose

I try to avoid Dancing Monkeys frothing at the mouth about politics because, invariably, the ones who do so are dumb as posts.

Today's example is Wil Wheaton, a known Dancing Monkey.

Wil is best known for playing a deeply unpopular character on Star Trek: Next Generation and a version of himself on The Big Bang Theory.

And for being an insufferable ass about politics.

Wil recently ranted, "Stephen Miller, on behalf of Star Trek, and everyone who knew and loved [Patrick Stewart], keep my Captain's name out of your fucking Nazi mouth.  He despised you, and everything you stand for."

Interesting that you're the official spokesman for the show now, Wil.  Did you ask Bill Shatner?  Does Paramount know?

But, let's address AGAIN the Nazi accusation that idiot leftists and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers keep making.

Wil, you would not be able to level this accusation at a real, dyed in the wool, National Socialist.

Well, not for very long.

Actual, real, literal, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei types would just pick you up off the street and have you executed by guillotine.  The White Rose Society was far milder in their opposition to Hitler than you are about Trump.  Just sayin'.

In short, Wil, you have no fucking clue about what you're talking about with regards to Nazis, so I will just have to assume that you have no clue as to the mind of Sir Patrick Stewart.

So, Dancing Monkey, I stopped paying the grinder a long time ago, you can shut up and slink off to wherever failed actors go.  Yes, I will have fries with my order.

Patrick Stewart, also a known Dancing Monkey, did express some socialist politics, but never did so in an abrasive, hateful way.  His public expression was that he disagreed, not despised, with policies.

But it matters not one whit because MISTER Stewart was a foreigner poking his nose into American politics.  Particularly gun control.

That's something I despise with a vengeance and it makes me miss him less.

And, AGAIN I emphasize the sozialistische part of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.

Socialist in English.

Let's see, Wil, who's more like Hitler than Trump.  You're a socialist, Hitler was a socialist.  You're a member of a trade union, "Arbeiterpartei" can be translated as "union" and Hitler was a member of a union...

Stewart, the same is true.

In truth, you Dancing Monkeys are better Nazis than anyone else I can name. 

Dead Pics

I've been finding posts with dead pictures in them.

In nearly every case it's a an unresponsive link to Flickr to a full size image.

No problems when I've linked to the 1024x768 version of an image.

So I've been fixing them as I find them.

It's a bit tedious. 

Interesting Doc

 

That they were open minded about it says a lot about how the tone has shifted over the years.

Nine Years One Month

I just noticed that I we went right past the 9th anniversary of the Mandalay Bay Hotel shooting in Las Vegas without 24-7 rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.

That change is significant!

Used to be the anniversaries of these things were reported breathlessly. 

FFS

I stopped watching his channel a while ago, but I don't think a national from a nation that LITERALLY made quarantine facilities concentration camps to house the people who refused the COVID vaccine has a lot of room to be critical about the level of freedom in America.

How's the freedom to own a gun going on down under?  Or to mod your car?  I feel a lot freer than you...

There's no truly FREE nation.

The tyranny of a million tiny regulatory cuts bleeds a lot of liberty away in every Western nation. 

But the entire point of the video is "Empire is BAD, America has become an Empire, therefore America is BAD."

You want to explain how your quarantine facilities were different from concentration camps?  Tough shit, Hitler was EVIL, Hitler made concentration camps, therefore YOU are EVIL for making concentration camps!  And I know this line of reasoning because you made the exact same argument about the internment camps the US put up for Japanese-American citizens. 

The last video I bothered watching he mentioned his school of thought for how to do history and I don't think that's a good method of doing it.  Ethno-History seems to be a means of applying guilt to a society with modern filters instead of the lenses used by the people of the time.

It's a lot like blaming a 5 year old for things as if they were an senior citizen.

Something else you need to understand about Americans, Mate:  "Shiny, let's be bad guys."  It's a cultural trait that if we keep being treated as if we're guilty, when we're innocent, to say, "fuck it, let's crime!"

Are you certain that after decades of the world accusing us of shit we weren't up to that you're not just seeing us saying "fuck it"? 

PS: I loathe to call any form of quarantine facility or internment camp a concentration camp because the National Socialists "feature" of gas chambers and crematoria is absent in Australian and American iterations of the idea.

PPS: This is a half-cocked rant about a particular YouTuber and not a well researched document on all of Australia.  Apologies to my readers Down-Under who feel they got tarred by the same brush. 

Lost And Found

There were four things missing when I did inventory after buttoning The Beast back up.

1. The cute little sweatshirt cover for the shifter.

2. My 4-jet lighter.

3. A baggie of heat-shrink tubing.

4. One nut for the windshield wipers.

We searched the entire garage and the car like three times to no avail.

Today we renewed the search.

The cute little sweatshirt was found in the glove box.

The lighter was found on top of the medicine cabinet in the garage bathroom.

The baggie of heat shrink tubing was found where it belonged, just hidden from view by something put back in that bin in the wrong order.

The nut is still missing!  It's been replaced by a Nyloc nut.

We're blaming the Spirit of Nana, the ashes of a dear friend that are being stored at our house.