Mr Elusive

We moved the feeder to keep the squirrels off and hoped our resident cardinal would come investigate.

The whole family came!

Apologies for the artifacts from shooting with my phone from behind both a screen and chicken wire from the porch.

The cardinals are VERY skittish, but they are definitely eyeing the feeder and thinking about getting closer to the monkey cage and the collection of cats.

There was a third one I didn't manage to get a picture of, but I think we have Mom, Dad and Son in the area until Dad drives Son off.

This May Be Your Only Chance!

Palmetto State Armory, doing business as Harrington & Richardson, has teamed up with DSA to produce a limited run of T48 FALs.

So, at 4:30 PM EDT, Friday, May 29, 2026 you can begin stabbing "add to cart" and attempting to enter your card information and check out before supplies are exhausted.

No price has been announced, but $2,600 is the rumor.

I have already made my case with Harvey about buying one:

1. It's really cool. 
2. It's really expensive.
3. We REALLY don't need it. 
4. It's objectively not as good as the FAL we already have. 

Did not dissuade her in the slightest.

She even consulted the Magic 8-Ball® which replied, "No." 

Shootin'

Took the 915 to the range with both it's new curved grips and refreshed magazines.

It shoots.

I am not unhappy with my group with it.

Harvey tried it out and discovered she likes a dot on the front sight and no dots in the rear.  We can change her M&P over to that.

We tried her out on all four backstraps and she's changed from the L to the S.  We originally used the larger grip when she was recovering from her shoulder surgery to compensate for some grip strength issues and numbness.

The S is working better for her now and shooting induced numbness appears to be reduced.  Win!

I'm working with her on stance and she needs a wider one than feels natural for her.  I remember going through this myself.  The immediate improvement in her group after she took a wider stance was worth it.

We talked about the differences in stance between archery and throwing darts, which she is more familiar with. 

No Show

Harvey and I attempted to go to a car show about 45 minutes away.

While it was a pleasant drive, the show was a no show.

The food trucks had arrived, but at 5:20 pm of a 4-8pm car show...  Yeah.

But we got a good drive out of it.

Trans temp peaked at 93°C (199.4°F) in stop and go traffic getting to the Suncoast Parkway.  That plummeted to 76°C (168.8°F) when it got into lock up at 70 mph.

In stop and go traffic on the way home, it barely broke 90°C. 

Upgrade

Did you know they made arched grips for 3rd gen S&W autos?

I do now!

Model 915 before:

Model 915 after:

I have long thought that the 59, x59 and 59xx series of guns needed an arched grip, and I was blissfully unaware that you could fix the 59xx guns!

Allegedly, there's a replacement, arched, backstrap for the 59 and x59 guns, but I have only seen a couple pictures, never the part for sale.

Sproing

Magazine springs are wear items.

Check every once and while if they've shrunk.

The top magazine is brand new.  The bottom one isn't.  I think it's an early 80's version of the 59xx series magazine.

The top spring is from an early 59xx 15 rounder.  The bottom spring is the same too short spring as the first pic.

Unloading the magazine with the shortest spring had a couple of moments where the follower wasn't following.

It was time to replace them.

Worth Your Time

If you're like me and Libertarian adjacent, this article is well worth your time.

It's long.  It might set you off a bit.

Gut it out. 

It codifies why the hair on the back of my neck rises when either of the Pauls spoke.  It identifies the wrongness.

Read the whole thing. 

All Lubed Up

Today was lubrication day for Alice and The Beast.

Both also got a new rubber gasket on the drain plugs.

The Beast's was very flat and showing signs of seepage. 

Update:  Today is a sad day.  My grease gun has given up the ghost.  Only had it 30 years.  Sadly, there don't appear to be repair kits for them anymore thanks to Chinese manufacturing making a complete replacement cheaper. 

Temps

The other day I had transmission temps between 82°C (179.6°F) and 79°C (174.2°F).

Yesterday, Marv's 2011 PPV was running temps around 59°C (138.2°F).

Several sites say the ideal temp range is 175°F (79.4°C) to 200°F (93.3°C). 

Looking around I discovered that the 2011 doesn't have the "thermal bypass" block like the 2012+ does.  This is a thermostat that controls when fluid is allowed into the transmission cooler.

The day was hotter and it wasn't raining when I made my measurements.

40 Years Of FOPA

40 years, yesterday, the Firearms Owners Protection Act went into effect.

Overall, a net positive, but the ban on new machine guns is still a thorn.

A few states reversed some of the gains, but most of us got freer. 

Self Correcting?

Tradition, Florida, has banned firearms from all the common areas.

Because it's, technically, private property, they can do that.

They're not a city, they're a planned community and their little ban is just an HOA rule.  If they were an incorporated entity, they would be forbidden to make that rule. 

However, he local popo has, publicly, stated that they don't enforce HOA rules, just state law.  This leaves them without a ready means to stop people from carrying in the common areas.

So, who's going to bell the cat?

A person who is against guns is going to tell someone with a gun to stop?

I think my reply would be along the lines of, "make me," because other people with guns aren't coming to stop me.

Living in the Wild West™ of unincorporated county has its drawbacks sometimes, but at least we don't have an HOA.

HOA's are run by the people who don't have anything else to do but run the HOA.  It's their life.  They are also the most busybody Karens you can imagine.  The only counter is to dedicate your life to the HOA, get elected and do nothing but run the HOA...

Normal people don't like that or seek it, so the Karens always end up in charge.

But bullshit like this almost always leads to the normal people staging a coup and reversing the stupid rule that pissed them off and normality is restored until Karen returns to power. 

1488? REALLY?!?

Is the inbred group of voters at WorldCon culturally appropriating Nazis with this 1488 shit?

 I've noticed that I have not read a Hugo award winner in a very long time.

I was half paying attention during the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies era and noticed that the point of the Hugo stopped being excellence in story telling but excellence in checking the progressive, minority, disability, LGBTQ boxes by the author regardless of the quality of the work.

Especially when there were Sad Puppy supporters saying things like, "I despise the author personally, but they wrote a really good story and should get your nomination and vote." 

I stopped reading at least one webcomic over the Hugo controversies.

Something this video made me notice is how similar the language is of the WorldCon nominating committee and Steve Jackson Games discussing inclusion with the upcoming GURPS 4eR.

Which makes me want to ask Sean Punch, "Are you actively happy with the Hugo Award?"

I think the answer matters because when we filter based on the attributes of the author and not the quality of the work, we will not be getting the highest quality work. 

Interesting

This is nothing I had not read about before, but it's a nice concise summary.

 

Lock Block

Ever see a scene so clearly it's like you were there and be utterly unable to phrase it even crayon sketch level in text?

I am there with a scene from my Sabers story.

Some dates have changed from the original outline, the triggering event happens later and the expedition through the spook hole happens more immediately after.  I am thinking of it being just before the events that triggered the Wounded Knee massacre.

The scene in question is the opening of the story.

Indians are shuffling in a big circle doing a ghost dance and are being watched by the local agent, who is worried about the Army coming to force them to stop.

He is relieved that it appears to be breaking up on its own over the course of the night as he is hearing fewer and fewer voices, so he goes to bed.

In the morning, there are no Indians.  Just a worn circle in the dirt and snow.

Dead Beer Brands

With the death of Schlitz I am thinking of other brands that have disappeared.

I remember my dad being a fan of Olympia.

Schmidt (imported from St Paul!) was popular among the bikers when we lived in the Twin Cities.

What other beer brands do you remember? 

Slogging

Moving files from the NAS to the expanded storage on DerpyPuter is a matter of wait.

I am finding a couple of files that don't exist on the NAS, but do exist on Crispy.

I must have moved rather than copied at least one time.

Ooops! 

Mox Nix

Politicians want credit for passing the same bill that gets passed every year. 

What this does, and has done, for as long as I can remember is tie the increases to veteran's compensation to the same percentage increase as Social Security.

If they wanna impress me, pass a law that doubles the compensation and make it law that it increases thereafter at 1.5x the percentage of SS.

More Space

DerpyPuter has shed the 500gb drive that came with her and now has a 1tb drive that used to house Win7 on Crispy I.

Special thanks to JT for figuring out a configuration issue.

Happy dance to go from 321 to 821 free gigs of space. 

Slushbox Baby

Got the deep transmission pan mod done on The Beast.  My buddy, JT's place of work has a lift and he generously allowed me to use it.

New pan on the left.  Just a bit of a difference.

It really doesn't affect the ground clearance at all:

The fill procedure is idiotic because they don't give you a dipstick.  So you take a pump and fill it through the hole that should have, and is in fact designed to have, a dipstick in it.

Actually, you overfill it.

Then you get the trans up to temperature by alternating between reverse and drive 15 seconds at a time.  Then you crawl under the car and remove what looks like a drain plug.  It isn't.  Inside the pan is a tube that is level with the top of the correct fluid level and when it stops pouring out the hole with the engine running and trans at temperature, you're good.

I'm good!

It got to a peak of 82°C (179.6°F) on the way home and averaged 79°C (174.2°F).  I'm happy with these temps in 86°F (30°C) high humidity weather.  I can't find where I wrote down what I was getting for temps last year when I took the time to log them.

The old fluid was a bit on the brown side, but still letting light pass through it.  No burnt smells.  A "normal" amount of stuff stuck to the pan magnet for 168k miles.

I suspect that the fluid has been changed before.  It looked too good for 168k miles and a cop car. 

Fine By Me

If you want to make cultural appropriation illegal, then you are going to have to stop appropriating MY culture, Ms Osei-Tutu.

I see you're in Miami.  You will have to give up air conditioning.  Your use of it is appropriating the works of European-American culture.

Best get used to walking too.  Cars, trains, buses, trucks and planes are all Western Civilization inventions.

Don't use the sidewalks or streets.  Concrete and asphalt are European and American, respectively.

The University you teach at is a product of Western Civilization and allowing you to have a prominent place in such an institution is also a Western Civ idea.

How about voting?  You're not only a woman, but a minority.  Where else, but by appropriating American culture could you have done that?

How about being a person instead of property?

But, let's not even go there.

Cultures in contact adopt what they like from each other.

Always have, and they always will.

Things get changed and relabeled constantly.

It's not a sign of disrespect.  It's not bigoted.

It just is.

It's stupid to try and stop it, and fruitless. 

We're Out Of Beer

The tagline was, "When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer."

Pabst has decided to stop brewing Schlitz, bringing a 177 year old brand name to an end. 

This is kind of a bummer for me, it was one of my favorite American style beers, you just never saw it in the stores down here in Florida and I once found some in Iowa on a visit.

Amusingly, based on the tag line, I kept the last bottle from that Iowa visit, so I'd never run out of beer.  It's, at least, 8-years old.  I'm afraid to open the bottle now. 

Food Truck Idea

The truck or the tow vehicle has to be a hearse.

The food will consist entirely of upper midwest casseroles normally made when someone dies.

Not sure what to call it yet. 

Dallas? DALLAS?

The best bagel is made in Dallas, Texas by Starship Bagel.

In before Texans claim bagels were invented in Texas and never had cream cheese schmear. 

Rolling Resistance

Prior to getting the new tires, The Beast was getting 16.5 mpg in town, on average.

This week's mileage is running right about 19 mpg.

I can't help but think that's because tires that are actually ROUND resist rolling less than tires that are ovoid.

I don't think I'm driving any differently.

Sort of related:

I went on a quest to find some of the Grillo's and Pabst Pickle beer.

The web site said in stock half an hour from here, so I fired up The Beast and headed out.

It was a perfect drive.  Almost no traffic, hit all the lights green, Sirius was playing good music, perfect temperature to run with the windows down and cruise... 

Son Of A...

Ha!  I finally bought a gun without borrowing money from someone!

Didn't you use a credit card?

FUCK! 

Just For The Record

Whomever thought that, "As long as the grass grows and the water flows," meant forever was a fool.

Because in the land in question, the grass stops growing and the water stops flowing every winter.

Sometimes you can tell which side had legal representation by the contract's terms. 

180 Years

It has been 180 years since the USA last declared war on Mexico.

Not the last time we've fought, but it was the last time war were declared.

It took about two years for it resolve. 

Offended For Them Because They Won't Be Offended For Themselves

Something I accidentally hit while looking for other stuff about The Sioux.

American Indians volunteer for the military in fairly high numbers compared to their population.

They've done so since the beginning of the nation, as a matter of fact.

Strange they're fine with joining forces with the people who genocided them into non-existence...  Except for that whole thing that there are actually more Indians now than when Columbus landed.

The thing I keep hitting, over and over, is most Native Americans are of the philosophy of, "we fought, we lost, we got over it and moved on," and it's a small minority who keep stirring shit back up.

Turns out race baiting isn't just for African American grifters!

Grifting comes in all colors!

Plus you never hear about the people who just shrugged and joined American society and live productive, happy, lives.  Happy productive people don't make the news or garner any graft.  You need angry, unhappy, people for that.

Every race can produce some of those. 

Turns out that most American Indians aren't sitting around feeling either offended or sorry for themselves.

While they might be as proud of being Cheyenne as I am of being Scots-Italian, it's not their primary allegiance.

PS: My Blackfoot wife is not pinin' for The Rez; she's an example of a happy, productive, citizen. 

Checking The Math

Using this inflation calculator to check the picture found here. 

 The calculator says there was 483.1% inflation, that means a 1975 dollar is $5.83 in 2024.

$39,300 house should become $239,144.57.
$14,100 income should become $82,212.17.
$0.59 gas should become $3.44.
$1,500 college tuition should become $9,057.31
$3,800 new car should become $22,156.47
$150 rent should become $874.60.
$2.10 minimum wage should become $12.24
$0.28 loaf of bread should become $1.63
$1.55 movie ticket should become $9.04

Gee, you'd think the calculator might not be calibrated correctly.  At least for those specific things.

A 23" Zenith TV was $420 in 1975.  It should cost $2,599.78 today.  They actually cost $99.
A Colt Gov't model was $175.50.  It should cost $1,086.34 today, but actually comes in at $970.99. 

Inflation is not even across all things, but calculators try to make it so. 

The invisible hand does not care if something is relatively more or less valuable compared to 50 years ago.

I remember $70 Mosin-Nagant 91/30's around 2004.  Inflation says that should only be $123.41, they're selling in the mid $400's now. 

Feeding The Wildlife

My mom loved cardinals more than any other bird.

She set out feeders to attract them so she could watch them more often.

My area has a resident cardinal who has a sixth sense about cameras.

I am determined to get a good photo, but he's very camera shy.

My best pic so far.

So we set out a feeder.

Little did we know we'd set out a squirrel feeder.

My grampa, famously, hated tree-rats, and some of that has rubbed off on me in how I talk about them, but I don't really mind squirrels that mind their own business.

It was also kinda fun watching them do their gymnastics to get at the feeder.

But it wasn't for them, and they're keeping the birds away, so we moved it to a spot that forces them to break cover longer than they're comfortable doing.

Now we see them returning to the place where the feeder used to be and looking confused.  We're almost feeling sorry enough to get then their own feeder. 

That's Better

I have severely edited my post berating Mikey for being illiterate.

It was childish and not up to my internal standards.

The replacement language says the exact same thing in a more adult tone.

I will try to explain the comment policy again...

You get to comment at my sufferance.

If I will not suffer you to comment, you don't get to comment.

Ending your commenting privilege doesn't mean I am afraid of your argument, it's means I'm sick of hearing from you.

Nothing about me allowing comments give you a right to express yourself here.

For the most part, if you remember to sign your comment, it's getting posted.

It actually takes some work to get me to give up and start moderating someone.

Filtering out the sealions makes my life easier and happier. 

Oh, and once I've decided to ban you, you're done.  No matter how reasonable and polite you are when you've forgotten about what you did to get banned. 

I Hope He's Wrong But Fear He's Right

 

But he's dead on about investment places ruining a brand.

True Cowardice (Rephrased)

True cowards shit on other people's blog without having their own to be shit upon.

You got banned for not being able to follow the posting rules, Mikey.

I'm not afraid of you, I'm sick of you.

And I know you can't read.

If you'd been able to read, you could still comment.

You'd have known I'd be mocking you for being unable to read. 

Tschüß! 

PS: Because I control if you get to reply, I get the last word. 

Americans Really Will Use Anything To Avoid Using The Metric System

An incredible 64 million cubic metres of rock – the equivalent of 24 Great Pyramids - splashed into the water below.

Hey There

It just hit me that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is set in the same time frame as the English Civil War.

How about that?

Kinda cements the idea that adding some blackpowder guns doesn't wreck the fantasy world feel too much.

It also underscores how little you really need to do to make WFRP work under GURPS, if you're motivated and not easily distracted.

Which, I'm sorry to say, I am unmotivated and easily distracted.

In a nutshell, 95% is already done.

If you wanna preserve the distinction between mage and cleric, you need a couple of GURPS: Dungeon Fantasy supplements.

All that's left is a couple of the world specific races and I've been plugging away at them.

It's slow work because WFRP is not well grounded in reality and that means converting stats is an irritating slog. 

Even If

I was reading about how Senator Kelly spewed the contents of a classified briefing in public (are charges coming?) about how shallow our stockpile of precision munitions is getting.

Need I remind everyone that the dumb munitions still work fine if you're willing to have a larger circle of destruction surrounding the target?

One of the main drivers of precision munitions is to get stand off distance to keep our own people safe from the enemy's defenses.

If the enemy has no defenses to speak of a WW2 bomber could do the mission. 

English Civil War

Nothing in current events, mind, but I just watched the old classic Richard Harris movie, "Cromwell."

I am thinking that I like the look of the period for a Fantasy campaign.

Solid early TL4 so all the "shouldn't exist at TL3" armor and weapons problems won't exist.

I like it.

The 17th century is, potentially, more fun than the 10th or 11th where most people envision Fantasy taking place.

What A Difference

Got the agitator dogs replaced in the Kenmore today.

What a difference!

The Boy's bed linens actually smell clean now.

I rewashed a load of my own clothes and the water was very gray during agitation.

I think it's safe to say that the washer ain't been washin' very well for a while.  I have no idea how long the dogs were not ratcheting.

Also the new clutch lets the drum really spin, so the clothes are coming out drier before they go into the dryer.

Control The Words Control The Dialog

There's a list of words that you cannot say on YouTube if you want to keep your channel monetized.

There's also a list of words that let you wink wink, nudge nudge, understand what word they'd meant to use.

Like unalived instead of kill.

Yahtzee for Nazi.

Etc.

By going along with the ban, you are going along with whatever messaging the people in charge of the purse strings wish you to portray.

I don't know a way around it except to be funded outside of YouTube and using their platform despite it.

But that leads to your channel being buried and not seen by new eyes... 

Clutches And Dogs

The washing machine was making a screeching noise in spin cycle.

No es bueno.

We hired the local appliance place to come diagnose and repair it.

It was very close to the same price as getting a different washer, but we LIKE our old Kenmore direct drive.

They're serviceable.

Repairable.

Nigh immortal.

The part that needed replaced was the clutch for the drum.

The repair guy mentioned our agitator dogs were out too, cheap fix and simple to perform.  He even said, "I can see your tool box, you can do this!"

That made me feel good.

He might even have seen me changing the hatch struts on Alice too.