Archive for the ‘Admin’ Category

Sorry, not sorry.

Thursday, November 7th, 2024

Part of me thinks I should apologize for not posting yesterday. The other part of me doesn’t.

I got about 3.5 hours of sleep Tuesday night, though I did nap some on Lawrence’s dog couch. So I was pretty worn out yesterday and still had to put in a full day at work. Plus, as I’ve said before, I am not a politics or geo-politics person. I have some things I could say about politics and gun politics, like what I’m hoping for out of the new boss (same as the old boss) but I’d just be stirring the metaphorical pot with a metaphorical stick.

There are plenty of other people who are smarter about politics than I am. I’d suggest Lawrence and Borepatch to start with. I’d also recommend the folks on Lawrence’s sidebar.

At least I can stop muting political ads, and continue muting Medicare supplement ads and lawyer ads.

In other news, I wanted to bookmark this article from American Handgunner, “Sixguns To The Rescue: The M1917 In World War One” about the M1917 revolvers. (Previously on WCD.)

From the obit front: Geoff Capes. I’d never heard of him, but he was hugely popular in the United Kingdom. He was a multiple time winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition, a six-time winner of the Highland Games, and won the “U.K. Truck-Pulling Championship” in 1986.

At 6-foot-6 and 365 pounds, Mr. Capes was a crushing Adonis whose daily diet consisted of seven pints of milk, two loaves of bread, a dozen eggs, two steaks, a jar of baked beans, two tins of sardines, a pound of butter and a leg of lamb.
His gargantuan caloric intake powered his extraordinary feats in strongman competitions: pulling 12-ton trucks uphill, flipping cars, tearing London phone books in half and tossing five-pound bricks as if they were Kleenex boxes. He could run 200 meters — nearly the length of two American football fields — in under 25 seconds.

His physical prowess made him a favorite of Queen Elizabeth II, who howled in laughter after her glove stuck to his sweaty, sticky hands when she congratulated him on winning the Braemar Games, another Scottish skills competition, in 1982. Prince Charles and Princess Diana stood nearby having a giggle.

He was also a world-class breeder of budgies.

He competed in budgerigar shows throughout Europe, winning a world championship in 1995. He was named president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008 and frequently judged competitions.
“There’s something about their color and beauty that fascinates me,” Mr. Capes told The Sunday People. “They bring out my gentler side.”

This is one that I’ve been a little behind on: Richard A. Cash, big damn hero.

One of the things that people don’t understand until they’ve read at least a little bit about medicine is: dehydration will kill you. And there are lots of diseases, such as cholera and dysentery, that trigger fatal dehydration.

Patients could go “from a grape to a raisin” within hours, Dr. Cash often said.

Dr. Cash and Dr. David Nalin were working in Pakistan in 1967, and together developed an experimental oral rehydration therapy. It worked exceptionally well in trials.

Their approach was put to the test in 1971, when Bangladesh’s war of independence drove tens of thousands of refugees into camps across the border in India. Cholera and other diseases soon spread rapidly.
An Indian pediatrician helping with the response, Dilip Mahalanabis, made oral rehydration a cornerstone of his strategy, with astounding success — proof for all the world that a simple solution could be brought to bear against one of the world’s greatest killers.

The World Health Organization estimates that oral hydration therapy has saved more than 50 million lives, a majority of them children. In 1978, the British medical journal The Lancet called their innovation “potentially the most important medical advance this century.”

Isn’t it ironic?

Monday, October 28th, 2024

No, it isn’t. It’s just stupid.

So Lawrence has already observed that blogging on his side is going to be light this week for reasons.

This would be a good chance to get people flocking over here like a bunch of temporarily orphaned baby ducks…

…except, as previously noted, I’m having cataract surgery on my right eye tomorrow, and I’m not sure how well I’m going to be able to see, much less blog, afterwards.

Plus, you know, they say you shouldn’t drive or operate heavy machinery after surgery. I’m not sure if blogging counts as operating heavy machinery, but, as a great philosopher once said:

See you all as and when I can.

Obit watch: July 30, 2024.

Tuesday, July 30th, 2024

15 years ago today, I posted my first obit, for the late legendary Reverend Ike.

Just sayin’. “15 years looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired.” I cannot tell a lie: that still makes me laugh my spleen out of my body. (As you know, Bob, the spleen is the most amusing body part, though not the most humerus.)

Francine Pascal, author. She did some screenwriting for soaps, but is best known as the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series and the spinoffs of that.

Ms. Pascal wrote the first 12 books in the series, then worked with a team of writers to keep a steady, rapid publication pace, often a book a month. She would draft a detailed outline, then hand it to a writer to flesh out while relying on what Ms. Pascal called her “bible” — a compendium of descriptions of the personalities, settings and dense web of relationships that defined life in Sweet Valley.

Edna O’Brien, author.

Roland Dumas, French foreign minister under François Mitterrand. This is the most French obit I’ve read recently.

A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the most high-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.

Mr. Mitterrand said of him, “I have two lawyers: Badinter for the law,” referring to Robert Badinter, the upright jurist who abolished the death penalty in France, “and Dumas for everything that’s twisted.”

But like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many aspects of European integration. He failed to foresee the rapid collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, believed in the fixed European relationships and borders established after World War II and, for much of his life, harbored hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he often said was the pivotal event of his life: the firing-squad shooting of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself in the French underground.

He served as foreign minister until 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political career.
In the meantime he had become involved with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil company, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had hired as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of nearly $9 million, including a luxurious Left Bank apartment. She used the money to give Mr. Dumas valuable ancient artifacts, expensive meals and the custom Berluti shoes, among other things.
Mr. Dumas later suggested that he was unclear about the source of all this spending. That argument was eventually adopted by an appeals court, which threw out his six-month prison sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics across the political spectrum, who saw France’s protective old-boy network in action.

Finally, William L. Calley Jr.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called it a successful search-and-destroy mission. It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.

On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai. He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct. But charges against the generals were dropped, as were those against 10 other officers and seven enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence. Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.
Lieutenant Calley’s trial, in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970. He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians. Many soldiers refused to testify. But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.
The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely; the Army did not count the bodies. The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.
Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted that he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.” The captain denied saying that, insisting that he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.
In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished. Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.

Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years, saying that Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.
In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement, which had ended in 1974.

WP (archived).

Well. That’s interesting. At least to me.

Sunday, July 28th, 2024

I have been blogging for 15 years as of today.

Travel day.

Tuesday, June 11th, 2024

Plug plug pluggity plug.

Saturday, June 1st, 2024

I am ashamed to admit it, but I get jealous of other bloggers sometimes. They got promo stuff from companies, or they get people reaching out to them directly making them offers, or just get more attention. What do I get?

But I mostly do this because I want to, not for glory or recognition or free stuff.

Yesterday, I noticed that one of the bloggers I read regularly was contacted by a certain company looking for a plug for their review. I admit, I did feel a certain twinge of jealousy, but not too much: this is a blogger I owe a favor to, so I wasn’t too upset.

Then I got an email from the same people, asking for a plug for the same review. And they were nice about it, so why not?

Widener’s has posted a review of the IWI Camel. I feel like there’s at least one person in my audience who will be interested in this, as the Camel is an ambidextrous battle rifle in the same vein as the SCAR, brought to you from the people responsible for the Uzi and Galil.

There are so few rifles on the market today that are fully ambidextrous. In the last decade, I’ve met more left-handed shooters than I can count. I feel for so many of them who have to manipulate the gun uncomfortably. The IWI Carmel rifle has an ambidextrous safety, magazine release, bolt catch, and non-reciprocating charging handle.

It uses AR mags, and the author says it shoots sub-MOA groups even with a suppressor.

The Carmel comes at a higher price point with all these amazing features. The Carmel’s MSRP is $1,799, which might seem high, but it’s on par with a customized AR-15 (minus the AR having ambi controls). To put the price in perspective, a quality AR-15 will cost anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500. It likely won’t have an ambidextrous safety, magazine release, or bolt catch. You can purchase an aftermarket ambidextrous safety and install it, but that can run another $50 and more if you need a gunsmith to install it.
An adjustable stock such as the LUTH-AR MBA-3 Carbine Buttstock costs north of $200 but allows you to set an AR-15 up to you. You can also change your AR-15’s gas by installing an adjustable gas block. However, this adds to the cost and potentially requires a gunsmith to install it.

As someone who has heard a lot about adjustable gas blocks recently (NOT that I’m BITTER or ANYTHING: no, seriously, I love my friends), this is good to know. And $1,800 compares favorably with the SCAR.

My only complaint with this review is that I can’t find a total round count in it. I’d like to know how many rounds they fired in testing.

If the Camel sounds like your cup of tea, check out the review at Widener’s. And thanks for thinking of me, guys.

On the road again…

Thursday, May 16th, 2024

Heading to Dallas for the NRA Annual Meeting.

Reportage to come once we get checked in and etc.

I’m all right, don’t nobody worry about me…

Tuesday, April 30th, 2024

…just really nothing to write about.

I want to do some more gun and gun book blogging, but I’m going to be busy through Wednesday and just won’t have time.

Administrative note.

Thursday, April 18th, 2024

This coming weekend is my birthday. I plan to be fairly busy for much of it: I’m taking Friday and Monday off work, and expect to be running around a lot (including some gun shopping) over the weekend. I also have some errands I want to run.

All of this is to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox posting is going to be catch as catch can probably through Tuesday of next week.

Ketchup.

Thursday, March 7th, 2024

Apologies for the silence the past two days. I have been busy assisting the police with their inquiries.

(more…)

Obit watch: January 2, 2024.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024

It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing obit catch-up here. Administratively, I plan to get TMQ Watch up at some point during the day.

Tom Wilkinson. THR. IMDB.

This has been pretty well covered, but I did want to make an observation. When I was at St. Ed’s, for my “Film and Literature” class, we had to watch “In the Bedroom” and read Andre Dubus’s “Killings”. I thought “Bedroom” was a pretty terrific movie: both Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek give career peak performances. If you have not seen it, I commend it to your attention.

(The Dubus story is good, too.)

Shecky Greene, comedian. THR. IMDB.

“I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”

Although never known as the most decorous of comedians, Mr. Greene made news in the comedy world in 2014 when he stormed out of a Friars Club event in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after his fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried did material that Mr. Greene, who had been scheduled to speak, found offensive.
“He got dirtier and dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without providing details, “so I got up and I said, ‘That’s it.’”

Cale Yarborough, one of the NASCAR greats.

Travel day.

Wednesday, November 8th, 2023

Blogging will be as time permits for about the next week.