Sean Sorrentino is doing a third run of Project Gunwalker t-shirts.
This is great news. As a proud owner of one of Sean’s shirts, I’m considering ordering two or three more. Remember, these shirts make great presents for any major holiday: Christmas, Easter, Hanukkah, Ashura, even Armistice Day (though from what Sean says, the shirts may ship a little late for that one).
Edited to add: Now in pink!
I’m a little busy, but I’m taking a break from Chimel v. California to throw some linky-love Lawrence’s way for his “Fast and Furious” posts. Especially this most recent one about Holder, which can best be summarized as:
One of WCD’s favorite quotes is from the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:
The notion that authority is entitled to reverence per se is the most subvervise of all notions in a free society. “There is not worse heresy,” Lord Acton wrote, “than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Authority is entitled only to the respect it earns, and not a whit more.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ:
Actually, this is just an excuse to link this historical piece from the LAT, featuring Hugh O’Brian (who played Wyatt Earp in the ABC TV series “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp”) and Al Jennings, “an admitted bank robber, train robber and cattle thief of the 1880s”.
What I like best about this piece is the huge photo at the top of Jennings and O’Brian shooting Colts, and the equally large photo at the bottom of Jennings, O’Brian, and two police officers.
Chain restaurants like Sonic (in one location) and Burger King (at least in their Whopper Bars) have started offering beer and wine. Unfortunately, this has turned into a great pain for little benefit:
(Our first thought is a big mouth-filling Cabernet. Other suggestions welcome in comments.)
The LAT asks the same musical question the FAA is asking: how do you keep planes from going into the crowd at Reno?
And the FBI apparently paid a deputy in the LA County Jail $1,500 to smuggle a cellphone in to an informant. You’re telling me a government agency would do something illegal? Why, the next thing I know, you’ll be telling me that government agents used form letters from BATFE to buy guns with taxpayer money, and then provided those guns directly to the drug cartels!
(Edited to add: Fox News. Hattip: Snowflakes in Hell.)
Last night in my “20th Century: Triumph and Tragedy” class, we were talking about World War I and the capping of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the hapless Gavrilo Princip (who used a FN Model 1910 chambered in .32 ACP: yes, another John Moses Browning design).
One thing that I really wasn’t totally conscious of was that Princip was not acting alone; I think I read somewhere previously that someone had thrown a grenade at the archduke’s car, but missed, and filed that away deep in my subconscious.
Anyway, that someone was Nedeljko Čabrinović, who threw the grenade, missed the archduke’s car, hit the third car in the procession, and then…
The blackly comic aspect of this is: the cyanide that Čabrinović, Princip, and the rest of the conspirators were carrying had expired, and all the pills did was make them vomit.
The river Čabrinović jumped into? It was 4 inches deep.
And, of course, the only reason Princip was able to shoot Ferdinand in the first place was that the Archduke’s driver turned down the wrong street, directly in front of Princip, and then stalled the car while trying to turn around. If Ferdinand had been in a Mercedes, would World War I have been averted? Or would it have been some other “damn thing in the Balkans“?
You killed my brother. Prepare to receive a strongly worded diplomatic message.
(Come on, do you really need a hattip?)
(Sipsey Street Irregulars has been on Gunwalker like a fat man on an all-you-can-eat buffet, but I want to be sure to keep this in front of you, my regular readers. Also my irregular readers; as I often tell you, I find Dr. Pepper and Cherry Coke Zero tend to…get things moving, for those of you in that group.)
(Apologies to Weer’d for stepping into his territory.)
The BATFE assured Mr. Howard they were going to follow the guns into the hands of Mexican cartels. We all know that didn’t happen.
So why am I linking this?
I generally try to avoid linking to stuff that’s been posted on other blogs more widely read than mine. After all, if someone like Tam’s already written about it, what more can I add?
My excuse in this case is that Tam only covered one very small part of the website in question, and there’s a lot more there that I think is fascinating.
Faded Glory: Dusty Roads of an FBI Era is devoted to the FBI agents of the early 1930s. Quoting:
In addition to Delf Bryce’s employment application, which Tam linked, there’s a lot of other great stuff here. For example:
And all of that is just a small part of what’s on the Faded Glory website. There’s weeks worth of browsing material there. Thanks to Tam for the heads-up.
We apologize for the delay in posting this week’s TMQ Watch. We’re taking a class on alternating Tuesday nights; last night was the first meeting, and it appears this class is going to eat up a significant chunk of time. Ah, well, onward and upward.
After the jump, haiku. Not our haiku, of course (we have already made our feelings on that subject known) but TMQ’s annual predictions haiku.