Archive for July 8th, 2012

Your loser update for July 8, 2012.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

I haven’t been following the baseball losers this year: I plan to do a post at the All-Star break about who has the worst records.

But I did want to point out this article from the HouChron:

Along with the worst record in baseball at 32-52, the Astros are alone in last place in the National League Central for the first time this season. The nine-game skid matches the longest for the Astros since Sept. 13-22, 2009, and is two shy of the club record.

(The Astros lost today, to make their record 33-53, still the worst record in baseball. Second worst is a tie between the Colorado Rockies…and the Cubs, both at 33-52.)

Edited to add: Huh. Well. Whaddya know? I guess we’re at the All-Star break after tonight’s games finish. I had no idea…

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Kindle notes.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Thursday and Friday were kind of slow days at work. For various reasons (including a series of discussions with several co-workers) I ended up downloading the Shooter app, which does run on the Kindle Fire. (I find that slightly surprising, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.)

Since the Kindle Fire lacks GPS and Bluetooth, you do miss out on a few features, such as interfacing with the Kestrel and GPS-based weather station input. On the other hand, I think the interface on a Kindle Fire may be slightly more pleasant; since you can apparently do cloud-based syncing, what I suspect will work out well is to do data entry on the Kindle Fire, sync with Shooter on your smart phone, and use the phone at the range.

This, in turn, led to me consider .22 LR ballistics. In turn, my consideration of same led me to start poking around on Amazon for some things I’d seen previously, such as The Complete Book of the .22: A Guide to the World’s Most Popular Guns (available used at a good price) and Rifleman’s Guide To Rimfire Ammunition (a book I want, but the Amazon prices aren’t that good; I’d rather support my local gunshop).

One of the books I found while poking around is a quaint and curious volume called The Art of Rimfire Accuracy by a gentleman named Bill Calfee. From what I can tell, Mr. Calfee has forgotten more about .22 accuracy than most people ever knew; he’s somewhat famous in the community as a .22 specialist gunsmith. (One thing that particularly amuses me is that Mr. Calfee builds custom .22 benchrest guns based on the XP-100 action; when I was six years old, I thought the XP-100 was the coolest gun in the world. I still want one chambered in .221 Fireball, but a Calfee .22 conversion sounds like it would be a neat thing to own as well.)

My understanding is that the book is mostly a collection of Mr. Calfee’s writings for Precision Shooting magazine: the book is 700+ pages long.

Mr. Calfee’s book is published by Authorhouse, a POD publisher and one that seems popular in the gun community. (Authorhouse also publishes The Rifleman’s Rifle: Winchester’s Model 70, 1936-1963, a book I want badly but can’t justify the $90 price tag for.)

Anyway, here’s my point: Mr. Calfee’s book in paperback is $42.63 with Prime shipping. Interestingly, it is also available on the Kindle…

…and the Kindle edition is $9.99. I’ve only made through the first three chapters so far, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s any photographic or other detail lost on the Kindle Fire. Welcome to the future of publishing. Now if we could only get more gun books on the Kindle, like History of Smith & Wesson or The Rifleman’s Rifle or Hatcher’s Notebook or even Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting, things would be hopping…

(I can even see a version of the Litz book that runs as an application, and allows you not only to read the text, but also to do ballistic calculations based on Litz’s equations interactively within the book itself, instead of using the supplied CD. Hey, a fellow can dream, can’t he?)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Kindleing | 1 Comment »

Horse tacos.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Today’s Statesman has a long backgrounder about Amado Pardo and Jovita’s. Jovita’s, you may recall, is the South Austin restaurant alleged to be at the center of a heroin distribution ring, and Pardo is one of the key figures in the indictment.

There’s some stuff in the article I was previously unaware of. Specifically:

  • Pardo’s political activism, not just for Democratic candidates, but specifically for Hispanic Democrats. (The Glen Maxey story, in particular, is interesting.)
  • Pardo was convicted of murder. Twice. The first murder was in 1971: he was sentenced to 12 years, and paroled in 1975 “after serving about four years” according to the Statesman. The second time was in 1983: he was sentenced to eight years, but paroled after four. He was also convicted of illegally possessing a firearm in 1978, and was released from prison on that charge in 1981. So he got almost as much time on the gun charge as he did on each of the two murders.
  • “….some who knew Pardo best said he appeared to have overcome his criminal past to become a community leader, a successful businessman and a strong patriarch to his large family.”
  • “Though the indictment accuses Pardo and the others of dealing heroin since May 2011, an FBI agent testified during a co-defendant’s detention hearing that he believes Pardo has been dealing the drug for more than 25 years — a period that predates Jovita’s.”

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law | 1 Comment »