Archive for December 23rd, 2021

Bad ideas ‘R’ us.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

Setup for this: Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) may have received one or more of the Brownells Gunsmith Kinks books for Christmas. SWIM may have texted me a message about “books about kinky gunsmiths”.

Which got me thinking…we have romance novels in just about every other area, including cop romances and SWAT romances (that’s “Special Werewolf Alpha Team“).

Why not…gunsmith romances?

John Brown is one of the best gunsmiths in the country. He can make a 1911 shoot cloverleafs at 50 yards. But he knows nothing about women.
Carrie Green is a Beverly Hills liberal who knows nothing about guns. But increasing crime has her worried. So she decides to buy a gun.
When Carrie walks into John’s shop, bullets won’t be the only thing in the air…

Nicole Cross is looking for someone to complete her father’s last firearms design. But when she meets hunky gunsmith Alex Middlemarch, her gas piston won’t be the only thing moving.

Police armorer Michelle Block lost her cop husband in a line of duty accident. She’s been immersed in her work for the past five years. But can she find love, and a father for her daughter, with macho SWAT cop Patrick Westlake?

A cinematographer is killed on the set of a Western, and movie armorer Lauren Hughes is blamed for her death. Can former SEAL and special investigator Donald Thomas prove she was framed…and find the real killer before he takes Lauren out of the picture?

Okay, that last one may cut a little too close to current events…

Notes on money. And other things.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

Gift cards are, gloriously, privately issued bank notes backed by the full faith and credit of Chipotle.

I suspect that, politically, there’s a lot of stuff we’d disagree about. But Patrick McKenzie of Stripe has been writing a lot of smart stuff: both on his Twitter (for example, this thread on buying new glasses, or this one about tax filing) and his newsletter.

The quote above is from a recent issue of his newsletter about “The secondary market in gift cards“. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I didn’t know, or hadn’t thought about:

Consider the corner bodega, for example. If you go there for a routine purchase, ring up $16.29, and then discover that you only have $15, that might mean you have to return some items. But some bodega owners will ask you “OK, if you don’t have money, what do you have?” And if you have e.g. a $20 Fandango movie theatre gift card, the bodega owner might say “Good enough! See you later.”

It becomes known that you can text an unbanked relative money by walking into any retailer and buying a gift card in cash, and that they will be able to convert that back into cash in minutes without needing to e.g. show ID that they may not have.

Totally unrelated, but I don’t have another good place to stick this:

I am amused by this because: a while back (it may have been Christmas 2019) a group of Saturday Dining Conspirators got into a discussion of the Hallmark Christmas Movie Cinematic Universe (HCMCU). If any of us had drawing talent (and could get past the copyright issues) we’d start doing HCMCU graphic novels.

Speaking of bad ideas…

Obit watch: December 23, 2021.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

Nicholas Georgiade.

He was “Enrico Rossi” in 113 episodes of “The Untouchables”. Other credits include two episodes of “Get Smart”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The Rockford Files”, four episodes of “Quincy M.E.”, the Andy Sidaris film “Picasso Trigger”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Deadfall”, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. We have not seen this yet, as we are saving season 1 until after we’ve watched seasons 2 through 8. But this is kind of a legendary episode: Joe Mannix gets into a bloody fight with his boss at Intertect.)

Robbie Roper. He was a high school quarterback in Georgia and one of the top recruits in this year’s class.

He was only 18 years old, and passed away after a routine surgery.