Archive for September 8th, 2022

Random gun-related crankery.

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

I like watches.

But not in the way other people do. I’m not so much into the expensive high-end mechanical watches (I think they’re cool, but not $180,000 cool) but weird digital watches. I’ve actually worn two Casio Triple Sensors and am on my second moon phase and tide watch.

Yes, I do find it increasingly hard to justify watches when my phone pretty much does every possible function I could want. But I digress. Trust me, I’m going somewhere.

Did you know Garmin makes a watch with Applied Ballistics software built-in? Yeah, really. It’s $1,600.

“So?”

The Apple Watch Ultra is $800. Apple claims that they already have a full-blown recreational dive computer on it. I’m wondering: what will the Garmin watch do that the Apple Ultra won’t? Other than battery life: the Garmin has a solar cell which boosts battery life before recharging.

How long do you think it’s going to be before we start seeing advanced ballistic apps that run well on the Ultra? My guess is not too long. You’ll probably need a smartphone to set up and load cartridge profiles and such, but if I’m reading Garmin’s marketing right the same thing applies.

I’ve said before: I like Apple stuff in my personal life because it just works. My work computer is a Mac (full-time employees have a choice between Mac and PC), but the machines I work on are UNIX boxes with a thick layer of Python slathered all over them. I’ve worked professionally with PCs and Windows servers before, and would do it again for money. When it comes to the platform wars, I am a conscientious objector.

I’m just thinking: I haven’t bought an Apple Watch before now because the value proposition hasn’t quite been there for me. But it is getting closer to being there, especially looking at the new Ultra.

(If I don’t buy one before that time: continuous blood glucose monitoring is the one thing that absolutely would push me over the edge. Unfortunately, it feels like that’s one of those things that’s been five years away for the past 20 years.)

Posted in Apple, Geek, Guns | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 8, 2022.

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

I started preparing the obit watch this morning, before things happened. Mike the Musicologist sent this over:

I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s passing…on November 22, 1963.

Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor.

Shaw was CNN’s first chief anchor and was with the network when it launched on June 1, 1980. He retired from CNN after more than 20 years on February 28, 2001.
During his storied career, Shaw reported on some of the biggest stories of that time — including the student revolt in Tiananmen Square in May 1989, the First Gulf war live from Baghdad in 1991, and the 2000 presidential election.

NYT.

Anne Garrels, NPR correspondent.

As much as Anne Garrels loved Russia, she is probably best known for her reporting during the 2003 Iraq war. She was one of a handful of foreign reporters who remained in Bagdhad as the war began. As she told Susan Stamberg, she used a satellite phone for her reports and went to great lengths to conceal it from Iraqi authorities.
“And then I decided it would be very smart if I broadcast naked, so if that, god forbid, the secret police were coming through the rooms, that would give me maybe five minutes to answer the phone, pretend I’d been asleep and sort of go ‘I don’t have any clothes on!’ And maybe it would maybe give me five seconds to hide the phone,” she said.

NYT:

Her most acclaimed reporting came during the 2003 Iraq war. More than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the run-up to the war. But once the United States began the all-out bombing campaign known as “shock and awe,” she was one of 16 American correspondents not embedded with U.S. troops who stayed — and for a time was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad…
Once she was home, other reporters interviewed her about her ordeal. She told of subsisting on Kit Kat chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights, bathing by gathering water in huge trash cans, and powering her equipment by attaching jumper cables to a car battery, which she lugged up to her hotel room every night.

She was 71. Lung cancer got her.

Don Gehrmann. Hadn’t heard of him before, but he had an interesting story. He was a runner. In the “1950 Wanamaker Mile”, he ran the race in four minutes and 9.3 seconds.

It took him 314 days to win the race.

In the 1950 Wanamaker Mile, on Jan. 28, Gehrmann seemed to catch Fred Wilt at the tape, or did he? Both first-place judges said Wilt had won. Both second-place judges said Wilt had finished second. The finish-line picture from the phototimer was inadvertently blocked by a judge. And so it was left to the chief judge, Asa Bushnell, who was at the finish line, to make the call. He declared Gehrmann the winner, with a time of 4 minutes, 9.3. seconds.
But that did not settle the matter. Wilt, an F.B.I. agent when not competing and a future inductee of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame, protested, and 13 days later the Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union’s registration committee, reversing Bushnell, declared him the winner.
Then Gehrmann protested that decision, and the matter carried over almost a year later to the A.A.U.’s national convention in Washington. By a vote of 314 to 108 — 314 days after the race — that ruling body’s board of governors upheld the chief judge’s decision and declared Gehrmann, forevermore, the victor.
Some were skeptical. As Howard Schmertz, the Millrose Games’ assistant meet director in 1950, told The New York Times in 2011, “The final decision was made by maybe a dozen people who saw the race and a few hundred who didn’t.”

…

In a 1976 interview with United Press International, Gehrmann described how the sport, by then having gone professional, had changed. He recalled that for his workouts he had usually run just 2 ¼ miles, that his pre-meet meal had usually consisted of a hamburger, French fries and soda pop, and that the cinder tracks he had run on stole a lot of energy.

Posted in Media, Obits, Radio, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

God Save the Queen.

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

Queen Elizabeth II dead at 96. BBC.

Edited to add: Formal NYT obit. Archive version. Borepatch.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Personal indulgence (possibly noteworthy for others).

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

I’ve been listening to the Hornady Podcast.

They cover a wide variety of topics. They’ve talked about various hunting opportunities (including Africa). They do interviews with prominent individuals in the industry like Jerry Miculek. (And, on a side note, I really enjoyed their interview with Kristy Titus. Not in the “oooh, a girl in the gun industry”, or the “I want to marry this woman” sense, but: here’s a person who seems to have their head screwed on straight, knows what they know and what they don’t know, and is actively working to fill in the gaps on what they don’t know. I find that admirable. I hadn’t heard of Ms. Titus before this: now I’m a fan.)

And they’ve done several podcasts on interior (what happens to the bullet inside the gun) and exterior (what happens to the bullet in flight) ballistics. Those podcasts are really deep dives into the way things work. If you’re a gun person with a techy bent at all, I encourage you to listen.

Episode 35 is a listener Q&A session. If you listen to the first few minutes of it, you might hear a name you recognize. You can listen to the whole thing if you’d like (I’d encourage that) but the “relevant” (for some value of “relevant”) part comes early.

A couple of quick points:

  • Remember this post? Yeah, this is what I was talking about. Preston from Hornady had told me they were doing a Q&A at some point, and asked if he could use my questions on the show. Of course I said yes.
  • There’s a bit more to the questions I asked than what made it on to the show. What’s on the show is a very good summary of one of the questions I asked. Preston and I had a long conversation about both of my questions. I’m not kidding: Preston actually called me on the phone and we talked through this stuff. I can’t tell you how impressed I am with their support for some random murder hobo. (I don’t think anybody at Hornady even knows I blog.)
  • They didn’t really go into my second question on this podcast, but that’s okay. They did kind of briefly touch on it, and, from what they said, they plan a much deeper dive into that question in some future podcast. Which is awesome.
  • Never read the YouTube comments. Seriously. I know I’m taking this personal-like, but Preston and the rest of the gang was so nice to me, I can’t imagine how people could treat them like crap in the YouTube comments. I guess a lot of people have trouble remembering there are real people behind the screen.

And, actually, some other things are coming together. My project for the Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association came to fruition and is active now. I’ve even received some nice feedback. (You can’t access it unless you’re a member. Which you should be if you’re interested in Smith and Wessons.)

The government finally mailed my tax refund. I haven’t gotten official word yet, but I’ve gotten “unofficial” word on my corporate bonus and pay for the next two quarters (at least) and been reassured there won’t be any layoffs on my team.

And I’ve been talking to a fellow collector, and there’s some more hoplobibilophilia coming soon-ish.

In the meantime, as we often say, look for the smiling face of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on every bottle!

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#97 in a series)

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

Jeff German was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review Journal. He specialized in investigative reporting, and was apparently quite well regarded by his peers.

I say “was” because Mr. German was stabbed to death on Friday. Mike the Musicologist sent me a tweet from some Twitter rando claiming that Mr. German’s latest investigative reporting was on the Oathkeepers.

Robert Telles is the “public administrator” for Clark County. According to the Clark County webpage:

Rob’s primary focus is to ensure that the CCPA serves the community as best as possible. Under the current administration, safeguarding and customer service performance have been increased significantly according to the statistical data provided on the CCPA website. Further, the CCPA now objects to many probate court matters where families are at risk.

It isn’t exactly clear to me what the “public administrator” does, but it is an elected position. Mr. Telles (who is a Democrat) lost the primary election for the position in June. He apparently blamed his loss on Mr. German, who had done a series of investigative pieces on Mr. Telles’s management of the office:

Reporting from May included allegations from former employees that Telles created a hostile work environment and had an “inappropriate relationship” with a staffer. There were also accusations of bullying and favoritism.

Yesterday, the police searched Mr. Telles’s home. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Telles was arrested and charged with “suspicion of murder”.

Not really sure what I can say here. Seems tragic that a reporter got stabbed for doing his job, especially when it was apparently a politician who’d already lost his own job. What did he think he was going to get out of killing a reporter? His old job back? Or was he just a bully who thought he could get away with killing someone who crossed him?

Considered innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda, but it’ll be interesting to see this one play out.

Edited to add: More from Reason. I haven’t quoted from the Review-Journal at all because that outlet is totally unreadable without a subscription, even in incognito mode.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed