Read This

Tamara went a different way with Independence Day. I wrote about the people who kicked it off 233 years ago; she wrote about us, their descendants. I'm glad they didn't live to read hers.

. . . . .Today's the day we remember the name of the brave patriot who rushed the keys for the trigger locks on the muskets to Lexington Green, just before the bad guys got there! The day we celebrate the airbags and five mile-per-hour bumpers on the Connestoga wagons that made the westward journey so safe! The smoking regulations at Belleau Wood and the non-toxic, lead-free ammunition at Bastogne! The SPF-30 warpaint worn by the native Americans as they scalped Custer . . . . . .

That's only a taste. You have to read the whole thing.

Thank You, Ladies and Gentlemen

Thank you.

Thank you for having the courage to see what had to be done and do it, even though so many thought that separating from the most powerful empire on earth was mad at best and evil at worst. Thank you for being willing to rebel against your King and your Parliament when they put you to the test. Thank you for giving up fortunes, futures, plans, families, treasure and peace and happiness and life itself.

I can't give any of it back to you, but after 233 years, I remember you. Thank you.

July 4, 2009

My Flower Beds

Let me show you them.
I probably should have taken a "before" picture . . . but I didn't, so I post what I post. Before, the front yard was completely empty. Then, one day, I came home and found my grandpa and my dad putting this trellis in at the side of the house, right where we had to dogleg to miss it every time we backed out of the drive. It was not ideal, but I didn't want to refuse my grandfather's gift; he made the thing himself. Thought the house needed something. Anyway, I've since moved it to the front, where it works a lot better, but makes mowing more complicated. Today, I put in two new flower beds in the corners of the walk, and yes, I did kill more grass than necessary on the left there. Good of you to notice. It's hard to see clearly in my cruddy photo, but they're edged with bricks recovered from the chimney we removed from our dining room, arranged along an arc of a circle with an eight-foot radius. This way, anybody should be able to mow right up to the bricks without needing to stop--just follow the curve. Now that the beds are in, I'll soon add Clematis flowering vines to climb the trellis, but for now, at least the beds are mulched and have "Big Bird" Hemerocallis lilies planted on each side. They don't look like much now, but soon enough they should look like this:

(Click photo to see where it came from)

Of course, that's only one small project, and tomorrow's is already lined up:

My little "shop" in the backyard. It's hard to tell here, but I painted it last year and painted the trim dark green, which made it look a lot better. Still, it's just kind of plonked down in the corner of the yard, and it's a pain to keep the weeds down.





You can also see that there's not much in front other than dirt, a few stones haphazardly piled to make a step, and a couple of big, cavernous holes where everything from rabbits to cats to my idiot dogs have burrowed under the shop. This building will be getting a small wooden porch and steps to make the front cleaner and safer to use.

Here you can see what lurks off to the side . . . . all space I want to reclaim for a useful purpose. You can also see the white spray-paint line that marks where the flower bed will be edged. The corners are arcs from 6-foot-radius circles, so again, mowing around this area should be quick and easy with almost no trimming. Eventually, most of this corner of the yard will be a small vegetable garden, since it's one of the few spots I have that get sun almost all day.

All that will have to wait, however. Dad has the day off tomorrow, so first . . . . we fish!

Reasoned Discourse on the Examiner

Reasoned Discourse on the Examiner

A few days ago I posted a link to a rambling collection of words on the Examiner site.

This idiot, name of Clifford Bryan, thinks that crime in NOLA is a conspiracy by 'whitey' against blacks. Clifford Bryan is also a firm believer in Reasoned Discourse. After denying that he (Clifford Bryan) plagiarized Brady Campaign lawyer Dennis Henigan, he (Clifford Bryan) then deleted the majority of my posts including the one showing the comparison:

Clifford Bryan's post:

In defense over 80% of gun owners support extending Brady Act background checks to private sales at gun shows. Even most self-identified members of the National Rifle Association support handgun registration and mandatory safety training before purchasing a firearm.

Written 4 days after this:

But it is also true that over 80% of gun owners support extending Brady Act background checks to private sales at gun shows. Even most self-identified members of the National Rifle Association support handgun registration and mandatory safety training before purchasing a firearm.

Yet he (Clifford Bryan) states:

@Third Yes I deny it and I am upset you would call me out like that.I leave links to any material I use.

So he's upset he got caught. Wonder how much else of his 'writing' is original? This guy is the epitome of gun control activism. We need more like him.

Progress in Wisconsin?

Gene German, Wisconsin Gun Rights Examiner,
explains why plans to push for a ban on open carry in
Wisconsin may blow up in anti-gun faces:

One month ago, Attorney General J B Van Hollen said in a memo to law enforcement publicly what has been the law in Wisconsin since forever. Open carry is lawful and is not by itself, disorderly conduct.

His memo has (predictably) prompted talk at the Capitol of a bill to ban open carry. This is good. The people of Wisconsin passed an amendment in 1998 to protect their rights to bear arms for self defense and other lawful purposes. They have been prohibited from carrying a gun concealed for 137 years but since open carry is allowed, the states law and constitution worked well together. If open carry becomes prohibited, it will be impossible for anyone to exercise their constitutionally protected right and the Wisconsin Supreme Court will get to decide which (or perhaps both) law to overturn. This outcome will give some anti-gun democrats serious heartburn because they know your good judgement can’t be trusted (you did elect them after all) but it is not likely to stop them from trying to deny you your rights anyway. You can fix this problem at the polls.

Back in the bad old days when most courts in the U.S. took the 2nd Amendment at face value, it was widely held that governments could regulate either the open carrying of weapons, or the concealed carrying of weapons, as long as one or the other was legal. It was not considered important which style of bearing arms was allowed as long as people could bear arms legally, and it often came down to invalidating whichever statute came along second (the first statute, by this reasoning, only regulated the manner of carry by prohibiting one or the other . . . .but the second statute, no matter which style of carry it addressed, represented a de facto ban on carrying weapons altogether and was thus forbidden. ) Whether this thinking will make a comeback in the coming years remains to be seen, since we don't actually have a ruling on how important the "and bear" part of the right to keep and bear arms is . . . . but I like German's optimism.

Knives Infinity

Awhile back, I got an offer from the owner of a fairly new online source for knives and accessories. All I had to do was to put a small link to his site on my front page, and he'd give me a 50% discount on any item in the store. That's a pretty good deal, considering that my ads are worth so little that I don't run any (you didn't think I kept the site ad free to be nice to you people, did you?) He gets to pay a one-time "fee" in the form of a discount for an advertisement that, although it won't be seen by thousands of people per day, will stay up for a long time and probably be seen mostly by people who are likely to order a knife over the internet. If he spreads that out over enough blogs, he can get seen by a lot of people. And let's face it, I can't buy just one knife from anyone, so he was likely to make his money back from my business alone if it worked out. You might have seen the link--the two words "Hunting Knives"--on other blogs.

But I can't do anything the easy way, so I decided that I would place a small order first and see what I thought of the service. Since the twins' birthday was coming up at the time, I went ahead and ordered two identical Opinel camp knives imported by Coghlan's.Those knives arrived promptly (that was months ago) in a padded envelope. The ordering system was easy to use and everything worked smoothly, which is what I really look for in a retailer. So if you look to the linkbar on the left, you'll see the Knives Infinity link from now on.

As for the knives themselves, I figure most of my readers are familiar with the Opinel design. McCann Industries has developed a swoopy "Foldair" folding knife with a gas cylinder taking the place of the spring in an axis/bearing-style lock, which they're advertising as the only locking folder on the market with no springs. That's not quite correct, actually, because the Opinel design, now over a century old, also eliminates the need for springs. The Opinel uses a rounded, lightweight one-piece wooden grip like any number of clasp knives or friction folders to grip a 1080-series carbon steel blade. It's tight enough to use the knife as a friction folder and never engage the lock if you don't mind a slipjoint. It's also tight enough to keep the blade securely closed with no springs; there's a traditional "nail nick" so you can open the thing with two hands (A folder to be opened with two hands? What will they think of next?) but old hands know that if you tap the end of the knife against something hard, like your head, the blade will spring out about an inch and can then be opened one-handed with the pinch method, the way people used to flip open Buck 110s. These knives are airweights; they feel light enough that one is tempted to see if they'll float, but I know for a fact that they will not. Don't ask me how I know.
I just know, OK?

The real point of interest on these knives, though, is the locking system, which is simple, yet very strong. The handle is round at the hinge point, and a steel collar is fitted around the wood so that it can turn. A slot is cut into the collar so that it looks a little like a c-clamp with a very narrow opening--just enough for the blade to pass through as it opens or closes. Once the blade has been opened, the user simply turns the steel ring so that the opening is no longer aligned with the blade. The angled edge of the ring engages the ricasso of the blade snugly, and the blade is solidly locked. Since the engaging surface is angled, like the engaging surface on properly-made liner lock folders, wear doesn't change the engagement. It's always solid (at least, I never managed to wear one enough to make it loose.) The lock is positive, tight, and very strong--slippage is essentially impossible, so you'd have to crumple or bend either the blade or the wide steel ring to get the lock to fail.

For awhile, Cold Steel offered their take on the Opinel, which predictably enough consisted of the same design but scaled up to "huge" and made with black glass-filled nylon instead of wood. It left me cold, especially since you can buy a brand-new Opinel No. 12 with the traditional wood made in France rather than in Taiwan or wherever Cold Steel was making them, and it will have a 12 cm/4.75 inch blade. Not huge enough? "Le Geant" is listed as having a 22-cm blade; that's over eight-and-a-half inches of blade as opposed to the Twistmaster's relatively puny five inches of "Carbon V," and the whole thing would be a little over 17 inches long when open. Kershaw had a version too, which looked a lot like a Finnish puukko (thanks for the correction, Tony!) when open. But it's telling that Opinel still sells these things as fast as they can make them, while Cold Steel and Kershaw have moved on to other things.

So Many Things are Wrong About this . . . .

I'm not sure where to start. David Codrea would say "Forget it, Jake, it's Chi-town," but I can't let it go. So let's start with the "Hired Truck Scandal." The link goes to Wikipedia's excellent summary, but the short-short version is that Chicago was supposed to be leasing privately-owned trucks for city jobs, thus saving all the expense of buying and maintaining their own fleet. What they did instead was to give huge amounts of money to trucking companies owned by the mafia and by friends and family of the Daleys (but I repeat myself.) They rented trucks by the hour which sat motionless for days on end. They also allowed the drivers of these trucks to drive off with huge amounts of the city's asphalt, which was then used in private projects. Your basic Chicago money-saving reform, in other words.

OK, that's the start. Then we have another scandal, in which Mayor Daley's nephew (Robert Vanecko) was for some reason given the job of investing $68 million in funds from the police, fire, and municipal pension funds. He poured the money down all manner of ratholes, making himself and his friends very rich in the process. Daley was shocked. Shocked, I say. Again, your basic day in Chicago, nothing to get too worked up about, I guess. Then Vanecko and his partners bought a 90% interest in a warehouse on Pulaski. The warehouse was near one of the city's asphalt suppliers, and since the city was now leasing a bunch of trucks long-term (remember, hiring the trucks by the hour for jobs didn't work out so well) they wanted to use the warehouse as a storage facility for their trucks. The city and Vanecko both say that he wasn't really involved in any negotiations, and the city says they moved in before Vanecko took ownership of the building.
They said it, I believe it, good enough for me.

That brings us to this week's story in the Chicago Sun-Times. Now we meet Candy Basselen, the owner of Springfield Supply, a steel fabrication shop operating, coincidentally enough, in that same warehouse on Pulaski. Well, it used to operate. Basselen says the city put her out of business by refusing to let her renew her business license last September when she moved into the warehouse. Their excuse? The warehouse (the one she doesn't own, remember?) doesn't meet city code. Maybe, like Basselen, you're thinking that sounds like a problem for an owner, not a tenant, but that wouldn't be The Chicago Way. In Chicago, the way it works is, somebody had a problem with Basselen in that warehouse, so Basselen had to have a problem, too, and somebody kept looking until they found a good problem for her to have. So she was completely out of business from September of last year to April of this year, when the city finally relented--after it was too late for her to stay in business because she had brought in zero dollars for eight months. I can't wait to find out what the real reason for all this was. My guess is that Basselen's business was in the way of a deal that was going to make Vanecko or another crony very rich.

Oh, and what were the city code violations for which the tenant of the warehouse on Pulaski was denied a business license, while the city used the same facility? The property didn't have enough trees and shrubs, and it didn't have a wrought-iron fence. One owner of the property says the required changes are "less than $75,000 of work." And apparently everyone involved is dead serious and saying all this with a straight face.

Chicago business licensing; because employing people sucks, and Chicago hates you for it.