Sigh.

So I sent that last post to my wife in a Facebook private message, and I told her that I'd only link it to Facebook if she approved. She told me "You're a great writer, and you made me cry, but I'm not comfortable with you putting that on Facebook . . . you can leave it on the blog, though."

Which tells you all you need to know about the power and reach of this blog. :-D

Moms Demand Action Says They'll Win, Because You're Laughing at Them.

Moms Demand Action Hits Home (h/t to the Aurora Beacon News)

This was the answer Annie Craig of Aurora gave when I asked her why she had gone to Indianapolis recently to attend a gathering of the group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Why Indianapolis? Because that’s where the National Rifle Association was holding its annual meeting.

And why over a mile away, out of sight of the convention? Because being threatened or spit on is such valuable street cred for this bunch that they're willing to accept stories without evidence, but being photographed amid a sea of friendly, happy people who all think their tiny band are dead wrong would be bad "optics."

“We wanted to go calmly, quietly, and unarmed to protest their leadership and the extremism they are promoting,” said Craig.

Uh huh. It was very important for them to go unarmed, which was why they hired armed security to bear the arms (and the karmic wounds inflicted by carrying guns in Indianapolis.) I actually did see two "Moms Demand Action" folks downtown, I should admit. They were riding yellow bicycles with little "Moms Demand Action" signs. I should have gotten photos, but I didn't. There were actually as many Moms Demand Action ladies downtown as there were NRA-specialist panhandlers, so they've got that going for them.*

“I don’t come from a gun family,” she said, “so I don’t understand gun mentality. Which is not to say that those who want guns and qualify, shouldn’t have them. We just want what we call ‘gun sense’ in our laws.” This gun sense includes universal background checks. This helps keep guns out of the hands of people who are convicted felons or mentally ill. They also want a ban on assault weapons and online guns sales.

But of course they do. Except . . . didn't you just quote Mrs. Craig as saying that her position doesn't mean that "those who want guns and qualify, shouldn't have them."? So, should I have my Colt AR15--the one made in 1971--or shouldn't I? 

No one is asking law-abiding gun owners to give up their guns or hunters to stop hunting. In the words of Moms Demand founder Shannon Watts: “Our issue is not really with the members of the NRA, 74 percent of whom believe there should be background checks on every gun purchase. We’re not anti-gun. We support the Second Amendment. Many of our moms are gun owners.” They simply want a return to common sense.

Well, no one except the people who want to ban various types of hunting, from feral hogs to wolves to bear, of course. And no one wants law-abiding gun owners to give up their guns except Mark Kirk and Dick Durbin, both of whom Craig specifically cites as politicians with "gun sense," both of whom have called for and voted for bans on specific firearms that I own. Or Watts' Axis of Bloomberg allies at CSGV, which have spent the last couple of weeks defending New Jersey's policy of banning every firearm except "smart guns," enacted before anyone even knew what form the technology would take or what it would be capable of doing. And, of course, Mrs. Craig herself, who was quoted elsewhere in the same article calling for a ban on "assault weapons." Remember that Colt AR-15 SP1 from 1971 that mentioned above? Do you want to take it away or not? And why should I believe your next answer when your last dozen were self-contradictory?

Craig told me how the NRA ignored them at first, but is now responding with anger, including snarky comments on social media, ridicule at how “small” Moms Demand Action is and outright lies about them. Watts recently had to take down her Facebook page due to all the hate and harrassment directed both at her and her family. But Moms Demand Action is not going away.

Uh huh. Moms Demand Action is one of the latest in a long, proud line of anti-gun activists who defame millions of people daily, refuse to engage with anyone who responds appropriately with facts and reason, and then complains about "harassment" and "bullying." Moms Demand Action has learned from other members of the Axis of Bloomberg on this front; like the CSGV. Their social media strategy for the past few months has been to ban anyone who politely disagreed on their Facebook page (ask me how I know) and carefully cultivate the few idiots who can't resist making threatening, profane or inappropriate comments. These they share widely, and they get twice the bang for their buck because reasonable gun owners who would condemn those comments never get the chance, at least not on the CSGV Facebook wall. In effect, they're curating a collection of gun owners or supporters who will act like the "insurrectionists" they want to believe are running things, and they're willing to prune the majority to get that collection.

Welcome to the internet, ma'am. It's an information superhighway.

“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” said Craig, “and our message is taking hold. I’m proud of our national legislators. Both Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk have gun sense. I wish that were the case for all our local representatives.”

Oh, it's a marathon, not a sprint? Just gonna outlast all those fickle gun owners who are only in it for a couple of weeks of activist cred? Good luck with that. I've been active on this issue for 25 years--I was literally a child--while you just got paid to fly to Indianapolis and stand in a park a mile away from the people you claimed to be protesting. Good luck with your marathon.

Personally, I would like to see the NRA return to what they once were and promote responsible gun ownership and hunting rather than fighting common sense things like background checks. But the NRA leadership seems unlikely to return to that legacy. So I expect to see the Moms Demand Action group fight on. Check them out at www.momsdemandaction.org.

You'd like to see the biggest, best-known opponent of your favored policy go away and focus on something else? Well, gee, that does sound like a swell deal. Where do I sign up to have you and yours just fold the tents and go away? Is this that Reasonable Discourse ™ thing I keep hearing about? BTW, congrats to MDA for beating out the Muscular Dystrophy Association and countless MILF-themed adult entertainment operators to grab that choice URL.

Gandhi once said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” If this is true, then Moms Demand Action is well on its way to victory.

Right, sure, gotcha, but there's a catch: if this were true, then being the plucky underdog with no members would assure victory. If being ignored or laughed at were some kind of guarantee of success, the Ku Klux Klan and the Raelians should both be on their way to cultural dominance. Not everybody who's losing is just about to pull off an amazing upset; often you're losing because you're wrong, or because you're not as good at the game you're playing as the other guy is. Muhammad Ali suckered everybody in with the rope-a-dope, sure, but he could do that because he was that much better than almost anybody else. If your strategy is to let George Foreman hammer on you until he gets tired because it worked for Ali, there's bad news: it barely worked for Ali, and you probably aren't on his level. This is really just a restatement of the refrain we've been hearing for 15 years now, that "the gun nuts can't keep winning forever, they just have to start losing . . . we're due for a win!" Mathematicians can tell you there's no such thing as being due for a win. Now, if you want a heartwarming story of a small group of plucky outsiders who made a difference in the end after being ignored and then mocked, consider the scrappy underdogs at Illinois Carry or the Buckeye Firearms Association. Illinois Carry is celebrating its tenth year this summer, and I'll be carrying a pistol to the celebration. Even I didn't see that coming when we started.





*If you were there, maybe you saw these guys? Sitting, reading Bibles, with signs that said things like, "First they took my guns, then they took my home. Any help appreciated." I briefly wondered whether some grad student was writing a paper on generosity and social empathy at the NRAAM, but I'm pretty sure this was just artisanal panhandling, carefully crafted just for you and me.

Nine Eleven Two Thousand Ten

Well, it's September 11th again, and nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the unknown third target, the big news is the fight over a mosque to be built in Manhattan (sometimes called the "Ground Zero Death to America Mosque and Terrorism School" by people who don't have enough real problems to get worked up about in their own lives.) The latest zany turn in the fight over whether people have the right to buy a building and use it for lawful religious purposes is the national furor over whether a deranged mustache in Florida, acting through its human puppet-avatar, has the right to burn a pile of Qurans (or possibly Korans.)

I'm not writing about this because I think there's anyone who might read it today who will say "Really? I hadn't heard about that!" It's all anyone is talking about today. I'm just recording that fact here so that, in the next few years, I can check a hypothesis. I think once the Mad Mustache gives up on book-burning (at least book-burning that makes terrorists angry) and the Westboro Baptist Nutty-Butter Church of Crazy burns an even bigger pile of books while chanting and holding up signs (such as "God Hates Everybody" and "What Does It Take to Get Martyred in This Country, Anyway?) the whole thing will die down. I think the mosque will get built, and the world will turn, and it'll probably turn out to be just another "community center." And I think that once that happens, the whole furor will be more or less forgotten by most Americans. Maybe by me, too, with the damage 24-hour news and internets have done to my precious, irreplaceable attention span. I just want to have a record here so that on future 9/11 anniversaries I can look back and remember that in 2010, we gave up on the idea of commemorating the attack that killed thousands of innocent Americans in one day, made us question everything we had assumed we knew about our own lives, and launched two wars. In 2010, we decided 9/11 was a good day for trivial bullshit, and I can't even pretend to be above it all because my own blatherings are recorded in my own archive in the post prior to this one.

At the very least, no matter how far I got sucked into the triviality and foolishness, even if I bought the hype just a little, let the record reflect in my defense that I managed to remember the real reason today matters in time to be a little ashamed.

OH! Why didn't you say so?

“Sure, the right to bear arms is an individual choice,” White said. “But that’s not a choice I’m willing to agree with.”

Well, now, that's a horse of a different color!
In that case, piss off, you nosy little shrew. Your agreement, like you, is irrelevant.

(That's just a very tiny part of a much larger brouhaha over women and guns, so read the whole thing at Aunt B's and SayUncle for the real outrages.)

240v Wiring Bleg--Don't know what I'm doing

So, if you read the last post entitled "Why is the smoke coming from under the stove?" you know that we had a power surge during a storm last night and the electric cooktop in the kitchen succumbed. I tried to figure it out between EMS calls last night with little success, and at 1:00 in the morning I ended up just disconnecting the wiring pigtail for the cooktop from the junction box. I really don't get 240v wiring, but I figured it was connected red/red, black/black, white/white, bare/bare, so how hard could it be? As I understand it, the only big difference from 120v is that there are two 120v feeds, so both the black and white are probably live with 120v.

I figure I need a new cooktop; it's an ancient Kenmore, so parts are probably worse than a new one if I keep it simple. But I don't want to have to go buy the first one I see this morning, so I thought I could cap the wires in the junction box and get the other appliances on the same circuit working again. That didn't work; the circuit is dead now.

What do I have to do to cap that junction safely and still have the rest of the circuit live? I'm tempted to wire the two 120v "hot" wires together, but I don't really see the point and I'm afraid of damaging the wiring because (I might have mentioned this before) I don't know what I'm doing. I just wanted to do the monkey-smart part, pulling out the old appliance and connecting the new one exactly the same way.

Luckily, my wife is smarter than me, and she called me awhile ago to tell me I should just plug the refrigerator into one of the working outlets in the kitchen with an extension cord until the circuit can be fixed. Thank God I'm pretty.

It's hard to see what's going on in this photo on the right, but this is one of the rheostat switches on the cooktop. This is where the smoke came from. One side of the plug is completely severed and the whole thing is covered in black, greasy crud. The cooktop was old and impossible to clean anyway, so I won't miss it. I just don't want to buy one, plunk it in and then watch it go up in smoke, too.
(I guess the advantage would be that parts should be available for the new one . . . as long as it doesn't burn the house down.

Goddamn Robots

I had to send an email to the Illinois State Board of Education yesterday, because I think they've overlooked a college course I took (They say I'm "deficient coursework in the psychological assessment of students with disabilities within the LBSI scope." Since I got an A in MSE528, "Psycho-Educational Testing," I can't tell whether they missed that course, whether I need more than one course, or whether I need more than 3 semester hours in that area . . . . and their letter doesn't specify, of course.

I attempted to resolve the matter by phone, but the number given for the certification department gave a busy signal no matter how many times I called over two days, of course.

Beginning to sense a pattern, I went to the ISBE website and clicked the "Contact" link. A web form presented itself for duty with reassuring alacrity, and I proceeded to fill it out and hit "Submit." A small red line of text appeared, thanking me for sending in my comments and/or questions and assuring me that my query would be answered as promptly as possible.
Success!

I should have had the sense to leave it at that, but instead I foolishly proceeded to open my email. Thunderbird cheerfully served up two messages from the ISBE Killer Robot Division (Dept. of Eating Old People's Medicine Dept.)* which had both apparently been delivered at 11:35 a.m. and which said--I am not making this up--this:

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

       certification@isbe.net
And yet also this:
Confirmation From : Certification
hi,
Thank you for contacting the Illinois State Board of Education. 
We will make every effort to respond as quickly as possible.

Very Best Regards,

Public Information Center
Illinois State Board of Education

Notice that State Board of Education Robots don't capitalize very consistently?  So did I.  "ISBE ro-bot 4-4-7-3 does not und-er-stand your hu-man e-mo-tion of 'frus-tra-tion.'  But ISBE ro-bot 4-4-7-3 finds this 'frus-tra-tion' fas-cin-a-ting.  ISBE ro-bot 4-4-7-3 must cre-ate more frus-tra-tion in or-der to stu-dy your strange hu-man feelings. . ."

One More Thing About Right-Wing Terrorists

Let me just make sure I have this right, before we move on to the next meme and abandon the "Right Wing Terrorists who quote the Constitution" stuff. According to the Obama administration, there are two lists.

People who are not terrorists:
William "Oops" Ayers
Bernardine "Dig It" Dohrn
FARC

People who are terrorists:
Anybody who went to a Tea Party
You.
Me.

The Bribe That Wasn't . . . . .

Armed and Safe: IL State Rep. Eddie Washington criticized for accepting money from NRA . . . but he didn't.

Days of our Trailers' Thirdpower has the story . . . . but here's what you need to know about the relevance of this particular band of malcontents before you get too much energy invested:
Maybe there are a couple hundred behind the cameraman (Michael Schmidt/News-Sun) but somehow, I think it more likely that the Three Amigas here were the entire protest. Meanwhile, Sebastian points out that this is the dumbest thing the Million Moms could possibly do. The odds that Rep. Washington is actually changing sides at this time are next to nil, but just because he abstained on a bill that wasn't going to pass with or without his vote (if he'd voted for it, it would have failed 56-60 instead of 55-60) they've decided to throw him under the bus and accuse him of corruption.
Good thinking.

And just so we all remember, this is what a political demonstration looks like:

Eek!

Some college kid found a round-"a" as in ONE round--of .45 acp in a washing machine. After a moment's break to soil himself and have a good cry, he apparently called the campus police, who shrieked like girls for the real police, who brought in "bomb-sniffing dogs" to search out any additional rounds of ammunition, or the .45-caliber assault weapons that fire them.

I'm guessing it took a long time to get the dogs in; you'd have to find one that wasn't trained to find pot, or you'd be in that dorm for days.

"45-caliber bullets are used in assault weapons such as handguns,"

Seriously? Shut up, sissy.

I Don't Think Your Car's Supposed to Sound Like That

Loyal readers will recall that I recently purchased a used 1994 Volvo 850 Turbo. Disloyal readers may rest assured that you will be ferreted out and exposed to the light of day . . . . but I digress. I consider my 850 sort of my homage to the greatest hot rod in the galaxy, the ultimate sleeper. I refer, of course, to the Millennium Falcon.The Turbo is like the Falcon in many ways:

• Silver in color, with some bare metal showing, and more than a few character marks from years of service.
• Boxy, almost ungainly appearance which nevertheless manages to convey a no-frills utilitarian handsomeness.
• Faster than she looks, boy.
• Tends not to attract a lot of attention; ideal for avoiding Imperial entanglements.
• Passengers ride in style . . . . worn, slightly scruffy style, but style nonetheless.
• The pilot is guaranteed a good time; everyone else should strap in.
• Something is probably breaking at any given moment, but that's OK.

On that last note, the timing belt is coming due soon, and I'm going to have to get it done. Gotta clean out the garage first; I got away with the driveway repairs today, but I think that was the last time until spring.

Today? Oh, yeah, today. Today I replaced the rear brake pads, rotors, and emergency brake shoes. Why? Because of this:
It looks a little like beautiful planetary rings in this picture, but it's just your average brake rotor. You can see the rusty hub on the left, and on the right, the rings where the brake pad made contact. If you're familiar with the way brakes work, you know that the pads are squeezed against the rotor by the calipers when you depress the brake pedal. The pads squeeze the rotor and slow down its rotation, and since it's locked on the wheel hub, that slows the wheel and stops the car. But normally these rings are sort of polished and glossy. This set seems to be rough and grooved, as if something had torn and gouged at the rotor. Do you think maybe that's why my car has sounded like it was coming apart at the seams for the last two weeks? Signs point to yes!
Here you can see the pads from the left rear rotor. The inside pad, on the left, still has a couple of millimeters of material left. The outside pad, on the right, is bare metal. Ouch.






The photo at the right shows the relative thickness a little better. I probably should have put one next to a new pad to show the difference, but what the heck. Back when this pad was just squealing a little, I thought I had a thin pad and an indicator spring was squealing. I was surprised to learn that Volvos don't usually have the indicators (thin pieces of metal bent so that their tips contact the rotor at a right angle. When the pads are at a useful thickness, they don't touch the rotor. When the pads wear down enough for them to touch the rotor, they emit a shriek you can hear for a block, which gets steadily worse as the pad gets thinner. Elegant little bits of engineering--which makes it weirder that Volvo doesn't use them.) Anyway, I was told that Volvos will almost always squeal with any aftermarket pads, even high-performance, high-dollar pieces. Since the Jurid pads Volvo uses are pretty cheap, I went ahead and got those. I did buy my rotors at NAPA, for two reasons. First, my local NAPA has never let me down. Second, when I ordered the various pads, shoes and spring parts, I was hoping to park the car and avoid damaging the rotor any further so it could be turned. That didn't work out, and I needed the rotors on short notice.

It also turns out that the Volvo 850 parking brake is a drum brake inside each of the rear brake rotors. I've never heard of an emergency brake designed that way, but I guess it works. The Haynes manual gave the procedure for checking the parking brake shoes, but noted "the shoes should rarely wear unless the e-brake has been used habitually to stop the car." Members at www.turbobricks.com knew better; "Get the e-brake parts, you'll need them" they said. I'm glad I did! Here's what the shoes looked like when I removed the disc hub, next to the new shoes for comparison:
I don't really use the e-brake very often, but this did not inspire confidence. I'm not sure whether it was even a wear issue, or whether the shoe rusted so badly that the material sloughed off somehow. If I had to guess, I'd say someone drove with the e-brake engaged by accident. Maybe more than a little.

So I had a merry time today; I set up in the driveway, since it would have taken longer to clean out the "open" side of the garage than to do the brake work anyway, and jacked 'er on up. There were, predictably, a few oddities. For one thing, the flare nuts on Volvo brake lines are apparently somewhere between 12mm and 10mm, and also somewhere between 7/16 and 3/8, because I bought wrenches in both metric and SAE and none of them worked. 7/16 and 11mm, which appear to be virtually the same, fit over the nut but are just a little too loose to turn it. Luckily, the manual was right, and as long as you support the brake caliper with some wire, you don't actually need to remove the brake line. That made me nervous, though, because I could picture myself kinking the steel brake line and screwing myself royally.

Also odd was the note in the manual that, once the caliper mounting bolts are removed, "new bolts will be required for re-assembly." I pulled the bolts, examined them closely, and found them to be perfectly ordinary automotive flange bolts with either 13mm or 1/2" heads. They're pretty beefy, and they didn't seem to be worn or damaged at all. They had a little red Loc-Tite on the threads, but I just saw no reason to try to find replacements . . . and besides, even FCP Groton doesn't list them, much less places like NAPA, so I'm guessing I have to go to a Volvo dealer and beg if I want them. I'll ask on the forums, but I just don't see what could make that necessary. I put 'em back in "farmer tight" and I'll check on 'em in a little while to see how they're doing; they're easy to reach.

By the end of the day, it was getting dark and beginning to mist rain, and I was not feeling too sparkly as I wrestled with the calipers. The manual says to compress the pistons with a pair of pliers but not pry against the rotor. Well, I tried the pliers, and a big set of blue-handled plumber's pliers got me most of the way home, but at some point the outside piston was bottomed out and simply didn't want to go any further. I fought it and fought it and, in the end, removed the shim from the pad on that side to get it to fit between the piston and the rotor. I used brake-quiet grease on the backs of the pads, and I have to admit, they are silent and the stopping power is great. But I worry about that outside piston in that left caliper. I don't think it's coincidence that the pad on that side wore down to nothing so fast, and then I couldn't get the stupid thing to compress far enough to fit the new pad in. I think in the near future I'm going to end up needing to get a caliper kit and redo the caliper, cleaning and fixing that piston in the process. That's something I've never done before, but how hard can it be, really?

No need to answer that.

The High Road; An Apology To You All

For now, all I have to say is that I don't have anything to say. Tomorrow I expect to go into much more detail. It's a dark day if you're a member of The High Road dot Org. It's after midnight, I spent all day in an emergency room, and I have parent-teacher conferences in the morning. I'm going to bed.

Before I do, I want to say this much:

If you're a member of www.thehighroad.org and you're wondering what's going on, I'm sorry. I apologize on behalf of the entire staff for the fact that we were not able to keep our childish bickering and junior-league food fights from destroying a community you built with us from nothing. I would urge you to hold yourselves blameless and instead hold the staff responsible for this epic failure of the ideals THR stands for, but I'm sure you've figured that part out for yourselves.

I'm sorry.

Dammit.

Not only did David Hardy get his Gun Blog .45 already (verily I shall be The Last) but Sunday, my mom and dad were packing up from an antique show a couple of hours away when he got hit with crumpling pain. He's had kidney stones before, but apparently this was worse than usual. They got him to the hospital, where he was told a dozen different things about how long they'd wait for him to pass the stone before performing surgery. Then, when I called last night to see how he was doing . . . he was at home. They'd moved a surgery up to the morning and gotten him in and out in 45 minutes, then sent him home in the afternoon. He seems like he's doing well.

But . . . .
Kane felt a little nauseated yesterday morning. By the time he came home from school last night, he was nauseated and running a fever of 101.5. We broke the fever with children's acetaminophen, but this morning it's back, along with abdominal tenderness. I'm no botanist, but when this happened to me at his age, I had appendicitis. I'm waiting for the nurse to call back now; I have a feeling we're going to end up at the emergency room this morning.

Cross your fingers for the flu or something, will ya?

(UPDATE: Well, it's official. We're headed to the ER this morning. Doc said he'd probably end up ordering us into Hospital Thing One for lab work anyway, so we're not going to bother stopping off.)

Don't Toy With Me, FFL-Man.

"I paid early last week. My wife said a gun arrived but I do not know which one since there are several arriving this week."

That's what my FFL sent me today in reply to my plea for news of the Gun Blog .45.

Argh.

Don't Do That, Dummy.

Ahem.

The Rules:

1. Boys don't hit girls. If she's trying to kill you and you can't get away, I might bend this one for you. Otherwise, boys don't hit girls.

2. If you're so dumb you want to fight with a girl, try not to be so dumb that you do it in public.

3. When the Big Angry Man tells you to let go of the girl, there is no need to ask "Why?"
You let go of her because there's a Big Angry Man with a phone telling you to do it. If you don't, he's most likely facing a choice between calling the cops and pounding you, depending on how red his neck is and how friendly his relationship with your local police department is.
Even if he looks pretty fat and old, chances are that he feels pretty confident that he can stomp a mudhole in your skinny young ass and walk it dry; otherwise he would probably have called the cops from inside his car.

4. Reactions which will be considered unacceptable when the Big Angry Man demands an explanation:

• Smirking
• Grinning
• "What's the matter?"
• "Whattya mean?"
• "It's just a fuckin' hug!"

5. Hugs are consensual events. If you have to sling her in a circle and throw her down on pavement before you can force her into a hug, it doesn't count. Remember: It's only a hug if the other person agrees that it's a hug.

6. When the Big Angry Man says that you must stop smirking and explain yourself or he will call the police, take him at his word. Middle-aged party poopers like him are just itching for a chance to call the The Man to oppress you and keep you down and stuff.

7. It is not, as a matter of fact, against the law for the Big Angry Man to take your picture as you stroll along in public. However, your legal acumen has been noted and the Big Angry Man has made a note to himself to be duly impressed at an undetermined time in the future.

(I was on my way to the car wash when I pulled into a Hardee's parking lot to get a soda and some change. There was a group of six kids in the parking lot; three younger ones and two teenagers. The teenaged boy was slinging the teenaged girl all over the place by her left arm. He threw her down and yanked her back up. She pounded her fists against him to get loose, but he yanked her around once more. I pulled the car up right in front of them and hopped out with my phone in my left hand. By that time, he'd pulled her in and was holding her in a bear hug while she struggled to get away. Description? I'd be hard put to describe her very well. Him? Ever read the Pratchett book "Maurice and His Amazing Educated Rodents?" The one with a character named only "Dumb-Looking Kid?" That was him.

I stayed a few feet away and asked what was going on. That was the wrong thing to say, but it was schoolteacher instinct. He told me nothing was going on. Also the wrong thing to say.

I ordered him to let her go in my schoolteacher "command voice." He asked why he should. This struck me as rather dense. It was my opinion that he should let her go because a man three times his size had just ordered him to do so in a loud voice, which meant that he might very well get his ass kicked if he didn't obey.


I ordered him to let her go again. He did, and she took off around a fence and down the main street in town. I told the boy to explain himself to me [again, this was a pointless waste of time. I should have just dialed the cops right then.] He smirked. I told him that a smirk wasn't an explanation. He opined that "It was just a fuckin' hug! That's all! Just a hug . . . ." This went on for half a minute or so before I cut him off and called the cops. He lit out.

I drove past a house where the younger kids had gone and were outside. I didn't see the girl anywhere. On the backside of the block, as I talked to the cops, I found the DL Kid walking down a quieter back street, chatting on his phone. I told the police dispatcher his description, told them about what had happened and where everyone had gone, and was thanked and asked for my number. Unfortunately, I'd lost the kid by that time. I met Officer Berns [Ever read any of the Pratchett books about Carrot? The mysterious Watch officer of Ankh-Morpork who was raised as a 6-foot-6-inch tall dwarf? So-called not because of his red hair but because he bulged a lot and tapered from feet up to shoulders? That's Berns in a nutshell.] Then, as I came back from the car wash, I met the DL Kid again, strolling down Rt. 4. This time I thought a little more and snapped a photo with my phone in case I needed to describe him again. At this he took umbrage and essayed to provide a lesson in civil liberties.
"Yew cain't just roll up and snap sumbuddy's picture! That's against the law!"

Right, Tinkerbell. Well, you've got a cell phone in your hand. Call the cops.

Later I got a call back from the dispatcher to to tell me that the officer had located both the DL Kid and the girl. I'm guessing all he got was a good lecture, but then, Berns can give a pretty good lecture when the occasion calls for it.)

I Can Explain

Just checked my voicemail, and I had a rather testy message from one of the officers at the Ambulance Squid, now several hours old. "Don, Beavis and Betty were looking for you. They want to go to the Girard football game and it's getting late, so call me at the shed when you get this." Well, it's almost 10:00 p.m., so I don't think I'll bother her right now. We DO cover the Virden and Girard football home games, you see, but since each team is playing nearly an hour away tonight, I'm guessing they weren't at the Girard field for very long before they figured out why I hadn't shown up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with caffeine overdose in hand.

Yes, my fellow Americans (and all you lovable foreigners,) it's football season again, and that means, if you're on a small-town ambulance crew on Friday nights, spending your Friday evenings watching high school football. There are worse punishments in life, but tonight I was exhausted from a long day and a good workout. I bought a paper on the way home and checked it out. My alma mater, the Bulldogs, are playing the Pretzels tonight (no, I'm not kidding) and the game is . . . . away. One down.
The other school we cover, the Big Red (Who have a vicious rivalry with the New French Lick "Juicy Fruit"--OK, that one I made up) are playing the Wildcats . . . . away. Oops. Oh well, kids, I wouldn't worry about it. The greater Girard metropolitan area has many inviting tourist attractions such as car lots and a Whirl-A-Whip, and is always worth the drive down nearly-scenic Illinois Rt. 4, which offers many scenic views of both soybeans and corn.

There's talk of consolidating Virden and Girard schools now, and people are starting to puff up their gills and feathers and dander and whatnot in impressive threat displays to Defend Our Beloved Schools. Except me, and here's why:

1. Consolidation is probably a great idea. Illinois has more school districts for its size than any other state. We are riddled with tiny rural districts that pay lots of redundant administrators and have to maintain their own athletic, transportation, and probably other systems. A consolidated district would be more stable, would be able to mix and match students between more buildings, and could make the transportation work better--probably.

2. It probably has no better chance this time than the previous three or so times it's been tried in my lifetime. It seems to get floated every decade or so. People draw battle lines (most of them on football fields or basketball courts, it seems) and the idea of consolidating becomes a symbol of what the evil, progressive world keeps trying to foist off on us, like gay rights and New Coke. Virden and Girard are vicious rivals of long standing in our athletic programs, and that seems to override all other considerations. Personally, I always figured that if Superman could work with Lex Luthor and Captain America could be on the same side as Joe Stalin (think about it, it's so true!) then we should be able to welcome our toothless, meth-addled brothers from the south with open arms. But not everyone is as loving and respectful as I am.

Blackwater Blog Weekend: The Journey

The floor is lurching and bucking. I'm standing up, my right hand braced on an overhead cabinet and my feet spread apart to grip the padded deck. Todd Jarrett is speaking in my ear, telling me to go ahead and draw my weapon. Tamara is waiting patiently behind me for her turn.
"Go ahead," he says, "it's no problem."

This is not an advanced tactical training exercise. Blackwater USA and Todd Jarrett just don't want us walking around with loaded pistols in non-training areas, which makes a certain kind of obvious sense, but it hadn't occurred to most of the gunbloggers as we were riding this rolling rec room (well, it's a rec room in the Burt Gummer sense of the word, as in this would be the wrong dang rec room to break into--did you know Blackhawk's bus driver was a cop for 28 years? Neither did I.) down from Virginia. Jarrett has gotten permission to have us clear our weapons with him on the bus so we can head over to lunch. And he's right; the gun comes out, the mag drops, the slide comes back, and I don't even fall down. It's a measure of how far this place will take me past my current limit. The instruction has not even begun yet!

But this post is really just about how I got here. Mostly, I want to thank Brian (who knows who he is, and who I don't necessarily need to "out" to the world since I don't know how private he wants to stay.) Brian doesn't know me, except that he reads this blog, and Lawdog's, and some others. Brian, like SailorCurt and several others, didn't get the chance to come to Blackwater with us, but he saw a chance to help out, so he gave me a place to stay. This trip hasn't been cheap, and that was a huge help. It actually reminded me a little bit of the time years ago (before most of us had blogs) when Oleg Volk decided he'd had enough of snow and socialism in Minnesota and moved to Tennessee. Oleg was as broke then as I am now, and I didn't have much either, but I did have a roof and four walls. Oleg and two of his friends stayed with my wife and I, and it was a great night and great fun. Anyway, Brian, watch the mail.

The flight was more or less uneventful; security treated me well and the airline's agents were very patient with me. I took photos out the window like a complete geek; the boys will want to see them when I get home. We took off in torrential rain and landed under clear skies, which is always worth doing. I read a little Pratchett and wrote a couple of lines of a bad poem ("Sailing in my steely fish/in the ocean miles above your head/You don't even know you're on the bottom of the sea") and tried to figure out why the little air-conditioning nozzle over my seat occasionally blew what smelled like pure sewer gas.

The next morning, I woke up on someone else's couch to the sound of sirens. The sirens rolled on by, but I was coming awake . . . . oh yeah! I gotta get up; I'm going shooting today! Ever mindful of the dangers of missing your cab or calling without knowing your address, I got all my info together and arranged a ride in a Vaudeville Taxi.

What's that? You haven't ridden in a Vaudeville Taxi? You'd love it. In a Vaudeville Taxi, the driver brings along her best friend/straight man and the two of them crack your ass up all the way to your destination. Stop signs may be disobeyed in the process, and your driver may find herself lost at least once, but you will leave a huge tip anyway because you have been entertained.
"Looka these firemen, fill the boot, fill the boot," one of them may say. "I need about dolla for what I got in the boot. Look at this boot and gimme a dolla. I'll give you a dolla, fireman, but I'm gonna need a boot or somethin'. You don't get nothin' for nothin', fireman."

Later, her friend will making random clicking noises and tell her "I just told you all about you, and you don't even know. That's African right there, girl, just a series of clicks. You don't even want to know what them clicks means."

It's a good time. It's kind of a shame when you have to get out of the cab. These two were very impressed that I was headed to Blackwater to do a pistol course.
"So, you do like that security stuff, right?" the straight man asked.
"No, I teach school and drive an ambulance, and that's about as adventurous as I get." I admitted.
"Oh! You do that overseas and stuff, huh?"
"Uh . . . . no. I do that in Illinois. I'm just a mild-mannered school teacher."
"OH! Illinois? You from Chicago, huh?"

Clearly I am something of a disappointment to my cab drivers, but they were still very nice to me.

OH . . . . did you want to read something about shooting at Blackwater? Maybe the next post.

Here I'm going to thank Todd Jarrett for everything he taught me today (and I DID learn new things that HAVE made me a better handgun shot. More on that later.)

I'm also going to thank Thanos and Kerby at Para-USA for making this all possible--and for thinking to include one voter in the mix, because without that, I wouldn't be here.

And I need to thank My Bride, because she made it easy to come here when she could have made it hard. And my sons, who wrote their daddy a card and sent him nuts.

Saying Goodbye to Family

I just got off the phone with Gracie Barra Springfield. This was not a fun call for me; I was calling to cancel my membership.

The thing is, I didn't really want to do it. I loved the school, I loved the instructors, I loved the other students. The problem was that the school was so far from my home that if I tried to attend, it would take my entire evening during the school year. During the summer, it was still twice the distance I commute to work. It just wasn't working. And frankly, right now, I'm just not in shape to go back to it. So I've actually been out for awhile, but still paying the fees every month. It's just not practical.

I've been re-evaluating a few things I've more or less given up over the years, telling myself that I had to put the family first. I've gone back to shooting recently, doing DCM highpower competition once a month this summer, and tomorrow I'll try IPSC competition for the first time. That's a weekly match, so I hope to get a little bit of experience before I go to Blackwater. It's also shot indoors, so it goes all winter, too.
Another thing I've given up on has been metalworking. I have a forge and anvil out in the shed that haven't seen a spark in a couple of years now. I think it's time to find someone willing to take on a part-time apprentice and try to make some real progress as a smith. I know a smith who sells knives here in my little town. What's stopping me from asking him to teach me? I'm just that shy and that quiet. But if the truth be told, if I could do anything for a living, I'd make knives and write. It's time to do something about it.
I've also let my weight-loss and fitness slip away in the last couple of years. I lost a lot of weight a few years ago, and it felt great, but it didn't last. I didn't sustain it. This is normal for a lot of Americans, but it isn't good enough. The bicycle I used to love to ride has hung in the garage since winter; there never seemed to be time. Now I'll make time.

Now, again, Gracie Barra Springfield is not at fault here. In fact, let me commend them--they have auto-debit access to my checking account, and they could have followed the standard American martial-arts school procedure by losing paperwork, asking me to quit in person, and otherwise making it as hard as they could or stretching out the process. Many schools just keep charging you like some evil clone of AOL, not even acknowledging that you've quit until the third or fourth try. All it took to GBS was a phone call. That speaks well of them. They're a great school. But in the list of things I really feel a need to do at this moment, jiu-jitsu just didn't make the cut.

Well, that didn't work.

In case you ever need to get to Taylorville Rifle and Pistol Club from the south, here's a tip: When you turn off County Road 600E, onto County Road 1275N, make sure you go east. See, if you go east, there's an s-curve and it turns into CR 1250N, and then you come to the club pretty quickly.

But if you turn west, there IS no 1250N, and you'll be checking the directions and driving in circles and checking them again--and these are big circles we're talking about. By the time I found the club, the match had been on for 45 minutes and was probably close to finished.

By that time, the baby was crying and My Bride was having a fairly serious Potty Emergency, and I still didn't know, technically speaking, how to get to Taylorville from where I was. But the thing about Illinois is that it's basically laid out in a giant grid. Long, long ago when this was mostly tall grass prairie full of rattlesnakes, township roads were laid out every mile. Beginning from some point in the county seat, going north, you cross CR 100N, CR 200N, and so on, plus the ones in between. This means that a lot of the concerns I hear about out west and down south, with people getting hopelessly lost, are no big deal here. If you've got enough water in the summer or enough clothing in the winter, you can walk out of just about anywhere if you have to. And luckily for me, it's a lot easier to find Taylorville than the gun club.

Anyway, our plans had seemed so simple the day before. My Bride would drop me off at the match and go into Taylorville to kill an hour or two, then come get me. We'd take some friends to lunch and then catch the new Batman movie at the Marvel Theater on the square, where new movies still cost $2.00. Unfortunately,the best-laid plans of big fat guys aft go agley.

• I couldn't find the range for the life of me.
• We couldn't get hold of our friends . . . I think they're out of town.
• We ended up having lunch early, with two hours to kill in Taylorville.
• We decided to go to the square and walk around the shops for two hours until the movie opened, since the theater is on the historic square (it has a statue of Abe Lincoln walking with his jacket over his shoulder, looking down with genuine affection at a small pig.)
• Aside from the theater, there is not ONE business open on the square in Taylorville on Sunday afternoon.
  
• By that time, I had two people on my hands who were cranky (not to say bitchy) and needed a nap apiece. At that point, I considered it prudent to withdraw, leaving the field to the foe (Murphy.)
  

But you know, it's not so bad. Right now I'm melting, but that's only because I'm grilling delicious chicken breasts on charcoal out back. Soon I'll take charred chicken, baked beans and Texas toast up to my wife and baby in the air-conditioned atmosphere of the bedroom. The sweat on my shirt will cool and then grow chilly like the shade coming on in an autumn evening, and as long as I don't get called out to lug a stretcher in this heat, I can just pretend that the whole world is that cool.

Plus, now I know where the Taylorville club is. It's about half the distance I drive to go shooting now, so if it's any good I'm going to have to try to join. If I didn't have to drive a little over an hour to go shooting, I could do a lot more of it.

Oh, Crap

I think I know what happened to my new PC.

It has a massive air intake with a small venturi-style funnel built in, which tunnels outside air directly to the fan mounted on the processor. It has a grid directly below that one, through which air tends to return to the outside.

Both are located on the right side of the case. My old computer had neither opening, and I kept it on the floor against the left side of my desk. I put the new computer in the same place--which meant there was an inch-thick pine board completely smothering both the cooling intake and exhaust.

That can't be good. And you know who who has to take all the blame, of course. That's right: Tom Kotowski.

Aw, Hey, Look . . . Nobody Likes a Whiner, OK?

See, this is sort of my vanity spot. I just post whatever comes to mind here, more or less. I don't troll the news sites looking for stuff to snark about, for instance. I have a job. A job with dedicated IT personnel who have no sense of humor about YouTube, gun forums, or Blogspot.

Anyway, when I get to ranting and raving and expressing all the pity I feel for myself, feel free to skip that one and read something else if you want.
Seriously, folks, don't let me get too maudlin on you.

Yesterday sucked. In fact, most of my long weekend sucked and this entire week has sucked. But that's the universe for you; sometimes it's your turn to be the guy everyone can look at and think, "Well, this is humiliating, but at least I'm not that poor bastard over there."

Tomorrow I'm on duty and therefore get to attend the local high school football game for free. I have a pickup truck, a mulletastic Camaro complete with T-tops, a bitchin' minivan with cool remote-controlled doors, and a 100-year-old Victorian farmhouse within walking distance of DiCarlo's Pizza, China House, Radio Shack, True Value hardware, TWO bookstores and the public library. I've got a beautiful wife and two strapping sons and a baby you'd have to see to believe. I've got two big dogs. I've got more guns than I really need and money in the bank. I teach kids about reading and the battle of Thermopylae for a living (Thermopylae is not in the offical curriculum, but everybody's got to have perks.) Hell, I get two weeks off in the summer to do another job or travel or take classes or whatever I want. Life is good on balance.

It's interesting to me, because I actually wrote about a day where everything seemed to go right a couple of months ago, and there were zero comments about that.

My biggest problem in life, and I'm being deadly serious now, is that there are so many things I want to do that I fear there's no way to do them all in one lifetime. So many ideas, so many opportunities. This is a good problem to have. The average guy living in a village in India would laugh at my "problems."
"Oh, it is very sad that you have to pick up your kids in your slightly older car because your new and shiny car is in use, sir! It makes me ashamed of the way I carried on when all my sons left for the city to find work in call centers and they couldn't write to me because I never got to learn to read--hearing about your struggle of owning too many automobiles and being too fat from eating delicious and plentiful food has really put the recent pandemic in the village into perspective. Yes, my entire family is dead and I live under a piece of corrugated tin in the mud, but imagine how sad I would be if my third car would not start?"

Don't look at me like that. They're a sarcastic bunch. Oh, and I'm going to solve my biggest problem tonight: I'm going to finish posting this and go to bed. There I will sleep for hours, baby willing.