Go ahead, make their day...

Say Thanks, it's so easy.

The Kommissar said, "So far there are less than 9 million names. What a pity. There should be three hundred million "Thank You's". Please forward this message to your friends, so they can do the same."

Traktors to the Kommissar, Traktors to all the Peoples!

Match Kings

For my Birthday my wife got me some 150-grain Match Kings, but for now I'm practicing with the stuff my buddy gave me and learning to measure things with a caliper. At first I didn't snap-to it, but after a few tries and some help it's working - my brain that is. Numbers are sometimes a bit of a dyslexic stew when I try to process them, I have to shift gears to get the right results.
All the Old Guys say the 30-40 Krag likes a longer setup for accuracy, jumping from the brass into the lands and grooves, down that long, old, 1900's chamber. But set like that it means the magazine won't feed them - you have to go singly. The 150-grainers however are short little beggars and will do the rapids fine. The question is, where does the accuracy lie? We'll have to test and see.

UPDATE: Around the turn of the prior century when they designed the Krag-Jorgenson, the Ordnance Department was coming off huge (for us nowdays) 500-grain-something 45/70 Springfields (and bigger) single-shot rifles, so the 220-grain magazine-fed roundnose that the Krag was designed-for was a petite little pill by the standards of an Age when Iron Men built Railroads. Today we consider it a bit heavy, at least in .30 caliber, and especially considering the 50-grain .223 (or 5.56) which is currently serving as the issue-standard.
For comparison top-to bottom: a 150 grain spitzer which is three-times the size of the standard-issue .223 load, the 150-grain HPBT (hollow-point boat-tail) Match King, and the big ol' little 220 grain roundnose. I found the 220-grain Hornadys at an old shop down south of here, and hopefully by seating them out close to the lands we'll pick up some points on paper, and besides it's what they were designed for over 100 years ago so I had to go with 'em.
I'll use the other 150gr. pills in my Garand loads where the payoff should show up with the Match Kings. I mean, they're called Match King for a reason, right? Hopefully...or else it's like a damn golfer, do you go with the Titelist or the Callaway or Nike-MaxFli-Wilson-TaylorMade...

More Krag-stuff here.

Les Tres Chic Airbux A380: The Zeppelin Returns

Thanks Damian at Babbling Brooks - in the dead of winter he knocks one out of the park, up over the humongous tailfin of the Super-Socialist Economi-chronic Subsidy-tronic Euroconsortium's Titannica Mega-Disco Yachtplane, a "three-deck, 150 tonne long-range (people-)freighter." Tres magnifique! But it's "All Alpenhorn and No Yodel." As Boris Johnson finally gets a round touit:

"If the EU can build the biggest commercial planes, and dominate the skies, why is America still the military master of the planet? The answer, of course, is that aeronautical success is no clue to political and military clout. The Russians had enormous Antonovs and Tupolevs, and where are they now? If Europe really wants to be a superpower, and if Chirac and Schröder really want to cock a snook at America, they must do something that no European government is prepared to do, and spend vastly more on defence.

Europe will have to build the choppers and the fighters that go with world leadership, and there is no sign of that whatsoever. The most that can be said is that Americans will buy the Airbus 380s to ferry their troops around the world."

UPDATE:
Only I don't think we'd be all that interested in an A380 when we can probably buy those big old Antonovs and Tupolevs, airplanes with proven track-records, for cheap - and in doing so cement new alliances in the non-pandering non Old-Euro realm.
Let the damn UN Bureaucrats waste Euros on the big bloated sky-floater, so that all the UN Ministers ands Sub-Ministers can fly around inspecting and overseeing and coordinating their Special Committees of Coordinating Inspectors and Oversight-Overseers and Coordinating Envoys ad-nauseum...

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Birthday Non-Blog

I was going to blog about yesterday's upgrade to 4.7 on my solar-orbit mileage-card, but it seems self-centered and blogging is already introspective and baggage-laden enough.
Work is proceeding, but slowly now, and coming to an end soon and it's difficult to focus. Another job-hunt looms.
Lately I've been obsessed with the notion of getting a National Postal Meter, ever since my brother called with the SN# to the old Carbine. Turns out to be a Rock-Ola. Sibling rivalry I guess.
A lot of guys go for the whole jukebox kind of singularity. Old metal Coke signs, Corvettes, hot-rods, and Bill Haley. I came along later so poodle-skirts and tight pink sweaters, as much as they are a time-collapsing memory-inducing seductress-sphynx and at once noticed, just aint my thing.
Maybe it (the National Postal Meter-thing) has to do with Capricornian order and symmetry, of stamps and organization. After all Benjamin Franklin shares my birthdate and was the first Postmaster General, and he invented the first odometer to keep track of straying Postal wagons.
Maybe that bureaucratic mindset ultimatly induces the apocalyptic postality of "The Postman." Though I'm not a real big Costner fan I like Sci-Fi, but haven't seen the movie. I do recall reading a review of the original book, and I believe was supposed to be somewhat (A LOT) different.
Or maybe it has to do with the crawly-stuff-under-a-rock underworld of vice and pain in, "The Postman Always Rings Twice."
James M. Cain wrote some good stuff including "Double Indemnity," and I read a lot of noir at one time, everything I could get my hands on in fact; all of Dashiell Hammett's work, and all of Raymond Chandler's, with big doses of Mickey Spillane - "Kiss Me Deadly" with Ralph Meeker is absolutely great - you'll never think of "If you like, I'll show you the scars" Cloris Leachman the same way ever again... I also read a host of unknowns and have a small collection of old lurid-cover pulp novels like, "Adam and Evil," "Walk the Bloody Boulevard," "Death Commits Bigamy," "Meet Me at the Morgue"... The covers are great, the writing in some is so bad it practically shouts, AT THIS LEVEL YOU TOO CAN BE A WRITER!
I am struck by a maybe not-so-subtle irony of wherewithal. Of an instrument of War being from National Postal Meter or similarly International Harvester. Its a sense of having to do with the machineries of War operating on an absolutely mundane and kind of farm-implement, shoe-leather level - and yet absolutely living up to their mechanical namesake. But somehow I'm not enough of a computer geek to be attracted by an IBM Carbine, even though they made them and the PC is a cornerstone and legacy, and maybe curse of my generation.
Gotta go make dinner, coconut chiken.

UN Delenda Est

One of my favorites, The Diplomad, hit one out of the park, a home-run, off the thinly stretched, leathery white head of a microcephallic buzzard UNocrat - an object much like a misshapen softball, similarly sized, and with near-equal intelligence.

As a former missionary-kid (and that's really not at all the right way to say it because there is something absolutely never "former" but essentially Always about that experience, growing up formatively in distant lands Overseas), we did get to know a fair number of our counterparts across the Service table. As we were then, we didn't always agree among each other, especially from our differently styled cultural undrpinnings and motives - but we were simply in different Armies. We caried different baggage (us by hand, they had servants), amunition, and armor. They lived in plush American compounds and had commissaries where you could buy hot-dogs - we lived in entirely different conditions and experienced a more "richly intense" local environment.
But when the homeschooling ended we went to Boarding School together and got to know each other as classmates - and we both got shot at by the Natives. Each of us recognized and had reckoned with The Ultimate Enemy, the carrion-feeding Petty Bureaucrats of The Overseas. I have seen them at work on a dead water-buffalo beside the road when I was seven, strutting forward with sharp talons to insert their buzzard-beaks shoulder deep into the dead animal's ass, eating away. Heyenas are nearly more elegant, as awkward-looking as they are - but also more deadly because they kill in order to eat, and they eat what they kill. Carrion birds like pie-dogs are creatures of opportunity, looking for a handout provided by death.

Seeing these UNocrats perched at the table, whispering to each other, back-slapping, shaking hands, they seemed like a periodic reunion of old cynical Mafia chieftains or mercenaries who run into each other in different hot spots, as they move from one slaughter to another, "How are you? Haven't seen you since Bosnia . . .." As the hours wore on, however, and I nervously doodled in my note pad, shifted in my chair, looked at my watch, and thought about all the real work I had to do that evening, I decided that, no, labeling them mafiosos or mercenaries was much too kind. They seemed more to be the progeny resulting from a mating between a mad oracle and a giant carrion-eater. They were akin to some sort of ancient mythical Greco-Roman-Aztec-Wes Craven-Egyptian-bird-god that demands constant sacrifice and feeding, and speaks in riddles which only it can solve. Yes, I decided, the UNocrats are great hideous vultures, roused from their caves in the European Alps and in the cement canyons and peaks of Manhattan by the stench of death in the Turd World. They leisurely take flight toward the smell of death; circle, and then swoop down, screeching UNintelligble nonsense. They arrive and immediately force others, e.g., the American tax payer, to build them new exclusive nests in the midst of poverty, and make themselves fat on the flesh of the dead. My friends, allow The Diplomad to present to you The High Priest Vulture Elite (HPVE).

That's not all, but that's a bit of the good part.

Trackback right atcha'!

Hit Me?

Globalistical Atomic Hitmaps! I'd like to try one out, but my brain hurts and I can't figure out the code-crap, not that I probably get anywhere near more than a few visits a week at best - and I haven't been blogging much since I started working again.
This rainy and gray weekend was a busy one though, the phone died - and in replacing it, the wall-jack doohickey was busted to smithereens. I pulled (yanked, moi?) up on the kitchen phone, and with a snap and a crack the old plastic on a short tether went straight to the ether. Naturally I worried that my DSL would be lost or corrupted, since that's the entry-point, but my curly-locked wife said fuggedaboudit. She didn't care if we didn't have a working phone all weekend, she hates the phone. I demurred, and so off to Home Depot for a new wall-plate and wiring harness, or whatever the hell you call it. Wires...green, red, black, yellow... I tried to mark the location of the ones that were already there and match white/blue, blue/white, white/orange...WTF? It still didn't work. Finally after a few switching-around(s) I got ~Dial Tone~! Ok!

Then there was lurking underneath the sink, the 20-something year-old In-Sink-Erator Badger-5 with a rusted-out center seam and a pan catching the drips.
I'm supposed to know this stuff. My Dad's step-father was a plumber and contractor who taught him a lot and with whom he worked. Myself as the son of a Shop-Teacher, there's just some things I'm supposed to have necessarily gathered at least by osmosis. Besides I scored high on the Plumber's Union test - but nobody died and opened up a slot. Long ago and after six-some years waiting I was still third on the Waiting-For-Godot list - and I got old. I decided that at 30+something I wasn't 22 and ripped, and that humping pipe and steel for Senior Union Management wasn't a realistic career path for me, and went into Graphics.
Anyhow, I started yanking on the collar and it wouldn't budge. The pins securing the yoke, instead of being three there were only two, and the whole thing was jacked to the side and seized-up. Evidently completing the installation using just two screws was much easier and less time-consuming for the original slipshod tradesman or migrant day-laborer who built our tar-paper shack. Also, the elbow from the dispose-all to the waste outflow was a 4-inch, 90-degree piece with a heavy flange - the one that came with the new unit was a two-inch elbow and thin-flange. Out into the rain again, but this time to Orchard Supply was closer than HD. After being told that I could look one-hundred years for a 4-inch, small-flange, disposall-outflow elbow, I decided to simply get with the Program and Go Modern. White PVC. The old traps and pipes were chromed steel and bronze fittings, and weighed mightily - I replaced it all including the sink-top air-vent, and everything lined-up and fit better. Phew! Now, back to work on graphics. Sheesh, don't I do enough around here?