Sidebar Tour

While I was procrastinating (I still have at least one article to write about the CCS Sectional Match), I decided to up date my sidebar.

It's kind of like in college, when I had a paper due the next day so I decided to clean my desk. Then I found my checkbook, which I hadn't seen for WEEKS (since the last paper was due 'tomorrow') and sat down to balance it. Then I started looking for a pen and found it resting on a half-finished letter to Mom, so I finished it, then balanced my checkbook, then finished cleaning the desk, stared at the typewriter and my notes for a while, and went off to the post office to buy stamps.

You know how it goes. Sometimes, when you sit down to Write (capitalized), you decide to just write (lower case).

My sidebar features both books and movies, because I'm interested in reading things that other people have written, and . . . and . . . and watching movies because it takes neither imagination nor effort. That's partly why I gave up my Cable TV subscription five years ago and never missed it; when I had TV, it was too easy to do absolutely NOTHING for hours at a time.

But I still have the TV, and a VCR and a DVD player. I buy the movies I like, and watch them from time to time. By now I have a pretty good library, so it's no problem deciding that tonite I feel like watching "ZULU", and a couple of days ago I watched "Gross Point Blank", and before that "Young Guns", and before that I watched "Point of No Return" with Brigit Fonda as well as "La Femme Nikita" in the original French version, and before that "Last Man Standing" and "Silverado" and "Ronin" and .... well, you get the idea. And you know what kind of violent action movies I enjoy. So sue me.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, the sidebar.

MOVIES:
This week I put up the movie "ZULU", which is the story of how "a scarce one hundred fifty" British Soldiers and auxiliaries repelled an attack by over four thousand Zulu warriors at the Battle of Rorke's Drift on January 22-23, 1879. I very much admire this movie, and watch it every few months. It may differ from historic reality in some details, but generally it seems to be accurate, at least according to an online website which describes the battle. Some of the incidental details are ignored or distorted for dramatic effect in the movie, and some of the characters are depicted inaccurately (the Swedish Minister Otto Witt, for example, was not drunk nor banished and his daughter was not present at the scene). However, by all available accounts it was indeed a valiant defense and the unprecedented 11 Victoria Crosses were certainly earned the hard way.

BOOKS:
I'm reading S.M. Stirling again. More accurately, I am re-reading him. In the mid 1990's Steve Stirling wrote a 5-book series, called "The General", with David Drake. He went on to write the 3-book "Nantucket" series on his own; this is a "Misplaced Moderns" SF tale of his own origination and "The Oceans of Eternity" is the final book. The theme is that the entire island of Nantucket is (somehow) ripped from 1999 America and transported to the same site in the Bronze-Age.

Stirling went on to write two other books on the same theme. In one, "Dies The Fire", he supposes that the world left behind by this dramatic anti-juxtapositioning is left without the ability to support rapid combustion (e.g. guns don't work) and electricity no longer functions.

In the other book, "Conquistador", he presupposes a similar multi-millenial era which is reachable by means of what can only be described as a 'dimensional portal' (reminiscent of Heinlein's "Tunnel In The Sky", or "The Door Into Summer"). Here, the "Misplaced Moderns" are in control. Their guns shoot, their electricity works, and they move both into the primitive world and make it their own ... with some primitive but deadly opposition from the temporal natives.

Surely I do admire the work of Stirling, although I find his "Draka" series somewhat too cruel to re-read.


LINKS:
You have doubtless that in recent weeks I added "Truth Laid Bear", Syd's "Front Sight, Press", and "Trigger Finger" to my sidebar. Today I corrected the non-functional link to BEAR, changing it to the 'gun bloggers community'. And I added a new link to "Lay Lines". Marc (apparently a Californian, but I like his writing anyway) talks about an air-gun range he built in his back yard, going to the range for recreational shooting, and using IPSC targets. What's not to like? Well, the organization of his archive is a little weird for my taste. I think that's a BlogSpot problem, though, and has nothing to do with the author. Obviously I like his politics, especially his RKBA position. He's easy to read and I think you'll like him, too. Go check the link over on the right side of the page.

TEMPLATE:
I've often contemplated changing my template. The colors are a little muddy and I like the crisp clean look of a white background. Also, I would like a sidebar to the left side of the screen as I've noticed in some other blogsites. I have a lot more incidental crap to display and . . . hey, wait a minute! This thing takes too long to load already, and the links and archive go all the way down to the floor. This blog already sags like Mother Hubbard's breasts, and I want to make it BIGGER?

Okay, so there's a good reason not to change the template. Also, I'm not convinced that BlogSpot is set up to directly convert from one template to another, so I might lose either content or functionality.

And besides, I'm not sure I want to spend the time backing up the current template, trying to plug it into a new one, and possibly re-installing the current template just to get back to where I started.

I'll have to find a MUCH better reason for procrastinating, before I get into THAT project!

In the meantime, I need to get OFF the blogspot and update the winners of the CCS Points Race. I think I lost B-Open, in which division I led before my disastrous performance at the Sectional match last weekend.

No; before you ask, that has nothing to do with my procrastination. I'm just naturally lazy.