September Blog Meat

Time for another Monthly Blog Meat. This is where I defer relating embarrassing personal foibles, eschew ranting about abrogation of civil rights and/or IPSC rule books, minimize Geek-Length Musings and instead share with you some of the interesting things OTHER people say, or do.

You may think I do this because I'm too lazy to write anything original, and in large part you would be right. More important, though, it's because sometimes I'm just a poor but honest reporter of news, situations, events and opinions I discover in my casual surfing of the Internet.

Let's get started, shall we?

One in a row....: Explanations

Hat tip to Geek with a .45 for this short story about one father's effort to explain the consequences and ramifications of the New Orleans Gun Grab. Elder Geek is correct, it's difficult to resist the temptation to give away the punchline.

Kim Du Toit is GONE!
That's right, the link over there on the sidebar is no longer operative. Kim took a sabbatical from blogging a week or two ago because his new job no longer allowed him the personal time to maintain his prodigious blogging output. Instead, he posted 'The Best Of' from his archives.

Then, yesterday, it was just . . . gone! Apparently he locked it up, because attempts to open that URL returns a 403 "Directory access is forbidden" screen.

Tonite, however, Elder Geek provided this link. There's a forum available with a format (and URL) which looks hauntingly familiar. Given that the first post is dated 12/24/04, the huge number of posts and bloated hit-counter, it must have been running for some time although this is the first time I have ever heard of it.

Which only proves my own ignorance. [sigh]


Geek Blog DOWN!
Yup, I was offline last night. Saw that right off. I mentioned it to The Hobo Brasser, told him how much I was going to miss it, sniffed a couple of times and then realized I had nothing to say so I wasn't missing much.

I did send a Trouble Report to blogger.com, however. This evening they confirmed my suspicions that they had a server error and this compromised several (though not all) blog accesses. They say it was cleared up by midnight, but i was in bed catching up on my reading. I finished "Banker" by Dick Francis, one of my favorite easy-reading mystery writers, this morning. Thanks, blogger.com, for giving me a guilt-free night off.


Presidential Pee!


According to one of my favorite tell-it-like-it-is sources, snopes.com, POTUS actually did (probably) ask 'permission' to leave the room at a UN meeting last week. Actually, it was a question of protocol, but as far as I'm concerned any man with such a sever regard for protocol under . . . ahem . . . uncomfortable circumstances deserves my vote.

News Two Hours Old: God Is My Co-Pilot

After three hours of tension and fear a passenger airplane landed safely at LA International Airport despite landing gear which would not retract because the nose-wheel had locked perpendicular to its normal attitude. I got home from work just in time to hear the live broadcast on the radio describing the landing. Disaster adverted, Al Queda apparently not involved.

With 146 souls on board, who are now alive due to the experience and skill of the pilot, I can only say "Thank God!"

Can I say that without the ACLU forcing me to a Supreme Court confrontation?

Screw 'em. "Thank God" I say, and "Thank God" is what I mean.

(And thanks to World Net Daily for the link.)


Can't We All Just Can't Get Along?
John Wayne Bobbitt (was there a more appropriate surname?) is up to his old tricks.

After being arrested last weekend for spousal abuse, Bobbitt posted bail and filed for divorce.

This article is only of interest to people who just can't resist the lure of bad puns.

Knock yourself out. Here's my punchline:
(Some men need SOMETHING to abuse, I guess, even if they can't indulge in 'self abuse')


Fish (or Man) Walks?

Last December I mentioned the case of a Washington (state) resident who was arrested for open carry of a firearm.

The latest news, dated July of 2005, suggests that charges may be dropped because the laws which the Ellensburg, WA, Police applied to arrest him may have been contradictory to other law and common sense, and badly written.

Nobody seems to be tracking this, and FISHORMAN isn't posting very often these days, but it seems worthy of at least a brief follow-up.

Jeff Cooper for September, 2005
The Colonel is UP!

Once again, I heartily encourage reading the comments of The Colonel.

Not only is he pithy and confrontational, but he provides a wealth of information which is not generally available. This is probably due to his longevity and active life-style (I hate that word!) when was a much younger man.

I propose for your consideration the following two comments (Quoted, but not necessarily quoted in full)

First quote: Hiroshima

When we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, there was certainly no reluctance for this dire act. Amongst the men involved in the fight in the Pacific, we gathered the idea that the Nips were simply not going to surrender, and that if we went forward with the invasion of the Japanese homeland, we could expect to suffer about 1 million American dead, at the same time killing about 20 million Japanese. That was the figure that I gathered in my job as an assistant G2 for the landing on Kyushu. It meant to me that the only way that I could avoid being killed in the invasion would be to suffer a critical injury and be evacuated alive - not a pleasant prospect. Historical review seems to agree that Japan had been so reduced by our submarine campaign that, coupled with the B29s, the Emperor might actually have decided to surrender. We did not know this, nor did we suspect it, and we were prepared for a very nasty campaign - on both sides.

Further research discloses the presence of a Japanese policy directive which called for the murder of all American prisoners being held at the time. This comes to the number of 144,000, all to be put to death immediately upon the landing of the first allied soldier on the homeland of Japan. I thought the decision to drop the bomb was fully justified at that time, and I think so even more now. The atom bomb was a dreadful thing, but its use turned out to be an enormous life-saver.

Note that this was included in his September, 2005, contribution. The Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945, almost exactly 60 years before the Cooper comment.

Approximately (according to news reports) 80,000 Japanese died in the initial bomb blast on August 6, 1945, and a further 60,000 died from the resultant effects. This estimate of 120,000 Japanese casualties, due to the immediate and post-immediate effects of the American attack on Hiroshima,is markedly less than the slaughter of 144,000 Americans which Cooper postulates.

Other references cite the dead at Hiroshima at 135,000, at Nagasaki 64,000. This is a horrendous casualty count, especially considering that these were predominately civilian casualties.

Compared with the Fire bombing of Dresdon (Germany, estimated at 40,000) . . . there is no comparison in terms of casualties. Yet these wartime actions are all to be deplored.

But who was at fault?

The Japanese deaths at Nagasaki are the sole responsibility of the Japanese authorities.

I don't propose to question the figure of millions of Japanese casualties from nuclear bomb, or the estimated 1 million US casualties (added on to the slaughter of POWs), which Cooper cites.

I only remind us that the Japanese military then in power were responsible for the initial attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1940, and thus were responsible for all loss of life incurred by both American and Japanese citizens afterward.

It is a matter of historical record that Truman considered the deaths of thousands of Japanese preferable to the deaths of thousands of Americans. I expect never to be in the position of making such a fatal decision. It's to the credit of President Truman that he was able to do so, and thus end the war with Japan. It's to the credit of Colonel Cooper that he can so succinctly provide us with the perspective of one of those Americans who could expect to die during the landings on Japanese beaches if Truman's decision had been otherwise.


Second quote: Medal of Honor Recognition

We are delighted to learn that our suggestion about income tax remission for winners of the Medal of Honor has been accepted by various persons of consequence. This is such a nifty idea that we can't see why it has not been acted upon long ere this. It is a no-lose proposition without any negative aspect. Anyone who holds the Medal of Honor has paid in full for his membership in the Liberty Club, and his individual periodic contribution is too slight to dent the budget.

The idea needs important support. The President is the one to act. Write him!

The Colonel. I don't always agree with him, and occasionally I find myself in dramatic opposition to his opinions.
But he is always . . . ALWAYS . . . worth reading.

Go thou and do likewise.

New Orleans Survivors - The Bad Guys?
We resort to The Michael Bane Blog and New Orleans, LA. (NOLA) for the Parthian shot.

THR (The High Road) features an excellent summary of the NOLA Survvors Experience. Maybe, just maybe, having the foresight, resources and courage to stay behind in a disaster and defend your home is NOT the very best choice.

Don't count on your 'friends and neighbors'. When SHTF happens, you may find yourself back in the Bomb Shelter conundrum envisioned in the 60's. It ain't all "Blast From The Past" or "Farhnam's Freehold", but it's bad enough.

. . .

That's it for tonite. Hope you found it as interesting as I did.

New Orleans Flood Map

New Orleans Flood Map

Because the battered state of Louisiana, and the damage to New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrine, are such newsworthy items, I thought you might be interested in this.

I've chosen not to write about The Big Not-So-Easy because everybody else in the Blogosphere is writing about it, or has been. But the flurry of commentary has eased off a bit, and this is entirely non-political.

You can see which areas have been flooded, and where the floodwaters yet remain. That should be enough for anyone.

Gargantuan Gunsite Gossip

While I was reviewing (and responding to) comments tonite, I mentioned Jeff Cooper's "Gargantuan Gunsite Gossip". I had bought this book about fifteen years ago, new, and read it with great interest. Then I loaned it to my father.

A few years ago, I took it to loan to a friend and while my car was parket in a public lot it was burgled. The book was stolen, along with a pack of cigarettes, the cord to an electrically heated coffee cup, some parking meter change, and a pair of sunglasses. Curiously, a 50-cal ammo can with about 1000 rounds of .38 super ammunition wasn't touched.

Given the odd selection of stolen items, I'm guessing that it was kids who made a target-of-opportunity raid on my car. If you're one of those kids, please GIVE THE BOOK BACK! No questions asked, you can keep the parking meter change.

On the other hand, if you're someone who has a copy of the book and have no immediate use for it, I would appreciate the loan of it. I'm contemplating an extended series on The History of IPSC, and the book contains (as I remember) some useful references which I would like to cite.

Amazon offers a copy for $95; Barnes and Noble has it at $200. Other internet book dealers have it listed at even higher (by about ten bucks) prices. As much as I would like to own this book, it's beyond my means at these prices. I've been looking for it in used book stores in Oregon for several years, and haven't seen a copy yet at any price.

Just so you know, I'll boil that last paragraph down to simple terms: it's a valuable book, but the market is small. I probably can't afford to BUY it from you, if it's priced competitively. So I'm reduced to begging for the loan of a copy.

There. I've been as honest as I can be. I lust for the book, but my immediate need is to use it as a reference source. The writings of Col. Jeff Cooper are among my favorite readings, and I have copies of his later volumes. This special volume has information which I would like to use on this website.

If you own a copy, please contact me at the email address encoded at the bottom of the page. I will be happy to reimburse you for shipping charges, and will return the book when my research is completed.

Croc Match Photographs

A couple of weeks ago, we in the Columbia Cascade Section (Oregon) hosted a hi-round-count match called the Croc Match.

This was an annual independent presentation hosted by the Dundee Practical Shooters (Chehalem Valley Shooting Club) featuring 8 stages of 50+ rounds per stage.

It's a colorful IPSC match, highly demanding of both man and machine. Pistol malfunctions are part of the game here, and anyone who can get through the grueling demands of firearms reliability combined with heads-up situational awareness can honestly claim to have accomplished Something Special.

SWMBO didn't compete in that match, although I did. We plan to write and article describing the match to the Front Sight Magazine in the future, so I will write the commentary from the perspective of a participant and she roamed the range for the entire two-day duration taking hundreds of photographs.

The response from other competitors was much more than we had anticipated.

While she was taking photographs, SWMBO talked to a lot more people than I did. She was essentially the reporter in this endeavor. She met a lot of new friends, interviewed them, and took their pictures.

In fact, she took over 650 photographs, along with a significant number of movies (which cannot, of course, be included in the proposed Front Sight Article.)

Here's the problem:
We don't expect more than a half-dozen of the photos, at best, to be included in the magazine article. That's less than 1% of the photos she took.

But the people who competed are writing to say that they are interested in seeing the photos that she took.

In fact, I've received a number of emails asking me directly whether and where the photos have been posted to the internet.

unfortunately, I haven't yet established webhosting for this volume of photographs . . . they are all High Resolution, each photograph taking up over one megabyte of storage. Including the movies (video) and photos provided by other photographers, we have in excess of two gigabytes of photos available . . . all unedited, and none of them organized. (We have between 50 and 100 photos of people who were awarded trophies during the award ceremony; many of these photos are worthy of storage and distribution, but some are of such average quality, due to lighting conditions, that they are of interest only to the award winners and their friends and family.)

There are concerns about distributing these photos because we haven't acquired releases from the people whose images are depicted. The volume is too great to be manageable without editing, and this editing and image selection takes a lot of our personal time. And we are disinclined to take to time to indiscriminately 'burn' copies of the CD's for general distribution.

Because of these and other factors, and also because we have a proprietary desire to preserve the 'freshness' of the photos for inclusion in future magazine articles, we are disinclined to provide copies of the CDs for general distribution.

However, we acknowledge that some people would very much like to have access to at least a few photos which are of special interest to them. Why? Because they were having FUN at the match!

So here's what we plan to do:

With the permission of the Match Director of the Croc Match, we will purchase webhosting of sufficient server storage to make these photos available on the Internet. It is my hope that we can present them in a format which allows the casual viewer to scan the photos in a 'thumbnail' format, select the photos of special interest for full-screen viewing, and the download the photos for personal storage and use.

If it seems financially and legally feasible to do this, we will announce the availability of these photos on this website, probably sometime in October. If you are interested, you will have a limited time in which you can download the photos before we are forced to remove them to make room for other match photos from other Columbia Cascade Matches. (These might include the Albany Single Stack Match and the Columbia Cascade Sectional, both match having occurred previous to the Croc Match.)

No guarantees are possible now, and this entire 'photo gallery' scheme is dependent on the availability of webhosting at a reasonable price. Please understand that this webhosting is expected to be at my own out-of-pocket expense, and subject to constraints beyond my immediate control. I have been negotiating with section-related webhosting resources (ARPC and CCS both) for inexpensive, plentiful hosting of a photo gallery, and it may happen that the potholes in the road to providing a photo gallery is much smoother than I anticipate.


If I can provide general access to these photos, I will do so. If it turns out to be impractical, it won't happen. I'll regret it, because SWMBO has done a wonderful job of covering the matches photographically.

I'll keep you informed.

Brain Phart From Heck

A funny thing happened to me at the TCGC IPSC match today.

We were on the last stage, which was a truly ODD stage requiring us to haul The Tazmanian Devil Monster uprange on a green garden cart, when I experienced The Brain Phart From Heck.

You know how it goes when you finish a stage. The official range commands are:

If Clear, Hammer Down, Holster. This comes AFTER you are obviously finished shooting and the Range Officer has give the official range command "If You Are Finished, Unload and Show Clear".

I had done that. The Range Officer glanced at the gun (as did I), didn't see any brass showing, decided the gun was unloaded and said the next official range command "If Clear, Hammer Down, Holster".

I did that.

I returned the STI Race Gun in the black Dillon pistol bag, zipped it up, and the Range Officer said the final phrase of the litany: "Range is Clear". At that point, he moved downrange to score the targets. I had stored my first magazine in my magazine carrier rather than to dump it on the ground (don't ask, it was a weird range and I wanted to keep the partially expended magazine because I didn't trust my backup magazine), so nobody had to pick up any magazines from the ground on this 24-round stage.

I was holding the round I had ejected from my 2nd magazine, and grabbed for that magazine from my belt, where I usually place magazines during the "Unload And Show Clear" process.

It wasn't there. I couldn't find it.

Huh?

Did I dump it on the ground? I usually don't do that. No, it wasn't on the ground.

Funny, I didn't remember removing the magazine. That's the first thing I ALWAYS do when I Unload and Show Clear.

Always.

As the light slowly dawned on me, I partially unzipped my range bag to check the gun (you can do that, you just can't touch the bagged gun.)

Oh oh.

I took a deep breath, zipped the pistol bag up again, and shouted out:

"Oh, Mister Range Officer! Mister Range Officer! Excuse me, we need to talk."

The RO was confused, as he had already scored the first target and was starting to score the second target. I said: "We need to get everyone back behind us, and you need to check my gun."

So the RO stopped what he was doing (scoring targets), pushed everyone back, and asked what was wrong.

"You and I have just experienced a Major Brain Phart. We need to get this sorted out before we can do anything else."

He came over to where I was standing, said "WHAT!" I handed him the round I had unloaded, and watched as I move downrange and unzipped the bag.


The magazine was still in the gun.

This time it was HIS turn for a sharp intake of breath. Then he walked me through the entire UNLOAD AND SHOW CLEAR regimen, we got the (empty) magazine out of the gun and into my magazine carrier. I zipped up he bag, he declared RANGE IS CLEAR again, and handed my my last round which I carefully placed into the just-now recovered last magazine.

What had happened was: I shot the first four targets with my first magazine, then placed it in my belt magazine carrier in case I ran out of ammo later, and replaced it with an 18-round magazine.

I engaged six steel targets and one IPSC target, grabbed the prop (a garden card carrying a HUGE stuffed doll representing the Tazmanian Devil Monster), and started dragging it uprange while shooting at IPSC targets 'strong hand only'.

It was a tough stage, because it included features not normally included in IPSC stages. The most difficulty was provided by the need to pull a wheeled cart uprange while engaging targets which could not be engaged until you had moved uprange of them. You couldn't point at the targets until you were uprange of them because that would require breaking the 180 degree line, which would lead to Match Disqualification. And you couldn't wait too long, because there were vision barriers (barrels) which would obscure the targets if you were situated past the point were you could see the target. Finally, you couldn't STOP the cart, because of inertia and the lack of brakes, so you had to keep moving all the time.

I solved this by shooting extra shots at the targets, and thus (thankfully) expending most of the remaining shots in the loaded magazine.

When I finished shooting at the last target, I had only one round left in the magazine. This was according to my cheesy plan. When I unloaded, I dumped my last round, leaving the magazine empty.

Because of this, we (the RO and I) didn't notice that I had somehow failed to remove the magazine. We only noted that there were no bright brass-colored thingies left showing, and assumed that the gun was empty.

Well, it was . . . except for the magazine with it's dull-black finish.

So when I dropped the hammer, there was no KerBANG, and I didn't get DQ'd.

The RO didn't notice that the magazine was still in the gun. The Assistant RO ( the scorekeeper) didn't notice. Even I didn't realize that I hadn't dropped the magazine.

And everybody in the squad just assumed that I had correctly unloaded the gun, even though I hadn't.

I have NEVER failed to drop the magazine at the end of the stage. After all these years, I had assumed that it was impossible that I would NOT do so. This is the kind of routine that you do without even thinking about it . . . it's a matter of training and experience. Right?

Wrong.

I suppose I could have just kept my mouth shut. After all, it was the last stage of the match and the gun was on its way to the car. If I hadn't said anything, nobody would ever have known. Of course I would have known when I got home and found the magazine still in the gun, but I didn't have to say anything.

The funny thing is, earlier in that stage I was the RO, and the guy who was RO-ing me (PacMan), was the shooter.

After I gave the "Load and Make Ready" command, he inserted a magazine in his XP and took a sight picture.

I said: "Excuse me, but according to the current version of the rule book you're not allowed to take a sight picture with a loaded gun."

He turned his head and looked at me, and said "I haven't chambered a round; the gun isn't loaded."

I replied: "I'm sorry; but if there's a magazine in the gun, it's loaded. It's not me, it's the rule book. Look it up."

(N.B.: Yes, that's true: 10.5.13 defines a 'loaded gun' as "... having a live round in a magazine inserted in a firearm.)

I got The Look (as if he was thinking "Jeez, what kind of Range Nazi am I dealing with here?") and I'm wondering if it wasn't justified.

The rule against taking a sight picture with a Loaded Gun is Rule 8.7.1.
This is superseded by US 8.7.1
"Not Applicable".

I'm wondering if I should have mentioned it to the PacMan?

So here are the two questions I have:

1. Should I have mentioned the cautionary note against taking a sight picture with a 'loaded firearm'?
2. Should I have been DQ'd either because I didn't remove the empty magazine from my firearm at UNLOAD AND SHOW CLEAR, or because I partially unzipped my range bag to look for my missing (unloaded) magazine?
3. Should I have been DQ'd for failing to remove my (unloaded) magazine?

I know what I think.

What do YOU think?

UPDATE:
The Unofficial IPSC List kindly points out that those were THREE questions, not TWO.

Dammit Jim, I'm a Geek, not a mathematician!

As for rule 8.7.1, 'Earthworm' (who hates to be called that, but it's the only nickname I have for him and I have a policy against identifying people by name without their permission) points out that there is little justification for distracting a competitor by mentioning an inapplicable rule. Point well taken. Perhaps it wasn't 'legally' wrong, but it wasn't the right thing to do.

Summer Wine Lyrics - Nancy Sinatra

Summer Wine Lyrics - Nancy Sinatra

Isn't it funny how a song will stay in your mind for decades, and hop onto your tongue for no good reason at all?

When I was in college, I subscribed to the Columbia Record Club. It was like a Book Club, every month they would send you a flyer of the current 'hit' records, and you could choose what you liked.

I had recently seen Nancy Sinatra in a movie (The Wild Angels) and her songs "Bang Bang" and "These Boots Are Made For Walking" were pretty big then, back in the sixties, so I chose to spend my dwindling funds on her latest LP.

Remember how hard it was to find money for anything more than Room, Beer, Board & Books when you were in college? I expect I spent $5.95 on this album, and that's significant bucks considering that at Gino's Pizza Parlor on 3rd and Van Buren would sell you three pitchers of beer for a buck on Wednesday nights.

I talked to my sweetie, SWMBO, on the phone tonite. She had just changed jobs, is looking for an apartment closer to the new office, and was pretty discouraged. I had suggested that we spend Saturday looking for an apartment, and Sunday shooting an IPSC match. "Poor Sweet Baby" I said.

What I should have said was: "I will give to you Strawberry Wine".

The N.Sinatra album I bought was "Nancy and Lee", and one of the most haunting of this surprisingly good album was Strawberry Wine. It was a duet-album with County Singer Lee Hazelwood, and it has NOT been converted to DVD, CD, or any other digital format. You can't buy the album, but you CAN buy it on the "Lightning Girl's Greatest Hits" album from Amazon for about $45.

Strawberries cherries and an angel´s kiss in spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I will give to you summer wine
Ohhh-oh summer wine

Yes, I still have the LP. It is one of the reasons I'm contemplating the purchase of hardware/software inteface so I can transform my extensive collection of 33-1/3 Long Playing Records (LP's) into digital files.

Is there a point here?

No, clearly not.

You got a problem with that?

UPDATE: November 7, 2007
This "Summer Wine" post has been one of those 'one-hit wonders' that you occasionally get on a blog. I wrote it because I felt strongly about the subject, never expected to find that anyone else ever cared, and was surprised when I got so many hits on the post.

I just shrugged it off until tonite I got an email from a lady in the UK who actually sounded interested. She wanted to know, for example, if (in my experience) this song was frequently played in high-school proms in the 1967 - 1968 period. She hinted broadly that she had 'other questions'.

Full Disclosure: when I wrote this article I had the LP album in my hand. Since then, I have been unable to find it. Well, my stack of LPs is on the floor under my 'work station table' in the Front Room, and it's about 5' long. I can't find the album now, although I had no problems finding the "How's That Grab You" and "Nancy in London" albums. Too bad. Judging from the comments on the Amazon website, there is a lot of interest in the exact songs, and the sequence in which they appeared in the original album. I could get some major bucks from selling this album. I say this in full recognition of the fact that the re-issue of the album starts at about $65, and goes up to over $250 on Amazon dot com. (I won't bother trying to provide links here, just go to Amazon.com and search "Nancy and Lee".)

This album was re-released in 1990, and is currently available for under $8 as an "MP3" collection under the title "Fairy Tales & Fantasies".

I have not listened to this album for at least two years, but I bought the MP3 download tonite and in fact am listening to it now .... "Summer Wine" is playing. This is the third successive time I've listened to the MP3 download, and to the best of my memory this album faithfully reproduces every song on the album, and in the correct *(original)* sequence.

I'll keep an eye open for the original album, but for those crazies who think this is an important point, I'll say it again:
The Amazon MP3 download of "Nancy and Lee: Fairy Tales and Fantasies" is a faithful reproduction of the original album, in that it provides ALL of the songs in the same sequence as the original.

If YOU really really need authoritative confirmation, please email me (address at the bottom of this page) and make me an author. For enough money, I will search my LP collection again and, if I find the album, I'll give you the information.

Hell, for enough money I'll sell the original LP.

After all, I have the music and I can listen to it any time I want to. I don't need the LP any more.

Joshua Heldreth Apology

Ten Year Old Arrested for Giving Food to Terri Schiavo Apologizes




I've been putting this off because of the plethora of IPSC-related information which has been available during the past month, but I mentioned the article to The Gary during the Croc Match, and told him I was going to post it Real Soon Now (RSN).

No more delays. I think this deserves some attention.


Several months ago, I posted an article describing how several adolescent members of the Keys family were arrested because they trespassed . . . they attempted to bring water to Terri Schaivo after her life support was terminated. (Note broken links to accompanying photos.)

I mentioned that others were also arrested, but I didn't name them (because I didn't have their names). Apparently, 10-year-old Joshua Heldreth, eldest of 8 children, was one of those 'others'.

At the end of August, his punishment was decided. He was to perform 25 hours of community service, and write a 'letter of apology' to the management of the hospice in which Ms. Schiavo was being . . . slowly murdered.

Here are excerpts of young Joshua's letter of apology:

"I was arrested on Good Friday for trespassing on the hospice center's property . . . Not giving Mrs. Shiavo (sic) food or water was wrong. The reason I had to go on your property was because Jesus would do the same thing. It made me sad that she was so thirsty and it made Jesus sad too. I knew she would die without water and I am called by Jesus to be a defender of the defenceless. So I had to go on your property to try to bring her a drink."
(. . .)
"I am sorry that you didn't like that and wouldn't allow me to help save her life and one day you will have to tell God why. I won't be able to help you then like I tried to help her. I will pray for you every day . . ."

You can read the entire article by clicking at the link at the head of this post. Or, you can click on the picture to view the PDF of his original letter.

I don't know if young Joshua is really qualified to speak for Jesus.

But I think he speaks for many people.

And I know a Perfect Squelch when I see one . . .

"I am sorry that you didn't like that and wouldn't allow me to help save her life and one day you will have to tell God why. I won't be able to help you then like I tried to help her. I will pray for you every day . . ."

Blog Maintenance

Over the past couple of days, I've received notefication that spammers are touting their commercial websites in comments to this blog.

(You may not be aware of this, but every comment made generates an email to me. This allows me to know who is saying what. It does NOT tell me which article is being commented upon.)

I looked for the spamnotes in the current posts, and haven't found them yet, so I assume they're not going to be a problem for anybody.

Still, I don't like the idea of my blog being pirated by commercial interests. I would like them to stop it, but I doubt they will do so voluntarily.

Blogger.com offers two tools which would help filter out these commercial entries:

• I can require you to register before your comment is accepted
• I can require you to verify a non-text word (you've seen the goofy typeface letters before)

I don't know about you, but when I care enough about what a blog says, I want to have my say with a minimum of hoops to jump through. It irritates me whenever I go to a typepad-hosted blog, for example, and learn that I have to register before I can comment. Worse, I never remember my ID and password for typepad, so usually I don't say what I had intended. Instead, I just go away mad.

These commercial comments aren't so intrusive that they take up a lot of my time or yours, so for the time being I have decided NOT to make it more difficult to comment to this weblog. If you want to be known as anonymous, that's fine with me. I would prefer that you let me know who you are, but it's your choice. The downside, for you, may be that I don't know who you are so I (and other readers) don't get a sense of continuity if you comment more than once or twice ... unlike, for example, the hobo brasser and norm the ungrateful.

If the commercial comments become a problem for YOU, please let me know. I'll reconsider my decision to make it as easy as possible for folks to add comments.

But I really don't want to impede reader comments. As far as I'm concerned, what YOU have to say is infinitely more interesting to me than what I had to say. Besides, without reader feedback (comments), I don't know if anybody is really interested in what I had to say.

Sure, I subscribe to a statistics service so I know if people are reading the blog. That doesn't count for much, it's just numbers.

Here in Geekistan, we're People Oriented. We want to know who you are, what you think, and what you want to know more about. Anything that makes it more awkward, difficult or inconvenient for you to provide that much-needed feedback is not A Good Thing in my opinion.

What do you think?

ISP Angst

If you read my 'stuff' regularly, you know that I've been agonizing over the choice of a replacement for AOL as my ISP and a 56baud modem as my connection.

(You know you read this stuff, as well as I know it, cause I have your comments. You either read with the hope that I'll say something of interest, or because you are amused by demonstrated Lack of Having A Life, or because you are a masochistic S.O.B. I'm voting for Option "C".)

A month ago, I thought I had a real chance of getting a broadcast WiFi connection. When I called the ISP office, they said "Hey, no problem, we already have a couple of customers on your street!"

This was good news, because I live on a cul-de-sac at the edge of their coverage area. I figure, if the folks across the street (there are only 8 houses on the street!) have a connection, I'm a sure shoo-in!

No joy. They came out and made their WiFi receiver tests, and said they couldn't do business with me. I'm in, like some kind of Oregon Vortex.

Well, I knew that. But I had hoped that the Internet Gods would have cut me a little slack this time. (Foolish boy!)

My remaining choices were between QWEST and COMCAST.

I really don't want COMCAST. I have a TV, but it's not hooked up to anything. I use it to view DVD's, VHS movie tapes, and sometimes to view the tapes I make with my VHS Analogue Video Cam (which I haven't used since I bought the Geek Digicam, on my birthday last February.) S

The alternative seems to be QWEST. Good upload/download speed, about a half-GIG of data storage, and since I'm already a customer they're willing to make me a deal by 'bundling' my services. This means they take the landline, the voice-mail, and the caller-ID charges and discount them ten percent before they add another thirty bucks a month for DSL.

The other alternative (COMCAST, and it looks like a slow runner since every deal they've pitched to me through their snail-mail spaaaaaaam) doesn't seem nearly as attractive. Sure, they'll give me 6 months of service at $30 a month, but the price then jumps up to $60 a month and I have to take Cable TV also. That adds about another $45 a month, for a grand total of $105 a month even though I don't WANT Television Access.

So I'm waffling back and forth, thinking that I don't use my landline except for the 56baud modem thingie, and tonite I tried to pay my QWEST bill online.

I tried six times, and every time I tried to pay my bill with my debit card, the online bill-pay kept coming back to the same screen. No error message, no reason why it wouldn't complete the transaction.

So I called the one-eight hundred phone number, and they can't figure it out either.

Nice lady Rachel told me she would be happy to take the information over the phone so I could complete the transaction.

No word on why the online bill-paying function wouldn't work, so (after assuring her that I had no complaints about her service at ALL) I asked to speak for her supervisor. Told her that I was angry and frustrated and I didn't want to take it out on her.

Her supervisor, Darren, was entirely polite but said he was 'disappointed' when I said I was tired of the QWEST Quik-Step every time I tried to pay my bill online and offered to take care of it personally.

I asked him to take notes, and then told him that I had experienced repeated problems with their online bill-paying, and I was tired of it. I mentioned that I only used the landline connection for Internet connection through AOL, and I just couldn't see any reason why I should have to jump through hoops every month just to pay my bill. This wasn't the first time I had to phone the home office to accomplish this supposed 'convenience', and I was tired of it. I wanted to pay my bill, and I did. But as soon as I could, I planned to discontinue my association with QWEST and use my cell phone for personal voice communications . . . which was provided by VERIZON, their closest competitor in this area.

After I had paid my QWEST bill I did a NetScape search on COMCAST and learned that they couldn't give me ISP service at my address.

Boy, did I feel the fool!

Then I went to one of the secondary links on the search page, and found a third-party provider who could hook me up with COMCAST, provide a six-month discount, and give me free installation of a free modem.

So here's the deal: Free installation (I have to stay home for a half-day so they can install the FREE modem, sometime around the end of the month) and I pay $30 a month for six months. Then the price rises to $49.95 a month for 4000 baud download, 385 baud upload. Plus they give me 50MB online storage . . . which means I have a place to park a few of those MPG files I've been threatening you with for a while.

Let me see: I pay $30 a month for six months, then I pay $50 a month.

And I don't need QWEST, so I save the nominal $60 a month I'm already paying.

Also, I don't need to pay $30 a month for AOL to be my primary ISP. Instead, I can pay $10 a month for minimal service.

Old monthly bills: $60/month for QWEST plus $30 a month for AOL = $90 a month.
New monthly bills: $50 a month for COMCAST plus $10 a month for AOL = $60 a month.

Current expense: 90 x 12 = $1080 per year.
Expected expense: $40 x 12 = $480 per year, a savings of $600.
Next year and successive years: $60 x 12 = $720 per year, a savings of $360.

Besides which, I can save an extra $120 a year if I use one of the SEVEN email addressed available on the COMCAST subscription and completely dump AOL. That's an attractive alternative all in itself.

Not only that, but I get online Internet access from 6 to 10 times faster, and I'm liking that.

Bottom line, I don't have to deal with QWEST any more when bill-paying time comes around, and I may even be able to get rid of the annoying AOL service discontinuities, which happen from time to time.


Right now, even before I get the COMCAST DSL service, I'm looking at a significant monthly savings. Plus I get faster access, plus I get online storage.

The downside?

I have a lot of history with AOL, and I'm taking in terms of archived emails.

I think I can live without that.

Anybody have any downside anecdotal reasons why COMCAST won't work for me?

Not My Favorite Things

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things . . .

Maria's song from "The Sound Of Music" helps us over the hard times, because it lists so poignantly those small 'things' which must bring us small joys and bring a special dimension to our life .

Unfortunately, these are not a common part of our everyday life. What we tend to focus on are the small irritations of day-to-day life, and that is the subject of today's Geek Rant.

Getting up early to go to work, professional frustrations, we have learned to expect these unfavorite things and they don't make us feel bad. In fact, the worst days at work are those in which I don't accomplish as much as I would have hoped. Is it that way with you?

But the niggling little daily irritations started working on my as I got home, and checked my mailbox.

Argh! Circulars, advertisements, and things addressed to "occupant" (or even worse, bulk mailings from Safeway et all with not even a salutation.) These things are an irritation at best, an impediment to my peaceful life at worst. I found myself with a handful of flyers and newsprint-quality advertisements from stores I never shop in. At the trash can, I started to throw them away and somehow caught myself just before I threw them away. Tucked inside the grocery store flyers and bi-monthly Corvallis Disposal newsletters was A Bill. Great for me, that I can toss the junk mail (Snail-Mail's version of SPAAAAAM!) and in so doing fail to pay a bill on time. Great for my credit rating, and more especially great for imposing a late fee because I didn't know I had been billed. Later, I May have wondered why I didn't get a bill for the revolving charge card, but it would probably have been too late to get my payment in before the past-due date.

Do you hate Junk Mail as much as I do?

Later, as I settled into my comfortable computer-desk chair to check my email, the FIRST thing AOL asked me to do was to check my SPAAAAM filer for online junk mail. I had a half-dozen letters asking me to send them money, under one guise or another. Surprisingly, I didn't have a Nigerian Letter variant which suggested that they would share umpteen million dollars in a bank which had been been inundated by the New Orleans flood. However, I was offered some great deals on Viagra, Vitamins, and some stock tips which you gotta see to believe. Good heavens, they must think I am some kind of chump to buy into their trailer park trash. I haven't seen such transparent scams since an Encyclopedia Salesman found my wife's trailer outside the Fort McClellan, Alabama, post limits.



Do you hate online junk mail as much as I do?

After I cleared out THAT trash-pile, I started reading my legitimate email. It was a breath of fresh air when I got to Syd's regular "News From The Sight 1911" email. Syd, I truly enjoy reading what you have to say every couple of weeks, but you were outraged and I am outraged at the news. (Click on the link to see Syd's supporting MSM references.)

Here we have the Mayor of New Orleans confiscating weapons from law-abiding citizens. This is making my scalp crawl. I've tried to find some legal justification for this egregious measure, but it just isn't there. The mayoral dictate is patently illegal, unconstitutional, and the men and women who are required to enforce this measure are as uncomfortable with it as I am. Still, they have been placed under the command of a martinet, and an incompetent one at that. They're banging on doors, and busting heads, and handcuffing solid citizens because those same citizens can't depend on the police to protect them and their property, yet the police are taking away the means to defend the property.

Do you hate Mayor Ray Nagin as much as I do?

Here's what Syd has to say:

News from The Sight M1911

Volume 187, 9/14/05

With the stunning devastation of Katrina receding into sound bite memory for most everyone except those folks who have no homes to go home to, the storm of wind and tidal surges has been replaced by another storm of equal intensity, that of blame, recrimination, and partisan broadsides: The government didn’t do enough. It didn’t do it fast enough. It didn’t move fast enough because the victims were black. It didn’t move fast enough because the victims were poor. The Mayor blew it. The Governor choked up. The FEMA chief was inexperienced. The President was disengaged. Too much of the guard was in Iraq to respond quickly to the disaster. Etc., etc.

I can’t help but wonder if the lion’s share of the emotional voltage of this critique – beyond the obvious, that it provides an arsenal of ammo with which to assail George Bush – comes from the fact that Katrina has laid bare the foundation myth of the nanny state: the government will protect you; the government will fix your problems and heal your wounds. The event showed once again that the government really doesn’t do a very good job of protecting us. Maybe it should, but the reality is that it doesn’t. Those who took responsibility for their own safety and survival came through OK; those who trusted the government’s promise to take care of them were tragically disappointed. The message is clear. The state is not the messiah. When the chips are down, be ready to provide for your own security and survival.

For those of us who care a lot about gun rights, New Orleans is truly “the handwriting on the wall.” When citizens needed their guns the most, the mayor of New Orleans gave an illegal order to his police to confiscate the guns of law abiding citizens. Interestingly, I have yet to hear of a single instance of a law abiding citizen misusing a personal defense firearms to abuse another person, to shoot someone by mistake, or even to resist the illegal orders issued by the mayor. The gun threat from law abiding citizens was purely imaginary, unless, of course, you happened to be a looter. There were enough cops and guard to disarm the victims going into the Superdome, but not enough to protect them from predators once they were inside. We all need to take a few minutes to dig up our states’ emergency powers laws to see just what kind of ugly little surprises might be buried there.

Still, the news from N'Orleans isn't all one-sided. Relief workers are laboring under unusual conditions (no surprise to any of us), and one of the 'unusual conditions' is that they are being shot at (a GREAT surprise to most of us!).

Well, they may not be experiencing combat conditions NOW, but we've all heard/read the news reports of relief workers, helicopters, et al, taking fire while trying to save human lives and relieve human miser.

Man, that really sucks.

Just one more thing that's not among my favorite things.

UPDATE:

There's just one more thing to say.

You know I work at a college. Today, I was walking across campus on my way to lunch, and I saw something I haven't seen for a long, long time.

It was a girl. Long dark hair, brushed and gleaming in the sun. White blouse, emerald green skirt, carrying a handbag and wearing honest-to goodness shoes. No flip-flop shower sandles. No baby-fat pierced-navel tummy hanging out. No slouching, or shuffling, no androgynous indifferent teens-conformist looks. Just a healthy, confident, I-am-what-I-am young woman who obviously enjoys being a girl.

I stopped, and stared, and swore to myself. Look at that, a girl who looks like a GIRL.

By God! As long as there are a few young women who like themselves and have enough self-pride to stride across a college campus with her head held high, there's hope for this old world yet.

Next week, I intend to look for boys who don't have pierced bodyparts and who aren't riding bicycles or skating along on skateboards. I don't have great expectations, but I have high hopes that there is at least one man, and one woman, in this town of thirty thousand. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . they'll meet, and marry, and start a new generation of Americans who have pride of self and dignity to match.

Wouldn't that be something?

thirteen thousand

Although it is not important to everyone, I note that in the past hour my stats counter has logged over 13,000 visitors to this site since I began counting on December 15, 2004.

Your patronage is important to me, and I am grateful that the few dozen people who frequent this website choose to return again and again. Even if the only reason for your visit is to see what indignity I perpetrate next upon the authors of the IPSC rulebook or the English language, I'm glad you came to visit.

This might be called a 'vanity' exercise. I write because I have to, and because . . . uh . . . okay, that pretty much sums it up for me.

I don't write to my family as often as I should, because I don't know what to say to them much of the time. I get tired of saying "My job is about the same, I spent last weekend going to another pistol match, just as I did last weekend and the weekend before that, I am in good health and I hope you are the same." I know they get tired of hearing that, too. Because my interests are not the same as theirs, I don't write to them.

But perhaps my interests do coincide with yours, and so I spend my time writing to you. If you don't like what I have to write about . . . pffft! Don't read it. I wouldn't.

I've been spending a lot of time taking pictures at IPSC matches lately, and I've occasionally conned SWMBO into believing convinced SWMBO that it was at least as much fun to take pictures of IPSC matches as it is to shoot them. She will never believe me again, but at least she took a SLEW of great action pictures before she became entirely disenchanted with photography. She shot a club match this weekend, and had a great match despite her extended hiatus from competition. In recognition of her patience, I made a point of leaving the camera in the car. She appreciated it.

In appreciation of her great contribution to IPSC history, I would like to present a very short video she took a couple of weeks ago, of someone performing an unsafe act at an IPSC match, leading to a match disqualification. This isn't necessarily a criticism of the competitor. I came within a hairs breadth of making the same mistake, within a few inches.

In IPSC, inches matter. A lot.

Anyway, as I say I would LIKE to provide you with a short video, but I won't. I need to turn it into an animated GIF, and the software I have (JASCO Animator, part of the Paint Shop Pro 9 software package) is still new to me. It will take more time than I have available tonite.

The Hobo Brasser is a hard taskmaster, and as Communications Director of the Columbia Cascade Section he expects me to send him the Points Match Standings for the first Points Match of the 2006 season. I haven't got it done, due to circumstances I won't go into, and I won't get it finished tonite.


But I can get a good start on it, so that's what I'll be doing from now until bedtime.

Tomorrow is a school day, and I have a job to do.

Memories of 9/11

Nom de guerre: Rivrdog: Feeling good about 9-11

Rivrdog is a retired Multnomah County (Oregon) Sheriff's Deputy. On 9/11, he was on duty in the Multnomah County Court House in Portland. Today, he recounted his memories of that day, and of the months to follow. He made a difference in his home town.

I wish I could say the same, but I can't. I woke to my clock radio talking about airplanes having crashed into the Twin Towers, first the one, then the other. As I lay there, stunned, wanting to believe that this was a latter-day Orsen Wells radio play, I felt unable to move.

After I heard that the towers had collapsed, I got up long enough to go to the phone and call my office. I said I would not be coming to work today. And then I went back to bed.

A while later, I got up and dressed. Then I sat in my chair and continued to listen to the radio.

Around noon, my daughter phoned me from her home in San Diego. We talked for a while, relishing the human contact. We couldn't reassure each other, because neither of us were yet able to develop any reassuring perspective on the event. Still, it was good to know that we were both still there, still caring, still a part of one another's fragile, necessary lives.

After we said goodbye, I continued to sit there in my lonely room, listening to the radio. I helped nobody, it never occurred to me to call any other members of my family, or my friends. I was not an American, nor did I make a difference.

I just . . . sat.

I sat until the sun went down. Then I turned on the lights, and sat some more. I wasn't in disbelief, only perhaps in mourning. Even that was a small part of it, because I wasn't yet ready to feel anything.

The next day I got up and went to work.

Nothing had been decided, at least by me. All I was doing was carrying on. I went to work, and did my job. It wasn't that I particularly cared about my job that day, it's just that this is what I do, and I did care that someone wouldn't be able to do their job if I didn't do my part.

I hope my reaction, or lack of reaction, wasn't typical. My job didn't seem to make much of a difference in the world, but it was all I had that I could do. Days later I realized that this was all I COULD do, so perhaps my day of stunned non-being will be overlooked by the world.

Recently we had a similar national shock, cause by a natural disaster. The effects were no less in terms of property damage and lives disrupted. We have yet to learn whether the loss of life is more, or less. But (at the risk of seeming to be callous and indifferent to the deaths of my fellow citizens), I was able to function on some level. I got up, I went to work, I did my job.

The difference isn't in the effect; the difference is in the cause.

Hurricane Katrina is responsible for the damage in the Gulf States. This wasn't caused by man's inhumanity to man. I can deal with natural disaster, at least in a small and insignificant sense.

What I can't deal with is the deliberate slaughter of 9/11.

What I can't deal with, what I can't comprehend, is how supposedly rational human beings can deliberately kill so many innocent fellow humans, and justify it by a differing theological or cultural set of priorities.

I know so many good, responsible, admirable people. They would not be capable of unilaterally causing such untold human suffering. They could not inflict such a slaughter of innocents.

How could anyone believe so whole-heartedly in God, that they could justify such a horrible, inhuman act as we experienced (however 'vicariously') on 9/11?

What are we do to with a segment of society which applauds such inhumanity? 9/11 wasn't a natural disaster, against which mankind still, after millenia of technological advance, we still have no defense.

Technology seems only to present new means and opportunities for slaughter. It doesn't protect us from the same disasters we have experienced since time began: comets half distroying the earth, volcanic eruptions, earthquake, fire, flood, blizzard.

What do we have to protect us from our fellow man? God may be the answer, but today it seems again that God, or the false promises of false prophets using God as an excuse, is as much our enemy as the winds and the tides.

But however clement the weather this day, we hold it as a day of national mourning. And we wait. We wait for the next inhumanity to be visited upon us. We hope it will not happen, and it appears that this anniversary of dreadful death has passed us by for this year.

We pray it will not happen again, but with little confidence.

For the horsemen of the Apocalypse have visited on this day, and there is little reason to expect that they will not visit again in future days.

All we have, all we can do, is to do our jobs.

Some are more important than others, some are more meaningful, some are more helpful to others.

For those who went out and did their jobs on 9/11, and in New Orleans, December 7, and all other days of disaster . . . I thank you.

Rivrdog, you're a good man. I thank you personally. I thank you for doing your job, when that is all you could do, and I especially thank you for doing your job when you did more than was expected of you.

This is the kind of man who holds the torch of civilization, when those around him can do nothing more than sit, and listen, and watch.

The Original IPSC Target

Today I revealed The Grand Deception. Namely, that the traditional IPSC target has been designated "The IPSC Metric Design Paper/Cardboard Target" for at least 15 years.

This despite my repeated and loud protests on the Unofficial IPSC list and at least two IPSC-related internet forums that it was arbitrarily so designated when IPSC introduced the "Classic" target in the 14th rule book edition (2001). I wondered how long it would take for someone to actually look through the old editions of the rule books and find out the real name of the IPSC target before the "Classic" was introduced.

The answer is: four years.

The joke has gone on long enough. Today, "IPSC-GUY" called my bluff, and I have to admit that my outraged protest is entirely without substance.

IPSC didn't make up the name "Metric Target" just to distinguish it from the new "Classic" target shape. They used the real, official name which had already been in effect for at least ten years. (I admit I didn't realize this when I made my first protest. I didn't discover it until I looked it up for myself. But it has been an interesting experiment, making all that noise without anybody confronting me with the truth.)

Incidently, the original IPSC target was designated "The Item Target", not the "Metric" Target (even though the dimensions were printed in centimeters rather than in inches.)


Here's a picture of the Item Target, along with an alternative design called the "Boxed Option" target, from the 1st Edition (May, 1983) of the IPSC and USPSA rule book.
(Click on all images for hi-res images).



For your casual information, here's a look at the cover of the 1st Edition rule book.

Part II: 2005 Croc Dundee Banzaii Balistic Match

The scores from the Croc Match are UP!

Yesterday I gave you the walk-through for the first five stages of the Croc Match, along with a representative photo of each stage.

Today, I want to finish the walkthrough. Later, I may be able to give you some of the background and color of the event, even though much of it may be of interest only to the people who actually attended.

(Don't say I didn't warn you that this was a don't-miss-it match. VileBill and Mr. Completely are already kicking themselves that they weren't there, and while I'm not going to give you the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, if you missed it you will never be able to say "I was there". Maybe next year, eh?)

Stage 6 (Bay 5) Combat Rock

49 rounds, 21 IPSC, 5 PP, 2 plates ... 245 points. Course Designer: Shaun Hescock

Starting the stage with a grubby, slimey diddy-bag in front of you is never an auspicious start. In this case, dozens of grubby, slimey IPSC shooters have probably chosen to grip a flap of the bag (filled with bubble-wrap, not a weight issue) in their teeth in order to free their hands for shooting some significant portion of the first 24 rounds in this 49-round stage. (Yes, Virginia, some of the stages DID require less than 50 rounds to complete them . . . but not by much!)

Here, you had the opportunity to engage a forward-falling popper to activate a bobber, and if you were really fast you could also engage the backward-falling popper before engaging the moving target. You could even shoot at the first two IPSC targets visible from the start box, even though it provided no advantage for those who weren't limited by a ten-round magazine capacity restriction.

Eventually, though, you had to carry the bag downrange, and there were one or two 4-target arrays to be engaged while carrying the bag . . . depending upon whether you were able to get rid of the bag while shooting these two arrays.

While I was working as the Range Officer for part of my squad, Robbie (a 15-year old shooter from Red Bluff, California, who was there with his father Tim) came up to the line. He obviously planned to move downrange with the bag held in his teeth. I asked him: "Does it bother you that dozens of grubby, slimey IPSC shooters have probably run this stage with the grubby, slimy diddy bag in their teeth, and have doubtless slobbered all over it?"

Robbie replied: "No."

A man don't get no more eloquent than that.

Still, I offer in evidence the Grubby, Slimey Diddy Bag after four or five squads had had their way with it. The bag started out a uniform washed-out brown color. The black part is the flap where several dozen Gurbby, Slimey IPSC shooters had slobbered all over it as they held it in their mouth.

I wouldn't bite this bag. When I ran this stage, I held it delicately before me betwixt thumb and forefinger . . . and I washed my hands when I was finished with the stage. SWMBO, who was taking lots and lots of excellent photos, tells me that the Super Squad members didn't hold it in their mouth, either. Some of them even threw the bag from the starting position downrange to the brass-colored bucket where they were required to deposit it before engaging the last target array.

Maybe that's how they got to be on the Super Squad. Maybe it's a matter of Survival Instincts. All I know is, most of my squad took the . . . er . . . bag between their teeth and ran with it.

We were not the Super Squad.

Stage 7 (Bay 6 . . . The Pit) Goin' To The Grammy's

57 rounds, 26 IPSC, 3 USP, 2 plates ... 285 points. Course Designer: Bill Marrs

Bill Marrs designed this stage. Anonymous Geek-Blog handle: Barsoom (for reasons which should be obvious who ever read the "John Carter of Mars" novels of Edgar Rice Boroughs ... yes, the same EE Boroughs who wrote the TARZAN series of books. But I digress.)

I never liked the man. He has this EEEVIL streak in him, and once again his stage rose up and bit me in the buttocks.

Okay, so I do like Bill. It's just that I can't shoot a stage designed by him without driving home sitting on one ham.

This one was no different.

Starting out sitting in a "Limo", there is one IPSC target (Hardcover on both sides, naturally, at 50 feet distance) and an 8" plate below it, which can ONLY be engaged by leaning far out of the window of the "Limo". Wouldn't you know it, when/if you hit the plate, it pops up a target.

Wouldn't you know it, the target is a No-shoot. I don't have the numbers to tell you how many people were fooled by this little Barsoom-gambit. I don't think many were sucked into shooting the no-shoot. Still, it gives you a creepy feeling to hit a plate and pop up a no-shoot. From that point on, you just KNOW that the stage designer has been plotting for months to screw you over.

(John Weil, "Big Dog", is shown here engaging targets through the window of the 'Limo'. Click on the picture to see a hi-res version which actually shows the targets very well.)

Ha ha, Barsoom ... I didn't shoot the No-Shoot! (Well, I may have shot AT it, but if I did, I missed it. Did I mention it was a long distance from the awkward shooting position in the Limo?)

After you shoot (or don't) those targets, there are a lot of other targets you can shoot from that awkward position. However, if you merely climb OUT of the Limo, you find that you can get a lot closer to the targets and shoot them in a more comfortable position. Just another way that Barsoom provides entertainment to the spectators, as they watch you (the shooter) hanging half out of a 'Limo' window to take long-distance shots at targets that would be easier engaged elsewhere.

As soon as you climb out of the 'Limo' ( a cramped, confined prop), you get to shoot four really close targets. This is where I got my single miss on this stage . . . it was one of four IPSC targets about four feet from the muzzle, and I got a Delta-Mike on it. Maybe I lost the dot in the sun, maybe I was a little excited.

There were plenty of targets to run past.

The shooter is Luke Britain, in a typical pose where he is grabbing another magazine. Luke showed up with only six 10-round magazines, and ran out of ammunition on at least two stages. He's a good shooter, but when the round-count on a stage is way above the 50-round mark and you have a series of 8-round (minimum) target arrays, and some of those targets are awfully small and awfully far away, it's obvious in retrospect that you need to be packing serious bullet-weight on your belt to get through these high-round-count stages.l

Luke will be back next year, with several more magazines. Luke was talking to me on the last stage (see below) about the Croc Match. He said: "People have been telling me about the Croc Match. They say 'Oh, yeah, the CROC MATCH! I'm going to be there for sure!' I never understood what they were talking about until now. Sure, I wish I had had more magazines, but I don't really care. It's a fun match, you can shoot until you run out of ammunition, and I've never SEEN so many targets all together in one stage before."

Well, actually, you didn't really run past the targets so much as run past the very narrow window through where you could engage them . . . bounded by vision barriers which were built of snow-fencing. They wouldn't let you engage them from close distances, but you could still see them sitting there, mocking you through the snow fencing, which was declared hard-cover/impermeable. We have a technical term for this shooting situation. We call it "Nanny Nanny Boo-Boo, you've just screwed yourself!"

Big Dog has The Perfect Squelch . . . on the back of his shirt.





Stage 8 (The Croc Bay) Graffiti Bridge

54 rounds, 24 IPSC, 6 plates ... 270 points. Course Designer: Trevor Ott

Now, I use to like Trevor. He's a young man, a school teacher (we should honor our teachers), and I don't at all mind that he's a sandbagging son-of-a-gun because as soon as he starts winning in a class . . . he changes division. Always looking for the challenge, Our Trevor, and he certainly presents a challenge on this stage.

This stage was sited katty-wampus on an L-shaped bay. There was a 'bridge' that defined the 180-line, which was actually at a forty-five degree angle to what you might usually consider the perpendicular to the A-line of the bay. The result was an Oregon Vortex, where each shooter experienced more or less confusion about just where he or she was, depending upon how locked in they were mentally to the conventional way of thinking.

I'm a little un-locked, so this was my best stage of the match.


There were two four-target arrays on either side of the Bridge, and you could start on either side. After dumping the 16-rounds (or more) on the relatively close targets, you get to step UP onto the Bridge and walk its parlous planks as you engaged to more close-range 8-round arrays of IPSC targets, and also a 6-plate rack sitting much farther away. It was a classic stage of speed up / slow down / speed up again. Competitors who got carried away on the speed-up portions of the stage couldn't slow down for the more difficult plate targets. Those who got too deeply into the slow-down plates, didn't speed up again for the hoser-arrays (the other two 4-IPSC-target arrays on the other side.)


Andrew Wesley Drew Jacobson, a local Junior, engages mixed IPSC targets from The Bridge.

In this stage, experience counts. Knowing when to minimize your losses counts. Being able to hose the close targets, and still be an accurate shooter when engaging the plate rack in the middle of the stage . . . was critical.

What a RUSH!

The whole darned match was just one gigantic extended adrenallin rush after another, and after two days pushing the Hormone Hosermatch the was nobody who didn't want to do the whole thing over, and nobody had the energy left to actually shoot another stage.

Well, maybe SOMEBODY did, but certainly none of them were Super Seniors!

UPDATE:
December 8, 2005


Photos and Videos (!) from this match are now available at Jerry the Geek's Shooting Gallery.

Day of the Evil Drawstring - Part II

The other day (July 31) I wrote about a reported incident wherein a Marion County Sheriff's Deputy suffered a wound due to a "self-inflicted shooting".

I put the term in quotes, not because I doubt the wound was self-inflicted but because I don't know what else to call it. Accidental, certainly. I use the term "self-inflicted shooting" rather than "accidental" to emphasize that there is no question that no other persons were involved.

This weekend I received a note from Deputy Stephen Cooper, the officer involved, expanding on the description of the incident. I was impressed by the unselfconscious explanation he provided, and I'm a little (well, more than a little) chagrined about referring to the original description as a Rube Goldbergian event. It was, in one sense, but I regret the clear suggestion that the accounting he originally offered was any less than the full unvarnished truth.

This only goes to show that it is far too easy to make judgment when you only hear (or, in this case, read) one side of the story. And I was too ready to make light of the incident, which was unconscionable of me.

The note was in the form of a comment to the original post,

Please use the link to read Deputy Cooper's note. I hope you come away, as I did, with the impression of a long-suffering LEO who has taken so much crap from his brother officers that he can respond to the facetious criticism of a know-nothing blogger with class and humor.

As for you, Deputy Cooper, if you ever find yourself with a free weekend, I hope you'll wander by one of the IPSC matches at Tri-County Gun Club (Sherwood, 3rd Sunday of every month), Chahalem Valley Shooters Club (Dundee, 4th Saturday of every month) or Albany Rifle and Pistol Club (Exit 228 from I-5, south of Albany, 2nd Saturday of every month). Ask anybody there where you can find Jerry the Geek. If you make yourself known to me, I will be grateful for the opportunity to apologize to you in person, in public, and in full sincerity.

Nobody there will bat an eye at your painful tale. We see Accidental Discharges several times a year at IPSC matches. It's just that we always take off our coats and sweatshirts before we holster a gun. It's a luxury which you can't afford.

PS: in the event that you are unable or unwilling to attend, I hope you willsend me an email address where I can, at least, offer you a private apology for ever having doubted you.

Any man who can stand up and say "This is what happened, it doesn't bother me that you're being a dork about it" just naturally deserves to be taken at face value.
__________________________________________________
UPDATE: 13-JUL-2008
This article contains broken links. For the complete story, see "Day of the Evil Drawstring - Part III".

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin

The Intellectual Activist

Our friend, The Hobo Brasser, sent me a copy of this article today. I thought it important enough to bring it to your attention, and also to give the author recognition by providing a link to the original article rather than to quote it entirely.

The Hobo had cleaned up the "FWD: FWD: FWD ...." chain in the headers, but it seems to have made the rounds over the past four days.

Robert Traciniski wrote it for what appears to be a daily / monthly online opinion webmagazine. To be frank, it's one that I had never encountered before, and I am grateful for the introduction.

Here are a few snippets to pique your interest, but I do recommend that you go read the whole thing. It loads fast, it won't take long to read, but it does give an almost unique perspective on the "Unnatural Disaster" in New Orleans.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

. . .

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

. . .

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

. . .

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
. . .

I've stolen too much, and too shamelessly, from the eloquence of this excellent author. I won't try to gild the lily. Please click on the link at the top of the post, and read the whole thing.

2005 Croc Dundee Banzaii Ballistic Match

At last!

I don't know about you, but I've been waiting for months for the Croc Match.

If you're your familiar with the concept, this is an IPSC match featuring (this year) EIGHT stages with every stage requiring at least 50 rounds.

This year, the match was eight stages. Here's the line-up.

(NOTE: SWMBO spent the entire two days taking pictures. She took 692 photos, including the awards ceremony and a couple of dozen motion-picture videos. She got very tired of taking pictures and interviewing people, but this WILL result in a Front Sight article sometime in the intermediate future. We also have another half-gig of photos from Ron Downs, whose pix may be featured in the article or in future Blog entries. Unless you see the photo credit for Ron ... and thanx for sharing those photos, Ron .... all photo credit is SWMBO.)

Stage 1 (Bay 1) Eye of the Tiger

56 rounds, 25 IPSC, 2 USP, 2 plates ... 280 points. Course Designer: Paul Meier

Shoot 'em on the left, shoot 'em on the right, repeat.
Climb a ramp, shoot the eyes out of the tiger (8" steel plates), shoot the US Poppers (bounded by no-shoots) which activate two swingers.

Our squad (Squad 1) started on this stage on Day 1 of 2. It was a hoser stage, until you started shooting at the Eye of the Tiger. Then ... you had better slow down and get your hits, Bubba, 'cause the Tiger will eat you up if you miss!



This is Norm the Ungrateful, eying The Tiger back. He smoked the stage and bit the tiger's tail.

Stage 2 (Bay 2) Rock Around The Croc
56 rounds, 26 IPSC, 4 USP ... 280 points. Course Designer: Mike McCarter

Start holding a metal plate on top of head with both hands, drop the plate into the barrel and it starts two swinging targets. You pretty much HAD to start the stage from the downrange-most position possible, and work yourself back uprange engaging 8-round arrays on both sides of the bay as you went. As was the case with almost every stage, those who were limited to 10-round magazines immediately discovered that the best way to shoot the stage is . . . if you're moving, you had BETTER be reloading! Also as was the case with most stages, it's very difficult to fit this many targets into a single limited-sized bay without inadvertently building in "one-eighty traps". That is, between the need for awkward movement and the extreme angle of engagement, the competitor is required to be very aware of the '180 line'. As far as I know, of the 107 competitors at this (the biggest IPSC match in the PNW?), 7 of them were Match-Disqualified, and all of them for 'breaking the 180'.

Safety was the most important part of the match, of course, and the Range Officers (and the seven Squad Leaders) were specifically enjoined by Range Master Mike McCarter during the Shooter Meeting before the match started to "find for the competitor in questions of scoring, but all Safety Rules WILL be strictly enforced".


The shooter here is Gary Fish, RO is Jerry the Geek. ARO is Charley McAlister, and the observer in the foreground is Area 1 Director Bruce Gary. (More about him later.)


Stage 3 (Bay 3) Over Under Sideways Down

48 rounds, 24 IPSC... 240 points. Course Designer: Barney Brooks

Shoot 'em on the left, shoot 'em on the right,move forward to the window on the left, kneel down to shoot through the low barrel, far right to shoot through the OTHER window, throw yourself down into a prone position to shoot through the low port.

Here Rick Aragon (sporting his sporty Single Stack Match T-shirt) completes the stage under the watchful of RM and RO Mike McCarter.




Stage 4 (Jungle Run) Soda Shop Boogie

50 rounds, 25 IPSC... 250 points. Course Designer: Lorin & Sherri Orpwood

Shhhhh! It's a Surprise Stage!

But I can let you in on this much ...
Be vewy vewy quiet. We are hunting Cardboard.


Stage 5 (Bay 4) :The Doors"

62 rounds, 30 IPSC, 2PP ... 310 points. Course Designer: Marty Lee

Marty is such a quiet, unassuming and friendly guy. You would never guess that he has such a mean streak.
This is the highest round-count stage in the match, the most confusing, and features the most bizarre props.

When you hit the Pepper Poppers at the extreme left or right side of the back of the stage, it opens doors (window, actually) which allow you views of another 8-round array, and close off the view of the 9-round array you have just engaged.



The odd thing is, there's still plenty of room to engage the arrays whether the doors are 'open' or 'closed', because the doors (12" x 16" plywood panels) don't fill the windows (16" x 16" holes in the vision barrier". Why should you worry about the doors? Nobody knows, but almost EVERYBODY allowed themselves to be sucked into the mind-vortex of "following directions".

Me too!
I guess this was just one more example of the many ways in which the Croc Dundee cheerfully play with your mind.


As if that wasn't bad enough, it obfuscated the REAL challenge ... engaging three reclining targets behind barrels on the left side of the stage, which just SCREAMED for you to move&shoot fast.
Unfortunately, it was all too easy to break the 180 while screaming past this earlier barrel-hidden array. Of the 7 DQ's for 180 violations, three of them were in this exact spot!

Gotcha!

This was the last stage that Squad 1 shot on Saturday. I have to tell you, AD1 (Bruce Gary) was the RO when I shot the stage, and he came within a hairs breadth of DQing me for breaking the 180 on that barrel-array. In fact, he actually shouted "STOP!" . . . but I didn't hear him. After I broke for the back wall, he took a close second look at the array, my shooting position (clearly marked by the skid-marks in the gravel surface of the bay, I assume), and decided that although I had come very very close to breaking the 180, I actually engaged the targets within the mandated bounds of safety.

Well, I thought so at the time, but when somebody asked me "where were you when you shot at this target?" I couldn't honestly answer. I was so wrapped up in implementing the best solution to the shooting problem, I was running on auto-pilot and only ASSUMED that I was in a safe position to engage the targets.

It didn't make all THAT much of a difference, as far as my score for that stage was concerned: I had completely blown-by one of the targets, which earned me one procedural penalty and two misses. And I had got Alpha/Mike (or more often Charley/Mike) scores on four other targets, giving me a total of six mikes plus the procedural for a total of eighty points DOWN on a single stage . . . and I still was far from zeroing the stage. That's one good reason for loving a 310-point stage. It's really difficult to zero it unless you do very badly.

Bruce and I spent a lot of time discussing my shoddy performance on that stage, especially (a) whether I realized I was so close to breaking the 180 line (I didn't), and (b) whether he would have actually DQ'd me if I had stopped when he so commanded me to. We never got around to (c) whether I was DQ's even though I failed to stop, or should be DQ'd for not stopping when he gave the command (even though I didn't hear it) just on general principles.

This should be grist for a lot of future discussions, but for now I'm just grateful that I was ultimately judged 'legal' by sufficient margin to be allowed to continue competing on Day 2.

That's all the overview for the first day. Tomorrow, I'll describe the other three stages we so happily endured.

BTW: The match results are not yet available on-line. When they become available, I'll let you know here.