It was just a day in September.

I had worked all night, and come home to find that my wife had the day off, for some reason. She took our daughter to daycare down the block, and we chatted. We had been married for about three and a half years, and were comfortable and familiar, but still, this was a nice day when she was home. I stayed up and might have even had a late cup of coffee, well into the mid morning. It was nice.
We stepped out onto the front porch of the apartment, noticing the less-hot, but still sticky air. Our apartment manager Mac, from next door, told us that he reckoned that we had heard the news. Strangely, I hadn't. I normally would have killed an hour on the internet on my desktop computer (internet on cell phones was in its infancy, and anyway, we didn't have a cell phone), or listening to the radio, but this morning, because my wife was home, I had just enjoyed her company.

So I turned on the television, and we saw the news, and the re-recitation of it for about 3 iterations of the cycle. And the phone rang, and it was my best friend, who told me that we HAD to nuke the Muslims who did this.

I really don't remember what my wife did or said, the rest of the day.

I got to bed at around 1:30 or 2:00 that afternoon (5 hours late), slept poorly, and got up around 7:00pm to hear our President declare that they had identified the group that had attacked our country, and that we would go after them.  I then got ready and showed up early for work for another midnight shift.

17 years later, it suddenly occurs to me that one of the many, MANY casualties of that attack was my lovely day with my wife.

It's nothing, I know. But we didn't have a lot of weekday mornings together, then or now.

I feel ashamed for even thinking about it. People lost their lives, and their families. We lost a little part of our country.

Tell your loved ones how you feel about them. You don't have very many chances to do so. You might even lose the next chance that you think that you'll have.

Deletion

I deleted some online contacts, today. One was Byron Quick. Byron passed away a few years ago. He was a nurse, and a Georgia cracker, and had been a fellow staff member at www.TheFiringLine.com, and at www.TheHighRoad.org. I hunted with Byron, and took meals with Byron, and was his guest, once. I miss his company.

Another was William Bligh-Glover, MD. I wrote here of his passing. I never met him. Still I thought of him as a friend.

Another was Jason Pittman. Jason and I were students in grade school through high school, together. His mother was my teacher. His father was an assistant scoutmaster of my troop. Jason, I am given to understand, fell into drugs and depression (who knows which caused the other), and he took his own life. He had been an Eagle Scout.

The day after his father was buried, I watched my Chief, a friend, delete his father from his cell phone, saying that it was silly to keep it in there. I shook my head, not sure that I could do such a thing with such a cavalier attitude. But I don't think (looking back) that he did it without thought. A photo or a note or a subscription to or a social media "friendship" does not a relationship make. You carry that in your heart. It is not a flag, that you wave.

I don't believe in ghosts. I wish that I did. But I've got some of these people's transferred personalities stored within my wetware*, and so I guess that they live on. In the meantime, this picture reminds me of an adventure in Georgia with my friends. I think that Tamara was already gone, but I don't recall who took this picture. JPG or John may recall. That's Byron in the middle.

_____________________________

*If I could, would I be stored as a RAM AI, like Neuromancer? If I were simply a ROM AI, I would want to be deleted, like Dixie Flatline. 

Ambi safeties.

I don't understand the constant claim that the ability to equally use a firearm with either hand is undesirable.

I've been carrying Glocks and double-action revolvers for the most part for the last 8 years. Sure, I love my beloved 1911s. But you know what's hard? Picking up a stock 1911 with your left hand, knocking off the safety (one-handed), and firing it.

I practice shooting partly because I need to know that in a gunfight, I can do what needs doing. While the chances of getting into a gunfight are small, the chances of me getting shot in a gunfight that I'm participating in are actually pretty high. (Well, higher than I'm comfortable with.) Given that my strong arm would likely be presented to an adversary in a gunfight or even a blade attack, the chances of my strong right arm or hand being injured aren't inconsiderable. Why not have a good plan to end this thing?

I qualify twice a year, and shoot quite a bit more than that. I don't shoot enough left-handed. Whenever I do, I'm reminded of how much I suck at it. I don't see any point in making an already difficult task near impossible. I like small auxiliary ambi safeties.

Admittedly, some ambidextrous safeties aren't made properly or installed properly. I am assuming that you have a quality part and installation. Swenson has made some fine ones for years.

So here I am, at odds with friend Jim Wilson. At least Jim and I agree on the uselessness of full-length guide rods.

Apology

By the way, it was rude of me to hijack Caleb's thread with almost 1500 words in the comments section, and I do apologize. I started out just responding to the post, and the riff just went on and on. I should have reined it in when I started numbering frickin' paragraphs. :rolleyes:

Late October. I won't tell you.

This month has thus far been pretty good, but I won't tell you about it.

--I could tell you about the three-day whistle-stop tour of Blogorado 5, where I had the best time with (roommate) A.D. and JPG and Gay Cynic and Tamara and FarmGirl and FarmFam and Old NFO and Stingray and Scribbler and DirtSailor and ERDoc and Scribbler and all the rest, but I won't. We had a great time.

--I could tell you about the drunk who wanted to fight me but I wouldn't let him, or the other drunk who called me an asshole the whole way to the jail and all through book-in, but I won't.

--I could tell you about the wrecks that I worked wearing each my fireman and my police hats, but I won't.

--I could tell you about the injury, and the recovery, and the costs, but I won't.

--I could tell you about the house repairs and the cars, and the expenses and such, but I won't.

--I suppose that I could tell about the kids, and their accomplishments, failures, and lessons learned, and their doings at the school and in their clubs... but I won't.

--I could talk about new laws and politics and such, but I  won't.

--Work squabbles I never much have written about. And still won't.

--I could talk about gun projects and successes and failures, but I won't.

--I could talk about the busy family weekend coming up, but I won't right here and now.  Maybe later.

It is a good month, and there are drawbacks and successes. But I shall choose to see that things are getting Better and Better.

Go home, Frank C Barnes. You're drunk!

One of my favorite books to kill a few minutes with is the great work by (the late) Frank C. Barnes: Cartridges Of The World. Barnes started the project in the mid-century, and periodically updated it with new editions. I finally threw away my old and yellowed worn-out 2nd Edition copy without a cover, which was missing pages. That old copy referenced .25-06 and .35 Whelen as "wildcats," and which didn't have 10 mm, .40 S&W, or .357 Sig in it. It talked about how the .257 Roberts was being pushed out by the "new 6mms," and talked about how the .45-70 was almost 100 years old!! 

Barnes passed away in the early '90s, and Richard A. Mann picked up the task of updating the mandatory reference manual; it is in its 13th Edition now.  He left in some of Barnes' original descriptions about different cartridges, and put in his own. By and large, he's done a pretty good job, of a pretty good job that Barnes had done. Keep doing a pretty good job for long enough, over a field as broad as this, and you end up with a real work of value. While everyone reads the historical notes and general descriptions of the cartridges, there is also a very valuable specifications section at the back, which gives gross measurements of each cartridge. Most of the rounds have descriptive loads in each section, but I will caution you NOT to use those for hand loading reference. But if you're a shooter, or a collector, or any kind of aficionado of firearms, this is a necessary household reference book.

At any rate, this morning while awaiting my coffee to perk, I let the book fall open where it may, and noticed something odd, for the first time, about the illustration for the classic old black powder cartridge, the .38-40 WCF:

This most certainly is NOT the .38-40 WCF. Perhaps it's the .38-40 WTF?

Without a scale, it's hard to know what caliber is portrayed there. It's obviously a belted magnum, likely of .38 caliber. It has a fairly sharp shoulder, and a long neck. It is most certainly NOT the .38-40 Winchester.
Hey, accidents happen.

Day of pictures, stream of consciousness.

I woke up this afternoon to find that my younger daughter had made a mocha:



Somehow I just knew. Don't ask me how. A father knows these things.

Then I made a run with Dad to Ray's Hardware in Dallas for speedstrips and other stuff. Ray's is really a gunshop. Legend has it that, back in the day, Ray's took in a .22 in exchange for a washtub, and sold the rifle later that day for a handsome profit. This caused more swapping, then dealing, then an FFL, and now they're about three generations into it. Their selection of ammo is pretty wide in cartridge calibers, but not so wide within each caliber. For example, they had about 10 boxes of .41 Long Colt when I checked (I always do, for my buddy LawDog. Sorry  bud-- though it was that same Winchester white box stuff from that run that they made in the '70, I couldn't go $85 a box.), but only two brands of .357 Sig, and only ONE flavor of .22 Hornet.  I got a box of Remington Express.38 S&W 148g LRNs, the only flavor of that caliber they had in stock.

Ray's has a bumper sticker that is seen around Dallas that says "Follow Me Across The Bridge To Ray's Hardware!" It has a picture of the catenary arch central to the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in the middle, which is visible from the front porch of Ray's on Singleton. After we left, we drove across the bridge, and I took a picture of the new-ish structure, built across the Trinity River in 2007. I daresay that it's destined to be thought of as an identifying characteristic of the Dallas skyline. It's pretty striking:



When I got home, Dad gave me one of his Bianchi Speed Strips, some .357 Sig ammo that he had graciously brought for me, and the .38 S&W ammo that he had bought while I was looking at MTM boxes. I gave him all the MTM boxes I had gotten. (two 50-round .38 boxes and two 100 round boxes.)  He had gotten the .38/.357s, and also the .44/.45 type speedstrips.

This of course made me combine my acquisitions:



The result is adorable.

Reaching in my pocket just now to pull out that strip of ammo, I found something in my pocket, a momento from taking my younger daughter shooting:

When I asked my younger daughter if she wanted to go shooting last week, she wanted to grab three things: Her rifle, her hearing protection, and her last remaining Barbie. I guess she wanted to be like her big sister. I found this in the trash yesternight, and grabbed it out to look for holes. The hair is matted from bullets pulling at it, but the head had popped off from a neck shot.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. She got to shoot her grandfather's 1928 Thompson submachinegun. Here's her first burst:

 

Then she set to rolling a milk jug.

Which reminds me, I need to get milk for my wife's coffee in the morning.
Maybe she'll make a mocha.

Wait.

PigPen plays the upright acoustic bass?

It's far easier to accept that Snoopy plays the guitar.

Oops.

Last night my wife and I ran some errands together, and dropped by the local gettin' place.  When I say "local," I mean to say that everyone in town goes to this store, and that it's kind of an informal gathering spot. One of the cashiers made some light joke about "I wish y'all would quit coming by my house all the time unannounced. Last time I barely got the guns and drugs hid in time." For some reason, this guy brings up my job whenever I come in off duty. He knows that I know that he's a pretty straight arrow, and to the best of my knowledge he's not had any problems with the law.

His co-worker then teased me that she had seen my mother (who is my next door neighbor) the other day, and that Mom had all kinds of bad stuff to reveal about me. Also clearly a joke. She finished with something to the extent of: "Oh yeah. She and I sure brought up old times!"

Good-naturedly, I responded, also tongue in cheek: "Old times? I didn't know you were on her caseload from before she retired from CPS."

Instantly, she ducked her head into her shoulders, turned her back toward her co-worker, and said, wide-eyed and sotto voce, "Is that where I knew her from? You know, that was all a big misunderstanding, and we got that straightened out, and they finally closed that case on me, you know..."

I quickly said that I had just been joking, but she kept talking, "I never realized that, the whole time we were talking..."

Cue the crickets.

I explained quickly that my mother had never discussed cases with me, and I fled the store. I found my wife halfway to the car, already. She turned to me, and we exclaimed, in sing-song unison: "Awk-ward!"

And we left.

Project A Kon

And speaking of Larry Correia, that reminds me-- I ran into a guy dressed out as one of his characters out of his excellent series of Monster Hunters International books.

He was very nice, and let me take his picture. I mentioned that I'd been a moderator with Larry at The Firing Line and The High Road for some time, and he asked if I wanted a patch. I've never gotten an MHI patch, so I was excited to get this one. I think that I'm going to sew it onto my patrol bag. I may put velcro on the back, and put it on my department gas mask bag, or on my fast response bag.

I ran into the guy at A-Kon, an anime convention for serious nerds. What was I doing at A-Kon, you may ask? Well, I think that I was being a good daddy. See, my elder daughter and her best friends have gotten deep into reading all manner of Japanese cartoon books called Manga. They watch videos of Japanese anime. They copy hundreds of Japanese pop songs in MP3 format to trade among each other to play on their iPods and phones and convert to CD format to play on my dadgummed car stereo when we go places.

So when my 12 year old daughter, who had just been recognized by Duke TIP as a really bright kid for doing exceptionally well on the SAT in 7th grade, got all A's for the six weeks, the semester, and the school year, she was getting a big reward. And she wanted A-Kon. I took her and her two best friends.

Folks, I've been to a few county fairs, a goat ropin', and I've seen ducks copulate, but I've never seen anything like this.

We drove into downtown Dallas to the hotel. No parking for blocks. We finally drove into a parking garage that was almost full, for $18 to park. We walked into the hotel amidst hundreds-- nay-- thousands of people dressed in various costumes. My daughter was not in costume, but she had dyed her bangs aqua (hey, they grow out). She was so normal-looking, that she was almost invisible. I just wore khakis and comfortable shoes. I was invisible.

We walked in as the conga line of several hundred passed us. The leader was a belly dancer with 8 foot butterfly wings of gold. Following her were all manner of costumed nerds who were in their natural habitat, mostly between the ages of 14 and 30.

It was as if, repressed of their chance to be social during their daily lives, these youngsters had finally found Their People, and took the opportunity to crawl out of their shells. They were jubilant. When they found someone in a similar costume, depicting the same character that they had come dressed as, they didn't get upset. Indeed, they would happily embrace, as would long-lost friends who had finally reunited. I saw this over and over again. They minded not at all if you asked to take a picture of them (or better yet, with them). It was a high compliment, and the most popular had worked on their poses. My daughter was a little jealous of her friend who was repeatedly recognized for the character whose costume she wore.

I paid the registration fee for all four of us. But that was it. (Besides snacks, lunch, supper, and a little help with a pin when a girl came up short.)

We saw furries, cross-dressers, perverts, and robots, both real and imagined. We saw storm troopers. We saw girl storm troopers. We saw video game characters. We saw faux Florentine fencing demonstrations. We saw people dressed as stone angels. We saw browncoats. We saw steampunks. We saw movie heroines. We saw superheroes. We saw strange mixes of culture that defied explanation. It was a throng of nerd-dom, taking up three stories of the hotel.

And next year, if she gets all A's, I'll take her to do it again.

Air conditioning project.

Supposedly, the hardest part of the project is behind us. I ran the ridiculously-expensive 7/8" copper freon lines ($259 plus tax) and a3/8" partner (~$60), which I coated in the best insulation that I could buy (~$120 worth), through the attic last night. They barely reach the utility closet without an inch to spare, which is good, because they only sell the copper A/C lines in 50 foot lengths at my local A/C supply house. This was particularly arduous because the attic was very warm, and I had about 24" of blown-in insulation covering the joists that I was trying to walk on so as not to fall through the ceiling, while directing a very delicate pipe through the attic around ducts and trusses and such. Whot phun.

Today, I need to build out the ducting from the coils to the plenum, reconnect the stovepipe to the heater (need more stove pipe. Why do the sections keep coming apart? It's not supposed to be this hard.), connect the copper to the outside compressor and the inside evaporator, and connect the electrical, and see if it turns on. We shall see.

Total price tag thus far for a new 5 tonne gas furnace and 5 tonne a/c unit is about $1900, but I reckon with the cost of incidentals like fuel to and from the store, some tools, and such, I'll be well over $2k.

By the way, the Shark Bite water connection devices, which simply push onto the pipe to connect copper to copper, or even copper to PVC, are pretty nifty. They made the re-installation of the hot water heater take less time than it took to even cut one of the copper pipes that originally connected it to the house water system.

My partner's dad needs a special thank-you when this is done. The guy is working like a dog for me, for free, because he apparently just wants to. I can't express my gratitude to the guy enough.

This and that.

Sorry I've not been feeling it in the form of good blogging, lately. We'll try the shotgun approach:

• --I bought a '94 Dodge van last week for $500. It runs like a top, has good A/C, a trailer hitch and working trailer lights connections, good rubber, and a stout luggage rack. It doesn't have any seats behind the front seats. Time to do some chores that I've been meaning to tend to, and I may just put together some kind of business with my shift partner. We'll see. In the mean time, the ride makes me look like a prime suspect for any future abductions. The word "skeevy" comes to mind.


• --I bought my wife an iPad 2 in 32gig 3G. It was difficult to find. The guy at Radio Shack was so customer friendly, he put me on a list and called me and held it for me when it came in. That guy needs a raise. The wife loves the iPad. I don't know yet just how useful it is. I can't type on it very well, though Marko says that he can, pretty well. Marko does not have hands as big and clumsy as I do. Neither did the silverback Lowland Gorilla that I saw today at the Dallas Zoo.


• --When we took my daughters and friends to the zoo today, we found parking was $7 per car (we took two), and admission was $12 a head. Then there was the cost of food inside. The animals ate well. Giraffes eat romaine lettuce and RyeCrisp crackers that you can buy from a vendor there. The bald eagle ate fresh quail. The fossa had a very nice looking rabbit. I don't recall my parents spending so much when they took me to the zoo as a kid. Still, we liked it.


• --Dunno what other heeled visitors were carrying, but with the temps in the high 80's, I just wore my standard J-frame stoked with +P .38 Spl, with a NY reload of a P3AT in my pocket. The roundbutt .38 rode VERY nicely in my new but steadily-being-worn holster by Mike, which I need to do a review on soon.


• --I found myself the other day able to compare Tamara's favorite Stone's Ruination IPA with my old standard Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. The Ruination has a more pure note of bitterness all the way from the initial sip through the fair-thee-well. The Dogfish Head has a more complex flavor, with more malt and mouth feel. The head is almost crunchy. This will require more study. --I used the van tonight to fetch home 24 bales of Owens Corning pink insulation and a blower, so that in the morning I might blow in about 12" of insulation into my mom's attic and perhaps another 6" over my garage.


• --My wife made a wonderful curry with venison on Thursday, and it suffers not one whit as leftovers, served over fluffy basmati rice. It seems that pressure-cooked venison makes a superb base for curry. If you're concerned about the gamey flavor of venison (we're not), may I heartily recommend you try it in a vindaloo?


• --I was able to help a local family out recently, after their kid went on the lam, merely by picking up the phone and calling a fellow law enforcement professional. It seems the run-away son got himself picked up (in Texas, you can be a runaway at 17, but can still be held in grown-up jail for your criminal actions) for a minor misdemeanor (fibbing about his age). LawDog made sure that, while his stay may not have been comfortable or fun, it was at least safe and reasonably smooth. Classification is something of an art, and sometimes it takes a nudge from an artist with LD's knowhow to keep the puppies out of the wolves' dens. Problem child is back at home, mending fences. With a little help from some people he's never even met, he'll get by. (Thanks, 'Dog.)

Ridiculous off-duty.

Pretty much, every day this next two weeks that I'm not at my day job, I'll be working off-duty. I've signed up for 80 hours' worth.

The good news is, this is one of the sweetest off-duty gigs that I've ever had thrown my way. I wish it could go on for many more weeks. If I get every single shift that I've signed up for, I will be set for this semester and next semester for my grad school (this should finally end this lengthy ride), and pay for my wife's school this semester and next, along with paying off a lingering credit card debt that we haven't been able to retire since our vacation last year.

I didn't set the rate. I would have been embarrassed to ask for that much, given how easy the work is.

A strange phenomenon

Look, I understand about depression. I go there, sometimes. I've been there for longer periods than I'd care to admit. Sometimes it's a state of humanity.

What I don't fully understand is cutting.

I run across cutters a fair bit in my job. I don't want to categorize or anything (middleclasswhitekids), but I do see some consistencies.

Cutters usually don't go very deep. Most break the skin to bleed, but don't really do any nerve and/or ligament damage. Often it's not even triple-thickness cuts. I've seen quite a few where there was a long series of parallel cuts down the arm or leg, which cuts barely bled. Occasionally you'll see deeper, but usually not.

Question: Does this really count as harming yourself? As a desire to do further, more significant harm to yourself?*

People give themselves homemade tats, and most people don't blink an eye. I know of a frat that engages in branding, and people don't much notice. Piercings, gaugings, sub-dermal inserts-- all of these are a form of self-mutilation. But say that a person is a cutter, and people freak, and sometimes even declare that the person is an active danger to himself, who must be taken into immediate medical and psychiatric care, whether or not the patient wants it.

As a libertarian, I say, let 'em go, unless someone else's life is threatened.

As a cop, I have a duty to protect them, if they're an active danger, even if only to themselves. So I try to evaluate if this person seems to be such a danger. Unfortunately, my evaluation is only given a grain of salt, so I have to call in the Ambulance Drivers, who sometimes take a different vies of things than I do.

There are more sanitary ways of self-destruction, people.

________________________
*2nd half of the question was edited later after original post.

This is getting old.

The most common (and apparently powerful) attack on the Tea Party movement that the Obama supporters have is race. You don't like the current administration, and some of you who are critical have been outspoken racists. Ergo: Your entire movement is racist. (Guilt By Association. Circumstantial ad hominem. Hasty Generalization. How many logical fallacies can they employ?)

You get people like those at Don't Tea On Me, who point to a single data point, and conclude that the argument is invalid, and thus the only answer for why you're critical of their side is that you're a racist.

The anonymous author of the story seems to interpret that graph differently than I do.

From what I can see, it shows that spending goes up during war. Even that's lamentable. Reagan ended the Cold War by outspending the communist bloc. Bush I spent in Iraq, Bush II spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I think that both Bushes overspent, I can't help but notice that the graph goes up at its steepest rate during the present President's administration.

That increase was predicted by the critics that heard the amazing array of government spending projects that were promised during the last presidential campaign. Give our President that: he's a man of his word, who spent and spent with his cohorts in Congress.

Again, though: it's offensive to be called a racist, simply for being the loyal opposition. I have NEVER thought of the President's race as a liability. Nor have any of my friends who are critics of him.

The truth is, the biggest wedge between the current President's administration and its critics are the knee-jerk supporters, who mindlessly attack the critical pundits with name-calling.

May is Zombie Awareness Month.

Have you got your gray awareness ribbon?

Bah. Humbug. Thank you.

There's snow on the ground. My girls were giddy as I took them to school today. It won't last, but it's a fun sight for north Texas in early December.

The New York Times published a fun little bit of history: The original manuscript for A Christmas Carol. Like I always do, I flipped quickly to my favorite part, about Old Fezziwig:

“He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”

“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.”

Dickens was writing about more than some silly feeling evoked by a season. He was writing about the simple acts of kindness that bring dignity and even joy to one's labors. You may not be a supervisor, but you probably have co-workers. You, by yourself, can make their existence a little more cheerful, and not in that schmaltzy way of greeting cards and tinsel. Every time you make a person feel welcome at their job, or proud of their work, you have helped give their life some more meaning.

I'm not kidding about this.

Try to catch somebody doing their job well, and tell them that you notice it. And after chatting with a co-worker or a friend or even a family member, thank them for their time and conversation. (I learned this last one recently from my friend John Shirley, who teaches me small but important things, once in a while.)

Consider this my late Thanksgiving post. I give thanks for those around me-- even strangers-- who help give joy and meaning to my life.

“A small matter,” said the Ghost, “to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.”

“Small!” echoed Scrooge.

Silly little scam email.

We all get Nigerian 419 scam emails. This one hit my email today, and banks on the recipient's greed that they will send $219 in the hopes of getting free money.

Believe it or not, I actually had someone receive some very nicely-forged travelers cheques and try to cash them before sending money, and they brought them to my PD to make a complaint. I asked whether the complainant had sent any money, and the complainant responded that they thought that it probably was a scam, and had not. I didn't even bother with a case number, typing a quick incident report instead. There's zero chance of catching these international folk. You just have to be alert, and send to money to uninvited emails.

I post this scam text in its entirety simply to document it on the search engines. Then again, people who are smart enough to check the text via a search engine are usually smart enough to know not to respond to this kind of scam.

The email title is: Alert:shipment information

"Customer Service:We have been waiting for you to contact us for your Package that is been registeredwith us for shipping to your residential location. We had thought that your sendergave you our contact details. It may interest you to know that a letter is also addedto your package. However, we cannot quote the content of your package, except that ithas a Bank Draft worth of $288,000.00 (Two Hundred and Eighty Eight Thousand USDollars). As you know, FedEx does not ship money in CASH or in CHEQUES but BANKDRAFTS are shippable.

The package is registered with us for mailing by an official of the united nationoffice in UK. We are sending you this email because your package is been registeredon a Special Order. What you have to do now, is to contact our Delivery Departmentfor immediate dispatch of your package to your residential address. Note that as soonas our Delivery Team confirms your information, it will take three (3) working days(72Hrs) for your package to arrive at your designated destination.For your information, the VAT & Shipping charges as well as Insurance fees have beenpaid by your colleague before your package was registered.Note that the payment that is made on the Insurance, Premium & ClearanceCertificates, are to certify that the Bank Draft is not a Drug Affiliated Fund DAF)neither is it funds to sponsor Terrorism in your country. This will help you avoidany form of query from the Monetary Authority of your country.However, you will have to pay a sum of £105 GBP which is equivalent to $210 USD tothe FedEx Delivery Department being full payment for the Security Keeping Fee of theFedEx Company as stated in our privacy terms & condition page. Also be informed thatyour colleague wished to pay for the Security Keeping charges, but we do not acceptsuch payments considering the fact that all items & packages that is registered withus have a time limitation and we cannot accept payment without knowing when you willbe picking up the package or even respond to us. So we cannot take the risk to haveaccepted such a payment incase of any possible demurrage. Kindly note that yourcolleague did not leave us with any further information.We hope that you respond to us as soon as possible because if you fail to responduntil the expiry date of the foremost package, we may refer the package to theBritish Commission for Welfare as the package do not have a return address. Kindlycontact the delivery department (FedEx Delivery Post) with the details given below:
Contact Person: Mr. Richard raynor
Email: fedex.09_@live.com
Tel: +234-7062266794
Kindly complete the below form and send it to the email address given above.. This is mandatory to reconfirm your Postal address and telephone numbers.
FULL NAMES:
TELEPHONE:
POSTAL ADDRESS:
CITY:
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Come one, come all! (Sheesh.)

Want to know why the news media are having to beg for audiences? Why newspapers are going under?

Markets are different, sure, but the main thing is: They don't even respect themselves, anymore.

They invite user participation. "What Do YOU Think?" "Sound Off!" "Log On To WWW.NewzKrap.Com, And Give Your Opinion!."

Remember when you had to be a trained journalist to end up in the newspaper? Or at least have your letter vetted by an editor, to appear on the editorial page?

Nowadays, they put up Comments sections of their news sites. Worse, the comments are allowed to be submitted anonymously. Still worse, there's no review of them before they are posted.

Case in point: Yesterday, the story came out that a mentally ill young man was shot with a taser by Fort Worth Police officers, and the man died. They precise mechanism of death is unknown. The precise actions by the officers before the tasing are unknown. The exact actions of the deceased and the description of the setting are unknown.

But there's a comment section following the sparse NBC story. 1/2 of the comments say the cops are thugs who should be put in jail for killing that poor little black boy (Oh, did I mention that there was a racial component to this?), and 1/2 the comments declare that any cop who kills "one of them" is a hero, regardless of the circumstance. The comments run into the hundreds, and eventually turn into a back-and-forth, which becomes less about the story than jibes at each other.

And why?

While I know that this is the Age Of The Common Man, let me just point out that when the journalists seek amateur input and it seems common and natural enough, we'd either be horrified or laugh our collective butts off if an amateur tried his hand at impromptu attempts at other professions, like surgery, or aircraft piloting, or electrical engineering.

Everyone is NOT special. Everyone, including me, is NOT a writer.

Your opinion? Just might not matter enough that I need to read it.

Hey? News venues? Turn off the comments to your stories. The irritainment just isn't worth it.

_________________________
"Everyone is special, Dash."
"Which is another way of saying no one is." (At 6:10)
__________________________

"You won't even go to your own son's graduation."
"It's not a graduation. He is moving from the fourth grade to the fifth grade."
"It's a ceremony!"
"It's psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!" (At 6:12)

It's Istanbul Not Constantinople.

What do we call Burma now? Myanmar.
What do we call Pretoria, South Africa now? Tshwane

I can't keep up with them all. I grant that new African countries would have new names, or re-use old ones. I get that Yugoslavian subdivisions got renamed. That figures. Likewise with the former USSR districts, regions, and states.

Recent events in India underscored that some of their better-known towns just flat changed their names without asking us:
Calcutta to Kolkata.
Madras to Chennai.
Bombay to Mumbai.

Lots of geographic geekery to be found here about name changes.

But here's a question I've had for a while, which I've never had a satisfactory answer to:
Why do we still call Bangkok "Bankok," when everyone in Siam Thailand calls it Krung Thep?

8 million residents there call it that. It's short for "Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit," which could really cost you to utter, when the meter's running on the cab you just hailed. ______________________________________________________

Click above to embiggen.[ate.][(ify.)]

Speaking of a practical use for knowledge of geographic name changes, my wife picked up a Replogle 12 Inch Starlight Globe fairly recently, at an auction. She seemed surprised at how happy this little $5 purchase made me, and said "I'm sure that it's not anywhere near current." Almost 11 years of marriage, and this woman still doesn't really know me fully. Of course it's not current! That's its charm! I was tickled to find that it didn't have a visible copyright date near the legend in the S. Pacific (where they put pretty much all the legends on globes, right?). Finding out when the map or the globe was made is half the fun of an old globe. Usually the answer is most easily found in Africa, specifically toward the south of that continent. But I started with the Middle East:

Click to embiggen.

See that place where Oman should be? It's listed as Muscat & Oman. That puts it as being prior to 1975, and probably earlier. See that pink area where Yemen should be? That's the Aden Protectorate. See the orange area listed as "Yemen"? That's North Yemen, which declared itself a republic in 1962. The Brits withdrew from the Aden Protectorate in 1967. Aha! We're getting closer. Let's see... does it help that Abu Dhabi isn't listed? Nah-- we wouldn't have seen it before '68 or the U.A.E. creation in '71. The Somali Republic had gained its independence from Britain in 1960, and Djibouti (French Somalia) didn't gain independence from France until 1977, so that's no help.

Let's check west Africa-- Western Sahara was still Spanish Sahara. Guinea-Basseu was still Portuguese Guinea. These do nothing to help me-- they still went by those old names in the early 1970s. Togo was no longer French Togoland, which put it later than mid-1960. Benin was still humorously named Dahomey, but that would last until 1970. Equitorial Guinea was still called Spanish Guinea. The Gambia got indepenence in 1965, but never changed its name.
Well, it's time to cheat, and go down to south Africa:
South West Africa hadn't yet re-invented itself Namibia, which they did in 1968. Aha! South Rhodesia hadn't yet changed its name to Zimbabwe in 1964.

And the clencher: Northern Rhodesia was a British protectorate from 1963 to 1964, when it became Zambia. (Well, it was also a British protectorate from 1924 to 1953, but we've already established that this globe's not that old.)

So, neat globe from the early Johnson administration. 1963. The world was really changing back then.

As I noted up above, it still changes even now, as well. Hour by hour.

But back then, the changes came so fast and furious, they would make you dizzy: