Grimy.

Theo Cottle is a photographer who documents the less glamorous sides of places like Thailand and Germany and the UK. His work is not pornographic, but it's unsavory, and some of it might not be safe for work.

Looking at his documentation of skinheads in the street, I am struck by the common traits among trash in different modern cultures, spanning different races that disdain each other.

Some of these people have less in common with me than the African bushmen, or the Dani of New Guinea.

I am a little defensive of the redneck, at times. There is a popular misconception that the term "redneck" is synonymous with "white trash." That's simply not true. While the terms are not mutually exclusive and there can be some overlap, that's just like saying "plumber" and "Catholic" can overlap.

White trash is world-wide, and even redneck white trash can span continents. Just ask the dwanky zef Boer trash that is Die Antwoord. (Don't watch that. Well, okay, you can watch that, but DON'T watch this. Seriously.)

Trash is universal. Why isn't distaste for it universal?

Weekend projects

Ventilating the shed.
When we bought this house, one of the attractive features was that there was a garden shed built in the back. It had been custom-made by the previous tenant's ex-husband, who was something of a craftsman. He had made the hinges himself (he was a welder by trade), and had put the shed together very snugly.
Actually, he did TOO good a job at making it snug. He didn't even use trim; the joints are all so close that he just ran a bead of caulk to seal them. The door is good-sized, and I literally had to lean on the door to get it to compress the air inside, so that I could latch it.

While this is good for keeping your lawn tools dry, it also means that it has been death to enter that shed in the summertime. We genuinely have feared for the lives of our cats, should one get caught in there for more than a couple of minutes while exploring a the opened shed and then get locked in when we close it. So, ventilation.

We went to a construction salvage store yesterday, and bought a new back door for the house. While there, I saw some nice used gable vents. I have made gable vents, while I was a carpenter's helper. It was a pain to do, right. These looked pretty good. We bought them, and I put them into the shed.

Modifying the gable by cutting a 12"X18" hole.

First vent installed.



Second vent, installed.

 The difference was immediate. The door swings shut effortlessly, too. Fear not; both vents are screened in the back. Strangely, they were already painted a shade that worked pretty well with the extant shed gables. Yay, me.

Cat Door.
This one, we haven't solved, correctly, yet. We wanted to make it so that only our cats could come and go. We bought a cat door for the garage that would only let in the cat with the magnetic bobbin on his collar. In short order, he lost the collar, and butted his way through, breaking the door.
I've noticed that the neighbor cat has been coming in.
We have a second door through the kitchen door to the garage. Its locking device was broken by our boulder-headed cat, as well, but the flap remains. My wife installed stops (many screws, with their heads sticking up) into the cat passage, to prevent the flap from opening inward. Thus, the cats can exit to crap, but cannot creep back in. They must been ushered in. We'll see if this works.

Looking online, there are auto doors that use the RFID chip in your animal to let them in, which you can program for only one of your animals. Smart. Neither of our cats is chipped. Also, they're made of plastic parts, as well. I'm not spending $150 (before $70 to chip the stupid cats) for another plastic door. That plastic hinge with a flexible poly door is a fatal flaw. Make the whole thing out of sheet steel/aluminum, and I'm there. I might even go higher. I don't dote on those vomiting, shedding, annoying pieces of crap. But they matter to my wife and my daughters, and I'm lazy, so I'd actually go $200 to not have to deal with this anymore.

That neighbor cat has a collar and tags. It would give me only momentary satisfaction to deal with it the way I first was tempted to. Unless there is danger, I'm against killing someone's pet, as a rule, even if it's trespassing. It's not HIS fault that we make the food in our house accessible to him. We need to put a stop to this, though. I don't want opossums or raccoons in here.

Gimme a hand, here:

I'm trying to find a blog. One of the writers in the blogosphere wrote a couple of years ago a story about his past that beautifully illustrated the illusion of doing good with other people's money. He wrote about how, as a teenaged churchgoer, he had joined the church early, and took part in his church's decision-making process. When they had all but decided not to fund a foreign mission, he related, he gave a spirited speech that shamed those who voted against funding the mission, and moved the congregation to vote to spend the money, not yet budgeted. He had been quite proud of himself. Afterwards, one of the church elders took him to lunch, and asked him how much extra he himself planned to contribute to the missionary fund. He, a broke teenager, mumbled that he was kind of short for cash just then. That's when the Dutch uncle of an elder pointed out that it was one thing to have good intentions with other people's money, but that it wasn't genuine charity, and at some point you had to put up or shut up.

I know he's just a degree of separation away.

Help me, friends, to find this blog. I want to print it and present it to a couple of people in my graduate Public Administration class, quite badly. :)

First day of Firearms Instructor School.

First, I noticed that the class is small. Just 6 of us.

I was impressed that they gave full measure for this class. We did NOT go home early. We did NOT take a long lunch break.

We talked about the role of the instructor, and spent a goodly time on the issue of integrity. I was pleased with this. Integrity needs to be adhered to, when you're a lowly officer, qualifying chiefs and lieutenants and other superior officers (or buddies!) to carry guns. Sometimes you're going to have to tell them to re-shoot. And if they don't do it on the re-shoot, they have to take a remedial class. And if they don't pass after the remedial class, then what?

The pressure to pass someone who failed can be very strong. But you can't do it.

In my department, I work with a handful of men. I eat with their families. I know their children's names, and all their wives. That's a tough one to have to tell them that they didn't qualify, if we set a standard that they don't meet. But I may very well have to do that, at some point. I'll for damned sure keep the standard high. And I'll raise it.

After lunch, we took a pre-test, and went to the range. This was a nice indoor range, and the targets were computer-controlled. The range officer stood behind us with a remote, and rather than giving us an audible signal to shoot, would tell us to make ready, and the targets, which had been hanging edge-on to us up to that point, would turn 90 degrees and give us the alotted time to shoot at them before quickly flipping back to edge-on, at the end of the given time.

A typical instruction would be: "Six rounds, fired from the holster at 25 yards, in strings of two shots each over 5 seconds. Shooters ready!" Flip. Target is presented for 5 seconds while you leisurely draw your pistol and shoot it twice before the target disappears. "Reholster! Shooters ready!" Flip. 2 shots. Repeat.

We shot the same course with revolver as we did with our duty pistols.

Some of the people in there had rarely shot revolvers before, and had borrowed one.

Two of the guys with borrowed revolvers were SWAT guys that I knew from the County. I saw their revolver targets, and commented on how tight the groups were. Considering a third of our shooting was done at 25 yards, the fact that their timed, offhand groups were all under 6" was impressive.

They failed, and had to re-shoot.

"Huh?!? There's a mistake here!" I said. I pointed to my target, that had passed easily with two thrown shots and a "group" on target that looked like a shotgun pattern from a distant range. If my piddlin' efforts had passed the 90% requirement, then surely theirs had.

But no.

They reshot. I asked if I could reshoot, too, just for the trigger time. This time, I threw THREE shots, and my group was even wider, but I passed again. (I had also put all my shots at less than 15 yards into the head, which was fairly tight but for one that hung outside of the ear of the silhouette.) But this time, I had noticed something about how I shot, and how the others shot. Generally, I was reholstered with a loaded revolver as the targets turned away from us. Some others shot right up to the last semi-second. Sometimes I would have partially reloaded my speedloader before the targets turned away.

Their groups were small, but in the end, they were scoring low because they weren't finishing their strings before the end of the time limits.

I'm not a licensed instructor, so I let the chips fall where they may. Luckily, the guy who was in the most trouble managed (barely) to make 90%. I told him my theory. "In the spirit of this Instructor's Course, you want my diagnosis of what your problem is?" I asked. He nodded assent. "You're too much of a perfectionist," I began.

"Well, I didn't do perfect with the revolver," he said, dejected.

"No, you did great with it, and a borrowed gun, too," I countered. "The problem was that you can't bear to see your tight groups open up. How dead do you want your target to be, anyway?"

"Accuracy is important," he said.

"It is! And I admire that you're accounting for every shot. But a necessary shot not taken is a miss. Turn up the volume, shoot faster, let your groups open up a little, and WIN. You don't get scored for Closest To Center. You get scored for Hits on the A-zone," I said. "Don't forget that your only problem is that you're such a good shooter, you've been penalizing yourself for anything less than perfection."

"Thanks," he said, and smiled, and maybe some of that smile was genuine.

____________

We all asked to stay late and shoot longer than the time alotted. It's a motivated class.

I picked up about 200+ .38 Special cases.

The guy beside me shooting his custom Kimber picked up all his .45 acp cases, and all the auto cases were either .40 or .357 Sig; I didn't want them.

_____________

I challenged the guy with the Kimber beside me to shoot headshots during a followup round. The instructor heard this and got my promise to do 10 pushups for every dropped shot. My range buddy chickened out, and I still have thirty pushups to do. :(

More soon. Tomorrow morning is shotguns.

Pale blue dot.

For too many, Carl Sagan was just a running joke about "billions and billions." But the man was taken with the giant* scale of the universe. As a thinking man, he couldn't help but have that affect his philosophy.

Take three and a half minutes, and go listen to the simple, profound words of a great thinker whom we lost too early.

_______________
*Edit.

Political Distribution.

There are shades of gray.


It would seem that people are so busy identifying the difference between black and white, that they forget that the vast majority of the world falls somewhere in between.


Most people tend to think of their political affiliations as falling along a single line, like this:

But it's not really that simple. It's at the very least two-dimensional, like this:

The above graphic is one that I sketched from memory, from a lecture by Dr. Robert Taylor in a graduate class on terrorism. This was early on in the class, and we were discussing what drives people that were allegedly on opposite ends of the political spectrum to take up very, very similar positions and tactics.

It's funny how worked up people get in their identity with regard to which side of the centerline that they fall.

I worry about the polarization that I see in our nation.

I worry about the civil Cold War that looms.

Uh thanks. But you're still a scam.

Oh, National Scholars Honor Society. How you still pester me. You pester me not for the glory of academia. You pester me not for the recognition of honor.

You pester me for money.

Which I shall not bestow upon you. Because you're still a scam.

No pride there.

We just got our tax return back, and it was over $2000. We paid off our interest-free deferred-payment debt on the stone, ceramic, and bamboo that we had bought for the house while renovating. We had 6 more months to do it in, but we don't like having debt out there, so we just paid it.

I'm not particularly proud of this, because I know that I lost a little money in the deal.

Dollars half a year from now will be worth less than dollars today do. Getting those already-discounted materials on interest-free credit for a year meant that we were essentially getting to discount the cost (well, the value of the cost) still further.

That $2k that I got back from Uncle Sugar was an interest-free loan that I made for most of a year. If I had calculated a little more carefully, I could have gone without making that loan. But, in truth, I probably wouldn't have saved it, and that depresses me. And while I could have taken it and invested it to bring a few dollars in interest before paying off the materials debt, I'm lazy enough that I frankly just would rather not worry about it, and would rather pay it off. And that depresses me.

To me, any time that I get a large tax return check, I feel like I'm a big sucker. But I still deposit it and utilize it. Yes, I do.

Oh yeah? How the hell do you know?

Tamara wrote an amusing yet profound little vignette of an example of why she's found herself withdrawing from many public firearm fora as of late, due to the the unfortunate nexus of the Information Age and the Age Of The Common Man.

Dad responds in agreement, and elaborates quite well.

In the field of firearms, I note some common threads:

1. Seems like everyone loves and recommends the gun that they own or owned or have been issued, and have had satisfactory experience with.
2. Just about everyone who has extensive experience with given firearm will assign its qualities to every other specimen of the type.
3. Generally, people will mistake being an expert with a single specific type of weapon (and most likely, a single specimen thereof) with being an expert in that entire genre. I.E.: "I know all about the Glock 31, which makes me an expert in duty pistols."

I'm quite certain that such foolishness is found in other fields of study, but it seems most pronounced in the study of guns, which gets people all caught up in mysticism and pride issues.

When you find a genuine possessor of knowledge on a topic, take the time to verify it, and then rejoice and be sure to do others a favor by identifying that person properly. If more experts were allowed to speak to the subject of their expertise, and more people would shut up and listen, this world would be a better place, wouldn't it?

I've got a lot yet to learn from Dad and Tamara, both. Among others.

Pickin' and Grinnin'

My wife and kids and I arose at 06:00 and went with my mom to go pick blueberries again this morning. Mom got a couple of quarts, and my wife and I picked enough to bulge out seven 1-quart storage bags well beyond their normal capacity, plus a pint or so that we ate fresh right away.

My girls picked about a quart of blackberries, too. We froze those, putting them on a pan single-layer and freezing them before bagging them for storage.

We are now set for some pies, cobblers, crisps, muffins, and pancakes, on the blueberry front. Sadly, that constitutes barely a taste, on the blackberry front. I grew up eating blackberry pies during summertime, and without black, I'm blue.

We were pretty hot from our jaunt through the patch in the sun, and were mighty glad that we had been waiting when they opened at 08:00. It was, for the second year in a row, the weekend that the berry farm held a fundraiser for the local VFD, and they had a bounce house, hamburger sale, raffle, and other stuff available to spend your money on for the VFD.

After about an hour, Mom was getting tired and needed a place to sit, and there was a booth to pay a buck and get 4 baseball throws at a strike zone net set about 50 feet from the table. I told Mom to sit in a comfy camp chair there, ostensibly to watch me throw. They had an older radar unit set on a folding table, and a bored guy with a clipboard took down your name and fastest throw. I knew mine wouldn't be much-- I had badly stressed my rotator cuff last winter on a slip on the ice on a slick bridge. But what the heck? A buck ain't much. My first throw was inside, but I was gratified that my last three throws, thrown as hard as I could get 'em, were well inside the strike zone. Yeah, yeah, I know-- it wasn't full regulation distance. But gimme a break-- I never played the game. I was also gratified that my top throw was the fastest on the clip board.

I returned to picking, and chatted with a guy and his son who were nearby. He asked me about the pitching thing. He nodded in agreement when I laughed that it's harder than one might think to get the speed over 50 mph. When our conversation drifted to college days, and the maroon-wearing Aggie found out that I had attended UT Austin for a year, I knew that he would be going to the pitching booth before long*.

When I checked by the booth an hour and a half later, I found that he had taken two turns to try to beat the Teasipper... and had failed. It's a sad day when 51mph takes the cupie doll, friends. But it's my cupie doll, so I'll bear it proudly. :)

__________________________
*I have never understood the fervor with which the Aggies hold up that rivalry.Even stranger, it is oft extended to the friends and family of Texas A&M alumni, against their fellow Texans. People that have never set foot on A&M campus will damn those "'Sips". Meanwhile, most of my friends that attended UT have always sort of viewed A&M as a respectable agricultural and engineering university, with nothing for them to be ashamed of.

Scam society.

This morning, when I checked my mailbox, I found a post card on nice cream paper stock, inviting me to join "THE NATIONAL SCHOLARS HONOR SOCIETY." It read, as follows:

"The Officers and Directors of

THE NATIONAL SCHOLARS

HONOR SOCIETY

Cordially invite you to apply for Honor Society Membership.
You may complete the application on-line at:

MAGNA CUM LAUDE.ORG

Your application code is 9XXX.

Wishing you congratulations and continued success.

The National Scholars Honor Society.

EstablishedMCMXCVII."

Well.

The organization certainly has the words "National," "Honor," and "Society" in its name, but, uh... it's not the National Honor Society. First, that organization is for recognizing high school and junior high school students, not post-graduate students. It's a nice little sumpin' sumpin' to put on your college application, if you were a member of NHS in high school. (I was not.) But I was pretty sure as I looked over this card that NHS hadn't begun to recognize aging graduate students with mediocre-at-best GPAs.

Then my eye caught that bottom part, after the logo/crest thingy. "MCMXCVII." Heh. 1997, huh? I don't know when the NHS first started making pimply teenagers put on car washes to fund service projects, but I guaren-damn-tee you that it was before I was born, rather than 7 years after I graduated high school.

So I went to their website, and was shocked --SHOCKED-- to find that they'll publish your name on the website as a member of their august organization, for the low-low entry fee of $85.

They proclaim that they are a society dedicated to recognizing people for more than just their G.P.A.s. They want to know that you're filled with integrity. How do they know? Why, you have to check a check box proclaiming that you have read and agree with their honor code, which basically says that we think it's wrong not to be nice to people. The code asserts that members pledge to "honor myself."

Well, yes, that's exactly what they pay the eighty five bucks for isn't it?

This card is now contributing to the future compost that resides in the receptacle under my shredder.