Retro has its limitations.

Look, I think steampunk callbacks to the Gilded Age and before are just kewler than heck.

But if you are home with your children in your frame house, and surmise that you've just had a drive-by (fellow going to his night-shift job) shooting (neighbor kids setting off some leftover firecrackers) out front, and your response is to:
Text your spouse about what you saw and heard, and
Ask what to do, and
Ruminate on his suggestion (via text!) to call the cops, and
Commiserate with your neighbor via phone, before finally
Calling the cops, then
I question whether you're fit to actually be taking care of those children at all.

When you're calling in an Emergency, don't just be a bear; be a grizzly.

While it's true that this person was wrong about her suppositions, I'm fine with that part. Heck, put a couple of walls between me and five evenly-spaced firecrackers, and I'd be hard-pressed to guarantee that it's not small caliber pistol-fire. Those who swear that they can tell the difference, without knowing the exact surface construction of the area of the discharge or what acoustic interference may lie between them and the source, are simply blowing smoke.

By all means, call the cops. But don't turn your whiz-bang, more-processing-power-and-better-communications-than-the-Apollo-astronauts-had-cell-phone into an 1850's telegraph key to do it. Excuse me-- to discuss doing it. You are empowered. There's a 9 key. There's a 1 key. There's a Send key. Make a cop come.

Clamshell holsters.

Among the stupider inventions that I've seen for toting a handgun around is the clamshell holster. When I mentioned that Season 3 of Adam-12 presented "the silliest floppy pivot holsters you've ever seen," I wasn't slamming articulated drop holsters as a whole-- just the ones these guys (and presumably all of LAPD, given the fervent attention to detail that Jack Webb put into his procedurals) had to carry. When you have to carry a full-sized revolver openly in uniform, a pivot is a mighty handy way to carry it in a drop holster format, so that it's fast to draw, but still easy to sit down with. None too concealable, but in uniform, that's not a concern.

Having never used such a contraption personally, I can say by looking at them that the problems with these clam shell holsters appear to be rife.

First and foremost, they pretty much demanded two hands or a lot more attention than should be necessary to re-holster. Friends, I'll tell you right now that being able to reholster one-handed and without unnecessarily-divided attention is one of the most important practical gun-related skills of police work. Smoothly securing your sidearm and efficiently bringing both hands to bear on the person whom you'd previously felt needed a gun pointed at is a skill that can keep a touchy transition from Going Badly Quickly.

Secondly, they flop so much that they seem to require two hands to open on occasion, and indeed that happens here, as demonstrated by Officer Reed*:

Officer Malloy, on the right, seems capable of drawing his revolver one-handed.

Note, too, that the spring-loaded clamshells spring open on hinges in the back. If the latch comes undone, the holster drops your gun on the ground. In most holsters, if the retention strap breaks, you can still carry your gun in it. These guys would have to put their gun in their pockets. Note how the holster, when the gun is drawn, is twice as big, and flops on one's hip like a stringer of fish.

Now, it's true that the holster protected the revolver from the elements, and covered the trigger guard. But... Elements? It was El Lay! They have the most consistently decent weather in the country!

Dumb. Somewhere, about the time I was born, a brass hat with LAPD made a goofball decision when those were ordered. I wonder how long they lasted?

__________________________________

*9:00 minutes in.

Great! When do I get some? Sign me up!

Some Dutch boffins are making inroads into a fuggetaboutit pill. They claim that they can make painful memories disappear.

The most hopeful use for this is for sufferers of PTSS, including victims of terrible crimes.

Me, I just want to erase the terrible marks left on my psyche when Mary Beth Rottencrotch turned me down to the high school dance, and that time I bought a procedural in a tactical match for shooting to slide lock, and dumping a mag with rounds remaining during what should have been a tac reload.

Ouch!

Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.

I'm a minor weather geek. Minor, in that I simply can't bring myself to turn on the Weather Channel and leave it on. Geek, in that I want more than the National Weather Service forecast that most of the media use, which is too regionalized.

I've taken to checking most of my raw data from various local personally-owned weather stations that are online through the disturbingly-named WeatherUnderground.com (and who the hell thought that was a good idea for a site name?!?). You put in your zip code, and it spits out, on the bottom, a list of privately-owned weather stations, and their rapid-fire updated history, so that you can see your micro-weather around you.

Yesterday, we had started the day kind of muggy, with a strong south wind blowing up warm moist air from the Gulf. I went into the P.D. last evening to finish preparing an accident report and type in a few call sheets. After an hour, I stepped out to my car to get my clipboard, and was blasted by cold air coming in twice as fast from the north. When my partner came in at 9pm, he looked baffled. "What just happened here?" The temperature had dropped 22 degrees in an hour. I mentioned that the wind had turned.

"Well, it's been windy all day," he said. "That's not the problem." He was shivering in his chair.

"It's not that the wind is blowing-- it's from where it's blowing," I said, and showed him this graph:



I love graphs. They spell out everything for you. Right at 8:00 PM, the wind turned from due south to NNW, and the temperature dropped through the floor. It always surprises me when other people don't notice the direction of the wind.


This morning, it was only down to 21 degrees farenheit, but with a steady 21mph wind gusting to 35 mph, it was brisk, of the like that most folks don't associate with Texas. I've GOT to better insulate this old place.

50 Years Ago This Month...

...a mad scientist/gunsmith inventor obtained a patent for a new kind of gun, which was basically a double action revolver with open cylinders, which were fed by a magazine. The empty cases were ejected like a semi-automatic. Later that year, he also obtained a patent for the ammunition to feed his bizarre hybrid gun, introducing the word "tround" to the esoteric vocabulary of gunny folk everywhere.



The inventor was named Dardick, as was his new gun.

What a great list.

List of firearms.

Why hadn't it occured to me to look for this before?

Remember when, a couple of years ago, Wikipedia kinda sucked? They seem to be past that, for the most part.

Comes now the rain.

About 4 inches today. Sheets.

I know I've mentioned this before, but if you haven't tried it yet, try to find a local car wash that uses Rain-X in place of wax. It's utterly amazing. Secret: you don't have to wipe it dry after applying-- just rinse it.

This is good news to me, as it means that I can apply it even during the rainstorm that made me seek it.

Bleg to my fellow Texans

Our state is making a new license plate design, to accompany the rollout of the new 7-digit license plate format. (Bah.)

The state has decided to let the citizenry vote for which plate design is used next. Good idea, right?

Well, sort of.

I'm all for democracy. I think that creating a work that is generally pleasing to the eye of the citizenry is pretty cool.

But here's the thing:

Most people are going to pick the pretty ones, without regard to the function of the plate.

What's the function of a license plate?

Answer: To identify a given vehicle for administrative and emergency purposes.

Now, some of y'all might think "Screw it-- if the cops or the robot revenuers can't read my plate, that's just so much the better." But a license plate allows not just cops, but the general public at large to read a vehicle's identifying numbers, and to report that the vehicle was at a specific time at a specific place, performing a specific action. Hit and run? Get the plate number. Robbery? Get the plate number. Road rage? Plate number. DWI running people off the road? Ditto.

Plates are hard enough to read as it is. Road grime, soot, spattered asphalt, etc all make them hard to read from 50 feet away on a highway while driving at highway speeds, and still taking due caution to drive safely yourself. That's one reason why the state requires that the plate be kept clean. But when we remove the high-contrast of black on white, the plate starts off being harder to read.

I ask you, gentle reader, to help me out: go to the Texas Department of Transportation License Plate e-Vote Page*, and vote for "Traditional Texas:"

Classic. State of issuance is easy to read (more important than you might think, with multiple plate designs from 50 states, other territories, Canadian provinces, and Mexican states), high contrast, not overly busy, with the Texas Lone Star on the bottom. Superb.

Better than the current plate, in my opinion, which is listed as "My Texas."

I love bluebonnets, and think that our state flower is a wonderful representation of this great Lone Star State. But we don't need muted fields of them behind our letters. First, bluebonnets should never be muted in their colors. Secondly, it takes what should be white, and makes it the color of lead. Dumb. Please do not vote for "Natural Texas:"

While I find "Lone Star Texas" to be visually pleasing, it's still too busy for a license plate, and should be thrown out:
And while the contrast is okay with "New Texas," the design is horrid. Reminds me of a banner you'd see at a Gay Pride parade (not that there's anything wrong with that) during the Bicentennial. Ugh:

Yes, a secondary function of our license plates can be to show our state pride, but the foremost reason that we muddle with the sleek lines of beautiful cars is to identify them. Keep in mind that the number one cause of unnatural death and injury is by automobile. You, as a citizen, benefit when we can read the blasted things. And I don't have to tailgate your car as much when I'm running your license plate. And that's a Good Thing.

Thanks in advance.

_ _ _ _

*Note: two votes per household, and it doesn't seem to care whether you live in Texas or not.

Shafted.

It seems that there's some outcry against a new device being marketed in South Africa to prevent rapes.

The "Rapex" is a device that's designed to be worn by a woman in her vagina, to literally barb and trap her attacker's offending member when inserted where it doesn't belong. The device is filled with razor-sharp barbs that require surgery to remove.

Apparently, this is just too violent, for some. "'Vengeful, horrible, and disgusting,' was the response from Charlene Smith, one of South Africa's leading anti-rape campaigners." In a land where 1,700,000 women are raped each year, partially because of the perpetuated myth that having sex with a virgin will cure a man of AIDS, you would think that Ms. Smith would understand something:

One protects many. Just the fact that a few of those devices are fielded, and the fact that a few dastardly dinguses have been shredded, will deter a certain number of would-be rapists.

Not a perfect answer. But in a world where rape can be a death sentence, isn't fighting back in some way, no matter how passive, worth something?

Genius prank.

While I don't get the over-zealous sports rivalries, I'd have to say that, for a high school prank, this ranks as legendary.

Worth every bit of the three day suspension the offender got.

Heh.

Why don't they make...

...a little adaptor kit for SMLE's to shoot 7.62 X 39? It would only take a little "Navy block" type chamber insert, and a replacement boltface for a bolt that was explicitly designed to have the boltfaces replaced.

For better than a decade, I've been waiting for someone to make one.

[Shrug]