3 months of “It’s out of stock, yada, yada, and my gun shop FINALLY found one!
Old school 590A1, wood furniture, ghost ring sights, 8+1. All up weight is right at 8 lbs, so not a ‘lightweight’, but excellent for what I want (Home defense).
And the gun shop had three offers to sell it before I could get down there and get it! Thankfully, he didn’t sell it out from under me.
Not going to add frou-frou bits to this one, going to keep it basic for what I need. Range report when I get a chance to get out and shoot it!
Why is it the Guardian, FFS, has BETTER coverage of goings on in the US than the lame stream media does???
In the first significant check on the Trump administration’s “energy-first” agenda, a US judge has temporarily halted hundreds of drilling projects for failing to take climate change into account.
The agency “did not adequately quantify the climate change impacts of oil and gas leasing”, said Rudolph Contreras, a US district judge in Washington DC, in a ruling late on Tuesday. He added that the agency “must consider the cumulative impact of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” generated by past, present and future BLM leases across the country.
Contreras was also involved in the FISA court as a judge, and had to recuse himself from the Flynn prosecution, since he ‘knew’ Peter Strzok well enough to exchange text messages with him.
Apparently the oldest known Mariner’s Astrolabe has been found!
Known as da Gama’s or Sodré’s astrolabe, it was found in the wreck of the Esmerelda, HERE.
The 3D photography indicated it had scribe marks for measuring the height of the sun, allowing the sailors to calculate their latitude.
This simple instrument was much less complicated than the ones used on land, because of ship movement, and these predate sextants by about 300 years.
When I was a navigator in the 80s and early 90s, we still did cel or celestial navigation as a backup to the inertial navigation systems on the airplane. We were happy to be within 5-10 miles of the actual position due to bouncing around and the time it took to take multiple measurements 2 minutes apart on different stars or the sun.
HERE is a nice article from Air and Space on a pilot’s use of a similar bubble sextant. With the advent of accurate clocks, good charts, The Nautical Almanac, and the training to plug and chug though the various pages, calculations, declination, etc. You could actually get close enough to home to get a TACAN lock on, where the early mariners were happy to get ‘close’ to what latitude they were on. I cannot imagine how frustrating that must have been to the navigators on those ships!!!
The University of Wyoming rolled out a new slogan and video last year…
Apparently more than two dozen faculty complained, including professor Tracey Owens Patton said that, “What goes behind the term cowboy” is “erasure, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and genocide.” The university’s Committee on Women & People of Color wrote in a letter that the marketing campaign “risks casting UW as a place where only people who identify with white, male, and able-bodied connotations of ‘cowboy’ belong.”
Obviously those people have never actually READ anything about the real cowboys who settled the west. They came from all over the world, including a number of Hispanic, Black, British, and other ethnicities, as one of the last ‘frontiers’ in the 1800s and early 1900s… Sigh…
But, the Board of Trustees voted unanimously in July to keep the slogan. Students, alumni and sports fans apparently weren’t offended as revenues were up approximately $38,000 in the latter half of the year and at least 18,000 people clicked the link to get more information.
The Perpetually Offended Snowflakes apparently tried to beat the university into submission, but they Cowboy’d up, and stood by the decision, which does seem to reflect the HONEST opinions of the people of Wyoming, and the students attending the university.
It’s been a lousy week weather wise, news wise, etc…
So… a little humor for your Friday!
Bloopers from Young Frankenstein…
And some ‘simple’ explanations of ‘isms’…
SOCIALISM:
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbor.
COMMUNISM:
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.
FASCISM:
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.
NAZISM:
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.
BUREAUCRATISM:
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.
TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM:
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income
ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND (VENTURE) CAPITALISM:
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.
SURREALISM:
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.
A GREEK CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
You borrow lots of euros to build barns, milking sheds, hay stores, feed sheds, dairies, cold stores, abattoir, cheese unit and packing sheds.
You still only have two cows.
A FRENCH CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.
A JAPANESE CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called a Cowkimona and market it worldwide.
AN ITALIAN CORPORATION:
You have two cows
But you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.
A SWISS CORPORATION:
You have 5000 cows.
None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.
A CHINESE CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them, you claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.
AN INDIAN CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
You worship them.
A BRITISH CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
Both are mad.
AN IRAQI CORPORATION:
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the shit out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.
AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.
A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION:
You have two cows.
They are unhappy and would rather live in Australia.
One of my oak trees in the front yard STILL has four leaves on it…
And this is after 24 hours of up to 50+kts of wind! I’m impressed! Those suckers just WILL NOT fall!
And we ‘think’ this is New Mexico blowing by…
West Texas came through an hour or so ago, and we thought we smelled oil, e.g. the Permian Basin. Thankfully, it’s stopped raining (for now). The bar ditches are full, and the water was lapping the outside lanes of the highway this morning. And to make things even MORE interesting, one, and only one side, of the crossing bars were down. Made for an interesting ‘dance’ getting over the railroad tracks, with people actually taking turns! Gotta love country drivers, they know courteous!
Updating software/firmware is enough of a PITA to make one want to skip it, and THAT assumes the basic program updates itself automatically…
What truly sucks is when the software doesn’t update, and will connect to the hardware, but won’t find the required firmware updates after you’ve screwed with it for 20 minutes…
So…
You have to try to upgrade the software, which, as it turns out, doesn’t upgrade if it is more than one generation out of date. Which means you have to uninstall it… And that’s a 20 minute drill.
You go find the update and reload the software… another 15-20 minutes down the drain. You plug the hardware in and the software doesn’t recognize it… And find out you need a @#@%# driver update. Another half your while Windoze searches and searches.
And it FINALLY installs, only to tell you it won’t work unless you do a total reboot of the system. Another 5 minutes.
So you reboot, and it takes another 10 minutes to actually update the driver! Now it’s start the software again, wait for it to realize there is a new driver, connect the hardware and… It finally connects.
And five minutes later is done… Sigh.
And the muse is gibbering in the corner. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually get some writing done.
