Bullseye

The local club had its first Bullseye match today. I shot the .22 portion with an iron-sighted 6" Model 17 and scored 766-5x. That was enough for second place; everyone else was using some flavor of Ruger/Volquartsen Mk II/III with optics. I had gotten in quite a bit of practice, primarily to get the timing down for shooting rapid-fire single-action style. And it paid off.

It was raining at the beginning of the match and maybe some other shooters stayed home, opting to roll back into bed or kick back with some coffee and the paper. Still, I got "into the money" with a revolver and iron sights, so I'm pretty happy with that.

Ancient Stupidity; Automotive Edition

(This post has been inspired by this one.)

Decades ago, we had relatives visiting. My uncle decided that he wanted to back his new car into the garage. He asked my brother to guide him into the garage-- probably because cars back then didn't have right-side mirrors and he had a car that was the size of a boat.

So my uncle backed his car in. My brother waved him on. (Probably should have mentioned that my brother was five years old.)

It probably went something like this:

Yes, my uncle smacked the garage with his new car.

My uncle was pissed off. My father was even more pissed off at my uncle, and asked, loudly and within earshot of everyone: "What kind of idiot asks a five-year old kid to help park his car?"

I don't remember how much damage was done to the garage or to the car. It was a very long time ago. But it was a memorable event.

And thanks, Murph, for reviving the memory.

"The Most Miserable Sonuvabitch on the Planet"

John Boehner had the right of it. Cruz is nothing more than a Mk1-Mod0 demagogue.

As Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seeks every possible edge to stop Donald J. Trump, he has seized on a once-obscure issue with a proven power to inflame conservatives: letting transgender women use women’s bathrooms.

Mr. Cruz mentions it constantly in Indiana, a state with many social conservatives that is all but a last stand for him in his fight to deprive Mr. Trump of the Republican presidential nomination.

Attacking a small, powerless subset of the population and demonizing them for political gain is about as despicable as it gets. This is the "Willie Horton" ad, three decades later. It'd be political suicide, these days, to go around insinuating that black men are being let out of prison so they can rape white women. So now it's "transgenders are going to rape your daughters in the shitter."

Right. And nobody gets at all upset about white pedophiles using the bathrooms in stadiums or shopping malls. Did you see anyone screaming about white Republican men using public bathrooms after Larry Craig was arrested? Were there any calls (other than snarky ones) to ban Republicans from using public bathrooms? Or Catholic priests?

Nope. There sure as hell wasn't.

This is rancid demagoguery. "Lucifer in the flesh" is understating the matter of the lack of character of Rafael T. Cruz.

Cruz is younger than I am. So what I plan to do is buy some high-quality vials, fill them with urine, and instruct my executor to pay someone to pour them on his grave.

Celebrate the Day

It's Hairball Awareness Day!

Because It's Friday

Until 4014 is out of the shop, this'll have to do.

Listen to Hutch for a Bit

Sort of suggested by the Bangor P.D., which ends their posts with variations of this:

The men and women of the Bangor, Maine Police Department urge folks to keep your hands to yourself, leave other people's things alone and try to be kind to one another.

Which is pretty damn good advice. Even if you're far away from Bangor.

Laugh About It, Shout About It, When You Get to Choose

Any way you look at it, you lose.

I think we got the two candidates we are going to see in November on Tuesday night. You don't vote for president with the candidates you want. You vote for president with the candidates you have.

I talked to a fairly hard-core conservative the other day who pretty much wished that President Obama could have a third term instead of either a President Trump or a President Hillary Clinton. That speaks volumes.

Look, Clinton has laid the groundwork for this for a long time. She began measuring the drapes for her general election run years ago. The one or two Democrats who might have been able to derail her never even tried. But her fragility as a candidate was laid bare by Bernie Sanders, who gave her a hard run and did it on a comparative shoestring. A stronger Democrat might have beaten her.

But on the GOP side: Jesus! They were given a gift, the single-most hated Democrat in the last quarter-century running as their opponent and what did they do? They came down to choosing between the two clowns who have even more negatives than Hillary and they're going with the one who is the most hated candidate since Hoover in `32, a man whose mentor at PR was Roy Cohn, a self-hating gay man who was probably the single most evil fucker in this country for decades.[1]

I've said it before: There are about 140 million people who are constitutionally qualified to be the president and it comes down to these two chuckleheads.

Because "Bailey's on your cereal" is amateur.

I don't know if my liver will stand it until 1/20/2021. Or 2025.
_______________________
[1] If there was anyone else in the country back then who had a faster slide into Hell than Cohen, other than maybe John Wayne Gacy, that worthy's name escapes me.

Seen on the Ramp

This monster was parked outside of an airport diner last weekend:

I think it's a Thrush. The windows don't look quite right for an Air Tractor. But that's just a wild guess.

Shorter McDonnell: "Bribery is Speech"

That's his pitch to avoid staying out of jail:

Facing an uphill fight to avoid a prison term for bribery, former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is making a bold argument in the Supreme Court this week that buying access and influence with public officials is protected by the 1st Amendment.

This could be the case in which the Supremes say "sorry, we fucked up" and cut back on Citizens United. Or it could be the case where they just open the floodgates and legalize bribery once and for all.

In the second eventuality, it might be time to take out the mill files and sharpen up the pitchforks.

Boom-chucka-lucka-lucka; +30 years

Chernobyl Unit 4 blew up 30 years ago. The nearest city, Pripyat, home to 50,000 people, was hurriedly abandoned. A thousand square miles, home to 120,000 people, had to be evacuated and which may be uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years. By default, the "exclusion zone" has turned into a thriving wildlife park.