Halloween

Living in a college town during Halloween means you get to sample heavily the best part about Halloween: college girls in slutty costumes. Naughty nurse, wicked catwoman, adulterous county attorney, hot teacher, etc. I don’t know why these chicks feel like they can’t dress like that the rest of the year. Who’d complain? Not me.

But, over at the post office, where they have to keep a modicum of decency, there’s a guy who, every year, goes the step further to really put in some effort at his costumes. This year? ’70s Disco Man:To be frank, could be Disco Man, could be John Holmes…..tough to tell without getting a lot closer than i care to. But, I salute the effort. The interesting part? He already had all these clothes. Thats the really scary part.

I don’t have the foresight to plan ahead for a good costume, but perhaps one of the years…. For now, when people ask where my costume is, I give them that famous reply from Wednesday Addams:

Where were his drops?

MegaMagMania runs for two more days… would you like to know more?
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Saw this, and a couple other similarly themed t-shirts and couldn’t help myself.

Starship Troopers is one of those rare books that gets the ol’ wheels turning. “Atlas Shrugged” was probably the one book that changed my way of thinking about a lot of things, but Troopers specifically gave me some thoughts about the nature of duty and obligation that I’d never really explored. (And for the love of Crom, read the book rather than see the movies.)  It’s a book that clearly is more geared towards military folks, but it’s explorations about the nature of individual duties to the state, the states duties to the individual, and that sort of thing were quite interesting. It’s been labelled as fascist or racist, but that’s usually by people who think everyone without a certain melanin count is automatically a racist.

This being a college town, I look forward to seeing if anyone gets the reference.

Watergun: parts arrival

As best I can tell, the missing parts to get the gun ‘shootable’ were a sear, sear pin, and firing pin retaining plate. In other words, these:

I am not a gunsmith by any stretch of the imagination…thats one of the reasons I shoot Glocks – you don’t ‘smith them, you just swap parts. At this point it looks like nothing needs fitting, which is good. But..the proof is in the function. We’ll get to that later. Alright…lets grab a punch, YouTube some disassembly/assembly videos, and get crackin’.

And once thats done…lets hand-cycle it, check the safety and trigger, and just generally play with it. It may look like the slide is a bit stiff but whats actually happening is that I’m trying to rack the slide without moving the gun or my hands out of the frame. Think its easy? Try it sometime.

Yeah, that rear sight is flopping around like Obama on a foreign policy question….but that’s a low priority at the moment. Next step is to take it to the range, tie it down, put a string to the trigger, and shoot the bloody thing.

And the sharp eyed viewer will notice that someone took the magazine safety out. Well, not really….it appears someone welded it to the trigger to deactivate it. :::SMH::: Whatever. Shooting this weekend. Hopefully the slide won’t go sailing through my brainpan.

For those keeping track:

Assuming everything works, and nothing cracks/breaks/explodes/flies off, I’ll send it down the valley for a coating of some kind and then, as the years go by, slowly start replacing parts with premium parts. Kinda make a sweet custom gun with a crappy, but interesting, finish. I’m pleased with how quickly this is coming together. :::Knocksonwood:::

Codename: Watergun

A friend came by today to show me something interesting and slightly upsetting:

Ooohhh, thats not right! Nooo…..


It’s a Belgian P35 (or ‘Hipower’ to you), circa 1971, that was retrieved from the waters of Lake Michigan. The lake it is said, never gives up her dead….but guns are a totally different matter. Anyway..it’s mine now.

Condition is about what you’d expect but…the internal surfaces are surprisingly good. Barrel isn’t bad, and the deep pitting is mostly on non-critical surfaces. I think…I might try getting the missing the parts and getting this thing up and running. (And shooting it from a tire with a long string.)

First thing I need to do is make up a spreadhseet of all the parts necessary to make a P35 and then see what I have and what I’m going to have to find. Once thats done, if it proves safe to shoot, I’ll send it off and cerakote the holy crap out of it.

The story, I am told fourth-hand, is that this gun and the mags came out of a diving episode in Lake Michigan a few years ago. The gun ‘had the rust removed’ which, judging by the lack of wire brush marks and the thoroughness, must have been done using electrolysis. The gun was disassembled, apparently, for the process and some parts are clearly missing. I managed to put the recoil assembly together, get it into the slide and , after  applying a tablespoon of CLP to the whole mess, got it sliding on to the frame, and then it seemed to cycle by hand just fine. Promising.

It also came with three what-used-to-be magazines. Now, thats a bit odd. See, if someone dropped this thing over the side off the boat doesn’t it seem a bit odd that there’s two spare magazines that fell over with it and made it all the way to the bottom lying next to it? Way I see it, the mags come with the gun for only two reasons: they were all in the same backpack/duffel when it was lost/tossed over the side or it was all on the same Sam Browne of whatever poor schmuck decided to breathe water. The mags will, I think, with new springs and some beadblast be just fine.

So….interesting project that I anticipate will take a year or two to wrap up since I’m going to try and do this with used parts inexpensively sourced off GunBroker and eBay. If it works out, it’ll be a gun with a great story.

 

Happy holidays

09-festivus-poles.w529.h352.2xThere’s a handful of holidays this month, some secular and some not-so-secular. It would be presumptuous for me to assume everyone has the same belief system, so I’ll just cover all the bases with a ‘I hope you have a happy whatever-holdiay-you-celebrate’.

Kwanzaa, Hannukah, Christmas, Festivus, Solstice, Voodoo Day, whatever……December really manages to pack a lot into it, doesn’t it?

Be safe on the roads, guys…drunks abound on these sorts of occasions.

End of the world practical joke

Rather clever. Succinctly, they take a superduper HD 82″ television and set it up in an office environment to replace a window. As people sit for the interview, they see the ‘window’ behind the interviewer showing a calm city scene…until the giant flaming meteor starts streaking across the sky….and they…respond.

Once in a blue moon, my end-of-the-world dreams look a lot like that….sudden brightness in the sky and then that agonizingly slow-looking descent of a fireball. The Russians got the real thing a few years back:

Scary stuff, right? I see something like that as I’m driving to work, guess what? I’m turning the car around and getting back the house…pronto!

One of the best pieces of survivalist fiction out there, Lucifer’s Hammer, revolves around comet fragments hitting the earth and doing terrific destruction. Movies like “Deep Impact” also cover the subject.

This is definitely one of those scenarios that you really just can’t prepare for. If it hits on the other side of the planet you’d be okay, although your life will definitely never be the same. And if it’s an ocean strike and you live anywhere near a coastline you might have a bad day. But if you lived in, say, Colorado, and it struck in Spain you’d probably be fine.

Likelihood? Not even something on my personal List of Things To Worry About. It’s right there with Xenu returning, the Rapture, Vogon constructor fleets and Mayan calendar failures.

But…I’ve been wrong before. Which is why we keep a basement full of freeze drieds.

I like to think that in that interview video if it had been me, I’d have quickly tood up, moved away from the window into an inner hallway and waited for the impact and shock wave. But, you never know.

As an aside, I bet that TV looks great.

“Collapse” – The post-apocalyptic card game

While I’ll be the first to agree that the end of the world will not be all sunshine-n-stun-grenades, the fantasy apocalyptic worlds can be entertaining.

Collapse is a deck building card game for 2-4 players set in the final months before the end of the world. Players can choose to play one of four world-ending Collapse scenarios, including: financial, biological, natural, or nuclear; or they can play at random where any combination of events may occur.

When playing Collapse, you will need to stock up on supplies such as food and weapons, as well as build fortifications on your home to earn months of survival time. Just remember, time is running out, and you and your neighbors are competing for the same resources. If you are going to survive, you will need a healthy mix of strategy and flexibility as available supplies change and events unfold.

Kind of amusing.

I’m still working on a bunch of back-end stuff here at the blog so more ‘substantive’ posting is slowed down. I do appreciate everyone hanging around while I get this sussed out, though.

The Chair Is Against The Wall

Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

This showed up in the mail the other day:

IMG_0619For those of you who don’t get the joke, maybe this’ll help:

It’s 11:59 on Radio Free America; this is Uncle Sam, with music, and the truth until dawn. Right now I’ve got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone: “the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall”, “john has a long mustache, john has a long mustache”. It’s twelve o’clock, American, another day closer to victory. And for all of you out there, on, or behind the line, this is your song.

Yeah, my geekdom knows no bounds. Oh, and before anyone asks: source.

As an aside, I’m rather intrigued that OCTactical gives you  options on what camouflage patterns you want on your gear…and that they actually include my beloved flecktarn. Now if they’d just get the PenCott Snowdrift or the Dansih snow camo then I’d be really happy.