Here we go again:
And if Mondays aren’t bad enough:
…and one good thing about all this Chinkvirus madness:
Finally:
Now get outta the pool and go do something productive, like fast-draw practice.
Month: January 2021
2020 Hangover
…and not the kind which follows delightful over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages, either.
No, I’m talking about the spiteful year of 2020, which saw us spared only a plague of crotch-eating crickets (no idea how it missed that one), but saw fit to land three quick punches in the face during the last three days of December.
1.) The clothes dryer packed up — heating element just quit, making it about as useful as a stud bull without testicles — it would go through the motions just fine, but no result. And — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — it happened two months after the manufacturer’s warranty had expired. However: when I was rummaging around in the papers surrounding its purchase so I’d have the details when I arranged for a service call, lo! there on the invoice was an additional cost for: ta-daaaa! an extended warranty (which I hardly ever buy but I had this time), and it had over a year still to run.
This didn’t end the problem. I called Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM, as they call themselves now) to see what they could do, and was directed to their (outsourced) repair company who handled such calls. After grappling with the poxy automated telephone system — add this bastard thing to my Ten Hates — I discovered that this outfit was only responsible for the warranty on items purchased since 2019, and my purchase from 2017 was handled by yet another company, and no of course they had no idea who that could be. So I called NFM and politely asked what the fuck they were doing by sending me to the wrong address, so to speak. To be fair, NFM was as always a delight to deal with: attentive, sympathetic and helpful, they apologized fulsomely and sent me to the proper company who, of course, had an automated telephone menu which eventually got me the number of a certified repair outlet in my area… whose number was no longer in service. So I went back to the company’s poxy website — which was designed by the same people who designed the ObamaCare government website — and eventually found a place which promised to send a guy round after the New Year to fix the dryer. (To be continued.)
2.) The next day (before New Year’s Eve) was cold and windy, and raining buckets. So, this being 2020, it came as no surprise when New Wife called plaintively from her school to inform me that Sputum (her Fiat 500, thus named because of its color) was refusing to start. Lights were working, but engine she no crank. She and the school maintenance guy had tried to jump-start the thing, but no luck. Shit. A new starter motor loomed in our future, $1,200 installed. So I went over, tried to push-start the car (stick shift, yay) so we could at least get it home or to the shop (did I mention that the day was freezing, wet and windy?) and… no joy. So maybe not the starter motor, but some chip in the ignition system? Crap. Called our car service guys (EuroSport in Plano, blessings be upon them), and they said that while they couldn’t attend to the car until the New Year (natch) because they were closed on New Year’s Eve, they’d organize a tow the next day and at least get Sputum to their shop.
I took New Wife to work on New Year’s Eve (half-day only) and waited for the tow service to arrive. They did, and took care of the business without any fuss. I went off and did the pre-NYE grocery shopping, then went back to pick up New Wife.
3.) And lo did the “Check Engine” light come on in the Tiguan — and to be fair to VW, that light only comes on when there’s something quite seriously wrong. No chance to get the thing checked, of course, because New Year’s Eve. I crept home nervously, therefore, and New Wife and I faced the prospect of no cars instead of two for the entire long weekend — and we had planned on going out a bit because we both had cabin fever and needed to.
So we spent the entire weekend cooped up in our apartment, snarling at each other. (Okay, to be fair, she moped and I was doing the snarling, as you might expect.)
The following Monday dawned bright and fair — no rain, no freezing temperatures, this was 2021, wasn’t it? — so I took her to work and set about the business of getting both cars attended to. Here’s the full report.
Sputum’s battery was dead — stone dead, despite the lights and such working — it was no longer capable of taking a charge. So one new battery, duly installed, and the Fiat was as good as new. The mechanic did mention that there were some signs of rodent infestation (nests containing acorns, hence squirrels), and they’d nibbled on some of the wires, but no serious damage. (I mention this because it will be important later.) Our apartment complex is quite heavily forested and there are a jillion of the little tree-rats all over the place, but can I shoot them out of the trees with my trusty Baikal pellet gun? Oh no, because city ordinance #2375-4 para. 48 “No discharge of guns including pellet guns in city limits”. Anyway, the outcome, Fiat-wise, was not bad especially as I discovered that this was the car’s original, four-year-old battery, so all in all, not a bad outcome.
And now we come to the Tiguan’s warning light. “Kim, at first glance it looks as though you may be having an issue with the turbo”, a comment which struck fear to my heart (and more especially to my wallet) because a new turbo is over $1,500 and double that for installation. So I waited with trepidation for the final diagnosis, hoping that maybe it was just the sensor that was at fault (only a few hundred dollars to replace that).
It was neither. “It looks as though you’ve had some serious rodent infestation, and they’ve chewed the wires connecting the sensor to the turbo.”
Cost of replacing the wire (which, of course, in the modern parlance means a new sensor because it’s a single unit): $160 plus labor.
So all in all, what had threatened to cost me close to $5,000 to fix both cars in 2020, eventually cost me less than $500 in 2021.
And the clothes dryer was duly attended to — turns out it was the control panel at fault, and not the heating coil or motor — and the fix took less than half an hour.
So life is good, so far in 2021. But later in the month will come the Presidential Inauguration, whereupon I expect not only socialism but crotch-eating crickets to follow soon thereafter.
You heard it here first.
Quote Of The Day
Talking about voting patterns:
“It’s a time-honored tradition in big Democratically controlled cities like Chicago my home town, Philadelphia, to do precisely what they’re doing now. I’ve never seen it at such a magnitude, because I think this is an indication of just how widespread it is, how deep it is. And I don’t think it’s just confined to Philadelphia. My instincts, and again, coming out of Chicago Democratic politics, my instincts tell me it’s going on in Atlanta, it’s going on in Detroit, it’s going on in Milwaukee, it’s going on in Las Vegas. It’s like what Justice Power said about pornography, “You can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.” And coming out of the Democratic Chicago political establishment, I know how they operate. They control polling places. They stop votes when their candidate’s behind. And then in the wee hours of the morning, in the dark of night, the stealing starts. And we’ve seen that in big numbers, unprecedented numbers this election in Michigan and in Philadelphia. It’s outrageous. The fact that they’re doing it with impunity is because the media is simply looking the other way, the corrupt mainstream media is not interested in protecting our Constitution or the rule of law, they just want to beat Donald Trump at all costs.” — Rod Blagoyevitch (D), former Governor of Illinois.
It would really have been nice if the Guv — knowing what he did — had put a stop to it when he was still in office… but of course, he was never going to do that, was he? because he benefited from it.
Kevin has the full story. Just put your guns away before reading it.
The Real Wonder-Nines
Way too much fluff has been written about the silly 9mm Europellet (a.k.a. 9mm Luger), the most egregious being its appellation as the “Wonder-Nine” [eyecross] , the only “wonder” being how people can believe all that crap.
So today I’m going to look at the two real wonder-nine cartridges that came out of Europe, i.e. the 9.3x74R and the 9.3x62mm, both well over a hundred years old and both the only serious contenders to the equally-venerable .375 H&H Magnum (blessings be upon it).
Both cartridges have a bullet diameter of .366″ with a typical weight of 285/286gr, and despite the different casing lengths, they are to all intents and purposes ballistically identical. The 9.3x74R is, as the nomenclature suggests, a rimmed cartridge intended for use in double rifles such as the Beretta 689:
…while the rimless 9.3x62mm (sometimes called the 9.3x62mm Mauser) is available for both the Mauser Model 12 and 98:
…the Sako 85 Bavarian:
…the CZ 550 line:
…and SIG Sauer’s Model 100 XT plastic rifle is also available in this caliber:
No prizes for guessing which rifle I’d pick, but let’s just say that full-length stocks make me twitch in all sorts of places, while plastic stocks… never mind.
The 9.3x62mm is expensive to shoot, not so much because of the ammo cost (inexpensive Prvi Partizan sells for around $26 per box, while premium hunting ammo runs around $90 — in other words, pretty much the same as .300 Win Mag) but because the rifles thus chambered are generally super-spendy (with the exception of the Sauer 100 XT rifle, for around $700-$800; the wood-stocked “Classic” is about $200 more). CZ-USA doesn’t even issue the Mod 557 in 9.3mm, which is a pity. (American hunters are already well served with other cartridge choices, which is no doubt the reason CZ didn’t extend the offering.)
As to why the smaller 9.3x62mm is often preferred over the .375 H&H, here’s a decent look at its ballistics. Also, because the 9.3x62mm can be fired from a “standard” length bolt-action rifle, it’s still cheaper than the longer “magnum” or “Safari” rifles — and, as the linked article suggests, its sectional density / penetration is pretty much the equal of the .375H&H, for considerably less recoil.
It’s even worse for the rimmed 9.3x74R cartridge (see here for an example), although I note that you can find the excellent Ruger #1 Medium Sporter chambered thusly, for about the same price as a regular quality bolt-action rifle.
I don’t think that anyone reading this is going to rush out and buy a rifle in either chambering anytime soon, but should you come across one for a decent price in a garage- or estate sale sometime, know that you won’t be making a bad buy, or buying something shooting an inadequate cartridge.
Caption Competition #159
Your suggestions in Comments.
Implants
No, not fake breasts, sorry. Via Insty comes this wonderful piece:
The notion that COVID-19 vaccines will be used by governments across the globe to track the human race’s every move has long been a topic of discussion among conspiracy theorists. But now, new ‘evidence’ has emerged from Italian proponents of the idea – only it would be evidence, were it not a reworked schematic for the Boss Metal Zone.
The conspiracy theorists shared the schematic online, claiming it depicted the diagram for the supposed 5G chip. It features a section labelled “5G frequency” – clearly the source of many a theorist’s eureka moment – as well as terms guitarists will find familiar: “MT-2 Gain”, “Footswitch” among the most recognizable.
Mario Fusco, a senior software engineer at Redhat, spotted the misinformation and took to Twitter to flag it.
It’s not often that I read something that causes me to collapse in a fit of helpless laughter, but this was one of those rarities. Hell, I’m still grinning.
Most conspiracy theorists are complete fucking idiots, but taking a circuit board schematic of a guitar pedal and claiming it’s the tracking /controlling device embedded in a vaccine? That’s brilliance compounded by stupidity.
Music Geekery Alert: That said, I could think of far worse things you could have implanted in your system than the BOSS Metal Zone pedal.
This little beauty can make the most awful guitar sound like anything played by Tony Iommi or Kirk Hammett, and it’s probably used by just about every lead guitarist in rock music.
In fact, the only other product of similar effect I’d agree to have implanted in me would be the venerable Ibanez Tube Screamer*, of similar renown and popularity:
I would respectfully suggest, however, that as excellent as these two pedals are, they would be piss-poor as human control devices.
*And yes, I know the difference between distortion (BOSS/transistors) and overdrive (Screamer/diodes). I may be a bassist (who doesn’t use either), but I’m not ignorant.