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Vanishing Point

Drive Time, Modernism, Traditions

I have spoken often of my distaste for much of modern life, and here’s just one more thing to make me want to pack a picnic lunch and an assault rifle, and go find a tall building somewhere.

Sadly, the end of the manual transmission is near, and the unfortunate truth is few people will miss it. Most young adults don’t know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission, and they aren’t interested in learning. Many modern automatics offer better fuel efficiency and quicker acceleration than their manual counterparts. Porsche now delivers 75% of its 718 and 911 sports cars with automatic transmissions. The new C8 Corvette is only available with one. When the stick shift loses Porsche and Corvette buyers, you know it’s quickly heading for the rearview mirror.

But it gets worse.

In the future, cars won’t only be automatics; it appears they’ll increasingly be automated, electric vehicles. The satisfying throbbing of the exhaust and the pleasure of driving will also become victims of progress. Traveling in a personal vehicle will be as exciting as riding in an elevator with windows.

And this guy adds his take, talking about

the dystopian future in which you’ll sit passively in your computer-driven car with government-mandated speed limits and instantly-revocable travel permissions programmed in.

In the next year or so I’ll be needing to get a new car because the old Tiguan has north of 115,000 miles under its belt.  Don’t be surprised if I get something with a stick shift (assuming I can find one, and even if it does limit my choices), if for no other reason than to shake my fist at the Empire.

  

And just let some future asshole government mandate “smart” guns with chips embedded so that they can be “controlled” by some central source — essentially, the same principle as automated cars.

At that point, my prospective trip up to the rooftops won’t just be a joke anymore.

Wizard

Sports

I saw an article which mentioned a man named Karl-Heinz Rumenigge (pronounced Room-in-nigga ), and I had a good chuckle at the memories the name evoked.

Back in the 1980s, Rumenigge was West Germany’s chief striker in their national football team, and he’s ranked 26th in the Top 50 World Cup Footballers Of All Time.  (The list includes Pele, Maradona, Cruyff, Messi, Yashin and Zhidane, so we’re not talking mediocrity here.)

I used to love watching him play, but not for the usual reasons.

You see, outside the penalty area, Rumenigge was hopeless:  he’d get the ball in the midfield, then trip over his own feet and fall over, or kick the ball into touch unintentionally, or pass the ball to the opposition, or kick one of his own team’s players accidentally — there was no telling how badly he could screw up.  (I exaggerate, of course, but only a little.)  And he had the worst hairstyle in football:

But when he got a sniff of the ball in the opponents’ penalty area:  GOAL.  Almost without fail, there would be a goal, whether by a thunderous shot which made the goalie look foolish, or by dribbling it past three defenders before netting the ball, or back-heeling the ball through a forest of legs, or poaching a loose ball anywhere within ten yards of the goalposts;  whatever it took, Karl-Heinz would get the job done (video).  At his club Bayern Munich, he scored 200 goals in ten years, and playing for Germany, he scored 45 goals in ninety-six matches, including a hat-trick during the 1982 World Cup.

By the way, he’s no dunce:  nowadays, Rumenigge is the Chairman of Executive Board of FC Bayern München.  And he has a better haircut.

News Roundup

Bad News

Short and sharp, like an assassin’s dagger.  Let’s start with international news:


…as opposed to L.A. and NYFC, where shoplifters can take whatever they want without penalty, as long as it’s less than $200 value.  Which system is better?  I report, you decide.


…seems a little redundant — although given the crime, not excessive.


…which, considering that such Moroccans make up about 1% of Spain’s population… stop me if you’ve heard something like this before, for other countries involved in the Great Multicultural Experiment.


…yup, there’s nothing like fucking up the next generation to make us all feel better.  For our own fuck-up, see below.


…which clearly means that cops aren’t to be trusted with guns.  Disarm The Police !!!!  But the Brits do get some things right.  Seen over London yesterday:


…why is this international news?  Because apparently it was sent by some Russian or Ukranian  Canucki , pointing to yet more foreign tampering with our elections.


…considering everything that’s gone into Ozzy’s body over the years and not killed him (including Sharon’s tongue), the Chinkvirus probably wouldn’t stand a chance.  (see:  Keith Richards)

And of course, all local news is about replacing some dead judge:


…with the expected response:


…does anyone remember how the Aryan Nation or KKK threatened violence over the USSC nominations of the Wise Latina Sotomayor or the  Jewish (Ginsburg and Kagan) chicks?  Me neither.

And of course, we’ve heard from Red Nancy, Yoda, Meathead, Hanoi Jane and Obama’s Heydrich on the topic.  In other news, such as it is:

COMMON CORE SUCKS
…which we all knew it would, especially as ObamaWorld was pushing it.


…but I will never be able to look at the word “privilege” again without giggling, thanks to this (found at Knuckledragger’s place):

Range Report: CZ 550 American / Meopta Optika6

Gun/Ammo Tests, Optics, The Gun Thing

Yesterday I took the new toys out to work, said toys being a CZ 550 American (6.5x55mm Swede), topped with a Meopta Optika6 3-18x50mm scope.  Here’s the tout ensemble:

…and the illuminated reticle:

…which I would only use if I were hunting at dusk or dawn.  (On paper, the cross-hairs work just fine.)

Now, I’m pretty sure I heard someone saying, “Meopta-whut?”

Me, too;  until I discovered who they are.  Here’s the full scoop, but the executive summary is:

  • Czech company
  • been around since the 1930s
  • mainly makes commercial photo-enlargers
  • renowned for the quality of their glass
  • started making scopes a couple decades ago
  • if you’ve ever bought a Zeiss Conquest scope [raises hand], it was made by Meopta and stamped by Zeiss
  • congratulations;  you just paid two hundred-odd dollars more than you had to, for the identical scope.

Let me get the basics out of the way, first.

This scope cost me about $650, and I honestly think I got $1,200 value for it.  Holy cow:  the precision of the scope is astonishing, and the clarity as as good as any scope I’ve ever looked through.  I was originally going to get a Minox ZX-5i of similar power for about $100 more, but nobody had it in stock at the time and I was antsy, so I took a flyer on the Meopta, and I don’t regret it, at all.

That said, there are a couple of things that irritated me about the scope’s setup operation.

I’m using Warne Maxima rings, the tallest you can get, because the 50mm bell needs to be raised off the barrel and CZ bases are quite low.  As it turned out, the bell wasn’t a problem.  What was a problem was that yuge magnification adjusting ring on the scope:

…which proved very good at preventing the bolt from being pulled back — which, in a bolt-action rifle, is Not A Good Thing.  I had to put a shim into the rear scope ring to raise the scope the requisite millimeter or thereabouts so that the bolt handle would clear the adjusting ring.

The second issue also involved the adjuster, and it was the little stick screwed into it, supposedly to aid the easy working of the mag adjuster (which, by the way, is hellish stiff, more than it has to be, I think, but it should ease up with use).

Well, maybe the stick helps adjust the ring, but what it also does is get in the way when you’re working the bolt — and yes, there are several threaded holes to choose from to overcome this problem:  but what I found was that moving the stick so that it stayed out of the way worked for one magnification setting, but as soon as I changed the magnification (from, say, 10x to 5x or 12x to 18x), the fucking thing would catch on my hand when I worked the bolt.  And nothing makes Uncle Kimmy crankier than when something interferes with him working the bolt.

So I unscrewed the little stick and threw it away.  Don’t need it, won’t need it, especially as the adjusting ring has those deep, thick grooves to provide a decent grip*.

But those were the only issues I encountered at that session.  The scope worked flawlessly, and zeroing it took just under an hour (I generally let the barrel cool between strings, especially a skinny lil’ thing like the 550’s.)

Like an idiot, I hadn’t bothered bore-sighting the scope before hitting the range, and I paid for it by having to waste over a dozen rounds just to land the boolets into a dinner-plate group.

I had no intention of going for MOA (except by luck) during this session, anyway.  This is a hunting rifle rather than a precision target piece, and in any event, I was only shooting one brand of ammo to get everything into the same zip code.

The ammo was my standard sighting-in choice:  bottom-of-the-line no-frills Federal 140-gr Soft Point:


…with which I managed this 100-yard grouping with the last 5 rounds in the box.

That’s close enough for government work (or anti-government work, depending on your circumstances).

Now that the scope is roughly zeroed, next week I’ll get serious and start running through the dozen-odd different brands and bullet weights I have lying around in Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer, to see which one works best.

What fun.

*I don’t wear heavy gloves when shooting, anyway — in very cold weather (e,g, Scotland), I use the flip-off mitten type over thin gloves.