Latest Posts

Primary & Backup

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

As Longtime Readers (and even a few casuals) will know, my primary carry piece is a Springfield 1911 in, of course, .45 ACP:

…and my backup piece a S&W 637 in .38 Special:

However, I recently acquired (through inheritance, don’t ask) a very battered Colt 1911, not anywhere near in the condition as pictured, but which puts all my 175gr .45 ACP boolets into a half-palm-sized group at 25 feet:

…and I had an evil thought.

Imagine being asked:

“What’s your primary carry piece?”
“A 1911.”
“And your backup piece?”
“Also a 1911.”

Hey, as the saying goes, “Two is one and one is none”… right?

And because the four spare CMC mags can do duty for both guns, I wouldn’t have to carry those bulky lil’ .38 speedloaders either.

Yeah, I know: “But but but… two 1911s are heavy, Kim!” 

I just lost over 40 lbs, so another 1lb or so of gun weight isn’t going to hurt me at all.  And besides, if that skinny old fart Clint Smith can carry two 1911s, then so can I.

Ripoff?

Business, Economics, Retailing

Let’s say you went into a little seaside diner feeling peckish, and saw that they had a menu item that read:  “2 slices of buttered toast”.

Sounds okay, yes?  (I’m going with “normal-person peckish” and not “American peckish” which would apparently require the entire loaf to satisfy that hunger pang.)

Then you see the price:  $5.00 for the two slices of buttered toast.

Ripoff?  Let’s analyze the thing.

I’m going to give the diner the benefit of the doubt here, and allow their claim that this isn’t Wonderbread and store-label butter, but a “premium” offering.  I’m also, for the purpose of the analysis, going to allow that they purchased the ingredients thereof at retail prices (they didn’t).

Our diner, by the way, would be located in the equivalent of coastal Florida, up in the Redneck Riviera.

So using my local gourmet store (Central Market) as a price guide, let’s look at the thing:

Let’s see what the unit cost is.  Assuming you’re doing thick-ish (e.g. “not-quite-Texan”) slice size, you’re going to get about 16 slices out of that loaf, assuming that we discard the ends, of course.  So: $5 / 16 = 31.25 cents ($0.3125) per slice; or 62.5 cents in total for the two.

Now the butter:  even assuming you slather the butter on like I typically do, you’re still going to use about 1/32oz per slice, ergo ending up with (8x 32 = 256;  398 / 256 = about 1.5 cents per slice or 3 cents for the menu item.

Total “cost”:  (31.25 + 1.5) x 2 = 65.5 cents ($0.655) for the two slices of buttered toast.

Now for the tricky bit.

Restaurants, from back when I still managed one, typically have had to mark up “cost” by 600% just to break even.  (Don’t even get me started on whether that’s the case in NYfC or Califuckingfornia:  it isn’t.)  This takes into account fixed overhead like salaries, supplies & equipment, utilities, real estate and so on (i.e. what it costs your diner each day before you get a single customer in the door).

So the extended cost of that 2-slice item works out to (errr carry the six) $3.93, before adding a single penny for gross profit. (And just so we’re clear:  $5 from $3.93 represents about 27% gross profit — I know, don’t make me laugh.)

Is $5, therefore, a total ripoff?

Not from where I stand, and this kind of analysis explains why you have to take your bank manager along to 5 Guys every time you visit them to get you and your wife a burger.

Here’s the article that prompted this post.

And Fuck Joe Biden, because about three years ago that $5 loaf of bread at Central Market used to cost $2.85, and the $4 butter about $2.75 (because I keep track of this kind of thing, even though the Gummint would prefer that I forget that the chocolate ration used to be 5 grams and not three).

[/Orwell]

When You’ve Lost The Dutch

Freaks & Loonies, Muzzies, Terrorism

Dutch people, as a rule, are famously tolerant and generally speaking, a decent lot (except when occupied by Nazi Germany).

So when the Dutchies use bulldozers and batons to clear out a terrorsymp encampment, you have to know that your cause may be in trouble.

And if the above two links didn’t elicit at least a grim smile from you, we can’t be friends.

My suggestion for riot control, as always, is a little stronger than bulldozers and batons:

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

And if you substitute Uncle Sam for the shrew on the left, you’ve about guessed my mood today.

 

And this neatly sums up my attitude vis-à-vis government:

But let me end with a more positive message to the alphabet agencies snooping around my back porch, seeing as it’s the beginning of the week:

Now say bye-bye, and head off to work.

Classic Beauty: Jane Russell

Classic Beauty

Probably one of the greatest sex symbols… actually, Jane Russell wasn’t.  Although she certainly had the body to qualify for the title, she was never overtly sexual like Marilyn or Mae and so she remained a favorite simply as a pinup.  I think she was extraordinary.

…and of course, the most famous ones of her, rolling in the hay so to speak:

Astonishing.

Inspiration

Fine Art, Literature

I can’t remember whether I’ve ever told the story behind my first (published) novel, Vienna Days.

Here goes.

I’ve always been fascinated by how people’s lives are shaped and/or changed by massive societal change.  Back in the early 1990s, this fascination was focused on the Secession Movement of the late 18th century in Vienna, and I wondered just how it would have felt to be someone who was a typical bourgeois, but over time got subverted by the changing times.

Of course, I’d done a lot of reading about 1880s Vienna (which is what sparked the whole thing) and the first thing that struck me was the fact that the suicide rate among young people in Vienna during this period was the highest ever recorded, and the highest in Europe as a whole.  So naturally, that became the first sentence of the novel.

The second thing to strike me was that when Crown Prince Rudolph, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had committed suicide, his funeral procession was attended by tens of thousands of people because, as the story goes, nobody likes a good funeral more than the Viennese.  So of course that became the first scene of the novel.

A story idea then began to assert itself.  Imagine that a bourgeois young man became seduced by the non-conformist Secession movement, and in secret began to do something that, if discovered, would spell ruin for his career — but he did it anyway, because the allure of this new movement was irresistible.  But what could that be?

Luckily, I imagined that he would have considerable artistic talent, hitherto unrealized because of his studies, and that led him to secretly draw pornographic pictures.  But pictures of whom?

I had already put this protagonist into a coffee bar where he became involved with a group of ne’er-do-well artists, and one of the people involved with the group was a mysterious and beautiful young woman named Astrid.

I was rather stuck at that point, so I stopped writing to read about pornography of that period, in Erotica  (Charlotte Hill and William Wallace).

There I discovered the works of an anonymous Austrian artist, who had drawn his images in charcoal and cryptically signed his work “A1”.   Wait… “A” for someone named “Astrid”?  Why not?  All I had to do was change the time period of the art, from the 1930s back to the 1880s — easy-peasy.

So I wrote the rest of the thing in about two months (I still had an actual job at the time, which took out my writing time, damn it).

And here’s a sample of the “A1” charcoals:

Read more