Bang!

Yeah. Nothing screams “law-abiding citizen” like stockpiling ammo and weapons. A lifetime supply of ammunition? I haz a fear.

@JNOV: Considering she’ll probably go out in a Ruby Ridge blaze of glory, that’s like, say, a year.

oh, and “people who are not working hard” = brown people.

@rptrcub: They should have left Weaver alone. He was stalked and set up by the ATF for no reason. They guy was doing everyone a favor living in the back of the beyond.

Think Progress had a piece recently that called the gun and ammo buyers suckers who were manipulated by the NRA to make more money for the gun industry, but having Holder say in February that the assault weapon ban should come back did not help. Unfortunately as a gun owning liberal Democrat, I am surrounded by the crazees.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/12/obama-gun-sales/

My local Wal-Mart limits purchases to two boxes of ammo per purchaser. They are almost always out of 9mm, .38 special, .357 mag., .45 auto and .380 auto, the most popular handgun calibers. This is true across northern New Mexico because I check them out when I’m on the road. Same with chain stores Big 5 and the Sportsman’s Warehouse in Albuquerque, while my two local shops don’t always have what I need either. I actually had to reserve a box of .38 special hollow points when a shipment came in to a local shop.

In addition to ammo, I could not buy reloading supplies from October until just recently. All calibers of bullets, primers and powder were out. I find myself in the odd position of stockpiling in response to the stockpilers.

On a related topic, a favorite site of mine thefirearmsblog.com followed up on a Fox* report that only 13 percent of the narcotrafficantes’ guns confiscated in Mexico originated in US America. Most of the stuff down there is actually military hardware that most of us (except perhaps for FCS ) can’t get legally like RPGs, anti-tank weapons, grenades, and full auto rifles used by the Mexican army.

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/04/05/lies-damned-lies-and-mexican-guns/

* I wish it wasn’t them, but no one else has done the story.

ADD: Ron Reagan had a guy on his show yesterday who was talking about the profile of the mass shooter – a profoundly angry person who feels that society is not up to his standards. Reagan tried to get his guest to agree with his point that something in the American character makes people into mass shooters but the guest, author of “Inside the Criminal Mind”, wasn’t going along with that line. America is too diverse a nation, he said. The guest brought it back to the person. Unfortunately, angry people who feel disenfranchised are exactly the people who are stocking up for what they see as the Great Patriotic War.

“It is when everything just went crazy in the gun business.”

Oh, so that’s when the gun bizniss went kray-zee.

@redmanlaw: Silly question, but does ammo go bad, like mayonnaise?

@blogenfreude: No, so long as it’s a metallic cartridge that has been kept dry in a moderate temperature range and corrosion free. I shot some .250 Savage and .243 Winchester rounds my father in law loaded decades ago and they still worked. I took the duds (there were a few) and pulled the bullets for use in my own reloads.

I think powder in cans does go bad over time, though, and really old powder should be disposed of properly such as by dumping the contents and lighting it in the presence of one’s son. (Foosh! / white mushroom cloud rises from backyard ). After reloading I usually have some powder that I’ve spilled on to the bench. We put it on a hard surface and light one end like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons and watch it burn (gun powder does not explode, but burns at various rates).

@blogenfreude: “Ammo doesn’t go bad, people go bad.”

Try the veal!

@redmanlaw: I find myself in the odd position of stockpiling in response to the stockpilers. The opening sentence in “Cannibal Anarchy: A Stinque novellete”?

ADD: Don’t forget this.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Before the election last year, I heard those NRA radio commercials whenever traveling around rural areas of AZ (including NM stations on the rez). I always heard about over-the-top “they’re gonna take your guns” stuff but never figured the commercials would actually say that … and in such a cartoonish manner. There was no subtlety or code-wording at all. It was literally “Obama wants to take your guns and ammunition away”. I was offended on behalf of my backwater brethren.

@Nabisco: *applause*

@redmanlaw: I had wondered if an old round is more likely to make the gun misfire. Now I know. Thanks.

So the NRA and the rest of the Fascist Fifth Column whip the wingnuts into a frenzy with the Obama-Muslim-Socialist-gun grabber meme. The terrorized wingnuts stampede gun selling establishments, stripping shelves bare of all guns and ammunition. Freshly armed, they hunker down in their trailers/tract houses/gated communities/whatever to ride out the coming apocalypse.

Now NPR comes along and terrorizes everyone else with this story about crazy wing nuts arming themselves to the teeth.

Is this a great country or what?

@blogenfreude: All my misfires this year involved quality control on my part in reloading. I think I set the primers too high in one batch of .357s, which increases the distance the flame has to travel through the flash holes in the bottom of the brass cartridge case. That resulted in some duds and some squibs in which the bullet lodges in the barrel, which can result in a gun-wrecking ka-boom if you fire another round before clearing the barrel.

@Jamie Sommers: You must have heard those on 770 KKKOB while in New Mexico, home of the bitters and the dead-enders.

Man, so I’m gonna have to rely on the axe and chainsaw combo come the Zombie Apocalypse? I guess I could dual-wield machetes, that would be pretty badass.

@drinkyclown: @redmanlaw:

Can’t you just pack random shit into a shotgun and have it fire still? With loose gunpowder or summach? I saw that in a movie once.

Oh, and btw, RML, are you the best dad in the world or what? You blow up stuff in the backyard!!!!

/TJ

Hey, how come I’m not the loser anymore? I was getting used to the attention!

@Tommmcatt the Wet Sprocket: You’re still listed as a loser, darling. But you’re a winner in my book.

How’s the puppeh? Have his ‘nads healed yet?

OH PLEASE we had this one like days ago:
http://www.shortsshortsshorts.com/?p=1609

@Tommmcatt the Wet Sprocket: We also built a little catapult, too.

Son of RML wrote an essay for school tonight about spending time with a favorite person and he wrote about when I took him to the Slipknot concert last month. Mrs RML recommended that he not include the song title “People = Shit”. On the less crazy side, I’m teaching him to fly fish, emphasizing the need to bring a book to read under a tree by the stream side and encouraging him to explore the woods above the river.

ADD: I don’t reload shotgun shells, but you probably could put a bunch of stuff above the powder charge and crimp it closed.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

@shortsshortsshorts: Yes, but I waited for the high-quality NPR coverage so I could link to it. I have my standards. They’re low, but they’re mine.

tj/ Awesome Japanese Obama action figures.

http://gamu-toys.info/sonota/sw/obama/obama.html

@redmanlaw: OMFSM – I am so going to get my girlfriend to translate that for us …

@redmanlaw: @blogenfreude: OMFG, I’m buying one.

@Promnight: Oy F-ing vey, brother. Depressing as all shit. Have you named the deli? What do you think of my idea of “Canteen”?

@SanFranLefty:

All healed! And no more cone, which he loves. Still poopin g under the bed, tho.

@SanFranLefty: Island Spice Market

@Jamie Sommers:
Speaking of Arizona, here’s a question that doesn’t have to do with Gov. Napo’s hairdo or fashion sense — why in the name of FSM’s green earth was Gabrielle Giffords (D-Tucson) so dumb as to take on Stephen Colbert w/r/t the naming of the space station? Yeah, I know she’s married to an astronaut, but she has just given Colbert so much material to work with by criticizing him and his fans for gaming the NASA naming contest.

@blogenfreude: I guess NPR had higher quality, but the first rule of battling wingnut Fight Club is, well fuck, I have no idea.

@Promnight: Are you going to carry all those awesome spices that were for sale at the farmer’s market thing in Philly?

@SanFranLefty: Just enough so that people who come looking for spices won’t be disappointed; the “spice” is meant to refer to the group of cuisines I want to offer, thai, mexican, mediterranean, african, middle eastern, that all have in common that they come from warm weather areas, and the food is so well suited to summer and the hot weather. You know I could not possibly carry that amzing number of things unless that was my specialty. Island Spice is a common name, and since I am on Long Beach Island, the name will really be like LB Island Spice Market and Deli. The island is known as LBI, universally. The logo will keep the LB small and emphasize the Island Spice.

Its such a gamble, and its on my mind tonight, we finally got the owner’s proposed lease agreement in hand just today. My financing, well, not good, the loan amount I hoped for was not approved, much less, my home equity seems to have disappeared over the last year. But I have to do it. I have to.

@shortsshortsshorts: We don’t break stories. We smash them.

@Promnight: Dude, I will come by one day. This. I. vow. It might take a while, but I’ll make it over for lunch.

@SanFranLefty: How ’bout that dumb ass congresscritter from New York who got the Full Colbert tonight?

@Promnight: I’ll do my best to get there as well … where is this place going to be?

@Promnight: Glad to hear things are moving along. Live the dream!

@blogenfreude: Long Beach Island, are you familiar with it? Its a barrier island off the Jersey coast, with a shallow bay behind it. Its very narrow, rarely more than a half mile or so, and 18 miles long, like the outer banks, in a way. Compared to other Jersey Shore spots, its like 30 years behind, still kinda quiet, a mix of middle class vacation homes and over the top multimillion dollar oceanfront mansions. There is only one bridge to the island, in the middle, and I am right there, in the town of Ship Bottom.

@redmanlaw: @SanFranLefty:

To all of you who offer these words of support, you have no idea how much they mean to me. Its fucking scary, most people in my day to day life think I am insane. But I gotta try, I have only learned one fucking thing in my life, that you regret the chance you did not take much more than the one you did, even if it failed.

Thank you.

Can I try out menu items on you? Will you be my focus group? Thats what I have been doing for a month now, making test batches and writing down specific detailed recipes, and pricing out the cost of production vs. market price for things. Thats drudgery, but the exciting part for me is that I want to offer few signature dishes that are unique, that noone else around is doing, only about 8 or 10 things, but these are the things that I need feedback on, don’t worry, I will take it for what its worth, very informal, unscientific, but I need to hear feedback.

Can I post descriptions and ask what you think?

@Promnight: I’ll rent a Smart Car and find it … I haven’t left Manhattan in what? Six or seven months? But I’ll come down there. Just let us know when it’s open and we’ll whore it for you.

@blogenfreude: Thank you, really.

Unrelated: did you all see the goofy Son of Segway that GM’s actually spending hard cash on?

http://www.freep.com/article/20090407/BUSINESS01/90407077

My reaction when I see that picture is to ask, “But what happens when you want to go up a hill?” There are some hills here in Seattle that would simply topple the thing.

ADD: And, best of all, it’s called a PUMA.

@Promnight: I’ll do my best to bring friends with high limits on their credit cards. It’s the least I can do ….

@blogenfreude: I’m bringing cash and a bottle of Don Julio for after closing time.

@IanJ: I did a spit take when I heard about the PUMA. My favorite part is that GM thinks every place will build special lanes for these too-unsafe-for-roads, too-fast-for-sidewalks brainstorms.

@Mistress Cynica: GM is forgetting its institutional history. First you buy off and close the competition, and the roads will follow.

@Promnight: Of course! I’ll be glad to
do some eyes-half- closed tasting and evaluation. Does the climate permit
year-round operation? You know you’re going to have to achieve the nearly
unattainable balance of nutritious, appealing food, affordability, and some form of je ne sais quois benefit-added allure to be named later, one which induces them to cross that bridge. “Business plan, managed growth, (too much success. too soon hath thwamped many a promising enterprise).” I retired from the travel agency field in 2002, with no retirement save social security disability. With Parkinson’s disease, there are very few ways to earn extra money. Being an accomplished photographer, I steered my little coracle of an idea through turbulent waters. After being part of one hundred exhibits
in several states, I landed on my feet and arranged with a wonderful
new gallery: Pictura, of Bloomington , Indiana, to be my sole source of
sales, marketing and distribution. At last I’m doing what I dreamed of, selling photographs I like in a wonderful atmosphere for
good money. Anyway, Prommie, you’re going to succeed. Surround
yourself with good people, delegate, maintain a balance in your life…
Hell! Nuthin’ to it!

@Promnight: I’ll be stopping by too. I’m not now going to B’more – they can get on without me – but we’re going to Sarasota in a couple of months and I’ll stop off for lunch on the way. I’d love to hear about the food. Middle eastern is my fave and when I cooked I used to cook that and Franch. The OH is a middle-eastern jew and his mother cooked marvelous things, though she wouldn’t tell you how. Good name, BTW. I bet you’re crazed. You should be. It’s a logical reaction. But you sound like you know what you’re doing and you will find your feet. It’s a tough business at the beginning simply because it’s so time consuming but, as I say, you’ll find your feet. Sounds like you’ve got a good locale. So good luck!!!!!!

BTW. T/J saw the Frost/Nixon interviews last night and became enraged all over again by that lying sack of shit. Not one word did I believe. Frost was good, puts to shame what passes for interviewers now. The only one to compare in terms of audacity is Colbert.

@Tommmcatt the Wet Sprocket: Pooping under the bed? Someone isn’t crate training. If he’s a bull terrier of whatever stripe he will grow up to be fastidious in such matters. Our boxer/bull mix finds secret places off in the long grass. We don’t want our pups to grow up with burdens of shame now do we? Because we know what that leads to.

Oh. And yeah, RML is teh awesome dad. But he’s adopting me first. K?

@Benedick: Since I know you’re a fan of the Dachshunds, check out the Dachshund Derby held this weekend at the race track near Berkeley.

@Promnight: Definitely start posting the recipes.

@Mistress Cynica: I too laughed at the name PUMA and also about the PUMA lanes. Because bike lanes are such a success, as taxi drivers and asshole drivers view them as a special lane for them to drive in?

@Promnight: Are you expecting to be open this summer? We’re doing the family vacay thing in the saturated lower shore week of July 4th, and have already penciled in a day trip up to LBI. Ms. Nabisco has a weakness for mousaka, and I’ll go up against the hottest thai curry you can finagle, if we can put in orders early…

@Nabisco: Yes, mid-may is the target date. It is my dream to make larp a staple in these parts. Moussaka, you have given me the most wonderful idea, I will try it tonight and report back.

@Nabisco: Are you able to buy the catfood cans of Maesri brand curry pastes? With these, anyone can make a passable thai curry, more than passable, easier than stouffers. And you can start putting spoonsful of the paste in just about anything else that strikes your fancy, from meatloaf to whatever.

Another amazing thing to look for in hard-core asian markets that cater to the asian restaurant owners is frozen chopped lemongrass, it comes in big bricks, chopped and frozen, its as fresh and bright as can be, and a brick of it lasts months, one of the greatest things to have in your freezer ever.

Speaking of guns, File this article on mass murder shootings under: No Shit Sherlock.

@Prommie: The Vietnamese community here just bought up an old strip mall and have converted it into an Asian market/VN restaurant/nail salon operation that I’m dying to visit when it opens officially next week. We can get the Maesri pastes at the local Giant. I grow my own hot peppers, and last night the wife and I finished off the last of our habaneros which were sinfully picante. I drive myself to the verge of hallucination with chiles.

ADD: @SanFranLefty: I just got through reading an U/FOUO document from DHS that says exactly the same thing. I was trying to decide if excerpting it on stinque would be considered “official use”, case closed! Remember Hopey’s lamentations about those who cling to their bibles and guns?

@Nabisco: Try the strange vietnamese subs, they make these sandwiches on skinny french baguettes, with spam or canned corned beef as the meat, and crunchy vegetables, and hot sauce, and butter, its the wierdest thing, a street-food combination of French and Vietnamese cuisines based on canned meat products that I am convinced are a legacy of all the years of war, wartime is the only time people eat spam and canned corned beef, except in polynesia.

@EffeteHipster: Congratulations. Does the gallery have any association with the University there?

@Promnight:

Will you leak recipies and let me try a couple if I promise not to share them?

@Prommie: When I was with legal aid on the Navajo Nation at Shiprock, the local supermarket had and entire aisle of Spam on display, facing an aisle of colored “fruit drink”. The Navajo homies used to buy it by the case because a lot of them had no electricity to run refrigerators in the outback. (There are LP refrigerators, but hardly anyone had one).

You gonna make those jet fuel Vietnamese coffees with espresso, Pet milk and sugar?

Also, you should develop a campaign to get free media in the local fishwrap and on line. I found a great steakhouse one night when on the road in Billings, MT by perusing the web at the hotel.

@Prommie: Spam is a delicacy in Hawai’i and in the local cuisine. Bahn mi (name of the Vietnamese sandwiches) are all over the place at the Vietnamese restaurants here in the Tenderloin area of SF and all over San Jose and they are amazing. They don’t use Spam, though, they cater towards the western palate and use beef, pork, or chicken. The fish sauce is the secret ingredient, I think.

@SanFranLefty: They love that spam all over the South Pacific, too, SFL. Its said to taste like people.

@FlyingChainSaw: Pictura Gallery is privately owned by Bloomington business-couple David and Martha Moore. They have done a superb job in designing and creating a gallery
space which would be an asset to any arts scene or cosmopolitan
city in the world. Dealing exclusively in photographic art, the gallery
celebrated its one-year anniversary Wednesday, April 8, with a stunning
exhibit by Peter and David Turnley, photojournalists whose recent release
McClellan Street documents their precocious grasp of the medium’s capabilities in the early seventies when they were both just
seventeen and growing up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. They both attended the
two-night reception, and signed books, shared anecdotes, and shone as we always hope stars will do.
The Bloomington Photography Club, founded 1989, has grown to 165
members as we enter our twentieth year. Although Pictura Gallery has no official ties to I.U., it has certainly benefited from the long-standing
symbiotic relationship with Steve Raymer, Claude Cookman (photo-journalism), Isamu James Nakagawa and Jeffrey Wolin (Fine Arts), and
Tyagan Miller (administration), as well as many others. It’s really a gas,
in other woids, to be here n0w .

@Prommie: Because South Pacific islanders are all cannibals?

@Nabisco: @Prommie: The one thing I miss about OKC (other than my friends) is the incredible Vietnamese food. There is a huge and prospering Vietnamese community there, and Little Saigon (officially the “Asian District”) is full of fabulous Asian markets (the Super Cao, with enormous golden gourds on top and lifesize neon green and orange palm trees in the parking lot is destination shopping at its finest), terrific pho and noodle places, and the greatest banh mi ever, where you can get a baguette filled with the meat of your choice plus pickled carrots and daikon, jalapenos, and cilantro, for $2 including tax. Now I’m really hungry.

@SanFranLefty: That’s so patently obvious they should be rewarded with a million-dollar grant for multi-year study.

@EffeteHipster: You know there’s another Stinquer who lives in Bloomington, yes?

@IanJ: Ha ha, you make joke! Everybody knows that hardly any polynesians are cannibals anymore, just a few of the old folk in remoter areas who ate people long time ago. The “spam tastes like people” joke is half-serious, I think, I have heard it and read it a thousand times, and I have a relkative who lived there (Samoa) for a long time and actually met some people who claimed to have eaten human. Our meat is said to be sweet, like spam.

The polynesians apparently got a taste for it during WWII when the US army and navy flooded the whole region with the stuff.

There is a great book you can get through Nojo’s amazon link, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, humorous memoir of dude who moved to Tarawa (I think his wife worked for the UN or an international aid organization).

@Prommie: I read it last year for book club. So many good parts, but the bit about trying to set up a New Yorker subscription about killed me.

@IanJ: Now this get interesting, it seems Paul Theroux claims credit for inventing the urban legend that pacific islanders love spam because it reminds them of Human, in The Happy Isles of Oceania. When Cecil Adams wrote a column on the topic, Theroux responded thusly:

“Cecil, my man!

You were right the first time. Yes, it is a joke. In spite of my solemn declaration in The Happy Isles of Oceania, the voracious Spam consumption in the Pacific is not conclusive evidence of a cannibal past.

And I enjoyed seeing my laborious joke cleverly adumbrated in yet another of your witty, wide-ranging, and inexhaustibly erudite columns.

But also, speaking as a vegetarian, all meat-eating looks to me like the first step down the road to anthropophagy.

With good wishes, Paul Theroux”

I do so hope you don’t think I am an anti-polynesian racist who believes in all manner of offensive polynesian stereotypes. They weigh no more than any other people, and by no means are they over-represented in the ranks of sumo wrestlers and NFL linemen.

Anywhoo, almost all reports do say human tastes like pork, so this would be one example of a myth arising through a backwards bit of logic, they used to eat human, human tastes like pork, spam is pork, voila!

@Prommie: I guess I don’t know any of the SPI stereotypes, other than the cannibal one that I figured died out some time before Moby Dick. I’ve never heard that Spam tasted like human, although I have heard that pig and human tasted similar. I just found your statement a bit odd.

I did know that SPIers loved them some Spam, but that’s from second-hand accounts — my parents sailed through the South Pacific a few years ago, and remarked upon it. The WWII GI theory was the explanation I heard.

@SanFranLefty: Not only do I know there is another Stinquer in Bloomington, I think I know who it is! Ssshhh. Every night, a female person slips into my bed, and all night, she is the first thing between me and the breaking-off of state-sized chunks of the Continental Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

Don’t tell my first wife; we’re not divorced, but we still live together. In fact, if we don’t blow it, we celebrate forty-four years of marital bliss on April 17, Friday. Ladies and gents, please welcome commenter extraordinaire, lynnlightfoot! And, how about giving it up for her ever-lovin’ hubbeh, Paul Lightfoot! With admirati0n and affection, oldsters now bed down. I hope our cooperation will be taken
into consideration. Should we turn ourselves in?

@EffeteHipster: As soon as I went on that gallery’s website and saw the last name of one of the artists, I figured you were either married or you were pulling a Libertarian Tool/Hose Manikin split personality routine.

Your stinquey love is quite cute.

P.S. I liked your work that was on that website.

@EffeteHipster: Whoa those are some beautiful photos. “Ascension” is my favorite, but I love that first big rusty one too. Congrats on the exhibit!

(Here’s the link for all you googlephobes)

@drinkyclown: I liked the blue one below big rusty. Looks like angels at a crime scene.

@redmanlaw: That was my favorite too. Great work, EffeteHipster.

ADD: Thanks to drinkyclown for the link–I was too lazy to google.

@Mistress Cynica, RML, Drinky, EffeteHipster: The blue angel one was my fave too. Great minds, etc, etc.

@drinkyclown: Drinky…yes, the link
was helpful to me as well. That Pictura Gallery website is recently updated. I have twenty images in my gallery at the photo club website…
http://bloomingtonphotoclub.org Click on dr0pdown on item 6,
“galleries” next page, display gallery 8 at the bottom (Paul Lightfoot).
The photos are numbered below, but some are faint. there should be 20 images all told.
@SanFranLefty: What a sly sleuth you
are, lady. You also win the best nom de plume award (natch) and
Red Man Law, you are a bastion of good sense and humour even when
surrounded by chaos. “Angels at a crime scene” is a chuckle. Prommie,
we’ll cross that LBI bridge when we come to it. We’ll probably have to
wait awhile to attempt it.