Pugs, Pumpkins, and Shorts

A recent email through this site asked if that is my Pug pictured to the right. No, it's not, it's a photo swiped from somewhere on the internet earlier this year. That in mind, it's a dead-ringer for my now 9-year old Pug when he was a puppy.

My two surviving pumpkin plants have really taken off. I let a mid-afternoon thunderstorm take care of the watering today, then Miracel-gro'd them heavily. The weather around here is supposed to be nearly perfect for the next week - sunny and low 80's, so I am really hoping the plants make up some more ground. I am still planning on picking off all flowers until late July to help make the plants focus on root development, but once fruit sets, it's off to the races.

Dill's Atlantic Giant, the variety of pumpkin I planted, is known in Latin as Cucurbitus Maxima", I discovered today. In English, that translates into "Really damn big squash". I can only hope.

After three summers of being worn almost daily, my favorite pair of shorts has gone kablooie after I caught my back pocket on the door frame of my truck. They are now relegated to yard work and any other time where having a significant part of the seat torn out and then amateurily resewn isn't a handicap. They're comfortable, have huge pockets, and wear like iron.
http://www.511tactical.com/index.asp?dlrID=511&dept=2&number=73312

Motivational Posters for Saturday

Short Mag (again)

A week after I spent most of two hours working on the .25WSSM a customer brought in with a feeding problem, the rifle is back on the shelf. The guy brought it back and explained that while he liked the rifle and appreciated everything we did to fix its issues, he simply couldn't afford to shoot it. We worked out a trade involving that rifle and some cash, and he walked out the door toting a Remington 700 in .270. .270, Jack Connor's pet cartridge, has been around nearly 80 years, and is two things that the .25WSSM isn't - cheap (relatively speaking) and available. Walk into any sporting goods store or WalMart in the country, and you'll be able to find .270, usually somewhere around $12 a box or so. .25WWSM, by contrast, costs, on average, three times that, and you're going to have to do some serious hunting to find it.

I respect and understand his decision. Now, anyone who wants a very lightly used .25WSSM Winchester M70 with black synthetic stock, drop me a line and we can probably work something out.

Political Platitudes

Earlier this week, an MSNBC report confirmed what most of us already knew, or at least suspected.

The huge majority of journalists are liberals.

Nothing ground-shaking here, but the proof in the proverbial pudding, MSNBC noted, is their political contributions. Of the 144 journalists they tracked, 125 gave to Democrats or liberal organizations, only 17 gave to Republicans or conservative movements, and two joyfully equally opportunistics gave to both. Breaking out the old calculator, 125 out of 144 makes 86.8%. I'm tempted to make it 127/144 (88.2% for the record), but the two who contributed both ways are OK with me for now. Read the link for more, it's interesting nonetheless.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485/

In other political news this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he is leaving the GOP and registering as an independent. Many conservatives, myself included, met this with a huge yawn. How, I ask, can you leave something that you were never really a part of to start with? The one and only reason that Bloomberg ever ran as a Republican was to capitalize on an association with (and endorsement from) his predecessor, Rudy Guiliani. Bloomberg's track record in Gracie Mansion has been anything but conservative, and frankly he is no big loss to the GOP.

One person, if anyone, who took serious notice of Bloomberg's announcement had to be Hillary Clinton. If Bloomberg decides to run for President in 2008 as an Independent, he will siphon away a large portion of the New York (and New Jersey and New England) center/left voters from Hillary, and with them, any chance at she has of winning. Look for some seriously freaky political twists in the next 13 months leading up to the conventions.

Today's obligatory Fred Thompson reference. Come on already, Fred. Just run.

Borat, A New Take

"Borat" was possibly the funniest movie released last year. That said, something was missing.



Guns.



One guy's take on a solution:





For the record, I thought "The Punisher" was awful.

Thinning the Crowd - Sort Of

When I had to restart the pumpkin patch in mid-May thanks to my toddler's eager hands, I planted five seeds, in three spots (two of two seeds and one of one, if that makes sense). The singleton never came up, but apparently to compensate for it, both seeds of one of the doubles just took off. Eventually, in the form of yesterday, it was time to pull one up, so logically I pulled up the weaker sprout. Weaker is kind of subjective, since it was still pretty big. Survival, Charles Darwin wrote, goes to the fittest. Three months after a package of ten seeds arrived in my mailbox, I have two vigorous sprouts, each with ten leaves. The biggest leaf I measured a little while ago was a heart shaped 5"x8".

Far from just thinning, yesterday was a time of rescuing. I pulled up an eggplant sprout from another section of the garden that had gotten almost choked out by weeds, and planted it in the corner of the pumpkin patch. It seems to be doing well so far, and I'm hoping to get a fruit or two off of it before the pumpkins in turn crowd it out.

Tinkering With a Short Mag

Last week a customer brought in a Winchester M70 bolt action rifle chambered in .25 Winchester Super Short Magnum. The .25WSSM has a short and wide case, and basically duplicates .25-06 ballistics but with an action almost an inch shorter.





The problem, he said, was that the bolt was skipping over the rear of the cartridge case and not chambering the round, resulting in an empty chamber and a "click" instead of a "boom". Not good.

The first place to look with almost any gun problem is the springs. In this case, it made sense to check the magazine spring, since it's responsible for pushing the rounds upwards and having them ready to be loaded into the chamber.

Oddly enough, the spring felt fine. It felt a little mushy towards the front of the magazine, but very strong towards the rear. The thing about leaf springs (it looks like a "Z" from the side) is that they will sometimes be inconsistent, and the strength towards the back end made me think that it wasn't the problem.

Next we checked the follower, the little platform in the magazine where the round sits. It looked to be a little short, but not short enough to cause the problem by itself. For some reason Winchester's quality control has slipped a little recently, and magazine bodies are no exception.

By this time, I'm baffled. Having no .25WSSM inert rounds or action dummies laying around (it's not a common round yet), I took the firing pin out of the bolt and used a couple of live rounds to check the feeding for myself. Any time you have a live round near a firearm and you're not planning on firing it, take the firing pin out to prevent any chance of it going boom. I have been around guns fired indoors unexpectedly, and it's unpleasant.

After loading the magazine and running several rounds through the action, I found the problem. The rounds fed fine if they were feeding from the right side of the magazine, but coming from the left side, they left the magazine feed lips at a bad angle and the front of the round nose-dived towards the front. Pull the bolt slightly back to fix this, and it skips over the round entirely. Problem identified. I pulled the magazine box out of the rifle, and immediately noticed that the magazine feed lips were completely different on the right side and left side. Reasoning that they got it right (no pun intended) with the right side and wrong with the left side, I carefully bent the left side lips to match its twin. I put the rifle back together minus the firing pin, and checked the action. Perfect cycling from both sides.

Total time to fix, after the head scratching? Five minutes with a pair of sheet metal pliers.

Primaries, Magazines, and Pumpkins

It's still a little early, but it looks like Ralph Smith is going to eke out a win in the 22nd district Republican primary for the State Senate, pulling in, at last count, 51% of the vote over incumbent Brandon Bell. I'll be really interested in the coming days to see why voters (at 6%) turnout) picked Smith, although I have previously listed my rationale for supporting him. Either way, congratulations, Mr Smith.

Good local coverage here:

http://www.wdbj7.com/Global/story.asp?S=6648897
http://www.roanoke.com/politics/wb/120435

Up at the shop, we got in a couple of MagPul polymer AR-15 30 round magazines, their new PMag. My previous experience with plastic AR mags, in the form of Orlite (Israeli), Thermold (Canadian) and RamLine (US) has been less then stellar, but I'm hoping for good things here. MagPul doesn't turn out junk - I have their enhanced followers in all my USGI magazines, and either RangerPlates or MagPul's on about half of them. I'm going to buy a couple of these magazines this week and get a range report up soon.

http://www.magpul.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=80_120&products_id=268

Pumpkin update: all three plants are up to eight very healthy leaves. I let two thunderstorms do the watering over the past couple of days, but tomorrow, they're getting fertilized.

A Reminder of Heroism

Yesterday, the 6th of June, was the 62nd anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, D-Day. D-Day was the largest amphibious operation in history, a fact that even a former Marine like myself can appreciate. As each year passes, so do the veterans who sacrificed so much, at a rate of almost 1,000 a day by some estimates. Of the 16,000,000 (that's sixteen million) Americans who fought in WW2, less than a fifth of them are alive today. If you see one, shake his (or her) hand, it's the least you can do.

A friend took this photograph of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial last month, and it's always a worth another look.

A Little Sick Humor

There's very little funny about the scourge of crystal meth. It's destroying lives at a record pace in a tsunami of stupid brought on by the desire for a quick rush. Search the 'net for for photos of meth users, and I guarantee that you won't sleep well tonight. I've seen them in person, and people like that are the closest thing to the undead that I have ever seen.

That said, any topic can rear some humor, however sick and twisted. I present:

Back in my day, I sold popcorn and iced tea on the front steps. What are kids coming to?