I always thought that the “fire and brimstone” style of preaching was a metaphor for a general “doom and gloom” style of preaching, rather than mention of actual fire and brimstone.
Similarly, I always thought the term “bible-thumper” was a metaphor for particularly devout, evangelical Christians, rather than an behavior.
I was wrong on both counts. My worldview is irevocably changed.
A preacher, Brother Jed ((Search for the guy on YouTube for some examples of his behavior.)) , occasionally comes to campus with his wife and aggressively preach ((Calling sorority girls “whores”, frat boys “fornicators”, making blatantly racist comments towards blacks and hispanics,? etc.)) to students. He was giving a no-shit fire-and-brimstone speech to a bunch of students outside the university’s administration building. On occasion, he’d thump his bible. I must admit I was somewhat stunned by his behavior; I had never thought that anyone would ever actually preach like that.
Unfortunately for him, his methods didn’t seem to be garnering any followers. Indeed, people seemed to be more amused by his behavior than they were interested in his message. I wonder if this guy has actually run a cost/benefit analysis to see how effective his methods are.
Category: Personal
I Don’t Care
Marko’s excellent post about the female side of the shooting sports is enlightening and should give people something to think about when it comes to interacting with others((In short, don’t be a jerk.)).
In my case, I don’t care if someone’s male or female, tall or short, red, white, black, brown, yellow, or any other descriptive term. I was raised by good parents to treat others with respect. The army reinforced that with the lesson that “in the army, everyone is green.”
While there are certainly differences between the sexes (being male I cannot, for example, bear children), there is absolutely nothing about one’s wibbly bits that has any bearing on shooting. To think otherwise is stupid to the extreme. For an example of such stupidity, see this quote by Tam in the comments to Marko’s post:
For the doubters out there, who believe there aren?t any mouth-breathing dumbasses in the gun world, I offer the eleventeen jillion times I?ve been at a gun show and some cretin asks the guy I?m with how much he?s asking for the gun I?m carrying.
[…]
At one of my first Indy 1500?s, one guy asked the total stranger standing next to me how much he wanted for my 6.8 AR.
While I haven’t seen anything so blatant as what Tam describes, I’ve certainly seen some of my female friends get some condescension from people at the range. They let it roll off their respective backs and laughed about it in the pub afterwards, but it’s still disrespectful and has no business happening.
That said, there are certainly important differences between individuals which are relevant to shooting and need to be considered when purchasing or handling guns.
For example, I’m left-handed, and so have some difficulty effectively operating bolt-action rifles meant for righties. Some pistols, specifically Sigs, have their controls placed in positions (like the very left-rear of the grip) that are quite difficult for me to manipulate. Some people lack the upper body strength to effectively hold larger, heavier guns like the M1 Garand or to operate the slide on a particular pistol. Some people’s bodies are smaller or larger than others, so “one size fits most” stocks don’t fit them well (which is why I am a huge fan of adjustable/collapsible stocks). Some people’s hands are larger or smaller than others, so a gun’s grips may or may not feel comfortable in their hands.
Nearly all of these issues can be resolved with either training (e.g. building up strength or endurance, practice with the mechanisms of the gun, etc.), accessories (adjustable stocks, different grips, etc.), or choice of guns. None of them have anything to do with the sex of the shooter (I’ve yet to see a gun that requires a penis to operate.), but rather individual characteristics.
Be polite and friendly to everyone, regardless of what they’ve got between their legs, and you’ll do fine.
Smoke Detectors
Well, I learned tonight that my neighbor’s smoke detector is audible through the wall.
Unfortunately, this is the neighbor who goes camping a lot, and so has a few 1lb cylinders of propane in his closet. The same closet that shares a wall with my closet, where I have my safe, ammo, primers, and powder (all safely stored in accordance with appropriate regulations and common sense). Not to mention the hazmat storage container hamper for dirty laundry. Whee.
Fortunately, the alarm was set off by his cooking, and not from his apartment being on fire. When I went outside to investigate, his wife was fanning the door to blow the smoke out. I helped them silence the alarm and offered my box fan to help clear out the smoke.
At least I know that the smoke detectors are audible through the walls, which should help if there’s ever an emergency.
Shopping Around
After spending a few days of spring break in Massachusetts doing wedding planning stuff and spending some time with the soon-to-be-in-laws (it’s cold in MA!), I’m back in Tucson.
After driving back from Phoenix (where I flew into and spent a few days with The Girl), I decided to stop at the Sportsmans Warehouse in Tucson and browse. As usual, their ammo/powder/primer supplies were depleted. A good 1/4th of their rifle racks were bare; I’m not sure if this is a result of their fun happy financial times or limited supplies from upstream suppliers. They did, however, have DPMS 30-round AR-15 magazines for a whopping $30 (not including tax) each. These same magazines sell, at retail prices, on DPMS’ own website for $18-$20. Yowzers.
On the same trip, I stopped by Murphy’s Guns and looked at their wares. Business was good, with two customers filling out 4473s for new guns, a few people buying ammo, and a bunch of people perusing the racks. They had several ARs in stock, an AK or two, the absurd-looking “Rolling Thunder” shotgun from Mossberg (photo here, press release here), and the normal selection of pistols, all at reasonable prices. There were a few higher-priced specialty rifles like the FN FS2000 (~$1,400, if I recall correctly) on the shelves as well. They were out of the Federal .223 ammo, but had plenty of PMC, Wolf, and Prvi Partizan .223 left (as well as a bunch of Prvi M193). They recently raised prices on the Prvi M193 from $9.19/20 to $10.xx (I forgot the cents), but they still have several of the old-priced stuff in the same crate, so I picked up 60 rounds of that stuff today. Get it while you can.
Alas, I ended up spending money today that I would rather have saved: one of the UPSes for my? computers had been indicating that its batteries needed to be replaced for some time (its runtime could be measured in tens of seconds rather than tens of minutes) and beeping annoyingly, so I bought some replacement batteries today. So far, so good — the batteries haven’t exploded yet, and they seem to be charging well.
I also took my motor scooter down to the shop, as I’ve been having annoying failures-to-start that would suggest a dead battery, but the battery is fine according to my float charger and my neighbor’s multimeter. Most days it starts just fine, but some days the lights only come on dimly and it won’t turn over (when I press the electric starter, the lights get even dimmer, suggesting that it’s supplying power to the starter motor but not enough to make it work). Occasionally it’ll turn over once, but not fast enough to start. If it does turn over once, something happens where I can’t kick-start it (but jump starting it from another vehicle works fine). If it doesn’t turn over electrically, then it’ll start just fine with the kick-starter. Hopefully the shop can figure it out, and hopefully it’ll be under warranty — money’s tight enough as it is.
As I had mentioned in a previous post, I’ve recently been struck with some inspiration for a lengthy piece of writing (whether it turns out to be a short story or a full-blown novel is left to my muse). I’ve been reading up on tips for turning such inspiration into a coherent story, and have been outlining some of my thoughts, detailing characters, etc. No idea when the first chapter will be done, but I’ll let you know when it is.
Dr. Manhattan’s Amazing Technicolor Penis
I just saw Watchmen with a group of friends this evening. While I had never read the graphic novel, my friend says the movie is remarkably true to it. That’s always good. I honestly knew nothing about it, and so I went in thinking it’d be a sort of Batman knockoff. I’m pleased to report that I was wrong.
The movie was quite good. It had a deep, twisted, but not difficult-to-follow plot, some great fight scenes, a hell of a lot of character development, good special effects, a few highly-sensual but not overly-erotic sex scenes, and a decided lack of pants, most notably by Dr. Manhattan.
At first, he’s clad either in a tasteful suit or a weird crotch-bat-thing reminiscent of the garment that Sting wore in the 1984 film version of Dune…but later he goes full-frontal on numerous occasions, being pantsless more often than not. Manhattan certainly has the whole “chiseled body” thing down and looks? remarkably like a Greek sculpture, but I don’t recall Greek sculptures having wibbly bits quite like that. I suspect a few of the females in our party may have gotten a bit excited by said dangling azure wang. Honestly, out of all the movies I’ve seen with nudity in them, this is the first one with more full-frontal male nudity than female. While it I certainly prefer female nudity to male, I must admit it was interesting to see a movie that isn’t afraid to show such things in order to remain loyal to the original text, even in the face of an oft-too-puritanical-for-their-own-good American public.
The only thing longer than Dr. Manhattan’s penis would be the movie itself: it went on for about two and a half hours, but I never felt bored. There were several parts that I thought that the producers would simply put a “To be continued…” and continue with a sequel, but they blazed right through and continued with the movie. Most impressive.
Conclusion: If you’re not bothered by highly-muscled, large-penised men who glow with an eerie blue aura, nor by the occasional boob, nor by a few scenes of impressive violence and gore (hint: it involves an angle grinder), I strongly recommend that you see the movie. As I mentioned before, I haven’t read the graphic novel, but I’ve been told that the novel really brings out a lot of details that the movie simply didn’t have time to fully explore. I should go read it sometime.
Many characters from comic books make for some great Halloween costumes (Batman, Spider Man, etc.). Characters like Nite Owl in Watchmen would lend themselves well to such costumes. A Dr. Manhattan costume…not so much. Sure, stripping naked and painting oneself blue might sound like fun, it’s likely to result in the police getting involved (though I suppose the mugshot would be quite epic). Unless you have a remarkably prodigious member and a physique that would qualify you to be a character in the movie 300, do something else this October. Hell, even if you do possess those atributes, it’s probably a better idea to just go as one of the Spartan warriors rather than Dr. Manhattan. My eyes will thank you.
My Anti-Drug
Why do I have such expensive tastes? Good Scotch, AR-15s, and high-performance computers. All on a college students budget. Bah.
Being Geeky
I just installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (“Jaunty Jackalope”) Alpha 4 on my laptop (I have a second hard disk for mucking about like this).
So far, it seems to have addressed several of the issues I’ve had with previous versions of Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop:
- Based on some limited testing, it suspends and wakes normally. Previously it froze up, requiring a hard restart, which defeated the purpose of having it on a laptop to begin with.
- Better wifi support. This improves with each release.
Alas, it still seems to be lacking in a few areas:
- There is no ATI-provided 3D graphics card driver for the built-in Radeon X1250, as ATI doesn’t support alpha-release OSs. Presumably this will be resolved when 9.04 gets released “for real”. In the interim I’m using the open source “radeon” driver, which works well enough for my purposes, but I suspect I won’t be playing any 3D games for a bit (not that I have time to do so). Desktop effects work fine out-of-the-box.
- Power management still sucks compared to Vista on this hardware. This computer was designed with Vista in mind (it came from Dell with it), and can get about 3.5-4 hours of normal use off of a charge. Running XP or linux results in about 1.5-2 hours of battery life. Something to do with good processor speed-stepping in Vista. A bit of a pain, yes, but not the end of the world.
Otherwise, things look pretty good. Desktop support is better than laptop support, but that’s mostly because laptops use weird hardware most of the time.
Happiness is…
…curling up with a warm 18-year-old.
Scotch whisky, that is.
I have two separate gastronomical soft spots: I have a sweet tooth and enjoy good drink. While many of my collegiate peers will be drinking Miller High Life whilst playing beer pong, I’ll have a bottle of Chimay Blue and observe. When they’re doing shots of Smirnoff vodka, I’ll savor a dram of Glenfiddich 18-year-old.
Such drinks are expensive, and so lead naturally to drinking in moderation. This is fortunate, as I need the time for studying rather than recreational pursuits.
Even so, there’s something excellent about good Scotch, a comfy chair, and some time to relax.
Laptop Battery Life
I have a Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop, which came with Windows Vista. I’ve got it dual-booting between XP and Vista at present (with Ubuntu Linux in a VM due to hardware-specific issues — it runs great in the VM).
Battery life in Vista is about 3.5-4 hours, while battery life in XP is 1-1.5 hours. It appears that this difference is due to Vista’s superior CPU speed adjustment (the laptop has an AMD Turion 64 X2) capabilities; it keeps the CPU throttled down more, resulting in higher battery life.
Does anyone know any way to improve battery life in XP? The Power Management control panel is set to Portable/Laptop, and the settings are all reasonable for good power management. Is there any additional software that one can install that can tell the system to do more aggressive CPU throttling while on battery?
Super Bowl
So…bloody…close.
When Arizona scored its last touchdown, I thought we had it. I thought we managed to pull things around from the Steelers’ epic just-before-halftime surprise interception, run, and touchdown. (I’m not a Steelers fan, but hot damn was that an awesome play. I never thought I’d see a big dude run that fast or that far.) I thought we managed to pull victory from the jaws of personal fouls, flag-happy refs, receivers who can’t catch worth a damn, and terrible defense.
But alas, it was not to be. The Steelers managed to squeak by and win. My hearty congratulations to them.
My congratulations also to my friend Louis for making his own from-scratch tomato sauce, which is exceedingly delicious, and to my beautiful fianc?e Sarah, who gave me her recipe for lasagna. Granted, I modified it slightly by adding even more ground beef than originally called for, so as to increase the awesomeness (Note: Success!). Alas, Sarah wasn’t in town this weekend, so Louis and I went to the Dog House[1] for the Super Bowl and prepared the sauce and lasagna there.
During halftime, we ignited (with rather prodigious amounts of lighter fluid and the resulting huge flames — direct quote: “Is the bottom part of the grill supposed to be on fire?”) the charcoal grill and grilling bratwursts and hot dogs. Of course, the normal assortment of chips, dip, and other snacky foods were available.
My voice is a bit hoarse from cheering and yelling throughout the game.
Even though Arizona lost, it was a damned good game and much fun was had today.
[1] The house that my friends Rita, Teresa, Alex, and Colin rent. So named as they wanted a faux-fraternity name, and so used the Greek letters “Delta Omega Gamma”, or “Dog”. As it has a large living room, TV, and couches, it is often a scene of social gathering, drinking, etc.