Tag: blogging

Support Soldiers’ Angels

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And maybe win something nice.

Linoge over at Walls of the City is holding a contest:

The Rules:

How to Earn a Ticket: 

1.  Every five dollars you donate directly to Soldiers’ Angels nets you one numbered ticket.
2.  Every five dollars you spend in their Dollar Days or Amazon shops (where the products are shipped directly to them) gets you one ticket.
3.  Every five dollars you spend in the Angels’ Store for any product that is shipped to “ANY Hero”, “ANY Wounded Soldier”, or “A SPECIFIC Soldier” earns you one ticket.
4.  DO NOT SEND ME MONEY.  All money and goods should go directly to Soldiers’ Angels. 
5.  DO SEND ME THE RECEIPT.  Anonymize it however you like, and use the actual receipt or a screencap, but email from an address I can reach you back at.  Send the receipt/proof to “linoge (at) wallsofthecity (dot) net”. 
6.  Within 24 hours, you should receive an email from me indicating your ticket numbers.  If you do not, feel free to email me again or comment here.

How We Will Do the Drawing:

1.  The drawing will occur in decreasing fair market value (in other words, most-expensive item first, according to MSRP). 
2.  You can only win once. 
3.  When you send me your receipt, please indicate how many tickets you want put in each pool. 
4.  A single drawing will take place for each prize (currently 12), not each pool. 
5.  Sometime on 01JAN12, with Better Half watching over my shoulder, I will hit up Random.org and generate however many numbers I need.  I will email the winners that day.

Go check out the various goodies he’s giving away. If you can’t use ’em you can re-gift ’em!  I’ve got $50 in Amazon credit I think I’ll donate to the cause.

Authorized Journalists

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David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh, that is.  At least according to my hometown newspaper, the Brevard Times.  (I grew up in Brevard Country, Florida.)

In January 2011, journalists David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh picked up the Gunwalker story from CleanUpATF.org. They began to investigate and report their findings as well as precipitate a Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry into the matter led by U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA). Codrea and Vanderboegh have zealously attempted to publicize the issue ever since. Their hard work finally paid off – Fox News briefly began to report the story while CBS began a full length investigation which aired last month. Just yesterday, CBS reported that the National Rifle Association used its annual convention to highlight the Gunwalker scandal.

And there’s this:

…President Obama’s claim that 90% of guns recovered from Mexico originated from the U.S. Obama’s 90% statistic drew criticism from media outlets such as Fox News and PolitiFact in April 2009 that his claims were not true and unsubstantiated.


So did the Obama administration hatch a plan to create evidence by using the A.T.F. to enable U.S. gun shipments to Mexico beginning in November 2009 in order to back up his 90% claim made just seven months earlier? It is quite possible that we will find out that answer as the Senate investigation proceeds.

So now we have official acknowledgement from the MSM that bloggers can be journalists.

And it’s interesting to see even a small MSM outlet ask the question, “Was Fast and Furious botched, or was it intentional?”

Codrea and Vanderboegh: The Woodward and Bernstein of the Twenty-first Century!

WTF?

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Weird traffic pattern on the blog today:

I’ve seen “googlebot” do a lot of page views in a short duration, but this has been happening all day from multiple sites. RR.com has been a common one, and the location has been all over the country. But as you can see, it’s not just one or two sites, it’s several.

WTF, over?

Nobody Asked Me

Kevin1 Comment

The current rage on the intarweb blogs is the “What was your first car?” meme.

Well, nobody asked me, but I’ll answer anyway. I’ve done this post before, but here it is again:

My first car at age 16 was my dad’s hand-me-down. He’d bought it for something like $700 in 1974, put another couple-hundred in parts into it so it would run, and drove it until 1978 when he went down to the Ford dealership and placed an order for his very first brand-new automobile, an F-150 pickup truck.

That was the year I turned 16. Our insurance agent told him, “Don, you have a new driver in the house. The insurance company sees ‘new driver’ and ‘new vehicle’ and they put two-and-two together and come up with a 60% increase in your insurance premium. Put the old car in your son’s name and insure it for the minimum you can.” So he did. Which is how I, out of three children, was the only one who got a car from my parents.

Pissed my brother off.

But the car in question was no particular prize. It was a 1969 Simca 1118:

Only mine didn’t look that good. It was originally silver, but the sun had faded that right through to the gray primer underneath. The interior was sun-rotted so the front seatbacks got reupholstered with T-shirts stretched over them. I got some scrap carpet from a friend – brown shag, no less – and carpeted the floor with that. Door panels, too. No radio, so my dad had mounted a 12V-powered AM-FM under the dash and wired it into the harness.

Rear-engine, rear-wheel drive, 1118cc, water-cooled, 56Hp. Zero-to-sixty? Take a lunch and eat it when you get there.

But it was a car, and it took me anywhere I wanted to go.

I always wondered what that car would be like with an engine transplant out of a Honda CBX.

Lots to Say, No Time to Say It

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I’ve got the urge to write another Überpost, but no time to do it.  There are a lot of things I want to comment on, and again, very little time.  The new job is going OK, but I’ll be happier when I don’t have to work in Phoenix.  It’s a bit far from home.

Just a quick post, then.

I caught the new movie Moneyball last weekend.  I’m not a baseball fan, but for some reason I like baseball movies:  The Natural, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Major League, Mr. Baseball, I liked ’em all.  Moneyball is based on fact, and per the blurb, it is:

The story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.

The theme of the film is that, while it’s possible to buy a championship team if you have bottomless pockets, it’s also possible to build a winning team on a budget if you can select players who can get on base and otherwise don’t cost that much.

For a movie based on statistics, it was pretty good.  I especially enjoyed the fact that this team of mutts and rejects managed to win a record-setting 20 games in a row – fact.

But throughout the entire movie, I kept having the same thought: The movie would have been just as good and cost a lot less if they’d passed over Brad Pitt and instead drafted Greg Kinnear for the lead role.

Falling Down on the Job

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Uh, I’m supposed to post pictures and videos and comments on the just-passed Gun Blogger Rendezvous.

Fail.

Well, not complete fail, but I didn’t get any video, and not too many pictures.  For once I did more shooting with firearms than with my camera.  Plus, I ran a squad at the Steel Challenge day, and had no opportunity to do much of anything with the camera.  Others have done (just scroll down) a fine job, though, including U.S. Citizen (keep scrolling there, too) who got a shot of me shooting my target AR, and Davidwhitewolf who got one of me shooting my XP-100, neither of which firearms have been featured here.  Mentioned in passing, yes.  Photographed, no.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get my meager and paltry collection of photos up this weekend, plus a long list of “thank you’s” to the supporters of the GBR who contributed this year.  I’m still waiting to hear from Mr. Completely how much money was raised for Project Valour-IT.