Dear Barack: Wish You Were Here
February 27th, 2010Gun Show!
First up today, two prayer requests.
I guess everyone knows Chile was hit by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake. This defies comprehension. The Port au Prince earthquake measured 7.0, so the Chile earthquake was ten to the power of 1.8 as intense. According to an online exponent calculator, that means it was 63 times as strong.
What earthquake intensity means, when measured numerically, is not clear to me. But this was an extraordinarily powerful quake.
When you get done praying for relief in Chile and the safety of all the people who are now threatened by tsunamis, consider adding a word for my friend Linda. She works for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Tomorrow she is having a cataract removed.
Today I went to a gun show with my prayer group. I enjoyed it a lot. I tried to give good advice to a couple of guys who were considering buying pistols. I steered them toward Glocks and Springfield XDs. One friend of mine was looking at cheaper guns. I think that’s a mistake. You save money up front, but then you don’t know what you have when it’s time to face a burglar. Will it fire? Will it jam? Bad time to have to worry about things like that.
I saw some okay gun prices, but ammunition was ridiculous. Twenty bucks for 9mm. Forty bucks for primers. The Obama ammunition bubble is behind us, or at least the peak is. I can buy 9mm for between ten and eleven bucks a box, and primers are back down to $30.
I saw a Saiga-12 for $489. That was a good deal. But it occurs to me that Saigas are only worthwhile for gun nuts, because you have to take off all the estrogen-oozing Hillary hardware and convert them back to real AK47s.
At breakfast, before the show, our group leader talked about the concept of fences. This is what our pastor is covering in his new series of sermons. The idea is that we have barriers in our lives, to keep us from getting into things we shouldn’t be messing with, and to keep evil out. Some barriers are intangible–rules–and others are physical.
We begin our lives in cribs, with bars around us. Then our parents expand the space we’re allowed to move around in, as we become better able to control ourselves. As we grow, the rules also change, and our freedom increases.
I find this concept interesting, because it ties into the concept of strongholds. We talk a lot about Satan’s strongholds, such as addiction and abuse, but we don’t talk much about God’s strongholds, such as the family, the home, the physical body, and the church. We are supposed to be like walled cities, and we should monitor our “gates,” which include our eyes, ears, and senses. We should control the people and things that go in and out of our homes. We should try to keep our churches pure.
A lot of people think an adult can’t be harmed by exposure to bad ideas and immorality, but that’s not true. You’re never too old to be subject to negative influences.
On the way back from the show, I stopped by church and grabbed some pizza cheese. I want to do an experiment. The other day I made a thin pizza in the church’s conventional gas oven, and it was very, very good. But judging from the time it took to bake, the temperature wasn’t as high as the temperature in my own oven. So I want to bake a pie at 500° here at home, to see what the result is like.
Pizza “experts” always yammer that you have to have a ten-thousand-degree oven to get a good pizza, but they’re wrong about all sorts of things, so I want to give this a shot and see what happens. The oven at my church was set on “Broil,” which should have been over 600°, but the pizza took eight minutes to bake, so clearly, it was not that hot.
I’m making the pie with non-kneaded dough. It’s a pain to make, because it’s hard to get the water-to-flour ratio right, but I think it should give a better texture than kneaded dough. I need to start weighing the ingredients so I can come up with exact amounts. That will make the corrections and additions unnecessary. When that happens, non-kneaded dough should be faster than kneaded dough.
I’m also considering giving up activating my yeast. I recently learned that there is a difference between active dry yeast and instant dry yeast. Supposedly, anyway. The directions on my instant yeast say you can mix it directly into the flour. I’m a bit wary of that advice, but it can’t hurt to try it a few times to see how well it works.
Eventually I’ll reach the point where I throw three ingredients into a bowl, stir it for ten seconds, microwave it for fifteen seconds, and eat it.
Maybe not. But the process does get shorter and simpler with time.
February 27th, 2010 at 2:16 PM
About the Saiga… Yeah, the factory stock has to go, but there are easier solutions than turning it back into an AK. At least one manufacturer makes a back block that allows you to mount AR grips and buttstocks. Which is much more simple task than the former.
February 27th, 2010 at 3:23 PM
I have thought for years that Ruger was a good gun at a good price. I have a 9mm P89DC that has never jammed with a few thousand rounds through it and a GP100 .38/.357 with the 6 2/3″ barrel (I *think*) and it is built like a tank.
February 27th, 2010 at 4:02 PM
that should be 6 3/4″, I think
February 27th, 2010 at 11:28 PM
I concur on the Ruger for reliablity and value.
For concealed carry, they tend to be a bit larger, clunkier and heavier than competing makes across similar platforms.
Some of the newer striker-fired Rugers have come down to competitive profiles in terms of weight and bulk. Same for the LCR snubbie revolver.
I’ll never say bad stuff about the strength and reliability of Ruger’s prodcuts. Sometimes some less than stellar rifle accuracy, and a history (in the process of now being corrected) of Bill Ruger Sr.’s express philosophy of “no one needs more than 10 round magazines” and other forms of castrating the citizen market.
If Ruger keeps it’s present course (and the millions spent on R&D and tooling dictate that they will), then watch for them to gain a deserved place among the top echelon of fighting armaments, vs. sporting (e.g. “Elmer Fudd”) arms.
By the way, Steve. The 3rd annual Shooting Fiesta, hosted by “Combat Controller” from the Gun Counter Forum will be held on the weekend of 13-14 March, in Austin, TX.
Link
http://www.theguncounter.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=9647
You really oughta think about coming out for the weekend!
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
February 28th, 2010 at 1:31 AM
I had a pastor who said you should always set the fence back away from the cliff, so when the kids climb over they don’t fall so far.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:23 AM
Which reminds me, I’m not an octopus (despite what my high school girlfriends in my previous incarnation might have thought) and will probably want my hands free if LA is hit by something more significant than it was in 1994. This week I’ll get a pistol and mag holster and a shotgun scabbard. I’ve got a neoprene butt sock thing for more shells and a 50-shell bandoleer and a belt pouch that carries another 100 more shells.
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Still need something with a scope to keep goblins at bay from at least a block away.
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Some positive development in my community concerning coordinated efforts to protect neighborhoods if there’s another of what local Rep. Maxine Waters would call an “uprising”. Perfect defense isn’t possible, but we are approaching a level of knowledge and supplies that would convince opportunistic gangs to look elsewhere for an easier target.
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Today’s Purim, a day where scripture tells of Jews arming and defending themselves against all who would threaten them.
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Happy anniversary, of sorts.
February 28th, 2010 at 5:00 AM
We should start our own TV show, something like a cross between Food Network’s “Iron Chef” and “Chopped.”
Thirty minutes from start to finish, and we could call it “Instant Pizza” or “Pizza Now” or something else glib and entertaining, and it would involve the contestants opening a basket of stuff…flour, yeast, cheese, and a mystery ingredient, jumping around with a knife and a bowl and a cutting board, then shoving a stone in a oven with the results laying on it at 500 or 600 degrees F.
Meanwhile some people would sit around and comment on the process and then eat the results after a commercial break…
I’m glad you have proven the concept and agree that I’m not crazy using my own minimally worked dough because I was afraid to tell anyone what I was doing and all of the stuff on TV and on the internet said you had to face Mecca and hum in the key of E flat minor and work your flour mixture for 15 minutes at 78 degrees F and I was too lazy and tone deaf to bother.
Most of the time I still pre mix my yeast with warm water and I do a “pre-rise” with a small batch of flour–about 3/4 cup to a 1/4 cup of water–when I have the time and want really thick crust, but I can also just throw everything in a bowl with some white pepper and salt and plop it on a pan with a clean dish towel cover, let it rise, roll it out, top it, and eat pizza in less than two hours.
The world is a better place for your efforts…
February 28th, 2010 at 11:09 AM
I bake pizza at home at 500º, with the rack as low as I can get it. Works great. And by all means, weigh your flour and water if you want to really groove a recipe. Once you have it down you can go back to just measuring, but I think you’ll learn a lot in the process.
February 28th, 2010 at 4:01 PM
RE Ruger, I should mention it to him. He considered a Ruger, but the thing he’s thinking of buying is a Hi-Point. I’ve read that they’re a bit clunky, but they work, and the customer service excellent. Sort of the opposite of Colt.
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Another armorbearer is offering to sell him a lightly-used S&W 9mm. I don’t know the model. The current owner is in love with a Springfield XD, so he is willing to dump the Smith for a good price. I don’t know much about the reputation of S&W 9mm pistols, but I doubt they make anything I would be ashamed to carry.
RE Purim, yesterday I told my prayer group leader about our meeting in Jerusalem, and how you dressed to give Haman a bit of the old ultra-violence.
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RE not kneading dough, it’s the greatest discovery since electricity. Better pizza and less work. Two things that mean a lot to me.
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RE weighing ingredients, I’m moving in that direction. It’s very hard to do with the church’s mixer, however. When our food processor arrives, I’ll be a dough-making MACHINE, and I should be able to nail everything down to within one gram.
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Making pizza dough with a mixer is just plain stupid.
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The 500° pizza was fine, but not as good as the one I made at church. No idea why. Pizza is a perpetual enigma.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:14 PM
By the way – an 8.8 (63 times as strong a quake) and fewer deaths (on the order of a 1 to 1000 ratio). Building Codes matter in a place where they are at least minimally quasi-followed.
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:50 AM
Kel-Tecs are great little guns for those on a budget. And their customer service is top notch.
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:56 AM
I wanted a Kel-Tec until I tried one. I still have no idea where the bullets landed. I’ve never seen anything like it.
March 2nd, 2010 at 12:52 PM
I stumbled upon the basis of the media claims about the much greater “strength” of the Chilean quake.
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“The Richter magnitude of an earthquake is determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs (adjustments are included to compensate for the variation in the distance between the various seismographs and the epicenter of the earthquake). The original formula is:[4]
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where A is the maximum excursion of the Wood-Anderson seismograph, the empirical function A0 depends only on the epicentral distance of the station, ?. In practice, readings from all observing stations are averaged after adjustment with station-specific corrections to obtain the ML value.
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Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude; in terms of energy, each whole number increase corresponds to an increase of about 31.6 times the amount of energy released.”