I Can’t Just Say “It’s Seven O’Clock Somewhere”

Today I woke up–the last time I woke up, I mean–at about 12:20 p.m. I guess you could say my leadership in the area of getting the household on a workable schedule is not what it could be.

The heir apparent is resisting sleeping in the bassinet again. Pretty sure this is his mother’s fault. She let him sleep in the bed for several days without telling me, and he got spoiled immediately. He would yell like crazy when she put him in the bassinet. I fixed this problem. I told her to let him cry, and it changed his disposition for the better in one day. I think he is reverting because she is getting around the no-sleeping-in-bed rule by letting him fall asleep with her in bed during the day.

There are two layers of resistance I have to deal with. His and hers.

He will sleep if she fills him up with milk and lets him pass out. She takes his unconscious form and moves it to the bassinet, and he keeps sleeping. But it just so happens we run out of milk between 10 p.m. and midnight, so guess when he finally fills up? The wee, wee hours.

Now it sounds like I’m talking about a different subject.

I have realized that I, a male, have to take over the feeding plan. I started buying protein shakes and bars, and we have a big can of pure protein powder on the way. If the web is giving me the straight poop, we need to try to get something like 100 grams of protein into the wife every day in order to keep the baby fed, and to put that in perspective, a large egg has 6 grams, so 100 grams would run, what, seventy-five dollars?

I am also pushing her to drink water. She forgets.

We have to build up a reserve so we can knock him out–I mean feed him responsibly–regardless of the hour.

It’s not that easy getting food and drink into my wife. If you told me I needed to drink half a gallon of water, I’d drink one half-liter bottle in 15 seconds, a second within the next minute, and the rest would be drunk within no more than 45 minutes. Wouldn’t mean a thing to me. For some reason, my wife is different. It takes her several minutes to drink one bottle.

The baby appears to take after me, to put it mildly. She says he drank 7 ounces of milk in one feeding yesterday.

She has a hard time with pills, too. I have no problem swallowing a half-dozen huge supplements at once, but she has trouble getting one large capsule down.

I don’t know if my wife has an accurate picture of the lifestyle she signed on for. The web says women should pump milk 8-12 times per day. In other words, normal sleep isn’t even something they should consider. The goal shouldn’t be to have a pleasant life during the first three months of a baby’s life. It should be to get the job done and accept a schedule most Chinese factory slaves wouldn’t trade for.

Sometimes she expresses shock or dismay when she finds out what she has to do. My response? “You decided to have a baby.” I tell her I know she is suffering, but it serves no purpose to discuss it as though there were a way around it. There isn’t, so discussion just promotes an escapist mindset and delays getting down to necessary tasks. The only productive thing is to do what you have to do.

I take jobs off of her. I tell her I understand this is a tough time for her. I try to make sure I’m not pushing too hard. But I am not going to stop, because if I do, there will be chaos.

After another month, things will get much easier. We just have to get there.

I have learned that when I know I absolutely have to do something unpleasant, I will get up and do it. If I think there is a way around it, however, I will waste a lot of time pitying myself and trying to craft an escape. This is why I tell my wife there is no way to avoid her tasks. It’s why I remind her she chose this challenge. In the end, it makes things easier on her. When she resigns herself to what she has to do, the peace it brings her is obvious, and it ends contention between us.

She needs me to reinforce her. She almost always knows what has to be done, but temptation creeps in, and she dithers. If I reinforce her, she stops dithering and bucks up.

I plan to take this approach with the boy, too. Unless he’s an exceptional kid, he will try to find ways to weasel out of things. My mother used to enable me when I shirked, and it did my character a lot of harm. It made me mushy and lazy. My son will pick up his toys and put them in a box. He will sit down and do his homework. He will take whatever shots I tell him to take. If he tries to get his mother on his side and divide us, he will wish he hadn’t.

This is what husbands and fathers are supposed to do. When my dad was stern with me, often it was for selfish reasons. He wasn’t a completely worthless father, but a lot of his parenting–perhaps most–was based on a desire to get out of parenting and get back to the TV. Often, he was also motivated by anger. He was often tough about the wrong things. When I’m tough, it’s not because I’m angry or I want to be excused from doing my job. I take stands because I know how things will deteriorate if I don’t. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t do it for myself.

A long time ago, my dad and I anchored his boat in Honeymoon Harbor south of Bimini. We had guests. In the evening, I checked some bearings, and it looked like our anchor was dragging. We seemed to be headed toward the shoals to our south.

I told my dad, and he didn’t want to deal with it. Getting a big boat off of sand would have been very difficult, and it would probably have cost a lot of money, but he wanted to sleep. I said I couldn’t go to bed until we knew things were okay. He said there was no point in both of us staying awake, so he turned in for the night.

A father can’t act like that. He has to be the person who takes the most responsibility, stands up, and does the hard, thankless jobs.

A while back, a tropical storm came close to us, and we got a lot of rain. I realized one of our roof gutters was overflowing. I had cleaned it out recently, but I had underestimated the amount of leaves that had fallen since. They had clogged things up.

I climbed out a window in the rain and sat on the roof scooping leaves into a bucket so I could dump them on the grass below. I fired up a leaf blower and shot air up the downspouts to blow leaves out. I got a ladder out and used it to scoop up leaves I couldn’t reach from the roof.

I told my wife to call the EMT’s if I fell.

It was no fun at all, but it absolutely had to be done in order to avoid a huge water intrusion that could have cost thousands in the end. Nobody else was available to help. Waiting wasn’t an option. There was no way around the job. It’s an example of the type of challenge that requires you to shut up immediately and get to work.

I just talked to the wife, and I told her no more breastfeeding in bed. She agrees. She wants to sleep, so she is open to ideas. She is more amenable to being led when her approach is causing her trouble.

Now it’s time to get up, attack the protein problem, attack the scheduling problem, and fix it so we don’t get up in the afternoon again tomorrow. I failed this week, but with God’s help, I should be able to get us back on track quickly.

Another Day Free of Furious Pansies

Those heartless, selfish, entitled conservatives. I don’t know how much more I can stand.

Today my conservative neighbor really outdid himself. He texted me out of the blue and asked if he could send a wheel loader over to pull a stump out of my yard and move it to my burn pile.

The nerve of some people.

This is the same MAGA creep who showed up the morning after a tropical storm came through, cut a downed tree in two places, and moved it off my driveway.

How I miss Miami, where people showed up to do thoughtful things like parking their cars in the yard for parties and destroying the grass, stealing Xenon headlights and oriental rugs, and yelling at me for leaving my truck in the street for 30 seconds.

I miss the kids who egged my car and shot a ball bearing through the rear windshield of my truck. I miss the great neighbors who carried their trash across the street to put it in my pile.

I really miss the salsa fans who had loud parties in spite of noise ordinances, keeping me awake through closed windows until past 2 a.m. on weekend nights. It was great how they never cleared this with their neighbors or invited us. Being taken by surprise made it extra special and showed us how important we were to them. Those thoughtful, altruistic Hispanic customs always make for tranquil neighborhoods.

Is it racist to say it seems like everyone wants to live among white people? I guess it is, because they also want to live among people from Japan, Korea, and China. Leaving East Asians out must be racist.

Hispanic and black NEIGHBORS can be fantastic. Hispanic and black neighborHOODS, not so much. No one ever starts to worry when whites, Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese move in next door.

I think the biggest problem with white neighbors is our tendency to form HOA’s. It shows why white people were the ones who invented Nazism.

It wouldn’t really make sense to count me as white when it comes to HOA’s. I’m a Southerner, and as far as I know, every last one of us hates HOA’s. But many of us can’t tell the difference between a front yard and a junkyard.

My current neighbor has a land-clearing business, so big machinery goes in and out from time to time. He put a couple of pole barns up, and he parks things under them. I could not care less. Anyone stupid enough to complain about a friendly neighbor who has a wheel loader and a backhoe should be barred from owning real estate.

We had a long conversation today. Due to my misanthrope status, he knows the other neighbors better than I do, and he gave me the lowdown on them. I already knew the people to the north were mentally ill because they had Biden signs, but he says they are hard core. The guy across the road from them is a jerk who flipped out because the land-clearing guy trimmed trees that hung over his property. He also trespassed to see what the land-clearing guy was doing on his own land. I believe he also had the Biden virus.

The wheel loader guy wants to park a big truck on his land at night. Ask me if I care. I thought he was already doing it. He is going to have to appear before some kind of county board or other. He wanted to know if I would write a letter. Of course I will. If he wanted to have a steady flow of big trucks up and down our road, I would not be happy, but going in and out once a day? Who cares?

We discussed the subdivision that borders us on the south. They are giving him hell because he sort of trespasses. The subdivision consists of little hobby horse farms, and there is a clear area that goes around it like a moat. It’s a bridle path. For many years, a family in the subdivision has been letting his family cross the path to enter their property to visit and swim.

He also drove small vehicles onto the path and went around looking for debris he could move for them, free of charge. He sometimes dumped the debris on his own property.

Now they’re mad, and they expect him to drive a mile and go around a bunch of properties to visit his friends. I think this is stupid. You never turn down free debris disposal. They should sign a paper saying he doesn’t have an easement, and they should let him continue to go over there as long as he owns his house. As things stand, he is not planning to move debris any more.

Has an HOA ever done anything good? They certainly do stupid things. The other day, I saw a story about an HOA that forces everyone to keep their garage doors raised. So no tools, I guess? No belongings allowed in garages?

The HOA president is a reasonable guy who always wants to make peace, but it seems some of the blue-state transplants who live there have not figured out that this isn’t Massachusetts.

While we were talking, I found out the loader guy is raising pigs. I had no idea. I told him we had deed restrictions that barred raising pigs. First time he had heard of it.

He said he kept them on mulch to kill the stink. It must work, because I’ve never smelled anything. I told him I didn’t care if he raised elephants as long as they didn’t smell. I also said he shouldn’t tell the other neighbors.

I was actually glad to know he had pigs, because if times get hard, pigs will be necessary. They are the cheapest source of four-legged protein. If they can be raised here on the QT, it could keep my family fed some day. Although I suppose deed restrictions won’t mean much if things get that bad.

He has three kids. He told me they don’t get to use screens. No video games. Brilliant. They’ll develop their brains instead of just their thumbs.

I invited my neighbor to come use the shooting berm whenever he wants, and I am probably going to hire him to remove some stumps. I should take them some brownies to show gratitude for the help.

What are people in blue cities doing today? Trying not to make eye contact with perpetually-enraged pansies looking for reasons to bully them. Waiting for oil protesters to have their hands unglued from the roads they use to get to work. Being arrested for defending themselves. Sitting in lawyers’ offices, trying to find ways to prevent their kids from being taken away and pumped full of wrong-sex hormones.

I don’t know if I will ever fully appreciate how blessed we are.

Pimp Your Nursery With this Tricked-Out Poo Cart

Tonight I asked my wife if she thought I was too harsh with my Mormon cousin who asked if she could involve my dead father in a sick pagan ritual, and my wife said my cousin was the rude one. She said my cousin had crossed the line, trying to push her weird non-Christian religion on Christians.

That is true. I can’t imagine emailing my cousin out of the blue and asking if I could help her renounce Mormonism and then lay hands on her and get her started praying in tongues. What if I asked her if I could do a Christian ceremony renouncing her parents’ wacky beliefs by proxy in hopes of getting them out of hell? I doubt she would have taken it well.

Mormons are very sensitive. I know that because I incensed one by criticizing their sacred underwear and posting a photo of it. It’s a real thing. He said it was deeply offensive even to mention it, which doesn’t ring true. It sounds like a trick to try to chill speech about anything that makes Mormonism look as bizarre as it actually is.

Mormons are all about deception when it comes to PR. For example, if you look at Wikipedia, you can tell articles about Mormonism have been written by lying Mormons, because they’re packed with lies and try to make Mormonism look completely reputable and reasonable. It is neither. It’s a shady faith started by a guy who was convicted of charging people to locate underground gold veins using a special stone which talked to him or something.

PR is the reason Mormons hate the word “Mormon” and call their cult the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It’s why they created an “informative” website with a URL containing “churchofjesuschrist.” Like it’s just another Christian church, and nobody who founded it claimed to read scriptures off imaginary gold plates he kept in his hat.

My aunt didn’t wear special underwear. Never mind how I know; it’s an ugly story and a sore spot with me. I don’t see how my uncle could have worn it, because it would have shown when he was dressed for hot weather. Maybe they wore it when they went to the local temple and pretended to believe Mormon myths like the one that says the Garden of Eden was in Missouri.

As for my cousin and her request, any person with good sense and good manners would know not to do what this woman did. Her good intentions don’t make it okay.

It’s good to have a wife who agrees with me on the important things. We help each other not to gaslight ourselves.

My cousin wants to make sure we all end up in Mormon heaven for eternity, which is ironic, since Mormonism was designed by damned spirits to lure people to hell. Joseph Smith. The Mormon false prophets. My cousin’s parents, almost certainly. Well…certainly. That’s the bleak reality.

They were atheists, and they had many chances to change. I, personally, tried to reason with them at least once.

While my aunt and uncle were attached to a Mormon congregation, they didn’t actually believe any of the doctrine. One day, they went to the high panjandrum or whatever and told him they were atheists. He told them they should still stick around for the social life, and that’s what they did.

I’m never going to see them again, and neither is my cousin, even if she follows them to hell. The damned are forgotten. That’s part of the nature of damnation. They don’t get to be with their families.

If I seem cavalier about this, it’s because it’s too much weight for me to carry. As a mere man, I have no power to do anything for the millions or billions of people who are determined to reject Yeshua, and I certainly can’t help those who are already in hell. I don’t obsess on these matters. It’s pointless, and it would make me miserable. I instinctively move on. Not everyone can do that. I’m glad I can.

In other news, our new diaper-changing table is a hit. I got us a one-drawer US General service cart from Harbor Freight. It took forever to put together. Now that it’s in use, it’s a tremendous blessing.

We had a changing pad which was too big for the cart, but when I jammed it in as a stopgap, I found it actually worked better than a pad that fit properly. One end sits higher than the other, and this keeps the noisier end of the baby higher than the less-noisy-but-far-from-silent end. I believe this is good for him, since he is usually full of liquid.

I bought the magnetic paper towel and glove attachments, and they are working fine, although for some reason, the glove attachment is a little too large to fit Harbor Freight glove boxes correctly. Harbor Freight buys from different manufacturers, so I guess the glove people aren’t the people who make the attachment.

I got out of Harbor Freight for about $175, including tax and two boxes of nitrile gloves. An Amazon table and gloves would have run around $155. It would have been too big, and it wouldn’t have been as good.

My wife loves it.

The baby can’t rock it or roll out of it, and the pad is wedged in there, so if I have to leave the room to get something, I just strap him in and go. If something gross gets on the pad, I can yank it out and take it to the shower a couple of feet away.

The footprint is much smaller than that of a dedicated baby table, and the wheels are a big help. When we’re done having babies, the cart will be useful for other things, whereas an Amazon table would have to go to the dump or charity.

If you’re planning to spawn, consider getting one of these things. In return, you can tell me what you know about noise-canceling headphones that can be tuned to baby-voice frequencies.

Couldn’t be much better.

Any Room Where you do Anything is a Workshop

We cheaped out on nursery furniture. We went Chinese. It looks okay, and it works, but it’s not Thomasville or Ethan Allen. My wife figured we would get rid of it in a few years, and she has seen that selling used furniture is a waste of time, so she thought we should save some money.

I agreed. Contain your astonishment. This was after she bought him designer socks, 450 burp rags, an electric wipe warmer, winter coats that won’t fit him until next year, and his own vacation home in St. Bart’s. Hard as it may believe, I, too, felt it would be okay to economize on a bed and dresser.

And a motorized nursing recliner. Because our other three recliners were just wrong. Sigh.

We have been using a changing pad instead of a changing table. My wife insists on changing our son in the bedroom suite instead of the nursery, because walking the extra 15 steps is just too much. Meanwhile, her elderly husband has no problem making the trip at 3 a.m.

She wanted to keep the changing pad on top of the bathroom counter between our sinks, but I put an end to that after finding a poopy wipe in the sink where I brush my teeth. Unlike moms, dads don’t suffer from poop blindness.

We have been putting the pad on the Chinese dresser and changing him there. It works fine, but he is getting stronger and more rambunctious, and we have realized we can no longer rationalize running out of the room to get things we’ve forgotten and leaving him on top of a dresser with no straps or Velcro or chains or anything to hold him in place. We have to get some kind of dedicated table that will restrain him, and it has to fit in our bathroom.

We could get a table made for the purpose of changing babies, but they are not all sturdy, and a lot of them take up a huge amount of room. I want to be able to get in and out of the shower without turning sideways. I found a product which is clearly a lot better: a US General service cart from Harbor Freight.

The cost is not that much higher than that of a crummy Chinese table that will fall apart if the baby breaks wind forcefully. The cart will outlast all of us, the top tray holds 350 pounds, the cart has a ball-bearing drawer that holds 75 pounds, and you can get magnetic attachments to hold paper towel rolls and boxes of nitrile gloves.

I don’t go near his butt without gloves. Make fun of me if you want. Doctors and nurses use gloves to keep baby poo, and for that matter all poo, off their hands, and I see no reason why I should do things any differently. Somehow the fact that he’s my baby is supposed to make me love his poo and think it’s delightful when I get it in my hair or, God forbid, my mouth. Maybe if I took enough estrogen, this would make sense to me, and I would also no longer be able to parallel park. Poo is always poo. I don’t care whose it is.

When the diaper (his) comes off, I have my PPE in place. Electronic shooting earmuffs and poo-proof gloves. Every time. I have considered using my grinding face shield as well.

It’s true I can’t hear my wife’s helpful suggestions when I’m wearing the muffs. But enough about the perks.

My wife is getting much more fatigued with his squawling than I am, and she goes in without ear protection, so obviously, I am right. Once again.

Hope she doesn’t read that.

The nursery furniture is (still) white, and the bathroom tile is blue. The local Harbor Freight doesn’t have any white carts, but blue is in stock, so I think we’re all set.

Our brains are still not right. I am probably up to 5 hours of sleep per night, but I still make mistakes like calling the pacifier a passport or even “the Passover,” and I can’t remember any number longer than three digits. My wife leaves things on a hot stove and only remembers to flush the toilet about 80% of the time.

This morning while talking to my wife, I expressed my newfound admiration for Donald Trump. He’s about 80 years old, he sleeps even less than we do, he’s been doing it for decades, and he runs a real estate empire, a social media empire, a crypto empire, and the most powerful nation on Earth. Is Diet Coke the answer? Maybe we should buy a few cases.

He tweets ingenious, convoluted tweets at 3 a.m., combining regime-boosting assertions with triggering criticisms of his enemies that provoke them to get out of bed and do Google research so they can post their ineffective replies. If I tweeted at 3 a.m., it would probably look like this:

Dr. Merkwerdichliebe837691 · Feb 21 @ PlzKidnapMe · 3hr

Someone tell m3 how to get this baby to quit spitting o7t the Passover

Joe Biden sleeps 18 hours a day, some of it with his eyes closed, and in a presidential debate, he told the world he finally “beat Medicare.”

What does that even mean?

Maybe it will make sense to me in a few more days, when the little elephants on the baby’s pajamas start dancing and winking at me.

The wife has been reluctant to let me use man solutions to baby problems. She eventually agreed to let me use brewery sanitizer to kill germs on things like bottles and nipples. Big win for me. That stuff is fantastic. It’s called Star San, and you just spray it on and let it dry. Costs about $25 for a year’s supply.

I think Star San got her ready for the tool cart, because she liked the cart right away.

Her helicopter mom inclinations are slowly drying up. The baby is beating them out of her. In response to his noise, she has started telling him he is just going to have to cry for a few minutes. This, instead of hurtling into the living room, sweeping him up in her arms, and wrapping him in the baby sling she bought from Amazon while I wasn’t looking.

We looked at the web to find out whether we should pick him up the instant he starts crying, and of course, just about every source said yes. But this is the web, and these are people who spend their lives writing about babies. They are almost certainly left-wing flakes who think meat is murder and 11-year-old tomboy mastectomies are health care. They claim there is no point in letting a newborn cry and that a newborn can’t be spoiled, because newborns can’t learn anything.

Yeah, okay. Our newborn learned to insist on plastic nipples in about 15 minutes, and it took about a day of excessive mothering to teach him screaming for half an hour would get him a ride on Mom’s belly. He can learn just fine. Maybe leftist newborns can’t learn. That would make sense. It’s consistent with their behavior as adults. “Socialism will work if we just do it RIGHT this time!”

Leftists insist grabbing kids the instant they start to whine won’t ruin them. They say things like, “We picked up little Bodhisattva every time zhey cried, and zhey came out just fine.” No, zhey’s not fine. Not if he has blue hair and nipple rings, wears ladies’ undergarments, and posts proud tweets about his upcoming elective man-parts amputation. If he buys bras that match his bright green beard, he’s not okay. You have to say no to kids sometimes.

Two words for anyone who disagrees: Jaden Smith.

My aunt used to pick her second son up every time he cried, and he turned into a real-life Chuckie. Broke everything he touched. Used to run through the house naked, screaming, every time she told him to take a bath. He used to hide under the bed, and she would get a broom and jab him. When he was about 6, she smacked him because he was making everyone miserable, and he reached up and slapped her face. I thought the world had come to an end, because I couldn’t believe God would permit it to go on after that. The other adults used to fantasize together about beating him.

He was the only kid my grandfather ever beat, and that includes my sister the felon, so no, I am not in favor of scooping babies up the instant the noise starts. Doors were invented for a reason.

Speaking of hormonal quirks, my wife can’t taste salt very well. My understanding is that this is caused by the same hormones that make her clinically insane. I mean, “highly concerned about the welfare of her baby.” Before she moved here, during the Biden famine panic, I bought about 6 cartons of salt to get me through the next few years. After she got pregnant, they started to vanish. One day she told me to buy salt, and I said to get one of the cartons out, and she said they were gone.

I used to go through about 1.5 cartons a year. I would guess she now goes through 8 all by herself. I have a dredge I use to shower large items with salt, and I used to refill it maybe once a year. It seems like it’s empty all the time. Maybe when the hormones subside, I’ll be able to find salt when I need it instead of refilling the shaker every time.

Anyway, she seems to be returning to her old stable self.

Well, here is good news. I have just been informed that our son the genius has finally learned how breastfeeding works. I better get up and battle the wife so she doesn’t send her family pictures of him in action.

Flag Down for Bringing a Walker on the Field

Someone on the web created a thread asking for unpopular opinions. When I saw it, I knew it was destiny. This is what I was made for.

I did quite a bit of writing. For one thing, I pointed out that pizza doesn’t go with beer. That must have made heads explode.

Pizza is acidic and a little sweet. It often contains oregano, a bitter herb. Obviously, you don’t pair that with a bitter beverage. Soft drinks and red wine go with pizza. Tea is acceptable. Beer? Insane.

I think people who drink beer with pizza are generally low-end beer drinkers who drink to get drunk. I think they must be people who drink really bad beer, chilled to the freezing point to kill the awful taste. People who drink stuff like Bud and Coors always drink it as cold as possible, and the reason is that when it warms up even a little, it tastes like seltzer with soap and a little sugar.

I think these people are likely to eat bad pizza from Papa John’s or Domino’s, and they just want something to wash it down and give them a buzz.

Beer goes with steak and rib roasts. It goes with Mexican food and seafood. It works with cheeseburgers and fries. Forcing it to get along with pizza is ill-advised at best. And nothing is worse than smelling other people’s beer-and-pizza burps while trying to eat.

If you think beer goes with everything, go eat an apple and chase it with a beer. It’s right up there with toothpaste and orange juice.

I also said Elvis was a lousy singer. It’s true. Elvis became famous because he caused girls with weak fathers to become sexually aroused. His early performances were basically riots, with little bacchantes fighting the ushers, tearing off their own underwear, and throwing it on the stage. People forget that. Today we make fun of people who call rock and roll the devil’s music, but it’s true. Any music that makes you throw your dirty underwear at people has some connection to hell.

Women still throw their dirty underwear at entertainers. It’s gross. They throw it at Justin Timberlake, for example. They throw it at the kind of guys who look like they take it home and put it on.

They should have men in Tyvek suits gather it and put it in medical waste bags. Someone could catch something.

Sinatra also mesmerized young tramps, but he was also an excellent singer whose style was innovative and unique. Jerry Lee Lewis was a much better singer than Elvis. Sam Cooke was far better. There were a lot of excellent male singers back in Elvis’s heyday. Nat King Cole. Eddie Arnold. Jim Reeves. Ray Price. Johnny Mathis. Ray Charles.

You can go into restaurants and bars today and still hear Sinatra recordings. Elvis? Not so much. It was never about the sound. It was about the pelvis.

I complained about sports worship. I said that if I wanted to watch overpaid illiterates work, I’d turn on The View.

I said I didn’t like it when people assumed I watched sports. People come up to me and try to make small talk about men I’ve never heard of, playing games I didn’t watch. “How about that Mahomes?” Who?

I pulled that name out of the air just now because I’ve seen it in headlines. I don’t know who he plays for or what his position is.

What if I went up to random men and said, “How about that Carl Friedrich Gauss? Is he the GOAT, or what?” He’s a fascinating guy. How can they not find him interesting? We wouldn’t have electronics or, well, any kind of serious technology without his discoveries.

Some guy responded and said I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

How thick can a person’s head be?

Me: I never watch football. It would be great if the stadium where the Super Bowl was played was obliterated by a meteor and replaced with a Buc-Ee’s.

Him: You must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

What?

This is completely typical of my experiences with sports fans. “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” They can’t believe a man who doesn’t watch sports can exist. It’s like they’re under a spell. And they are. Demons are filling their minds with absurdities.

It also bugs me when men with hurt feelings try to tell me how empty my life must be because I don’t watch sports. What possible reason could you have to be angry at me for not sharing all of your hobbies? Do I get mad at you for not knowing how to weld?

I look down on you, sure. But I don’t get angry.

Kidding.

Yeah, my life is empty. I love my wife, and I spend a lot of time having fun with her. I don’t turn the TV on as soon as I get on and ignore her while I fill the house with obnoxious crowd noises and pray I don’t lose my ill-informed, emotion-driven bets, which I didn’t tell her about. Oh, the emptiness.

I have all sorts of time for my interests, like prayer, cooking, shooting, writing, and using tools. I get to spend time with my pet. I get to sit in the recliner with my son on my chest and relax in an atmosphere of pure love.

Empty, empty, empty. It would be so much better to be outside a stadium, trying to dodge as kids try to spit on me on my way in. I’d really rather be paying $11 each for cups of extremely bad beer and then standing in a quarter-inch of other people’s urine in packed men’s rooms. I long to get caught up in post-game brawls where people fight to defend the reputations of spoiled young athletes who pay armed men to keep fans away from them.

If only I could spend 4 hours fighting traffic, trying to get home from a stadium after my team lost, avoiding eye contact with drunk road-ragers and praying I don’t get stopped at a DUI checkpoint.

To get average seats for my three-person family, I’d have to shell out almost $500. I would happily pay $100 to be allowed to stay home.

But I must have been rooting for Taylor Swift and the Chiefs.

For $500, I can get my son a brand-new CZ 457 Scout in .22LR, and he can hand it down to his son. But no, I’d rather watch grown men play a game created to amuse children. When are the duck-duck-goose playoffs?

On a related note, I said Bill Burr was an idiot. A lot of men think he’s a genius and the world’s last straight shooter. A regular guy with a platform. Hello? It’s an act, and he’s an entertainer. If he were telling the truth, they wouldn’t call it an act.

Rock Hudson made romantic comedies with women. Just saying.

He’s not smart, and he’s not one of us. Normal men, I mean. He’s just another showbiz liberal, kissing the rings on the hands that feed him.

He has crippling TDS. Right after dozens of people died in the unnecessary LA fires, he appeared with another fool, Jimmy Kimmel, and made jokes about people who criticized California’s fire preparation and response. He ridiculed them. He stupidly asserted it wasn’t possible to put fires out with ocean water. He didn’t even think about the insensitivity of doing all this while bodies were literally still warm.

California and LA officials themselves have admitted they blew it. They admitted it in Donald Trump’s presence soon after Burr made an ass of himself. Talk about jokes aging badly.

Burr says he–“HE”–doesn’t get tired of winning football games. He supports the Patriots, and he uses the words “I” and “we” when he talks about them. “I don’t get tired of winning.” “We won.”

If Bill Burr is still capable of running 40 yards, he would probably do it in a minute and a half. On the field, he would move like Joe Biden trying to find his way off a stage. You could measure his vertical leap with a feeler gauge. His most likely tool for stopping an NFL pass is his forehead. Who is “we”?

You know those videos of drunken fans rushing onto football fields, careening around at 6 mph, and then having angry players turn them into Tex-Avery-style murals? That’s what a Bill Burr NFL cameo would look like, except maybe he would keep his shirt on. They would peel him off the turf like a fruit roll-up and bury him in a map tube.

If Bill Burr played in a game, he wouldn’t sit on the bench. They’d bring in a hospital bed and a bag with a zipper on it.

Bill Burr has never “won” a game. The people who win are paid to be there. If you have to pay, you’re not part of “we.”

Ticket Taker: Ticket, please.

Bill Burr: Ticket? I have to get in! We’re playing today!

Ticket Taker: Okay, pops. Ticket and DNR.

Burr says he feels bad for days when “WE” lose. Seriously? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if the plane carrying the New England Patriots flew into a bus carrying the Kansas City Chiefs, I would be fine. I would be very sorry to see it happen, I would feel bad for everyone who knew them, and I would probably pray for their loved ones, but 15 minutes later, I’d probably be watching Paul Harrell videos on Youtube.

If your emotional wellbeing depends on how well a bunch of total strangers play a game you stink at, you need an intervention, because your life is devoid of meaningful pursuits. Burr felt jolly and sassy after dozens of people died in fires caused by incompetence, so maybe something in his head needs to be adjusted.

Some people got annoyed with me, but that just proved I was doing it right. If they wanted me to make them happy, they should have posted a popular opinion thread.

If I Liked Being Treated Like a Child, I Wouldn’t Have Guns in the First Place

More than once, I have written positive things about Savage firearms on this blog. I have a couple of Savage rifles, and a third one is coming. I have an A22, which is a semi-auto .22 rifle. I like it for a number of reasons, but it fails miserably in one regard: customer support.

I got myself a silencer, so I need a threaded muzzle for the A22. If I want to buy, say, a Smith & Wesson barrel, I can go to a website, place an order, explain nothing to anyone, and have the product sent to my house. I can also buy a barrel nut and a whole bunch of other things. If I want to buy a Savage barrel, well, I can’t. They will not sell me one. They won’t sell me the nut, either.

They won’t sell it to me. They won’t sell it to a gunsmith. They won’t sell it to God himself.

If you want to put a new barrel on a Savage A22, you have to ship your gun to Savage and pay them to do it. Okay, so it costs a little more. No big deal, right? Wrong. They will only give you the same kind of barrel the gun came with. Because…because of stupid, I guess.

The A22 comes from the factory with a variety of barrels. There is nothing dangerous about putting a different barrel on the gun. There is no good reason not to send people the barrels they like.

If Savage were willing to send parts out, people would buy more of their guns. Obviously. When people find out a manufacturer is anti-right-to-repair, they start buying from other manufacturers.

Good luck finding an aftermarket A22 barrel. The A22 is pretty far down on the popularity list, so it’s not like Shilen and Bartlein are scrambling to make barrels for it. There are lots of precision 10/22 barrels, though.

I plan to try altering the existing barrel myself, and if I somehow manage to fail, I’ll put the barrel in a dumpster and keep the rest of the gun for parts. I’m not poor. I can afford to destroy a cheap gun, especially one that is likely to cause me heartburn in the future due to poor treatment from the manufacturer.

Savage won’t send me a target trigger spring, either. And no one else makes them.

A company named Jard makes a high-end trigger for the A22. You can probably find one for about $270 if you look. About the cost of an A22. This is all that appetizing to most .22 shooters. The gun is 3 MOA at best, with a trigger made by the angels in heaven, so doubling the price of the gun to improve the trigger only makes sense for real enthusiasts who have a lot of money to spend.

The A22 has an Accu-trigger, which is a proprietary Savage thing intended to provide an easy, smooth trigger pull. Unfortunately, a lot of these guns have heavy pulls even after the triggers are adjusted to the minimum.

You can put a Savage target trigger in your A22, and it will lighten the pull, but Savage will not sell you the spring because you can’t be trusted with a complicated object like that. To get one, you would have to read off a serial number proving you own a gun that came with a target spring. You can also go to Gun Shack and buy one online, when Gun Shack has them in stock, but that’s about it.

Without a good trigger, the A22 is just an average gun, like a Ruger 10/22, but unlike the 10/22, it doesn’t come with a world of aftermarket parts for customization. Might as well buy an A22 and start customizing. You can rebarrel it. You can buy a new trigger. The sky’s the limit.

Gun manufacturers, unfortunately, tend to end up in the hands of stupid people. Marlin, Remington, and Smith & Wesson collapsed when firearms sales were peaking due to the efforts of the world’s greatest gun salesman, Barack Obama. If you can lose money in a market like that, you should be working for an hourly wage for someone who can do what you can’t.

I guess someone must have sued Savage over a part installed by an end user. They must have a weak-kneed attorney who told them to choke off the supply along with their customer goodwill.

Whatever. I’m all done with Savage.

Whose Past is on my Wall?

Sometimes I really disappoint myself. It’s already January 13, and I have only bought two rifles this year.

Technically, I’ve only bought one. I ordered one in late December and picked it up this year.

I’m pretty sure I’ve bought fewer than 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

The first rifle is a bolt-action .22. The second is a semi-auto. “What possible reason could a person have to buy two .22 rifles in one month?”, asked no reader of this blog, ever.

Last year, I made a tentative decision to cut 5.5″ off the barrel of my Savage A22 and thread the end for a silencer. I had received a .22 silencer, and it would have been cumbersome to have it hanging off a 22″ barrel. I tried to find someone near me who would do the work, but even though this is a huge 2A area, there is nobody. I think people here generally buy off the rack, receive no training, do very little customization, and shoot low-grade ammo.

I did some research, and I think I now know how to modify the barrel myself. I bought a dial test indicator to help me do the work.

I could have bought a new gun and sold the old one, but selling a gun is like selling a child, without the relief over not having to pay for college. Also, I have done a little work on the gun, and I wasn’t eager to do it over on a new one.

I guess that sounds silly. Not wanting to do a little trigger work on a new gun, but being willing to machine an old one. I wanted to learn how to thread barrels, though, so I wasn’t all that bothered by the prospect.

Another thing: it’s pretty unusual for a gun to drop in value. They go up and up and up. It’s almost always better to have an old gun than the money you could get for it.

While I was thinking about all this, I found out that Savage now sells the same gun, with a cute camo stock, with exactly the options I want. It has the short barrel and the threading. And it’s pretty cheap. Surprisingly so. I ordered one.

I figure I’ll shoot the new one and hold the old one until my son is old enough to shoot it. So several months, at least.

I am inclined to try cutting up the barrel anyway. It would be a good experience. If I blow it, I can buy a new barrel.

I should think about my son’s inheritance when I buy guns. If the rapture doesn’t come before I die, and 2A hasn’t been undone, my son or sons will get all my firearms. I should make an effort to leave some nice stuff behind.

My grandfather had some nice guns, but while he was alive, he failed to say who got what, and when he died, I got nothing decent except for a shotgun which actually belonged to my dad. My grandmother gave it to him after my grandfather died. The stuff I inherited from my grandfather is junk.

The worst example? A counterfeit shotgun.

Possibly counterfeit.

At some point after the nice guns had mysteriously vanished, I was given a list of things I could still have, and it wasn’t pretty. One thing that surprised me: no one wanted my great-grandfather’s gun. It had been mounted over a fireplace in my grandparents’ house. The story was that my grandfather tracked down the guy who owned it and bought it from him.

I remembered it as a fairly nice gun with a figured-wood stock.

I asked for it, and I received a double-barreled flintlock shotgun that looked like someone had painted the stock with something slightly nicer than Rust-Oleum. I don’t recall the valuation that was placed on it, but I know it was between $100 and $200. Trash, but for sentimental value.

I didn’t think too much about it. I decided to stick it on my wall.

Eventually, I remembered something from my childhood. I remembered playing with the ramrod from the gun my grandfather owned. It was a rifle ramrod, small enough to fit in a .40-caliber barrel. It was raw wood.

The crummy gun I received has a big, fat varnished ramrod. A shotgun ramrod. You could never get it into a rifle.

I don’t think this gun belonged to my grandfather. It looks like my memories were right. So now I have an almost-worthless gun which apparently belonged to some stranger, and when I see it on my wall, what I think about most is not my grandfather, but the mystery of what happened to the real gun.

Assuming my memories are correct.

Did the gun seller who evaluated the estate’s guns steal it and substitute the shotgun? Did one of my cousins take it home and tell the dealer to claim the shotgun was the one from the estate? I’ll never know.

At least I know why no one wanted it.

Now what do I do? Do I leave it on my wall?

I am thinking I might buy a nice antique Kentucky rifle, prettier and more valuable than anything great-great-granddad had. I have a practice of buying nicer guns than the ones that vanished. On top of that, I have real shooting training, and I make my own ammunition and modify my guns. And I have some excellent glass. I don’t think my grandfather owned a scope.

For a few grand, I can get something really nice, and it will appreciate.

If I had some of received my grandfather’s guns, most of what I would have gotten would have been mediocre. An old Smith & Wesson .357, maybe, with a 3″ barrel. Too heavy to carry; too short for targets. A Marlin lever action in an inferior caliber. A creaky old 12 gauge that can’t measure up to today’s standards. A .32 revolver only a pimp would carry on his person. An Enforcer M1 pistol, which is another item a pimp would like. Flashy, with very poor quality. The American Draco, except a Draco is a good, reliable weapon.

On the other hand, I have some pretty good stuff. Some beautiful 1911’s. A very nice Browning Challenger. A nicer Colt Woodsman than the one my grandfather had. An RPR that shoots 0.5 MOA or better. Some extremely accurate hunting rifles. An AR-15 with a White Oak Armament varmint upper. The Tikka .22 I got recently is infinitely better than anything my grandfather had. I also have some excellent revolvers.

I have a great shooting mat. Rests. I built my own roofed long-range platform which will last forever, along with a heavy-duty bench made from thick-walled 2″ square steel tubing. I fabricated my own gong stands.

I’ll be able to pass on some neat guns and related tools, and I’ll be able to teach my son(s) how to develop loads, mount scopes the proper way, and shoot at 1,000 yards. I don’t think my offspring will be upset about not getting a rusty Remington 550-1 .22 or a lever-action Marlin that shoots 4 MOA and has poor ballistics.

I only got one knife my grandfather owned, and like the shotgun, it came through my dad. One day he told my grandmother he would like to have a knife my grandfather owned, so she gave him one.

It’s a German folder with no lock. It rusts. It was nasty and rusty when I got it, because my grandfather used to cut apples with his knifes. It was dull. I fixed it up, because I’m the only grandson who has the tools for it, but I wouldn’t carry it. He carried junk knives. Street value? Probably $10.

On my own, I got Benchmade. Cold Steel made from CTS-XHP. Lionsteel made from M390. I have a handmade Entrek. Some Spydercos. Gerber is my low-end choice for jobs that might mess knives up. And I have a fancy rig for putting better-than-factory edges on knives.

I bought my son, myself, and my wife engraved Swiss Army knives in Switzerland. Now I have to hide his and mine for 8 years.

I’m not sure what to do with the shotgun. What if it turns out Gramps owned it, and it was in a closet or something when I was a kid? I don’t see any way it could be the gun with the skinny ramrod and the figured wood that I remember. The gun that had a powder horn with it, which vanished with the Marlin, the Remington, the Colt, and the revolvers. And my closeness with my relatives.

My relatives would lie if they were guilty, and they would say the same things if they were innocent. I already know what they would say if I asked about the guns and powder horn, so there is no point in bothering with them. One of the bad things about lying habitually is that it eventually teaches people that speaking to you makes things worse and is not worth the effort.

It would be great to have some heirlooms, but you can also make heirlooms. My grandfather’s dynasty fell apart, but mine can hold up, if we stick with God.

The new Savage should be here in a couple of days. The old one will be good for my son. Although a CZ 457 Scout with a 12″ length of pull would actually be better…

I’m going to stop now.

Doing the Unnecessary in the Pursuit of the Unimportant is no Vice

Today I had some fun doing something which may well have been unnecessary and even detrimental.

Nothing new there, now that I think about it.

What do you do when you want to kill squirrels at 50 yards or less?

A) Buy a cheap Ruger 10/22, a $75 scope, and a box of Mini-mags and fire at will, accepting the fact that you will miss a lot.

B) Buy a shotgun and a box of 6 shot and get the job over with.

C) Buy an expensive bolt-action rifle, put a silencer on it, and top it with a 2-12x42mm first focal plane scope with an illuminated mrad reticle, and then spend a king’s ransom on an assortment of expensive ammunition to find out what works best?

If you didn’t pick C, you’re not me.

Actually, I’ve done B and C.

I got myself a Tikka T1x rifle, and today I put an Athlon Helos milrad scope on it.

If you were going to put a scope on a rifle, what would you do?

A) Install the rail without checking the torque, install the ring bases without checking the torque, install the caps without checking the torque or lapping the rings, level the scope via wild guess, and start plugging squirrels?

B) Use a torque wrench to install the mount and bases, spend two hours lapping the rings, spend another 20 minutes cleaning lapping compound off everything, install the caps with a torque wrench, and level the scope by shoving a machinist’s parallel between it and the base?

I didn’t do A, if that’s what you’re wondering.

I don’t know how much of this stuff is really necessary. Shooters are like golfers. If a golfer hits a hole-in-one while wearing one red sock, he’ll wear one red sock for the rest of his life. No one is really positive installing scopes carefully makes a difference, but some shooters think it does, so a lot of them do it. And apparently, and lot don’t, and they make fun of the others.

I consulted some people, and most of them said lapping was stupid and was only needed for terrible rings. On the other hand, there are shooters on the web who think anyone who doesn’t lap is an idiot.

I decided the preponderance of the evidence slightly favored the lappers.

“Lapping” means polishing with fine grit. In the case of scopes, it grinds irregularities out of the inner surfaces of rings.

A scope is a straight tube except when the Chinese have an off day, and it has to be held in two metal rings that should be 100% concentric and free of bumps and so on. The theory is that if the rings don’t line up, or if the inside surfaces are irregular, the high points will mar your scope, you may put bending forces on the scope which will affect the function, and the rings won’t hold on very well.

When I took my precision rifle course, I was taught to lap rings. I think. Anyway, someone somewhere told me to do it, so I have done it a few times. I have a kit.

The kit consists mainly of a hard steel bar the diameter of a scope tube. You put lapping compound (an abrasive) inside the rings, you clamp the bar inside them, and you move it back and forth until compound grinds the rings round and true.

When you lap, you remove the bar from the rings once in a while to see if you’ve ground out enough metal to get something like 80% contact with the bar. When you do this, it’s hard to keep the compound from getting into the threads on the ring bases.

The problem with this, other than the mess, is that the caps are supposed to be torqued to certain values. The grit in the threads produces friction, so it seems to me you could end up with caps that aren’t tight enough. The grit could give you a high torque reading when the screws aren’t really in far enough. I think.

I used a sonic cleaner and brake cleaner to get the compound out. Did I succeed? No way to know. The grit may have embedded itself in the threads.

Another thing: I had to take the scope bases off the rail to clean them. So who’s to say the rings register exactly the same way every time they’re put on the rail? I hope they do, but what if they don’t? Maybe I did more harm than good.

People say to buy really good rings in order to avoid lapping, but that doesn’t help if the rail isn’t perfect. If lapping is necessary because rails can’t be trusted, then expensive rings can’t fix the problem.

Whatever. Now the scope is mounted. I really like it. It has tons of eye relief, so I had a lot of leeway when I decided where to put it. The reticle is bright. The glass is pretty good. The diopter thing works with my vision issues without glasses. It should be great.

The big problem now is that my list of excuses for not hitting squirrels just got a lot shorter.

A Varmint Will Never Quit. Ever.

I’m going through a wave of firearm enthusiasm. It hasn’t passed yet.

A few years back, I consulted the most hard core gun nerds I knew, asking if it was possible to shoot well with a .22 rifle. To me, that means 20 consecutive sub-MOA shots at 100 yards.

A lot of people will shoot a hundred bad groups in a day and then go to the web and post a photo of the only three-shot group that came in sub-MOA and say, “Wow, this gun is a tack-driver!” I think most of them don’t realize they’re lying, because before they decided to lie to the Internet, they lied to themselves, successfully.

A monkey can produce a one-hole three-shot group with a horrible gun. You just have to give him enough time and ammunition. When you go up to 20 consecutive shots, the monkeys slink off and find other things to talk about.

Very knowledgeable people convinced me it was not possible, because rimfire ammunition is so poorly made. It’s inconsistent. I decided to quit and accept what I had.

Now I’m thinking about it again.

There is a niche-famous Internet thread about .22 accuracy. People post their achievements, and they have to prove them. To make it, you have to produce 30 consecutive shots at 50 or 100 yards. A surprising number of people have broken the MOA barrier at both ranges.

For reasons unknown to me, a gun that shoots sub-MOA at 50 yards may not do as well at 100. It’s not because they’re trying to hit the same circle at a longer distance; they’re not. At 50 yards, 1 MOA is about 0.525″, and at 100, it’s about 1.05″. The definining measurement is an angle, not a diameter.

Anyway, the list people shoot at two distances. And they do great.

This puts me back in the hole I dug out of. Maybe rimfire ammo is inconsistent, but if other people can shoot into half an inch at 50 yards, consistently, I should be able to come up with a rifle that will do humane squirrel head shots at 100 feet and humane body shots at 50 yards. I can no longer throw up my hands and say the quest is unrealistic or a waste of time.

Right now, with semiautos, I can shoot two MOA all day at 25 yards, which is a distance some squirrels will allow you to close. I have seen guys on Youtube showing groups worse than mine, with bolt-action rifles, and talking as though they were doing great. I find that hard to understand. I think anyone who holds himself out to be a great shot should be able to shoot into a quarter-inch. I’m merely pretty good, so they should be doing better than me, not worse.

My Savage A22 shoots about the same with Mini-mags as it does with CCI Standard Velocity, which is supposedly more accurate. Go figure. I have no reason to give up velocity and hollow bullets if the accuracy is the same. Standard Velocity only comes in round nose.

I have a silencer now, so things are getting complex. The silencer is 6″ long, so it’s desirable to have a short barrel. Obviously, the barrel has to be threaded. When you look for short, accurate guns that have threaded barrels and don’t cost a fortune, the field narrows fast.

I looked at the list to see what other people used. There are a lot of Anschutz rifles. Forget that. I’m not blowing over a grand on a rimfire. I don’t care if it wakes up before me every day and makes French toast. There are other expensive rifles on the list, and they don’t interest me either.

There are a few Ruger 10/22’s on the list. Surprising, since they are generally considered less accurate than the Marlin Model 60. I’ve only seen one Model 60 on the list.

CZ guns appear frequently, although some have very expensive Lilja barrels. If you’re going to spend that much, why not start out with an Anschutz?

I’ve studied up, and there are a few rifles worth considering.

1. Tikka T1x MTR. Not too pricey. Appears frequently on the list. Comes with a threaded 16″ barrel. If you decide to upgrade later, the barrel comes out when you loosen a few screws.

2. Savage Mark II FV-SR. Downright cheap. An MTR runs $650. I don’t think Tikka allows discounts. I can get a Mark II for $269. Being a Savage, it may be a little rough. Savage puts all the money into accuracy.

3. CZ 457 Scout. This is a fine gun with a short threaded barrel, but it comes with a tiny stock for children, so you have to spend over $200 on a real stock or slap some kind of clumsy attachment on the butt. It also comes with a 1-round magazine, so you have to upgrade that. The other CZ 457’s don’t fit my specs.

4. Bergara BMR. This is a Spanish gun with a great reputation. Not too expensive, and the barrel is threaded, but the shortest one you can get is 18″ long. Not a deal-killer. Not that far from 16″, which is the length I want.

If you own a Bergara, and you eventually decide you want to spend more, you can add a target trigger made for a Remington 700.

At the moment, my plan is to cut up my Savage A22 and see what happens. It has a 22″ barrel, which is too long, and the barrel is not threaded.

When I looked into shortening and threading a barrel, it turned out to be a complex job, of course.

Any idiot can shorten a barrel. You clamp it in a vise, cut it with a hacksaw, and use an inexpensive set of hand tools to repair the muzzle.

To thread a barrel, you have to find the center of the bore. If your threads are not concentric with the bore, your silencer will also be out of alignment, and when you shoot, you will shoot the silencer.

You would think gun makers would make their bores and barrels concentric, but most don’t. It’s hard to make a long, completely straight hole down the middle of a round rod, concentric with the rod’s surface. Manufacturers try to get close, and that’s about it.

When you thread a barrel, you have to stick something inside the bore in order to find out where the center is. There is a complicated procedure involving a thing called a range rod. I won’t go into that, because it appears to be outdated.

These days, people put barrels in their lathes and use test indicators with long probes to indicate the bores. If you don’t understand that sentence, it just means you’re not a machinist or gunsmith. A test indicator will tell you when something moves a ten-thousandth or two ten-thousandths of an inch, depending on its level of precision. You stick your probe in your bore and rotate the barrel, and you move things around until the indicator dial’s hand stops moving.

Some people use indicators that can go 2.75″ into barrels. That seems silly to me, although I may be wrong. A bullet’s path is entirely determined by the last bit of the barrel. Bores usually are not straight, but bullets aren’t influenced by whatever crooked paths they may traverse on the way to muzzles. Stretches of barrel farther down the line move them wherever they want. A bullet has no memory of what it was doing a few inches earlier.

If this is true, then indicating the last inch should be more than adequate. Whatever direction the last inch is pointing in will be the direction in which the bullet will fly.

This is my theory.

I plan to take the barrel out of the gun and cut it down to 16.5″. Then I’ll hold it in a 4-jaw chuck with about 2″ hanging out. I may have to find a way to stabilize the rear of the barrel, which will be unsupported in the lathe’s hollow spindle, but if I keep the speed low, I don’t think I’ll need to. It shouldn’t whip around.

I’ll put a nice face on the new muzzle. I’ll make an 11° crown. I’ll turn down the last half-inch for threading. I’ll put a small chamfer at the end to make it easier to get the barrel into the silencer. I’ll put a radiused recess in where the shoulder meets the turned-down part, so the threads will end before reaching the shoulder. Then I’ll thread the barrel and polish everything. Finally, I’ll blue the exposed metal.

I can also drill new holes near the muzzle so I can put the front sight back on the barrel.

This should work, and if it doesn’t, a new A22 barrel can be had cheaply.

When it’s over, I should have a handy, short gun that shoots a little better than it did originally. The velocity should be nearly the same. I won’t have to use hearing protection.

Unless I chicken out and get a new gun. Since starting to write this, I have learned new things, and I am wavering.

As bolt guns go, the Tikka is just about perfect. Fantastic trigger and barrel. Light. Super accurate. If I went this route, I wouldn’t have to do any work, and I’d have my first bolt-action .22.

A Savage Mark II would work, but gun nerds say they have ejection issues.

If I want to stick with semiauto, I can buy a shorter Savage barrel with a threaded muzzle and stick it in my A22.

Finally, I could buy a Savage A22 with a short barrel. They are not expensive at all. They’re so cheap, I could buy one and sell my old one and not lose more than maybe $150.

Of course, I wouldn’t sell the old one, because guns increase in value. I’d hang onto it as long as I had room for it. No reason to hurry.

I don’t know why I’m even thinking about this, with the squirrels avoiding every area where I can get a safe shot and forming conga lines and cheerleader-style pyramids between me and my neighbor’s house.

Whatever I end up doing, it looks like real squirrel-grade accuracy is possible, even with a semiauto.

I Need a Rifle That Fires Hungry Cats

I do not understand how the universe works.

I took a couple of my .22’s and sighted them in for squirrel work. I even put a better trigger in one of them. I fixed them up so they’re accurate enough for squirrels that have the audacity to show up in my yard.

Since then, I have not had one good shooting solution on a squirrel.

I like that term. “Shooting solution.” Like I’m stalking Jap carriers in the Bungo Straits.

The squirrels have vanished. Except for the ones that prance around and taunt me from locations where I would rather not shoot. I don’t want to shoot toward my neighbor’s house. Naturally, they get between my house and his and form Soul Train lines.

Why is the world like this? Why am I not rewarded for my efforts?

I got myself a silencer, and I am enjoying using it with my Ruger 10/22. It’s still very loud, but I am assured it’s not loud enough to do any damage to my ears.

I wish I had a liberal silencer. The kind people like Joy Behar and Rosie O’Donnell think exist. The ones that make a sound like “FFTT. FFTT,” when you shoot. So quiet they don’t even wake up the cat.

For that matter, I wish I had liberal guns. The ones liberal gun-haters use in movies. You plug a 300-pound man in the gut, and the impact lifts him off his feet and carries him through a convenient window.

These guns also keep shooting when the known capacities of their magazines have been exceeded, and they let you do things like shooting a twig off a tree from a thousand yards, offhand.

Where are these guns? They could save me a lot on ammunition. I could shoot 31 real rounds and then keep firing from an empty magazine.

I like my silencer, but it only screws onto one gun. The others aren’t threaded. Now I have to decide whether to thread them (some of them) myself or take them to a gunsmith.

I am supposedly a machinist. I have a 16×40 lathe. It’s long enough to hold just about any rifle barrel between centers. You would think I could thread a barrel, but it looks like it’s a little complicated.

You chuck your barrel up, you turn on the power, you put a shoulder on it, you thread it, and you’re done, right? Well, not necessarily, although I think some bubbas do it that way.

Your silencer’s bullet path has to be concentric with the barrel’s bore, because if it’s not, the bullets can hit the silencer on the way out. You have to be within a few thousandths of concentricity.

This means you can’t just center the barrel on the lathe. You have to center the bore, and when that’s done, the barrel itself may be running eccentrically. Bores aren’t always in the centers of barrels, believe it or not. They wander around in there.

No problem, right? You just jam a live center in the barrel’s muzzle and hold the breech end with a 4-jaw chuck. Well, it looks like it doesn’t work that way. I’m not sure why not, but evidently this may not give you concentricity. You need a thing called a range rod that goes into the muzzle. I haven’t been able to figure out what a range rod is yet, but they cost a hundred bucks or more. That part, I figured out.

I am considering chopping up my Savage A22. This is a really neat .22 semiauto. It has a Savage Accu-trigger, which is about as good as you can do without going to an expensive aftermarket part. It’s easy to disassemble and clean. It has a Savage barrel, and that’s one thing Savage does really well. It’s a great gun. But the barrel is not threaded.

I would like to thread it for the squirrels. I owe it to them.

I also want to cut it shorter. My silencer is something like 6″ long, and it will make the gun unwieldy. It’s already pretty unwieldy. The factory barrel is 22″ long, which seems nutty to me.

I read up, and I learned that there is no point in making a .22 barrel longer than about 16.5″. This is where you get peak velocity. As you add inches, the speed drops. So why are so many guns so long? I have read that it’s all about sight radius.

When you use iron or open sights, a longer distance between the rear sight and the front sight makes the gun easier to aim accurately. Supposedly.

Is this actually true? I have my doubts. Why would it be?

A longer radius means a heavier barrel, and that means the barrel will shake more when you shoulder the gun.

It can’t be because the same angular error at the point of discharge results in a smaller linear error downrange. That’s obviously wrong.

Gun precision is measured in degrees or milrads. Units of angular displacement. If your gun keeps every shot within 1.05″ at 100 yards, that’s one minute of angle, or 1/60 of a degree. If you move your gun up 10° from a given point of aim, the change in the point of aim, measured in linear units downrange, will be the same regardless of how short your barrel is.

My understanding is that the idea is that the same LINEAR error at the shooter’s end will produce a smaller error downrange with a long sight radius, and that is true, but that means you’re making a bigger angular error as you aim. Why would a short barrel cause that?

When I use a scope at 100 or 1000 yards, I have a sight radius of a few inches. It’s inside the scope. I can still shot 1/2-MOA at 100 yards. The nature of the sight makes it easy to see how far off-target I am, so I can withhold fire until I get it right. Why can’t I do that with open sights? Seems to be it’s just a matter of tightening them up. Instead of a front sight as wide as a paper match, use one half as wide.

Am I wrong? I can’t see the mistake.

It’s not easy to shoot a snubnose revolver accurately, but is that because they’re not built to be precise? No. It’s because they have huge, blocky sights which take extra skill to work with. When your sights cover up half of what you’re shooting at, you need to get used to them and figure out where your bullets are going to land.

I just saw a video of a guy shooting a snubnose at 50 yards, and he shot into an area the size of a canteloupe. That would be fantastic shooting with any pistol. I’m a great pistol shot, but this guy is on another planet.

A long barrel doesn’t do more to stabilize a bullet than a short one. It may seem like it would, but it doesn’t. The only thing a bullet remembers when it leaves a gun is the last millimeter of the barrel. Because a bullet is in contact with the barrel’s lands all the way down, it’s not like the lands a foot back from the muzzle have any influence on the bullet’s flight. If the front of the muzzle is in good shape, and the barrel isn’t worn out, the bullet will fly true. If it has a tiny imperfection, the rounds will go all over, even if the other 99.95% of the barrel is perfect.

Barrel rigidity is important to accuracy. Gun barrels hum as bullets move out. They experience waves along their lengths. The shorter or thicker a barrel is, the smaller the amplitude of the waves will be. A shorter barrel should actually be more accurate than a long one as long as the velocity is the same and the bullet twist rate is just as good.

I think putting a 22″ barrel on a .22 rifle is a mistake. I’ll bet they do it mostly for marketing reasons. A long barrel looks better, and people think they’re more accurate. And people expect higher velocities from them.

A .22 charge is pretty weak, so by the time a bullet moves 16″ down the barrel, it has exhausted whatever energy the powder provided. It’s not like a bunch of unused gas will follow it out of the muzzle instead of providing extra speed.

I’m thinking I’ll cut my barrel down to 16.25″, have it threaded, and have the front sight reattached. The gun will be lighter and easier to aim with a scope, and it won’t be 4 feet long with a silencer.

I don’t plan to use the front sight, but I might decide to try it some day, or maybe I’ll find an aftermarket peep sight set I like. Might as well keep my options open.

The gap in the rear sight might have to be widened by a third or so. I don’t know. Or I could grind the front sight down by a third.

I don’t know if an open front sight would be tall enough to be seen over a silencer.

In any case, it would be a pretty neat rifle with these changes. If it didn’t work out, I could probably get a new barrel for a hundred bucks.

Doesn’t do me much good if the squirrels keep reading my mind, however.

It Never Takes 5 Minutes

I have some information for anyone who is having a hard time installing a new trigger group in a Ruger 10/22 rifle or pistol. This is supposed to be a 5-minute job, and of course, with all my tools, I spent about two hours on it. It’s just like the 30-minute toilet-bolt-cap job I did recently, which took 4 hours.

1. The pins holding the old group in don’t just “fall out,” as people claim they do, and you can’t just push them out with a punch. I had to bang the snot out of mine with a big hammer and a punch. They were really tight. I put a couple of blocks of wood on my bench and covered them with paper towels to prevent marring, and the pins came out. They are the same on both ends, so you can’t push them out the wrong way. Either way works.

2. The two smaller pins DO just fall out, and they do it while you’re working on the gun. If you let this happen, you’ll have to fiddle with it to get them back in, so don’t let it happen.

3. If your bolt lock doesn’t seem to want to let go, it’s because it’s stupidly designed. The manual contains some frustrating tripe about pulling the lock lever’s upper part to make it let go, which is counterintuitive. Forget all that. Pull the bolt back, pull the lever, let the lever go, and release the handle. This works.

4. You can buy a new bolt lock lever just about anywhere for $14 or less. Tandemkross makes a really neat one that hangs out where you can get at it. It will also release the bolt when you pull it back and let it go, so your 10/22 will be like a normal gun.

5. Tandemkross also makes a really neat magazine release lever. Other companies make them too, but I trust Tandemkross more than a random sweatshop in Shenzhen that sells via Amazon.

I decided to get a Ruger BX trigger, which is a nicer version of the standard trigger. The pull is a lot lighter. You can’t adjust it; at least not if you’re a typical user. I suppose a gun nerd could do it.

The BX trigger is a direct replacement. Sadly, it has no markings on it indicating that it’s a BX, so if you take your old trigger out and put both triggers down together, you are likely to install the wrong one when you get back to work.

You can also buy triggers costing a couple of hundred dollars. I don’t think a 10/22 rifle is capable of shooting accurately enough to make them worth it. The BX feels very good, and there is no way I’ll need anything better on a pistol with a red dot.

A hex nut fell on my workbench while I was working on the gun, and it matches the pitch of the screw that holds the handgrip on. There are no nuts in the manufacturer’s parts list or exploded views, and if you put the hex nut on the screw, there is no place in the gun where it will fit.

I kind of wonder if there was a nut on the bench, which stuck to my hand while I was fighting with the pistol and then fell off. If so, the matching pitch is an impressive coincidence. I put the gun together without it, and everything seems fine.

I have the above-mentioned Tandemkross parts on the way, so I will not have to keep suffering with the factory bolt lock and magazine release. I also bought a Shock Block, which is a thing that cushions the bolt when it flies back in the receiver. There is a steel pin in the rear of the receiver, and people say the bolt hits it.

There is a lot of argument about whether the bolt needs cushioning. Some say the bolt never hits the pin. Some say it only happens with fast ammunition. Some say it definitely happens when using a silencer. I figured it couldn’t hurt.

This is where my 10/22 efforts and knowledge stand right now. I want to punch the whole Ruger company in the face. I will try out the trigger tomorrow or the next day, and I’ll try the other stuff when it arrives.

Tune Your Saw with Contrarianism

Do you have an Echo CS-590 chainsaw you modified? Did you advance the timing and open up the muffler? Do you have a carb from a more-powerful saw on it?

Are you totally unable to start and tune it now that you’ve worked on it?

Take heart, friend. I may have the answer.

I put a new key on the shaft of my saw’s flywheel a while back, advancing the timing, and it seemed to run considerably stronger. I stuck a new, more open deflector on the muffler, too. Everything was fine. But my motto is, “If it ain’t broke, fix it,” so I got back to work.

I removed my muffler’s deflector and drilled 6 3/16″ holes in the muffler, around the factory opening that shoots gas out of the saw. This reduced back pressure and should end up giving me considerably more power.

The carb I have on it comes from a CS-620P, which is a professional-grade saw. It’s more powerful than a stock CS-590, so the carb has a slightly higher capacity. Unfortunately, it comes with a main jet/check valve that has a little hole in it that always lets some fuel go through, even when you close the H and L screws.

This hole is there to save Echo aggravation. It’s just like the little plastic things my saw used to have, to prevent people from turning the screws too far. The purpose of both is to keep people from leaning their saws out until they blow up. Echo knows people will do this and then expect warranty repairs.

The main jet has a check valve to keep air from being sucked backward into the system.

If you modify your saw, you will need to readjust your carb, so the limiter caps on the screws have to go, along with the hole in the check valve. If you have a hole in your valve, you may not be able to lean your saw out enough to make it run well after modifications. A saw the factory wants to max out at 12,000 RPM may run well at 15,000 after modifications, requiring a different mix, so you don’t want a check valve ruining your day.

I installed a new check valve with no hole, and then I tried to tune the saw. It drove me crazy for several days.

It wouldn’t start. Then it would start, but it wouldn’t idle. Then it would idle, but it died when I goosed the throttle.

A guy who sells modification parts did a video, and he said that if you change your check valve, you should open up the H screw to richen the mixture. Other people on the web seemed to agree that saws with muffler mods needed more fuel. Believing this tripe, I tried starting my saw with the screws out a little past the OEM settings, and I tried the OEM settings. Finally, I tried starting the L screw at one turn out from zero, and the saw ran.

So if you have modified your CS-590, and you’re losing your mind trying to make it work, try leaning out the L feed.

I should add that sometimes tightening a screw will actually make the mixture richer at wide-open throttle, but let’s not go there. I don’t think it applies to the L screw. All I know is, I needed to tighten mine.

I got the saw to run smoothly last night, but I ran out of blood for the mosquitoes, so I didn’t finish the job.

Before fooling with the muffler and valve, the saw was doing something like 13,500, I think. Maybe it was 13,300. This is wide open, with no load. Last night, all I could get was 12,500, which is within wimpy factory specs. Disgraceful.

Today I set the idle at 3,000, pretty much in the middle of the range. I tuned the L screw by ear. Then I opened up the H screw, and BANG, I was at 13,300 with an occasional burp.

It was like, “WAAAAAAAAAAAAA bip WAAAAAAAAAAA bip WAAAAAAAAAAA bip.”

In case you want to know how to tune a saw’s H needle, I have found out, so I’ll tell you.

It’s the last thing you adjust.

You want it to “four-stroke.” This is a misnomer used by chainsaw dudes. A chainsaw has a 2-stroke motor, and it can’t do what a 4-stroke does. It can SOUND a little like a 4-stroke, however. It sounds that way because it’s missing.

You want to make the H feed so rich, the saw misses a little when wide open with no load. Just a little. This means it’s getting more fuel than it can burn. When you put it in the wood, that fuel will be burned to provide more power, and the saw will run smoothly.

My saw has a limited ignition coil. The limit is 13,500.

People say you can’t tune a saw with a limited coil, because when it hits the limit, if starts missing, and it sounds like the saw is tuned correctly. I don’t think I’m having that problem, because I’m not hitting 13,500 and the saw is missing, but I will keep testing it.

The big take-away here is this: if you have been modifying your CS-590, and you’re pulling your hair out because it won’t let you tune it, and you think you broke it, set the L screw at one turn out, or whatever is 1/4 turn in from the OEM setting for your carb. It may be the answer.

Now I have 4 pretty decent gas saws for wood clearing. I have a homeowner-grade 40cc rebadged Husqvarna 435, a modified CS-590 which is maybe 90% professional-grade, an Echo CS-510P, which is a 50-cc pro saw, and a Husqvarna 562XP, which is a 4.9-horsepower 60-cc saw with a 24″ bar.

I only need one big saw and one small saw to work, so with two in each size, it’s pretty likely I’ll always have a set of two gas saws that function. And I have a cordless Makita that will save me if both of my small saws die on me.

I have no idea how much power the CS-590 makes now, but it should be significantly more than the 4 horsepower it was born with.

I’m keeping my chains sharp, so that also helps. Sharpening your chain is like adding one or more horsepower. I also use grown-up chains, not the safety chains lawyers put on saws places like Home Depot sells. Those safety chains are amazing. You buy a 4-horsepower saw, to pick a number, and the chain, sharpened to its peak, makes it cut like 3 horsepower.

I’m Getting Mystic Here

For some reason, I started thinking about the smartest guy in the world, so I Googled him yesterday.

Is he really the smartest guy in the world? No. As far as I know, the smartest known person is an Asian mathematician, and the mathematician, whatever his name is, has the record to back up the claim. But the guy I Googled is often referred to as the smartest person in the world. He promotes himself before the public.

I find the super-brilliant interesting. I am not the smartest guy in the world, but I am usually the smartest person in the room, so being around someone I know to be smarter is a treat. I wish I could be improved and be more like them. I wanted to find out about the guy I Googled.

Instead of convincing me he deserved the title, this experience made me think about fraud and the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. As you surely know, this syndrome is found in people who are not very smart and/or competent, yet who can’t be convinced they’re not the best of the best.

My understanding is that the research that gave rise to the naming of the syndrome also showed that the smartest and/or most competent people had the opposite problem. They tend to feel they are much less smart or competent than they are. They fail to come forward when they should and tell everyone else what to do. When you’re smart, you are better at perceiving your limitations and the problems you may run into. See Idiocracy for more information.

The man’s name is Chris Langan. He’s a rancher. He has no college degree. He has never held a job that required much in the way of brains or knowledge. He worked as a bouncer, for example. For 20 years. He says he blows out the top of intelligence tests, and he is said to have an IQ of 195-200.

Einstein is said to have had an IQ of only 160. I kind of doubt that. I am at least close to that figure, and I haven’t revolutionized the field or physics or any other field. There are supposedly several million people in that general range, and we don’t see a lot of Einsteins.

Langan has a theory of life, the universe, and everything. I have not tried to read it. There are doubters, to say the least. He calls it CMTU or something.

Reading up on him led me to call BS on his claims. I will explain.

1. He says he got a perfect score on the SAT and had time to take a nap. Assuming the SAT took three hours back in his day, as it does now, he didn’t have time to take a nap. Not a real nap.

I took the verbal GRE, checked my answers over and over because I had nothing else to do, decided to quit, and walked to a convenience store to get something to drink. I got a perfect score, which is unusual. I would guess I killed 20 minutes with the beverage excursion. Taking a nap would have been out of the question.

Too bad I didn’t get perfect scores on the other parts, but let’s not talk about that.

Anyway, what happens when you get a perfect score on the SAT?

The College Board tells universities how you did, whether you apply or not. If you break a certain figure, they send you letters. Carl Hovde, the chairman of Columbia University’s English department, sent me a letter asking me to apply, even though I did not get a 1600. The University of South Carolina flat-out told me I was admitted. I got letters from other universities and colleges, asking me to apply.

I didn’t get any scholarships, but I was pursued. Maybe I would have gotten some if I had replied.

Langan says he was offered two full scholarships, as one of a tiny handful of perfect-scorers in the entire world. They came from the University of Chicago and a place called Reed College. I can’t buy this. I believe a pre-1995 perfect scorer, who took the old, harder version of the test, would have been chased all over the place.

Langan says he chose Reed College, which, he says, was a mistake. How can the smartest person on Earth turn down the University of Chigago for Reed College? Chicago is one of America’s great schools, up there with the Ivy League. Can’t swallow it.

My dad turned down a scholarship from Harvard Law School and went to the University of Kentucky, but then his IQ was only 142. I know this because he was furious when my mom took a test and scored 144. She loved telling that story. She laughed and laughed.

Langan says his family was extremely poor, but he lost his scholarship because his mother failed to send in the required financial information. How could that happen? Was she in a coma? He would have been a big, strapping adult. The smartest adult in the world. Why didn’t he do it for her? Not credible.

He says he got a scholarship from Montana State University but lost it when they refused to move a class to a later time for him. His car was not working, so he couldn’t get to class on time.

What?

This reminds me of a delusional girl I knew in law school. She came from one of the Virgins. She said people there loved her, and they were building a million-dollar house for her, free of charge. Then she said she didn’t plan to live in the house because there was too much dust.

She was a nice girl. I liked her. But she was delusional.

A university dumped a 1600-SAT student because he couldn’t make it to one class? The smartest undergrad on Earth couldn’t fix his car or figure out a way to get transportation? And who tells universities when to schedule classes? This can be done? I was not aware of this. I would have scheduled all my classes for 8 p.m.

He couldn’t take a semester off and return when his car was fixed?

2. He says that at 15, he was able to pick up a guitar and copy Jimi Hendrix perfectly. Okay, so he worked at a nightclub as a bouncer, and he made nearly no money, doing an unpleasant job in the rain and snow. Inside, there were guitarists who could never hope to equal Jimi Hendrix, and they made great money doing very little. But he settled for working the door?

He has this wonderful musical talent, but there are no videos or recordings of him on the web. He publicizes his other gifts, but being able to match a professional guitarist in the top 0.1% of his kind doesn’t seem to be important enough to showcase. But airing his claim that he COULD play like Jimi Hendrix is important.

So much dust.

3. He says that when he was young, he used to get high grades on tests in foreign languages he didn’t know. He flipped through textbooks briefly, and that was enough.

This is not possible, unless he means he took first-semester midterms. “J’ai un chat gris.” “Ou se trouve le W.C.?”

Who let him take the tests? “Excuse me, Miss Crabtree, but can I barge into your 11th-grade German II class and take the final?” That doesn’t happen. Why would they let him do it?

Languages don’t just require memorization and understanding. They require practice, and you have to learn the inconsistencies and variations. I suppose there are people who could pick up a lot in a day, especially if they already knew related languages, but not enough to pass a difficult test.

I found out he was on Twitter, so I took a look. The man is a raving antisemite! I mean, out there! Past the eccentric orbit of Candace Owens in the Nick Fuentes belt!

He thinks Jews control the world! Right! That’s how they got a cruddy little piece of oilless desert, their worst enemies got all the oil, and Gentiles got Europe and North America! It’s all part of their master plan! Letting Hitler kill a third of them was a tactical move! Four-D chess! The brilliance will be apparent any day now. If you were the smartest guy in the world, you would already see it.

He has a problem with blacks! And he said something really stupid about them.

Forbes published an article saying black women were going to lead us into a new age or something. This is ridiculous, but anyway, his response was on the same level. He said:

Question 1: Into what kind of future can a group A (White men) be led by another avowedly exceptional group B (Black women) with mean IQ up to 2 standard deviations below that of group A?

I have no idea what “up to” means here, since we all know the average IQ’s of these groups. The average IQ of white males in the US is about 101, and for black women, it’s about 88. A difference of 13 points. The standard deviation for all groups is about 15. Let’s subtract two times 15 from 101. I get 71.

So your IQ is ~200, and you think 88 is two standard deviations away from 101.

He also said this, in response to a tweet:

Obviously, Hitler was beside himself after reading Praktischer Idealismus (1925) and other Ziobankster-funded (specifically, Warburg/Rothschild-funded) works of RN Coudenhove-Kalergi, which declared Jews the “Master Race” and proposed that non-aristocratic European non-Jews be mongrelized to total extinction by forced miscegenation with imported nonwhites to form the “Eurasian-negroid race of the future”. (Note that it was not Hitler who came up with the term “Master Race”, but those who had scared the living hell out of Hitler and every other sane non-Jewish White person in Europe.)

Where to begin?

“Ziobankster”? What?

Praktischer Idealismus is the German title of Practical Idealism, a book written by a strange man named Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi. All I know about him is what I just read on Wikipedia. He appears to have been an eccentric who came up with a ridiculous plan for ordering the world’s nations and races, as though that were possible. It looks like he was very influential, but he was a nothing compared to what he wanted to be. His version of the world never came to be.

Hitler hated Coudenhove-Kalergi. But why would anyone call Hitler “sane”? Hitler was a paranoid dictator who practiced genocide so successfully he’s in history’s top 10. He killed more gentiles than Jews, many of them fellow antisemites. He was sane in the sense that he wasn’t psychotic, but Langan doesn’t use the word “sane” to mean “not psychotic.” He uses it to mean “rational.” So Hitler was rational?

He mentions the Rothschilds and Warburgs. The whole business about wealthy Jewish families running the world is absurd, for the reasons mentioned above. If Jews run the world, why are Iran, Lebanon, and Syria not occupied right now? How did Obama get elected?

What a crummy job they’re doing. Maybe the Elders of Zion are demented, like Joe Biden. Maybe they need to be eased into retirement homes and replaced by Ben Shapiro and, let’s say, Jerry Seinfeld. “J’ever notice how gentiles…”

My take on this guy is that he’s like the con man Frank Abagnale. A self-promoter who makes bogus claims he hopes no one will check.

I was laughing about this last night with my wife. I told her, “NEVER believe anyone’s resume.”

It’s true. You know how many CEO’s America has now? Go to Facebook or Linkedin and count them. Every third black male teenager on Tiktok is a CEO. The CEO of his mom’s basement. I guess technically I’m a CEO. I have a business entity.

If someone says, “I was involved in the founding of Starlink,” it means he was the guy they called when the guy who walked Elon Musk’s dog called in sick. If he says he’s a web-based entrepreneur, it means he links to Amazon from Youtube videos no one watches.

I know a guy who said he had a big company that bought and restored old Navy ships so they could be put on display as museums. He had a corporation with an impressive name.

He found a destroyer in Mexico, and he got the Mexicans to agree to sell it. Then, according to sources on the web, he told a Texas company he wanted to move it. The company later sued him, saying they spent something like $800,000 preparing for the move. They said he ghosted them and never paid them. They got a default judgment because he didn’t show up in court.

According to web sources, his company’s total income for one year was below $25,000. But to talk to him, you would have thought he was running Maersk. We’re doing this, and we’re doing that, and we’re in negotiations with this bunch to form a partnership, and this important person in the NSA is telling me that, and it’s all very hush-hush, there will be an announcement soon…

He claimed he had designed a practical atom bomb when he was in high school, and that a state university had admitted him as a physics major based on his design. No application required.

When leftists were lying, saying Iraq never had any uranium ore, I wrote about it. It turned out they had hundreds of tons. I am a real physics major. I figured out how much bomb-grade uranium the ore contained, and I figured out how many critical masses–bomb cores–could be made from it. It’s sixth-grade math.

My acquaintance called and let me know I was pretty close to correct. Like he knew. He brazenly told this to a person who had studied physics for 5 years.

Eventually, I asked him why he didn’t graduate from college and become a physicist. He told me it was because there was too much math. He couldn’t do math.

I told my wife this was like saying, “I was going to be a bestselling author, but I couldn’t write words.” Even at the high school level, physics is all math.

Know what? He didn’t design a bomb. He has no idea how a fission reaction works. He has no idea how to make a critical mass in a short enough time to create a successful explosion. He would not understand this paragraph.

He was not accepted by a major university and put into its physics program. He didn’t do physics in high school, and he never got past algebra. They don’t put freshmen in physics programs, anyway. Students choose their own majors. Colleges just admit them.

He was a likeable guy, but a lot of things he said were totally unrelated to reality. He lied constantly.

He said he was building a big compound for some reason or other. He would have a concrete house impervious to storms. He would have a big workshop with a huge array of tools. None of that exists.

He offered people jobs. If he liked you, he offered you a position. He said I should be the organization’s attorney. A friend of mine is married to a mechanic. He was going to be the in-house mechanic. Never happened.

Never believe a person’s resume.

This got me thinking about Dunning-Kruger, which is a little different from fraud but has a similar smell to it.

I belong to a forum, and it has a section where you can discuss religion and politics. Stupidly, I visited after Trump won. Leftist laymen were saying really stupid things. One said Trump’s Supreme Court would find a way to put Biden in prison.

The Supreme Court does not indict or try criminals. I think they tell people this in high school. I explained this, and I started getting the usual stupid blowback lawyers get when they try to talk sense to ignorant people.

I lost patience and told these people law doesn’t require much intelligence, but it does require education. I told one he could not understand anything I said until he became educated enough to comprehend it.

That made him really mad. He said I was appealing to authority.

“Appeal to authority” is, as you surely know, a type of logical fallacy. I’ll give an example. “Over 90% of scientists agree that climate change is caused by human beings.”

A person who says that is saying, “Everything you say is invalid because people who are smarter than you disagree, and even though I, personally, have no idea what’s right or wrong, I win the argument. No tags back. Infinity.”

I told him he didn’t understand what “appeal to authority” meant. I would have been appealing to authority had I said, “Over 90% of legal scholars say you can’t understand discussions of law without some education.” I was just telling him, from my personal knowledge, gained from an accredited law school and years of practice, why he wasn’t competent to discuss law.

Incidentally, most scientists are not qualified to make judgments about climate. A lot of scientists spend their careers doing things like collecting bear poop and examining it under microscopes.

I had a wonderful professor at Columbia. His name was Walter Bock. He taught vertebrate anatomy and evolution, among other things. Basically, 19th-century science. He was an accomplished birdwatcher. Sometimes he appeared in class in his birdwatching boots. He was a fantastic speaker. His lectures were interesting. He was a bona fide Ivy League scientist.

He didn’t know squat about the climate. Most scientists don’t.

I was appealing to my own authority, as a person who, compared to the lay people on the forum, was an accredited expert. I have been a layman, and I am now a lawyer. I know why laymen do not understand discussions about law. I could have begun to explain why, but I would have had to write a whole lot of blog posts, I would have had to have an audience who was open to correction, and they would have had to be smart enough to understand the explanations. The first requirement was not going to happen, for the same reason you don’t debate your cranky toddler about using the potty or the floor, and the other two were not fulfilled.

Well, that’s probably wrong. I’m sure the forum people were smart enough to understand, because understanding didn’t require great intelligence. But pride and stubbornness negate intelligence.

Richard Feynman, the great physicist, once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That quotation may be wrong. I read his books, and I think he said something about explaining to a young child. Anyway, that’s the gist of it, and he was totally wrong. Changing the world of physics, which I will never do, does not mean you’re automatically right about everything.

You can’t explain everything simply. Many things are hard to understand. Feynman was a real smartass, and he liked saying things that sounded cleverer than they were.

Explain differential geometry simply. No. Fricking. Way. Explain the Rule Against Perpetuities to a really smart 5-year-old. Good luck.

Am I claiming to be smarter than Feynman? No, but he said something stupid, and it was easy to refute.

Incidentally, and I don’t care what anyone says, appealing to authority is a perfectly valid way to argue. It all depends on how you do it. If I say obesity is bad for you, and I support my argument by saying virtually every authority who has studied it agrees, and I’m telling the truth, I have a pretty good argument.

If we argue about the meaning of a word, and I open the dictionary, am I putting forth a fallacy? Referring to authorities is crucial to the progress of knowledge. Lawyers use the word “authorities” to describe the, well, authorities they refer to when arguing before judges. Judges refer to authorities when issuing decisions. A case is authority. A treatise or hornbook is authority.

I told a forum guy what he was doing was the ESSENCE of Dunning-Kruger, but he was too busy coming back with Pee-Wee-Herman-level replies, so I let it go. “Lulzers u really burned him good.”

Okay. The floor, then.

Humility is really important. I would never try to tell an expert about his field. I defer to uneducated people who repair cars and install air conditioners because they know more than I do. It’s amazing how nearly everyone will argue with a lawyer who went to school for 6 semesters and passed difficult bar exams.

In any case, the Supreme Court is not going to indict anyone.

The worst DK sufferer I ever knew was a guy named Jim Robinson. He was a friend of my dad’s law partner, Norton.

Norton was utterly absorbed in making life good for Norton, the way a lamprey thinks about making life good for a lamprey without worrying too much about the bass. I guess Norton is still at it somewhere unless he’s dead.

Wow. The web says he died on June 16. I don’t feel any grief, because he was an annoyance from whom I distanced myself. When my dad and mother got divorced, and my mother’s life was hell, Norton told my dad he would swear lies for him. And he and his wife voted my dad out of the firm, after he let Norton become a partner very early.

I found myself right next to him at a grocery store before I left Miami, and on another occasion, I found myself a few feet away from him, his wife, and his son at a Winn-Dixie. I mean like 5 feet. We were all aware of each other. I never opened my mouth. They didn’t acknowledge me, either. We treated each other as though we were invisible. It was like the theater of the absurd.

His wife is basically a nice person.

Norton got my dad started in yachting. He got him to go in with him and Jim on a 38-foot Bertram, and they eventually got a 46-foot Hatteras.

Jim was not gifted, and that’s fine. We are not all brilliant. We are not all tall or good-looking or talented. We should try not to ridicule people over their shortcomings, although I guess I have done that as much as anyone alive.

Jim’s problem was that he thought he was really smart. He could not be reasoned with. He also hated me, because his son did something dumb, and when Jim tried to blame me, it backfired.

I recall a story my dad told me about Norton. He wanted my dad to approve some expensive change to the boat, and my dad gave in. He said, “What about Jim?” Norton said, “I’ll handle Jim. He’ll do whatever I say. He’s stupid.”

Wonderful friend. My dad should have seen his future then.

The Hatteras had a small Boston Whaler on the bow, on a davit. To use the Whaler, you removed some cables that held it to the deck chocks. Then you rotated the davit so the Whaler was over the water, and you lowered it.

When they bought the boat, I lived in Kentucky. I had no idea how to operate anything on it. My dad invited me on a trip, and we went to the Bahamas.

The seas were rough, and the Whaler came off the chocks and ran back into the boat’s windshield, which sealed off the saloon, which is what you call the living room.

I looked at it later, and I saw that someone had replaced a steel cable with a bungee cord. I also found a turnbuckle nut someone had lost on the deck. Without the nut, it was not possible to tighten the cable. I didn’t know what it was at first, but I figured it out.

Hmm. Wonder who lost the nut and put a rubber band in its place to avoid getting in trouble.

I didn’t know how to put the Whaler in the water or run it. I was seeing the Hatteras for the first time in my life. Jim.

Jim had a teenaged son who, according to my mother (appeal to authority), profited from selling a popular herb. Jim’s son was familiar with the boat.

When Jim found out about the cable, he was very angry with me. He accused me of causing the Whaler to go through the windshield, as well as lying about it. Clearly, I was a) too dishonest to admit I lost a nut, and b) too stupid to realize a rubber bungee cord would not hold a 400-pound boat in place in 6-foot seas.

Mind you, I was the one who told my dad and Norton about the nut and cord. So I was too dumb to hide the evidence?

I was an adult, and Jim’s son was a kid. I wouldn’t have cared if they had found out I broke the boat. I was not afraid of my parents or Jim. Why would I lie?

It had to be the son. Norton had no children at the time.

Jim didn’t know me from Adam’s housecat, and I didn’t know him, either, but this is the way he chose for our relationship to begin. He knew his son, so he must have known he was capable of putting a bungee cord where a cable should have been and lying about it.

So Jim’s plan to blame me for what his son did failed, and henceforth, I was on his list. He loved to criticize me, and he was never right about anything. He was always proven wrong because he didn’t think. Being proven wrong just made him madder, as if it were my fault.

The sad thing is that I tried to get off on the right foot with Jim the first time we met, but there was no dealing with him. I always try to get along with people. I never stood a chance with this guy. It was like he was possessed.

He argued with me about everything. A bunch of us were on a dock in Harbour Island, and I mentioned misty grouper, a popular bottom fish. Jim looked at me with scorn and said, “mystic grouper.” One for Jim!

Well, not really. “Mystic grouper” was something the other casual boaters were saying because it was a corruption that was going around. I, on the other hand, enjoyed reading McClane’s Fishing Encyclopedia, so I knew better. I corrected him back. Made him even madder.

He could have just kept his mouth shut. He thought he finally had me, so he jumped off the cliff without thinking. Not my fault at all.

Why would you call a grouper “mystic”? Are they down there flipping tarot cards? It makes no sense. “Misty” works because the bars on the side of the fish look faded.

Jim was very handy with tools because he ran an excavation business his dad left him. He made my dad a prop-puller for his boat. This was two big aluminum plates with a U-shaped recess for the prop shaft to go through, and four holes for bolts to go through. It may be hard to picture, but the idea was to put one plate behind the prop, over the shaft, put the other behind the prop, thread the bolts between the plates, and tighten them until the front plate pushed the prop back off the shaft. Or pulled, depending on how you look at it.

Well, it only works if the bolts fit between the blades. Jim had made us a 4-bolt puller, and my dad had picked up some spare screws with three blades.

On one trip, my dad guided the boat onto Mama Rhoda Rock in the Bahamas, and we tore up our props. We needed to get them off.

I had a buddy who was a graduate engineer from Columbia, and I wasn’t entirely stupid. We went under the boat and found there was no way to make a four-blade puller pull a three-blade prop. We hired a guy who had a 13-pound sledge, and he took care of it.

Back in Miami, my dad told me to take the puller to Jim and tell him what was wrong. My friend and I took it to him, and he insisted it would work with a three-blade prop. Politely, because I didn’t want to trigger Jim, we assured him there was no way. It was obvious. I said it needed another pair of bolt holes. Because I had said it, Jim had to prove otherwise.

He sweated in the sun, grunting and getting angrier and angrier. He should have just listened. We stood there, captives. He was doing my dad a favor. We couldn’t just tell him what to do.

When he got tired, he gave up. He took the puller with him and said, “I’ll monkey around with it.”

Oh, boy. I will not touch that, but my mother thought it was very funny.

When he returned the puller, it had two more holes in it.

My dad and Norton owned a building full of old people on Section 8. They had a crooked Cuban guy managing it, and they asked me to take over. I was all over it. I moved to Miami. I did all the work to prepare. I started a corporation. Then my dad and Norton did nothing at all. This went on for maybe a year. I could not get them to budge. I decided to get a real estate license.

Jim and his wife Carol, who was never anything but sweet, decided to give it a try. We had a meeting in my dad’s office, with my dad present. I told them everything I knew, hoping to be helpful. Jim sat on the couch making snotty, uninformed remarks. I should have been grateful for an opportunity like this. My dad was doing this great thing for me, and here I was, wasting it.

I think Carol could see I wanted to pummel him. She kept interjecting, speaking in soothing tones, trying to put a nice coat of drywall mud over Jim’s rudeness. She must have a hard life. The web says they’re alive. I thought Jim was older than my dad, but he’s younger. Some people don’t have the genes to age slowly. Look at Trump and Biden.

I could have saved them a lot of trouble. Well, no I could not have. If I had told Jim he and Carol were never going to get the job, there would have been more nasty, baseless, unnecessary comments that would age poorly, and Jim would have dedicated his existence to proving me wrong.

Of course, they wasted their time. The Cuban guy went nowhere, because no one but me tried to dislodge him. I don’t know why my dad didn’t stand up for me. He was not shy at all about getting in people’s faces and cursing them out, and here was this character, sniping at his son at every opportunity.

Jim is the worst DK case I have ever known, and unfortunately, I am one of the people he tried to use as a prop to make himself look smart, and he did it with wild hostility that came from nowhere and did not need to exist.

Anyway, I do not think Chris Langan is quite what he says he is. I believe the Asian guy, because he has proven his brilliance. The guy with the ship business really needs to come clean and not ruin his old age. And Carol has my sympathy. I guess I’ll pray for the Robinsons tonight.

They Should Make a Cargo Drone

Before I start, an amusing remark I heard from the wife. She said she can’t wait to give birth so she can get some sleep.

She really said that.

Also, an update on my friend, whose wife was jailed recently for aggravated stalking, theft, and violating a protective order. Alleged, alleged, alleged. A female judge let her out on $8000 bond yesterday, so $800 out of pocket.

Ridiculous. If you violate a protective order, you break in the victim’s house and steal, you bother his children at school, you steal the ashes of the person who raised him, and you are arrested for stalking, you have violated exactly the type of crimes that warrant pretrial detention. You have shown you have to be physically restrained in order to keep the victim safe. And she’s also ALLEGEDLY a huge flight risk. It took months to find out where she was, and my friend says she was living in Florida while pretending to live in Georgia.

Oh, well. She’ll be incarcerated again soon enough. She has no self-control, so she’ll keep doing things to get the attention of the authorities. I hope they put her away before anyone else gets hurt.

She appears to be the person who called the cops and reported, falsely, that a man resembling her husband was dealing fentanyl from my house. I hope she’ll leave me out of this from now on, because I do not want to end up in a self-defense situation.

People are like bears. Much more dangerous when they have young to protect. You can let a lot of things slide–you can take risks–when you’re the only one in danger. You don’t have as much leeway when your child is threatened.

They let her out on Halloween, a day when servants of Satan celebrate their defeated, infantile, doomed, embarrassing false god. Interesting.

Today I’m thinking about woods maintenance, as I was yesterday. I drilled out the muffler on my Echo CS-590 and added a couple of parts to seal up the air filter. This model has a problem with letting fine particles by, and the general belief is that once they’re in the cylinder, they will cause it to wear.

Is that true? A good threshold question. It sounds like it might be true, but I haven’t seen evidence yet. People argue about it. Wood dust is very soft, so I’m not sure it can pose a threat to rings and cylinders. If it burns while in the cylinder, it turns to carbon, and it’s normal for cylinders to have carbon in them. It sticks to pistons.

It’s not like the saw lets a lot of this stuff in. It’s a tiny amount. If pressed, I would guess that the otherwise-excellent engineers at Shindaiwa, Echo’s parent company, designed their filters better than they needed to be.

Dirt is another matter, because it’s made of stone. I don’t run saws in dusty conditions, however.

Anyway, I stuck the filter kit in the saw, I drilled 6 3/16″ holes in the muffler, and I started trying to tune the saw’s carburetor.

This is an annoying process, because every single expert on Earth starts out his instructions the same way: “Start the saw and let it warm up.”

What if you can’t start the saw?

I can tune a saw which will run, but when the carb is way off, it’s much harder.

My saw was running very well before yesterday, but after I worked on it, I could not keep it running. Then I fiddled with it, and it ran strangely. It took off and revved up on its own. With the carb set differently, it would only rev up to half speed.

Apparently, when a saw changes speed on its own, it’s a sign of an air leak. I decided to remove the air filter changes. I don’t see how an air leak BEFORE the carburetor can matter, but what the heck.

I got it to where it should be tuneable, but then it decided not to start, so I quit. Today may be better.

For a long time, I’ve been looking for a good way to carry saws on my tractor. Back when I had awful debris tines that mounted on the bucket, I could put saws in the bucket. Now that I have a proper fork with no bucket, all I have is a ballast box with a little empty space at the top. If I put a saw in it, the bar will hang out over the edge. Putting two saws in is worse. And there is always the possibility one will fall out.

I can tell you about one product I don’t plan to buy: the Sawhaul chainsaw holder.

It looks like a fine product. You drill holes in your tractor, or you use a U-bolt, to attach the mount. You attach a plastic scabbard to it. You put the saw in, bar down. It’s like a holster.

My big issues are the price and the fact that the scabbard part of the holder is only right for one size bar. The saw’s weight rests on the inside of the tip of the scabbard, to keep the saw body off the mount so it doesn’t get beaten up. If you have a saw that’s too long, it’s going to flop around. If it’s too short, the saw will rest directly on the mount.

Right now I have 16″, 18″, 20″, and 24″ bars.

I don’t think it’s wise to have a heavy saw resting on its tip in a plastic sheath. I would expect it to cut through eventually.

The Sawhaul goes for $180 on Amazon, and it looks like it could be sold profitably for $60. That’s another problem.

These things are typically mounted on the upright portions of front end loaders. Don’t you need that area clear so you can reach the grease zerks? It seems like a flaw.

So let’s forget holster-type mounts. What’s the answer, then?

I was thinking of building a tray for the top of my ballast box. The box is extremely sturdy, and more weight can only improve its performance. But building a tray would be a pain, and it would not be free. Steel is not free, and neither is plywood. Neither are primer, paint, and fasteners. I don’t think I could do it for less than $50. The necessity of spending money and doing hours of work make spending a little more money and avoiding work look good.

My ballast box has a 2″ receiver built into the back. This gave me ideas. I live in an area full of old people, so many vehicles here have cargo carriers on trailer hitch receivers. A cargo carrier is a metal frame around 4 feet long and two feet wide. The structural bits are tubing, and if there is any kind of platform in it, it will usually be made from expanded metal. People here use them to carry mobility carts.

My big issue with virtually every cargo carrier made is that the sides are open. Typically, a cargo carrier will have a thin piece of tubing going around the top, around 4 inches above the bottom. Between the top and bottom, there is space, through which just about anything can fall.

A guy who calls himself Tractor Mike sells a lot of helpful products, and one is the Tractor Caddy. It’s a cargo carrier made from sheet steel, so the sides are mostly closed up. Problem: it’s small. Problem: it doesn’t mount in a receiver; it attaches to a roll-over device, in the way. Big problem: it costs about $350, before shipping. You would have to be nuts to buy this thing.

So what should I do? I’ll tell you, friends. I should buy an aluminum carrier made by Elevate Outdoor. In fact, I did. Amazon is bringing it here for $138, ready to go.

It’s big. It’s set up for a receiver. It holds (allegedly) 500 pounds, or 440 pounds more than I will ever put in it. The sides are solid. It’s aluminum, so it won’t rust. It folds up so my tractor will fit in my shop with the door closed.

The only problem is that the bottom is made of slats, so stuff can fall through. I’ll have to put a sheet of plywood in there, and I’m sure I’ll end up painting it, because that’s how I am. But I already have paint.

If it’s a well-designed product, it will be perfect. I’ll have no trouble putting two saws in it, along with a strap and some tools. Maybe even my helmet and chaps.

There are a lot of really beautiful homemade devices for this purpose. Some guys have outdone the pros by a wide margin. But they spent a lot and did a lot of work. I want to work on the trees, not the tractor. And their solutions lack versatility.

I had an idea for another solution. You cut a piece of goat fencing and lay it across the debris tines to form a floor. You attach it to the tines at the rear. When you need it, flip it down and put stuff on it. When you don’t, flip it up and secure it. In the up position, it keeps things from coming back at you between the tines. Cost: $0. I already have fencing.

The fencing is good because it makes it easy to hold long tools like pole saws.

Maybe I should have gone with fencing. It would only work when the tines were on the tractor, but that’s 90% of the time.

I can always do both. I need fencing to protect me anyway.

I can keep the carrier even if I end up using fencing, because it will fit my car.

Can’t hurt.

Guess I better get out there and cut things.

My Personal Trainer’s Name is Milton

Life here is going extremely well, although I have some concerns about my wife because she holds her belly and sings to it. I am pretty old, I have seen lots of pregnant women, and they have all seemed pretty miserable. My wife isn’t getting the message.

I’m having fun moving hurricane trees. A real whopper flopped in my woods, over the dirt road that goes down the middle of the lot. I would say it’s 80 feet tall, or, more accurately, long. It’s about two feet thick at what used to be waist level. It fell so the crown got stuck in some other trash oaks.

Some of the upper branches hit the ground, and others were caught in the other trees. In a situation like that, it can be impossible to predict what the tree wants to do. Is it firmly stuck at the top end, or is the root ball holding it up? If you cut it, will it do nothing, fall straight down, or fall while rotating? Which end will fall when you cut? Will the tree’s canopy drop, ripping limbs off the other trees? Will the stump end come toward you? Will it go up or down?

Making things worse, this is a V-shaped tree. It has one big trunk and one small one. It fell in the direction of the small trunk, pinning the smaller part of the tree to the ground. The V-shaped base of the tree held the big trunk up so the lowest good place to cut was at waist height. When you cut a nearly-horizontal tree which is three feet off the ground, the part that falls can fall…three feet. With you close at hand.

I have two new chainsaws. I got frustrated with my Echo Timberwolf and the little Jonsered CS2240 I bought in 2017, because I had trouble keeping them running. This year, I bought a Husqvarna 562XP with a 24″ bar, and I just picked up a 50-cc Echo CS-501P with a 16″ bar. The CS-501P usually comes with a longer bar, but I wanted a light, overpowered short saw for bucking. My new saws are commercial saws. The old Echo came with commercial innards for the most part, but it also had some residential-grade stuff, some of which I have replaced.

As you can see, this is a scary tree to cut. If you cut the top end, it could come loose and crush you without warning. If you cut the bottom end, you can’t tell which way it will go. It was surrounded with vines and other trip hazards, making it even more fun.

I will call the big part of the tree “Tree 1” and the small part “Tree 2.” I decided I should try to get most of Tree 2 out from under Tree 1 so Tree 1 would not fall on it and then roll toward me. Using my knowledge of tree behavior, accumulated over 7 years, I cut Tree 2 a couple of yards from the root ball, confident I could keep it from pinching the saw. Which it did, almost immediately.

I had to go back to the house and get the cordless Makita to get it loose. I could not get a wedge into the wood to open it up, so I had to make a second cut close by, while standing nearly under the trunk of Tree 1.

I can’t say enough about the cordless Makita. If you have a lot of trees, you can’t really get by without a gas saw unless you want to buy maybe 8 expensive batteries, but for most jobs, the Makita is fantastic. It has incredible torque, it cuts really fast, it makes no noise, it always starts, and Makita engineered it so it’s very easy to use. You don’t need a scrench to install or adjust chains.

Makita makes top-quality gas saws under the Dolmar name, but they don’t have much of a presence in the US.

If I only had a few chainsaw jobs to do every year, I’d be happy with the Makita and a cordless pole saw.

Well, that’s not true. I’d also want a small gas saw to free the Makita if it got pinched. Which it would.

I got a fair amount of Tree 2 out of there. Tree 1 did not move. I figured the next thing was to cut Tree 1 by the root ball.

I have bucked a lot of fallen trees, and the root balls have pretty much always stayed put. Not so this time.

Guessing that the root ball wasn’t applying any torque to the trunk, I figured the top of the trunk was in compression and the bottom was being pulled. After praying not to die, I cut into the top and made a slot deep enough for a wedge and a chainsaw bar. I pounded a wedge in to keep the cut from closing. Then I bored into the side of the trunk and cut up to the slot I had made. Then I noticed that the wedge was moving deeper into the wood.

The cut was opening, not closing as I had expected. The canopy of the tree was trying to fall.

I ended up going back to the house and leaving the tree alone. I planned to get back on it the next day. The cut was gradually widening, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to poke at it.

When I got back the next day, the trunk was nearly separated from the stump. There was a strap of intact wood under it, holding things together. The stump had rotated upward, and the stump of Tree 2 had inconveniently positioned itself under Tree 1. Tree 1 was resting on it, preventing the trunk of Tree 1 from falling and ripping the strap apart.

I had to get a pole saw and cut the strap. I was not going to be near the tree when it gave up. When the situation resolved, the canopy of the tree fell straight down, so it was no longer hung in other trees. Anyone trying to work under it, thinking it was hung securely, would have been squooshed.

Now I have to start nibbling the tree and moving the bits away from the road. I can keep nibbling until I get close to the stump, and then I’ll get the lowest segment of the trunk off the stump and onto the ground.

I used to burn everything I cut, but I eventually realized it didn’t matter if there was debris in the woods. It goes away in three years, and while it’s there, it doesn’t bother anyone. I plan to put this year’s junk in piles and leave it.

Burning piles of trees is kind of fun, and it makes you feel like you’re doing a good job keeping your land neat, but it’s also a pain. You have to be around to make sure nothing gets out of hand. You have to get permits. You have to put your piles out before a certain time of day, which is not always possible. Sometimes a pile will smolder for several days, and I just count on the condition of the surrounding grass and trees to prevent problems. It’s very hard to start a wildfire in unfavorable conditions. Impossible, really.

I don’t like going to bed knowing something out there is still burning, but it’s either that or stay up all night with the hose and tractor. It’s not unsafe to let things burn, but I can’t help thinking about worst-case scenarios that can’t actually happen.

Since I learned burn permits aren’t needed for piles smaller than 8 feet across, I am making an effort to cut trees in smaller pieces.

I am going to hop up the new CS-501P. I didn’t have a great need to buy it, but my other two small saws have some limitations, and I thought it would be fun to have a better one and increase the power. The Makita is limited by battery life, and the Jonsered is very unpleasant to work on.

I bought a new exhaust deflector. This won’t increase the power much, but it may help heat escape. It’s aluminum. Heat is what kills chainsaws, and their greenie exhaust systems hold it in. Arborists really hate environmentalists. It’s amazing how conservative they are. I can see why, when I think about all the ways environmentalists hinder their work and cost them money.

The saw has a strange removable tube in the muffler, and that’s coming out. This should make a noticeable difference. I think Echo made it removable for this reason. I may also drill some holes in the muffler.

I got myself a decent-quality tachometer. I already had a tach, but I learned the model I got was not considered accurate. Hard to believe, at the high price of $7. When the new saw has gone through a couple of tanks of fuel, and the exhaust stuff is installed, I’ll use the tachometer to check the top speed when the saw is tuned orrectly. When that is done, the saw should be making substantially more power. The dyno guy, referenced below, got something like 15% this way.

I don’t really need to check the top speed. It turns out a tachometer is not really needed to tune a saw. You do it by ear. I didn’t completely understand things when I bought the tachometer. But it should help when checking modifications to see if I’m getting improvement.

I might even open up the cylinder’s ports. I could take this little saw up to 5 horsepower, which would be an increase of about a third. My 60-cc Echo Timberwolf has a bigger engine and only put out 4 horsepower before I changed the carb and timing. My Husqvarna 562XP only produces 4.7, and it pulls a 24″ bar very well.

Does it make sense to soup up a saw when I’m planning to use a 16″ bar? Maybe not. I don’t care.

Actually, it does make sense. Most of the time, I’ll be cutting things under 4″ thick, but it would be convenient to have a light saw that really rips through things a foot across. I would be able to leave the bigger saws in my shop more often.

Adding a couple of pounds to a saw’s weight makes a surprising difference over the course of a job. A little extra weight makes the saw wear you down.

Chainsaw people are nuts. They love modifying their saws. There is a guy on Youtube who built his own chainsaw dynamometer, and he hooked it to a computer. He does modifications and tests the saws before and after. He gets saws to put out 50% or more power than they did from the factory. This stuff is not shade-tree-mechanic ignorance.

The weird thing is that modified pro saws don’t lose reliability or endurance. Reasonable modifications actually make them last longer and make them harder to damage. This is what the professional mechanics say, anyway. They also say homeowner-grade saws are different because they have plastic cases that may not like increased power. A pro saw will always have a metal case.

I will lose my warranty if I modify, but I don’t care about that. Echo is notorious for horrible customer service and weaseling out of warranty obligations, and anyway, I don’t want to leave my saw with a mechanic for 6 weeks. I went a whole summer with a saw in the hands of bad mechanics.

I should be able to fix anything at all that goes wrong. I don’t know if I will ever be able to fix complicated saws with electronics issues, but I can deal with the mechanical things.

I really enjoy cutting wood. I have never been one of those people who look forward to working out, but for a few years, I’ve felt like there was a ball of excess energy inside me. I have gone out and bucked trees just for the sensation of cutting, lifting, and hurling. It’s very odd.

I was cutting yesterday, and I was breathing a little hard. I kept going. I wanted to feel that way.

I started wondering. Was I really experiencing physical strength and energy, or was it all mental and spiritual? What if I was putting my body in danger because it wasn’t as strong as I felt?

Here’s something weird: I don’t get sore after doing this kind of work. I get dehydrated and tired eventually, but the day after I work, I feel great. I am not working out these days, and I’m old. I don’t take medicine to keep me alive. I eat a lot of ice cream. I’m not preparing myself in order to avoid soreness. I don’t know what’s going on.

I hope it lasts.

This type of work makes me lose weight. When I do a lot of wood removal, I can’t keep weight on. May that happen this time as it has in the past. The Ben & Jerry’s weight has to go.