Blogger Bane has passed away. His family has some financial problems; you might say a prayer for them. Keep an eye out for an upcoming fundraising effort.

Do me a favor and don’t post any negative stuff here.

Decor at its Best

Remember me writing about all the crap I got done on Saturday? Feast your eyes on THIS:

The picture is bad. I can’t even guess how you’re supposed to get a good photo of an object shaped like that.

Men, you need one of these on your wall. The instant it goes up, you’ll have the pleasant, illusory sensation that testosterone is coursing through your veins.

There is Nothing I and my Mighty Tools Cannot Do

I am the most amazing human being for miles around. I just pulled the last concrete slug out of the yard.

The truck loosened it up, so I went out there, took it by the chain, and rocked and lifted until up it came. The damned thing probably weighs about 125 pounds–it’s bigger than a huge turkey, and it’s nice and wet–so once the weight was subtracted from the tension, I was probably putting about three ounces of upward pull on it. But it worked.

I tried to drag it across the yard, but it’s so heavy, it digs into the grass. I decided to leave it, as a monument. No, but I am in need of a meal, and I don’t feel like putting the slug in the wheelbarrow right now.

The rebar and epoxy method works great. If the slug had not been in a bed with landscape timbers around it, I could have pulled it clear with the truck and kept going until it was in the trash pile.

What do I do with a huge slug with an iron handle? I’ll let the trash people worry about it.

I thank the reader who suggested soaking the ground around it. Although I’m sure that made it heavier.

Genius Never Made a Sound Like This

The Lord of the Tools has bad news.

Today I re-applied my scheme for getting the last concrete slug out of the yard. I glued a rebar loop to it, and I attached the loop to my dad’s old Explorer with a chain. And I applied tension. The slug broke loose to where I won’t have a problem getting it out. I may have to find a clever way to apply leverage, but it’s doable.

Problem: when I was done, the Explorer wouldn’t go into reverse! When I shifted, it made a hideous whiny sound.

I didn’t overtax the transmission. I wasn’t jerking or spinning my tires. I just pulled carefully until the slug moved. The truck should have been able to take it.

I think the problem is in the mechanism which switches the truck from 4WD to 2WD. I put it in 4WD Low to pull the slug, and then I shifted back to 2WD, and it went nuts. I can still use reverse in 4WD Low, but not in 2WD.

I’ve read that other people have had this problem because the dashboard switch was out of adjustment.

I am seriously bummed out. The whole point of this exercise was to save money, time, and aggravation. What if it costs a pile to fix the Explorer?

Damn it.

If only I had a johnson bar to pry that slug out. Hmm…I know where I can buy one. Yes…yes…clearly, I need a new tool. Right away. That will solve my problems.

Saga of a Failed Jedi Mind Trick

I’ll tell you something crazy. There are blogs I don’t read, just because their names turn me off. I can’t explain it. It’s no reflection on the blogs. It’s just one of my quirks.

One example: The Jawa Report. When I see that name, a little voice from down in my brainstem says, “STAR WARS NERDS: AVOID.” Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I picture an adult male who owns an Ewok suit.

But today I went to The Jawa Report anyway, because Sondra linked to it. There’s a pretty wild piece of Citizen Journalism there. If the piece is correct, some goof from a famous PR firm–Winner & Associates–has been posting illegal videos to harm Sarah Palin, and he wasn’t even smart enough to use a fake email address. And Kos and DU helped.

This ranks right up there with the Dan Rather phony memo thing, but it’s more complex. Get a fresh mug of coffee and turn off your phone’s ringer before you read it.

What is it with Sarah Palin? Why do people hate her so much? I shudder to say this, but PDS makes BDS seem insignificant. It’s like I keep saying: Obama is running against Palin, not McCain. She scares the hell out of the opposition.

It’s just an ELECTION, people. She’s not Darth Palin, to refer to Star Wars yet again. She’s not orbiting the earth in a Death Snow Machine, preparing to shoot abortion providers from space with her moose rifle. Get a grip, liberals. If Joe Biden disturbed me as much as Sarah Palin disturbs you, I’d be shopping for a suicide belt. I admit, I’ve entertained the thought of suicide while listening to him speak, but that’s different.

She’s not even running for President. Let’s be real, here. If McCain wins, she’ll spend the next eight years flying to funerals and hiding from terrorists in various undisclosed locations. You act like she was going to drive around the country, holding liberals down and forcing them to eat meat and carry their children to term. Why are you so edgy? Is there a marijuana shortage I haven’t heard about?

I’m feeling dehumanized, here. As a conservative, I mean. How about the rest of you? Anyone feel demonized? Look how they hate us. This is how the left treats people about ten years before they take over and the firing squads assemble. What’s next? Kristallnacht II, sponsored by Apple and Birkenstock? Thank God I live in Florida and I still have time to buy a rural compound. I better get started, sewing yellow crosses on all my T-shirts.

I congratulate…the Jawa person (?)…on this wonderful blog post. This is the kind of thing that nearly justifies the existence of the Blogosphere.

Sick Palin Humor Highlights National Disease

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live. It’s on too late. I’m not a big TV-watcher. And bad episodes have conditioned me to avoid the show. Some people have managed to live through the really bad SNL years without quitting. I haven’t been a regular watcher since the Eddie Murphy days. Probably not even then, now that I think about it.

I used to wonder how SNL could have bad seasons. They have a whole lot of money to buy writers and actors, and it’s hard to think of a job a TV writer would find more alluring. That’s me, guessing. For all I know, it’s a miserable job. I don’t know what the atmosphere on the set or among the writers is like; maybe good writers jump ship as soon as they can. Still, to an outsider, it’s difficult to understand how the SNL crew ever managed to do their job badly. But they pulled it off, many, many times.

At my advanced age, with my burgeoning Christian sentiments, I can’t imagine sitting up past eleven p.m. to watch anything, let alone a disappointing, often tedious show that reinforces all of my worst traits. So I am not a fan. Sometimes they do something really funny, and I catch it on Youtube, but that’s about it.

I wasn’t watching this weekend, when they did a sketch about Sarah Palin. I can’t find it on Youtube, either. I guess their attorneys are pulling material so fast, it doesn’t survive the weekend. I can’t give an informed critique of the sketch. But I feel like I’m on firm ground when I say they had no business joking about her husband committing incest. The Palins have kids. Those kids have friends. I’m sure many of those friends watch SNL. This is not something they needed inside their young minds. Imagine your kids’ friends, joking about your family and incest. Not wholesome. Then imagine actors joking about it on national television.

SNL is like flavored malt liquor, or clove cigarettes. It’s supposed to be for adults, but the nature of the product makes it appealing to children and to adults barely over the age of majority. It’s a little sad, if you think about it. An ensemble of not-so-young people, dedicating their lives to producing material which many grown people find too sophomoric and crude to enjoy. There is a certain dignity in doing kids’ programming, like Captain Kangaroo or Misterogers Neighborhood, because everyone knows you’re acting, and that when the cameras are off, you’re a regular grown-up. But when you’re in your thirties and forties and you’re doing SNL humor for high school and college kids, it’s a different story. You stoop to the level of the audience, in a way that infects your life. You may end up clinging to the adolescent mindset, at least in the public eye, long after you should have moved on. It’s one more example of the perversity of modern culture, in which adults take their moral cues from the benighted young. I think that explains the astoundingly broad and clumsy toilet jokes in the Austin Powers movies. Shakespeare gave us a subtle pun about a petard. Mike Myers gave us an overflowing bowl, on camera.

I’m not sure who is insulted more, by that kind of humor. Is it the audience, because it suggests they’re too stupid to understand anything smarter, or is it the writer, because it demonstrates that he believes he lacks the talent to write intelligent material?

I read about the incest sketch. It appears that the intent was to mock provincial East Coast journalists, who assume the worst about the backward folks in Jesusland. Still, wouldn’t it have been better to avoid the subject? Even if they were trying to defend Sarah Palin, in their own way, they probably ended up adding to the layer of slime which had already accumulated on her and her family, thanks to leftist slanders.

We ought to declare the Animal House/Porky’s era dead, once and for all. We should make an effort, as a nation, to get past adolescence. You can be funny without cruelty or obscenity. You can do it without driving a wedge between the generations. Writers shouldn’t be looking for ways to inject shock into their work. They should be looking for ways to remove it. I think about this a lot, with regard to my own work. When I see people like Sandra Bernhard and the SNL bunch blowing it, I think about things I’ve written, and I cringe. I’ve been trying to improve, but when you’ve become jaded by repeated exposure to obscenity and cruelty, it takes time to wear off. It affects your ability to perceive your own crassness. There are things I wrote last year that I would not publish today.

I let myself be duped by a corrupt popular culture that convinced me that in order to do well, I had to pull out the stops. That was stupid. Artists thrive on restrictions. They make you work harder, and you end up producing things that make your audience work harder, and they are rewarded for it.

The other night, I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for a while. There are two romances in the film. One is between two career martial artists, and the other is between a governor’s daughter and a thief. The first involves only glances, touches, and loaded remarks. The other involves a lot of groping and simulated sex. And which is more powerful? The first. The thwarted lovers who can only express their feelings obliquely burn up the screen. That’s what happens when an artist makes his audience do some of the work. An artist who deals in the obvious and the sensational is a sort of slut. He hits the audience with everything he has, right away, because he doubts he has the ability to hold their interest if he restrains himself.

God bless Sarah Palin and her family. They should not have to endure this, simply because a comedy writer in Manhattan hasn’t gotten it together yet.

My Eyes Deceive Me

I’m having a nice Sabbath. Took a few hours out to go to Man Camp and watch the Dolphins…WIN? Very confusing. Is that supposed to happen? Must be a great day for them. They probably felt like they would never win again.

I couldn’t resist taking a few minutes to see if my plan to remove the last concrete slug from the yard had worked. I hooked up the chain and took off. Problem: the epoxy had not set up. I must have mixed it badly. The slug moved about three inches before the rebar popped out. One leg popped out right away, but the second one held out longer, and the crook in the rebar kept the chain attached.

The rebar was asymmetrical after it came out; one leg was longer than the other. I ground a few inches off the long end, hit the other end with a MAPP torch to get the bulk of the epoxy residue off, cleaned up the holes with the hammer drill, vacuumed out the debris, mixed more epoxy, put it in the holes, and re-inserted the rebar.

Should be ready to yank tomorrow. This method works. You just have to do it right. I also took a mattock and dug out some dirt on the chain side of the slug. That will help it come out.

I shouldn’t have taken time to fool with this on the Sabbath. Temptation overcame me. But I’m back.

One fun thing about Man Camp is that Pat, who lives next door to Val, always has a new toy to look at. Two weeks ago, it was a camper and a pickup. This week, it was a scooter. Someone sold him a reasonably nice one for $200. I took it for a spin. When the speedometer hit 65, I got a little nervous. Then I realized it was 65 kilometers per hour.

I’m not a green freak, but I think scooters are a good idea for people who live close to the places where they run errands.

Scooters are strange. You don’t do anything with your feet, so all your motorcycle instincts get screwed up. I told Pat to get himself to MSF class (Motorcycle Safety Foundation). You may think you don’t need training to ride a scooter safely, but that’s not true. It’s a small motorcycle. The same problems apply, and you can’t learn how to avoid them from experience. Some of the safety stuff is not intuitive. Someone has to teach you.

I told Pat he needed a helmet and gloves. Val thought I was nuts. Riding a bike without a helmet is pretty safe, because bikes are much more maneuverable, and you don’t ride in traffic, and you don’t go as fast. But you need one on a scooter. As for gloves, what do you do when you fall off a motorcycle? You put your hands down. At anything over five miles per hour, that means kiss your palms goodbye.

I think a scooter would be a great thing to have, for grocery missions and so on. But I don’t have Pat’s knack for finding cheap used stuff. Oh well.

Drinking Disgusting Canned Shakes

More good news about Mish Weiss, the young IDF soldier who is fighting leukemia in Jerusalem. Even though she’s a vegan, Leah Friedman has convinced her to drink Ensure, which is a liquid meal substitute that helps people gain weight. I don’t know what the objection to Ensure is; maybe it has animal-derived B12 in it. When Mish gets better, I think we should all chip in and ship her and her family some prime steaks for a barbecue. I know we can convert her! Hmm…might be tough to locate prime kosher beef.

Unless things have changed since I lived there, the beef situation in Israel is not rosy. When I left Israel and flew to Athens, my top priority was locating beef. Athens was full of New York-style diners, and food was very cheap. I sat myself down at the first place I could find and had a cheeseburger platter, with a second cheeseburger on the side. I probably paid a dollar-fifty (Reagan dollars) for that meal.

Mish is having problems with nausea. I wonder if they have fresh ginger over there. Japanese longliners chew it instead of taking seasickness pills.

Says Leah, on Mish’s blog: “Thank you so very much for the prayers, they work!”

They most certainly do. Thanks, everybody. As Aaron is fond of saying, God is near to all who call on Him. The rest of the verse: “to all who call upon him in truth.”

Things continue to go well here. I still feel as though an invisible but oppressive layer of clouds had lifted. I attribute sensations of oppression to supernatural opposition, and I’m not the only one. I hope the change lasts, and that I can help my family find what I’ve found.

My psalm-memorizing campaign goes well, although to be honest, I’ve only been re-memorizing psalms I committed to memory long ago. I have 1, 23, and 63 under control. I may get ambitious and shoot for 37 next.

Things are Getting DONE

It’s amazing, what I got done today. I will bore you with a list.

Hung my grandfather’s gun rack on the wall. Lots of drilling and patching. Glued the felt on the gun supports back in place.

Round-Upped every plant on the property that even looked at me funny.

Put a latch on the patio TV cabinet doors.

Mulched.

Removed a worthless oak tree.

Prepared a concrete slug for its date with the tow chain. I decided to let it cure overnight instead of trusting the epoxy packaging. I don’t want to have to glue that rebar in there a second time.

It may not sound like a lot, but it was more work than you would imagine. I also had to clean up a lot, put tools away, and so on. And I made a heavy-duty Home Depot run to prepare for all this.

Tools used:

1. Impact Driver
2. Hammer drill
3. Vise
4. Vise Grips
5. Level
6. Screwdriver
7. Shop-Vac
8. Tow chain
9. Proxxon
10. Shovel
12. Angle grinder
13. Claw hammer
14. Punch

I love having tools. Every time a problem came up, I had the right item to fix it. If you don’t have an impact driver and a hammer drill, you should qualify for handicapped parking, because you are helpless.

I want go fondle my shiny new tow chain.

I’m thrilled with the stuff I got done. These were nagging jobs I thought I’d never get around to. Sometimes I think one sign that you have problems you need to take up with God is that you can’t finish things you need to get done. You make plans, but somehow, things don’t work out. Today I got some things off my back, which had been bothering me for eons.

I feel as if some kind of blockage in my life has broken loose.

I think I’m also going to get a new cage for Marv. His cage is very nice, but he has been getting territorial about it, and I think the answer is to make the birds switch cages every day. The problem with that is that Marv’s cage is smaller than Maynard’s, so Maynard gets the shaft. His wingspan is bigger. Marv’s cage isn’t really adequate for him.

I can’t even guess what I’ll do with Marv’s cage. Ebay or Craig’s List, I suppose. I wish I knew a bird that needed a better cage. Actually, I do, but his owner would never go for it.

Some people think height is more important than square footage in a bird cage. I disagree completely. Narrow cages get dirty faster; there is less room for the poop. And wide cages let birds move around more, and you can put more toys in them.

I’m going to put together some kind of hinged perch for the patio, so these little goofs will have a proper place to hang out, instead of sitting on the back of a chair.

It was a beautiful day, and tomorrow is Sunday, so I get to relax, attend to my religious obligations, and pay a visit to Man Camp.

Not bad.

Also Wildlife

If this works, tool people will be required to make me their king for life.

I drilled holes in my concrete slug:

Here is my rebar, with my epoxy.

Here is the rebar epoxied into the holes.

Here is the fox, who came out while I was walking to the slug and just stood there.

I did NOT try to pet it. Let the neighbors deal with fox diseases. I couldn’t get a better photo. I had trouble making the camera focus. It’s humid, and the second you go outside with anything made of glass, condensation forms on it. It made it difficult to see whether the fox was in focus. And the silly thing was standing there the second I walked outside.

The epoxy label says it cures in 5 minutes, but the packaging says something about 24 hours for full strength. I think I’ll give it a yank after an hour and a half.

No Slug is Safe

I am apparently the dumbest person who ever lived. But before you start feeling superior, let me point out that all of you are pretty dumb, too. Because I asked your advice about something, and your advice was just as dumb as what I eventually did.

I had several concrete slugs in the yard. I had to get rid of them. I ended up renting a demo hammer and breaking them up so I could pull them out by hand. Boy, was that dumb. I later realized there was a better way. You drill two holes in the slug, attach a loop of rebar with epoxy, attach a chain to the loop, and pull with a hoist or a truck or something. Actually, a real man would twist a loop in the rebar with his vice and 3-foot pipe wrench, so he could attach it to the slug with one hole. I happen to know where I can borrow a 3-foot pipe wrench.

I still have one slug. Today I bought a piece of rebar and some epoxy, plus something every man needs: a tow chain. I was going to make up my own, but Home Depot had premade chains with hooks, and I didn’t want to wait three hours for someone to cut a piece of chain for me.

I just used the chain to rip out a live oak tree I didn’t like. Here, squirrels are sacred, because the local citizenry has no understanding of the evil that abides in the heart of a squirrel. Among their other misdeeds and atrocities (like cutting every single fruit off my mango tree), the squirrels plant invasive weeds and trees everywhere. Eventually there will be nothing here but live oaks, scrub oaks, jasmine vines, and happy, leering squirrels. There was a live oak in a hedge next to the house, thanks to my rodent friends. It got so big, the yard guys thought it was a shrub, and they trimmed it for a couple of years.

I wrapped my new chain around it, attached the chain to my father’s Explorer, and yanked. First one direction, then another. Now the tree resides in the trash heap. And I declare victory. BAH HA HA. Kneel before Zod.

Here’s a new reason to hate leaf blowers: they blow mulch away. I know, because I just spent half an hour replacing it. If you don’t mulch your trees, the Salvadorans go right up to them with their motorized weed whackers, and they girdle them. That may be why one of my papayas just fell over dead.

The papayas sucked anyway.

I decided to mulch my potted peppers to keep the weeds down. I hope mulch doesn’t kill pepper plants.

I have decided I need a second chain hoist. I have one in the garage, but it’s mounted on the overhead trusses, and I don’t feel like taking it down when I need it. And it’s only a half-ton job. I want a slightly bigger one I can attach to heavy objects when I need to pull things for various reasons.

Time to get up. I have steaks to freeze, guns to clean, a hasp to install…the list is pretty nasty.

I may go out and spit on that tree, just for the joy of it.

I am Not a Portion for Foxes

The craziest thing happened today. Last week I found myself thinking about the way wildlife was disappearing around here. I hadn’t seen a coon or a fox in a long time. They used to be all over the place. As I was watering the peppers this morning, I noticed a reddish cat walking away from me on the patio, about ten feet away. Something about it didn’t look right; it was very skinny and had a funny gait. Then I realized it was a fox. I guess it had been lying in the shade. I must have disturbed it. It wasn’t scared at all. It walked across the patio, turned and stared at me for a while, and then went under the deck. I guess it’s still there.

It wasn’t much to look at. Its tail was about as big around as a thick broom handle.

I don’t know why it wasn’t afraid. Usually it’s hard to get close to a fox. Our suburban neighbors may be handfeeding it out of ignorance. Or it may have rabies.

I have good news about Mish Weiss; I asked people to pray for her last night. She has leukemia, and yesterday she started to despair. Her friend Leah Friedman emailed me this morning. Mish has a more positive attitude this morning. They have found a bone marrow donor for her. That’s very good. Prayer works; God listens. The bad: she’s a vegan, and she refuses to eat or drink animal-based products that will help her get strong enough for a transplant.

Leah says she’s trying to get her to drink Ensure, a high-calorie drink for people who need a lot of nutrition without much effort. I guess it has animal products in it; Mish won’t touch it. If I had a cold, I’d gladly eat Bambi to get rid of it.

I remember begging my mother to drink Ensure when she was dying from lung cancer. My mother’s death was hastened by starvation. When she received radiation therapy, they burned her esophagus, and she was never able to eat properly after that. And the cancer made food disgusting to her; it does that to some people. I don’t know if Mish understands how lucky she is that she could make herself drink that stuff if she wanted to. There are many cancer patients out there who wish they could eat, but can’t.

I talked to Aaron about her situation last night. He said that Jewish law would require him to eat pork ribs, if he had to do it to save his life. Require.

Please keep Mish in your prayers. Leah, too. She still has lingering effects from her respiratory arrest.

I’m having an unusually good day. Might as well write about it.

Like most Christians, I have persistent sins I have to fight. Last night, I felt like I was having a big setback. And I prayed for God to turn it into a triumph. A few minutes later, as I prayed about other things, I realized my attitude had completely changed. I had forgotten my frustration and discouragement. I felt full of faith, and I was taking advantage of it by praying for other people. My prayer for a triumph had been answered almost instantly. Sometimes you have to be really alert, or else you won’t notice when God gives you exactly what you asked for.

I had a peculiar but uplifting thought. God gives different people different things to share with others. One example is wealth. You can use it to feed people and educate them and buy medical care and so on. You can finance ministries. You can use your money to help poor Jews fly to Israel. Last night I realized faith is like wealth. God distributes it unevenly. Presumably, people who have a lot of it are obligated to use it to help people who have less. Faith, then, is a kind of wealth. Because I know that, I have a better understanding of Acts 3:6.

I’m generally pretty pleased with the amount of faith I have. But until last night, I never thought of it as a gift I was supposed to share with other people.

Ever since I became aware of that, I have felt different. I feel as though the sun had risen inside me. Very odd, but I’ll take it. It’s a little bit like mania, which I am familiar with, because of the nature of my personality. But somehow it seems cleaner and healthier and more sustainable. I hope it lasts.

I feel energized. I feel like I can get things done. I’m usually pretty upbeat in real life, regardless of how I come across here, but today I have a powerful sensation of looking forward to whatever comes. I want to get up, get out there, and DO things.

Many times, I’ve read about Christians who claim to live in joy. I’ve always hoped I could reach that state. I feel good most of the time, and my faith has made things better, but I have never really reached a state which seemed to match the happiness so many Christians proclaim. Maybe I’m starting to see a piece of it. If it’s real, it would be a wonderful thing to help others achieve. One of the big drawbacks of Christianity is that potential adherents see it as a bunch of sacrifices with no reward until you die. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. A good life is supposed to be a better life.

I have stuff to do. Thanks for listening.

Ask Others to Pray

I have very sad news, via Jeffro. Leah Friedman’s friend Mish Weiss is not doing well, and she claims she wants to be allowed to die. She has acute myeloid leukemia, she has gone from 125 pounds to 90, and she is very depressed.

I you don’t remember Leah, she’s the girl in Jerusalem who went into respiratory arrest a while back. She had a heart condition, and somehow that is the cause of what happened. I asked my readers to pray for her, and so did other bloggers, and she has recovered well, although she still has some paralysis and some lingering mental symptoms.

Mish is in the IDF. She likes to shoot. She’s a vegan, which is probably unfortunate at this moment, when her body needs so much help. But she refuses to sacrifice her principles.

The situation is a little confusing. I don’t know much about this disease. Wikipedia paints a discouraging picture, but a post on Mish’s blog says the treatment she took works about 60% of the time, so cures do occur.

I have gone over her blog. If I understand the situation correctly, chemo didn’t work, so they are treating her with arsenic. That causes a lot of problems; it’s a poison, after all. From what I’ve read, it’s not clear that the treatment isn’t working. It may be that it’s so unpleasant, she no longer cares whether it works, and she simply wants to quit.

It’s not clear who wrote the last post on her blog, but here is how it ends: “All of you who have faithfully followed please pray for strength we certainly need it. And for us to make the right decisions.”

Here is what I ask. Pray that the treatment will work. Pray that she will find the strength to bear it. Pray that her loved ones will find ways to help. And pray that her relationship with her creator is right, at this pivotal time. And if you have a blog, pass the word.

And go to Mish’s blog and leave an encouraging comment! Let her know people are thinking of her, far away in America.

It’s late on Friday; it will be hard to get observant Jews in on this. Christians, pitch in!

Playing Hooky

Today I did something I had absolutely no business doing. I went to the gun range for a SECOND time, in one week.

I could not help myself. I’ve been so lax about shooting lately, I could not fill the need with a single Wednesday outing.

I blame Jim from Smoke on the Water. His house in Galveston nearly got washed away, and he’s living in someone’s spare room, and he felt he had to call…to give me tips on rifle shooting.

He told me about a weird technique. You grasp the pistol grip of the gun lightly, and you put your left fist under the butt of the gun to manage elevation. You don’t touch the foregrip. It rests on your bipod or whatever. I’ve seen people doing this, but I always figured they were insane.

I loaded up the .17 HMR and the K31, and off I went.

I’m sorry to say, the technique doesn’t work too well with the tiny Savage stock. It’s just a matter of geometry. But it still gave me an excuse to shoot.

Before I could start shooting, the guy to my left apologized to me; he had just fired two rounds into my target. I told him to make sure he made me look good. He and his buddy were shooting two very odd-looking rifles. They had composite target stocks and muzzle brakes. They were bolt actions. I had no idea what they were. Every time either of them fired, the shock wave hit me with the force of Michael Moore’s breath. And they were shooting exactly the way Jim told me to shoot.

It worked well for them. The guy who hit my target put 30 .308 rounds into an area smaller than a lemon. He said shooting that gun at 100 yards was boring.

It turned out to be a Remington 700, with some crap added. I may have to get me a Savage .270 with an Accutrigger and see what I can do.

The Savage shot well today. For rifle shooting, I use 5″ Shoot-N-C targets. Each comes with 4 black pasters about 1 1/4″ in diameter. I put the target in the middle of the paper, with the pasters around it. The scope’s zero was a little off for some reason, so I got it sighted in and started shooting.

I find that a typical 5-shot group is smaller than a golf ball. I can’t reliably keep five shots on a paster; it seems impossible to sight the scope in at 100 yards so it reliably hits the point of aim. I settled for shooting slightly low and to the left. I used the pasters to warm up, and then I shot a couple of targets. I did better than last time. The groups were only a little smaller, but there were fewer flyers. The bulk of the shots concentrated in a smaller area. Here’s an example:

Any animal bigger than a tennis ball and small enough to be killed by a .17-caliber round will have a very limited life expectancy within 100 yards of this gun. I consistently shoot a little worse than 2 MOA, and I am still not a great rifle shot.

Here’s a typical paster:

I got out the K31 and my weird Swiss ammunition. I noticed a few things. First of all, it’s much more steady than the Savage. It probably weighs twice as much, and that reduces the movement. That tells me I should look for a heavier stock for the Savage. Or maybe there is some way to weight the existing stock. Second thing: the trigger is crap. It breaks cleanly, but the pull is very heavy compared to the 2-pound factory setting of the Accutrigger. Third, the person who designed the gun’s butt was a sadist. It has two points on it. After a couple of dozen rounds, you get tired of having them jabbed into your shoulder. In all likelihood, it was designed for underfed Europeans with 36-inch chests. Europeans used to be spindly and feeble compared to Americans. My grandfather was about 6’3″ tall, and when my family made a trip to Europe in 1972, he was almost always easy to find in a crowd, because people there were so short. That isn’t true any more. Another thing: I lost my luggage on that trip, and my mother had to buy me pants and a shirt in Luxembourg. The shirtsleeves were so narrow they fit like spandex.

I shot thirty rounds with the K31, and I felt like it just was not as accurate as the Savage. It was easier to aim, and I believe I pulled the trigger well. But the shots covered an area the size of a grapefruit. I don’t think all of that error can be attributed to me. And it’s not acceptable. I want to learn to shoot, and I can’t do it with guns that hide my errors within their own. I know people swear by K31s, but it’s a used rifle, so there is no guarantee that every barrel is good.

I learned something interesting about the K31. I mounted the scope with something called an Accu-mount. It’s machined out of aluminum, and you attach it to the receiver. It has an Allen screw on top, which the literature calls a “recoil stop.” I have no idea what that means. Anyway, I must have overtightened this screw, because a bulge formed under it, projecting down from the mount and against the receiver. This raised the front end of the mount slightly, which raised the scope. I believe this explains why I have had problems getting the rifle sighted in. Today I ground the bump off, and I was able to get the crosshairs more or less over to the point of impact.

I may as well get a new stock for the Savage. I don’t like creepy laminate stocks, but it looks like that’s what’s available. I guess I’ll get a thumbhole model that isn’t so odd you can’t use it for hunting. I need the extra weight, and I need something I can feel in my hands.

The .308 guy said my bipod was too tall, and he was right. My rest is too low for the Savage, and the bipod I bought is a little too high. Guess I better head back to Bass.

I’m glad I got the Savage. In a month or two, I may actually be able to shoot well.

That’s Why she Expects Them to Rape on Command

Yesterday, I asked a fellow blogger if she could think of any more rotten things the left could do to Sarah Palin. I was being sarcastic. My point was that leftists had been so creative and so cruel, it was hard to think of anything new for them to do.

Wow, was I wrong.

They accused her of pretending her daughter’s baby was hers. They said she should have stayed home having babies, instead of governing a state. They compared her to the political-machine stooge (close kin to a community organizer) who had Jesus scourged and delivered Him up for crucifixion. Then they hacked into her email account, and leftist blogs put the emails on display, claiming they were “legitimate news.”

Now we learn that Sanda Bernhard is publicly joking about Governor Palin being gang-raped by Bernhard’s “big black brothers.” And people are paying to hear this crap. Not many; it looks like she’s appearing in one of those clubs that used to be a Pack-n-Ship or a Mrs. Field’s, but still.

What do you say about a “joke” like this? It makes me think of all the over-the-top jokes I’ve made, which makes me want to crawl into a hole. I hope I am not as culpable as Ms. Bernhard.

What is the point of making a joke like this? What merit is there in the joke, that justifies putting that horrible image in our minds, and in the minds of Governor Palin’s kids? What will we joke about next? Raping children? Auschwitz?

What exactly did Sarah Palin do, to deserve the treatment she has received from the left? She accepted an invitation to run for public office. That’s her crime. She didn’t shoot up a day care center. She didn’t bomb the World Trade Center. She didn’t–let me pull an example out of a hat–bomb the Pentagon, publicly confess it, and state that she wished she had done more. She didn’t steal documents from the National Archives. She didn’t commit perjury and get disbarred. She didn’t con the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bogus land deal in Arkansas. She didn’t encourage Los Angeles residents to riot, shouting “No justice, no peace!” She didn’t hit a security officer on her way into the Capitol. She wasn’t involved in the first and only real “Troopergate.” She didn’t hide $90,000 in bribe money in her freezer. She didn’t steal furniture from the White House, or vandalize it before a new administration moved in. She just answered the call, when her party and her country needed her.

It’s a wonder anyone is willing to run for office as a Republican. Look at the treatment our candidates and politicians get. If the kooks don’t get you, unethical prosecutors will. And the press will turn a blind eye, and sometimes, they’ll aid in the persecution.

What an education her kids are getting. Liberals present themselves as warm and loving people who care about all the trees and bunnies, and who protect the downtrodden from mean old Republicans, who want to return to the feudal system. But there is nothing warm and loving about the way liberals are treating Sarah Palin. It’s no exaggeration to say they display more hatred for her than they do for Osama bin Laden.

Governor Palin’s treatment is an ominous reminder of the way the hard left wishes to treat those who disagree with it. It reminds us that killing fields and gulags can happen here, too. If Bill Ayers were in charge, we would have had those things forty years ago. And it looks like Sandra Bernhard would approve.

What ever happened to perspective? When did Americans decide that the need to win an election justified this kind of vile behavior?

Another question: what does Sandra Bernhard think of black men? It seems pretty obvious. She thinks they gang-rape people for trivial reasons. I’m trying to think of a more depraved example of racism, but I’m drawing a blank. This is a person who feels solidarity with blacks? She cares about them and respects them and empathizes with them, but she thinks she can count on them to rape a visiting governor. Black people should rejoice, having a friend who thinks so highly of them. I wonder what the Obamas thought of her remarks.

I already hoped Sarah Palin would win, because I support her politically. But now I hope she wins because her enemies are so vicious. I don’t want to see them rewarded.

I wonder if we can make it to Monday without a new story about someone sliming or threatening or mistreating Sarah Palin. I hope so, but I wouldn’t bet my lunch money on it.