Author: Kim du Toit

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

Well, I guess if you’re going to play Big Boy Games, you need to be prepared to die like a man:

A 16-year-old male was shot and killed Monday while allegedly trying to steal a car around 2:20 a.m. from a San Antonio, Texas, apartment complex.

Police indicated the owner of the car heard glass breaking outside his apartment and went to investigate. Once outside, he found the 16-year-old allegedly sitting his his car, trying to steal it.

The car owner believed the 16-year-old was armed so he fired at the suspect, striking him once and killing him. [some editing necessary – K.]

Gotta say that San Antonio seems to be becoming a dangerous place to work, that is if your “work” involves undocumented property redistribution.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Prairie Assault Rifle

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Longtime Readers know well that I am a huge, unabashed fan of the venerable lever-action rifle, often called the “prairie assault rifle” because of its history in the settlement of the West, its ease of shooting and handling, and because of its capacious (for the time) magazine capacity.  Here’s a Marlin 336 in .30-30:

…which as we all know, is a gun I think should be given to all freshly-naturalized citizens immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, courtesy of the U.S. Government.

However, someone in some Marketing Department somewhere decided that the Marlin needed a facelift, and came up with this concept:

…adding to its capacity, so to speak, and lightening the thing by carving out holes in its (plastic!) stock to make up for all the weight added by the extra cartridges (I guess).

Well you know, I don’t have too much of a problem with the above modifications, other than the fact that they make for a truly fugly weapon, and are completely unnecessary in every sense of the word.  (I do make an exception for the red-dot sight device, because I can’t see the front sight anymore and I’m sure there are a bunch of Olde Pharttes in precisely my predicament — said Olde Pharttes being, I guess, the principal target market for such “improvements”.)

The problem is that as much as they want to make the lever-action rifle more resemble a modern semi-automatic rifle of the AR-15 genre, there’s no point because the AR-15 is a semi-automatic with a detachable magazine while the lever action is, well, not.

So then, assuming that you do want a handy semi-automatic rifle but you want to keep the spirit of the lever gun (light, handy, large-capacity magazine etc.), then allow me to suggest an alternative to the Frankenlever thing above:

Yes, it’s the equally-venerable M1 Carbine, made in the several millions, killed probably far more Nazis/Commies than the lever rifle killed Indians, and is the spiritual descendant of the lever rifle.  And if you want, you can add a red-dot sight to the M1 as well, using an Ultimak mount:

See?  I’ll bet that given the choice, the early settlers would have been quite happy with them — and you won’t have to mess around with loading round after round into a lever rifle either (and both Oliver Winchester and John Moses Browning can stop that dreadful grave-spinning, as a bonus).

Never Not Ever No Way

Drive Time

Commenting on this post about my car issues, Longtime Reader Fred Z. asks:

“Have you considered a small motorbike for short trips and simple errands? Cheap to buy, cheap on gas, cheap to maintain.”

And easy to fall from, be struck by another car with, and a host of other dangers.  As the meme goes:

I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, was last on one (my uncle’s) at age 10 and never again since.  Ain’t gonna happen.

I’d drive an EV before a bike, but only if it looks like this:

Bright, high-visibility yellow.  No doors so I can jump out easily if the fershlugginer thing catches fire.

Kinda like riding a bike, except with four wheels.  I am aware of the irony, thank you.

Does that answer the question?

Fugly Houses

Architecture

I am often amused by the excitement (mostly negative) that arises over in Britishland when there’s any talk of housing development — i.e. building new houses where hitherto there have been none.  Mostly, of course, the fury arises from among the NIMBYs who, having purchased their houses in or near village A, don’t want anyone else to live nearby because of “character” and the loss thereof.

It makes no sense because there’s a distinct lack of affordable housing Over There, not the least because very little new housing gets built — and when it does, it is of surpassing ugliness.  Here’s an example of one such development recently built near Cambridge:

Yes, dear Readers, those are single-family homes, built according to the principles of Gropius and Le Corbusier, only with slanted roofs.  Anywhere else, they’d be called “apartments” because that’s what they resemble, and I leave it to your imagination to decide how people would feel about living in such surroundings.  Small wonder the existing population gets upset, if what’s coming looks like that.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that.  As our family often says, “architecture doesn’t have to suck”, and here’s an example of same, in Doc Russia’s neighborhood a couple of towns over from Plano.

I should point out that the interiors of the above houses are almost identical:  the floorplans and footprints are as close to uniform as can be imagined, and the square footage thereof likewise.  (It may not look that way, but that’s the genius of the developer’s architect.)

Basically, the developer said to the initial homeowners:  “We have about a dozen different looks for the houses here.  Pick one, but just note that no identical outside designs can be next door to or across the road from each other, and in fact we intend to keep the designs separate as much as possible so that the development looks like a group of custom homes, even if they aren’t.  Oh, and they’re all going to cost about the same, within a couple-five thousand dollars of each other depending on what cladding you choose for the front of the house.”  It is a remarkably attractive development, and the prices have increased massively over time precisely because people don’t want to live in a suburb looking like that Cambridge cell-block.

And I should point out that those Brit houses and the American ones are very close in price, even allowing for the currency difference.

So the Brits could have built something according to the same ethos, but they didn’t because… well, they didn’t care, they had no imagination,there were cost savings, they figured that the buyers would just want to get whatever they could regardless of appearance, I dunno.

Anyway, the good news is that after the Cambridge development was completed, the council housing inspectors found that the entire suburb had a systemic flaw in the foundation design, with this happy result a few months later:

…and yes, I laughed and laughed and laughed myself sick.  However, I will not offer odds that the rebuilt houses will look any different from their predecessors.

By the way, I have to point out in all fairness that we in Murka have similar problems;  Doc Russia’s little enclave notwithstanding, I saw on my way home from the drugstore this horrible fucking  thing that sprang up in Plano over a period of a couple months:

Those architectural pustules are townhouses, and in the normal course of events they’d lie empty for decades;  but sadly, there is such great demand for new housing hereabouts (Californians, uh-huh, uh-huh) that I think the houses were almost all sold before completion.  Yes, they look like nothing more than white-painted Monopoly houses all crammed together, and to say that they look nothing like any other townhouse development in Plano is an understatement.  These are a block or two away from my place:

I think I’ll drop an anonymous note to our housing inspectors, saying that those white blocky things may be too dangerous for habitation because of foundation problems;  but sadly, our inspection process here must be different from Over There because the foundations are inspected before any walls can be built on them.

Pity, that.

Sour Taste

Drive Time, Surveillance Society, Two-Minute Hate

Was chatting to my insurance guy the other day, and the result of said discussion was that as far as my VW Tiguan is concerned, I’m screwed if I ever get into a wreck because the book value of the 2013 model with 130,000+ miles is in the single-figure thousands.

This would be barely enough for a deposit on a “new” (i.e. second-hand) replacement, assuming I could even find one in acceptable condition — mine is near-perfect because I look after my cars, and it has the “leatherette” seats which are like hen’s teeth in this model.  (I’m a huge fan of the Tiggy because I’ve owned two, consecutively, and neither ever gave me any trouble, for a total of 210,000 miles.)

And to continue on the math of the thing, a $5,000 deposit would result in a $450+ monthly car payment, which I can’t afford #CrappyCashFlow.

So I’m stuck with what I’ve got, and the only thing I’ve got going for me is that a month’s total driving tops out at about 200 miles.  Had I not done Uber for a couple years, the mileage would now stand at about 40,000 miles, but I had no option in the matter (did I already mention #CrappyCashFlow?).

Anyway, I’ll just have to be careful out there, as a wise TV cop once said.

But there is an advantage to not having a modern — i.e. 2015+ — model, in that the electronics of the Tiguan are minuscule:  no keyless entry, no mapping software or any of that jive.  In fact, other than electric windows and -rearview mirrors, it’s about as electronics-free as one could imagine:  no seat “memory”, no “touchless trunk-closer”, none of any of those apparently-must-have “features” which are now common in cars nowadays.  Hell, my Tiggy doesn’t even have an Event Data Recorder (EDR) chip installed (that came after the 2014 model year).

This non-modernism is a real advantage when it comes to dealing with bastardy of this nature:

In a world where privacy is becoming increasingly elusive, drivers are facing an invisible foe that could be costing them money. A New York Times report details how automakers are sharing information on driving habits with insurance companies which can have a harmful impact on people’s wallets.

Insurance companies have “offered incentives to people who install dongles in their cars or download smartphone apps that monitor their driving, including how much they drive, how fast they take corners, how hard they hit the brakes and whether they speed.”

Car companies have established relationships with insurance companies, so that if drivers want to sign up for what’s called usage-based insurance — where rates are set based on monitoring of their driving habits — it’s easy to collect that data wirelessly from their cars.

But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.

Here’s the thing:  I am one of the world’s most careful drivers;  in fifty-odd years of driving, I’ve had two wrecks of any consequence (and none at all in the past forty years) and two — count ’em, two — speeding tickets (both for doing less than 50 in a 40mph zone).  That’s it.

So if anyone would qualify for a lower insurance premium, assuming that I’d agree to let my insurance company snoop on my driving, it would be me.

But I’ll see them all burn in hell before I agree to this bullshit.  Fuck these assholes, fuck their Big Brother snooping, and fuck any car company who goes along with this foulness.  I’ll stick with my old ‘un, thankee:

No wonder ol’ Fred’s smiling.  He doesn’t have to put up with all this bullshit.

Au Revoir, Paddy

Entertainment, Morons & Idiots

I’ve spoken before of my distaste for “holidays” which simply serve as a catalyst for “social drinking”, not the least because like New Year’s Eve, they put a whole bunch of amateur drinkers out on the streets and behind the wheel of a car.

Most egregious of these is St. Patrick’s Day:  a time when, as the marketing goes, everyone turns Irish and drinks Guinness, Bushmills and Tullamore Dew.

Except me.  This would be like commemorating “St. Boromir Day” when I wear a Cossack hat and drink chilled neat vodka till I fall over.  What a farce.

Still, let me not be a killjoy.  There are always the costumes:

Makes you proud to be “Irish”, dunnit?