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Back To Butter

Advice, Gummint, Health, Lies and Untruths

So now butter and lard are good for you again, and vegetable oils (except olive) are bad:

The World Health Organization has faced fierce backlash after telling people to replace butter and lard with ‘healthier’ oils in the New Year.
A leading cardiologist today said he was ‘shocked and disturbed’ by the advice, which the UN agency listed as a tip to prolong people’s lives.
Butter has been demonised for decades over its saturated fat content – but an array of evidence is beginning to prove it can be healthy.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose.

This announcement could have had some impact on my life, except that I never stopped using butter and I’ve always looked suspiciously at all cooking oils anyway.

Never mind:  next week some other cardiologist will warn us that butter causes (or, more likely, “may” cause) aggravated syphilis or something.

In the meantime, any report from a large government- or international agency (CDC, WHO, etc.) should be treated with the utmost skepticism if not outright rejection.  In fact, if Agency A warns that X is bad for you, a rule of thumb would be to increase the intake of X.

I don’t see that the above advice can be any worse than the bullshit we’ve been fed for the past fifty-odd years.

From My Cabin To Yours…

Entertainment, Friends and Family

…a warm and wonderful New Year.

And may all the new guns you buy in 2019 shoot straight and work properly.

You are going to buy some new guns in 2019, aren’t you?  It’s one way to make your New Year a happy one.

And speaking of happy:

Cheers, y’all.  That’s for “Dry January”… and after that, it’s this for “Veganuary”:

Might as well start the year off the way I plan to do for the rest of it:  pissing off the people who want me to stop enjoying myself.

Buh-Bye

Drive Time

Apparently, these cars are going to disappear (or at least cease production) in 2019, and I can’t say I’m going to miss any of them.  The only one I’d accept as a gift would be the VW Touareg (unkindly nicknamed “Toe-rag” by the Top Gear morons):

…and that only because the Touareg is essentially a larger version of the Tiguan.

…and as any fule kno, I’m a longtime VW devotee (nine VWs in my life so far, and counting).

My current Tiguan is my second, and unless something unforeseen happens before then, I’ll just replace it with a similar model when the time comes.

When you have a winning formula, why mess with it?

Beauties And Beasts – 5

Beauty, Drive Time

Once again, I hear the whines:  “Oh Kim, those purty lil’ sports cars are fine an’ all… but they’re plain useless if’n you want to haul a load or sump’n.  So give us more Murkin eye candy.”

I serve to please:

…and that’s it for this series, as 2018 draws to a close.  Next Sunday there’ll be something totally different.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: When Speed Doesn’t Matter

Gratuitous Gun Pics

There is something (okay, several things) about shooting an old-fashioned single-action .22 revolver that I like.  Take Ruger’s excellent Single-Six (and its modern -Nine and -Ten variants), for example:

The most common complaint about this kind of revolver is that it’s a royal pain in the ass to load and reload, in that you can only load one round at a time through the loading gate, and then, when the cylinder has been emptied, you have to push the spent casings one at a time back out of the gate with the ejector rod.

That’s not counting the PITA of only being able to fire the thing by re-cocking the piece manually after every squeeze of the trigger, of course.

To me, this slowness of operation is a feature, not a bug.  I like the slow, deliberate aspect of shooting as much as — or maybe even more than — the rush of sending as much lead downrange as quickly as possible.

It also satisfies the ingrained “make every bullet count” aspect of my shooting philosophy.

I can understand why shooting larger calibers like .357 Mag, .30 Carbine or .44 Mag ammo slowly through a bigger Ruger single action is defensible;  those big boys are expensive compared to .22 LR, after all.

But let’s be honest here, and compare shooting to fishing for a moment.  Is not one of the best parts of fishing the quiet relaxation of it, and would not the experience be a little spoiled if you hooked a fish every 30 seconds for the entire day?

I think that shooting single-action revolvers has a similar attraction.

Maybe it’s just part of getting older, but I’m starting to prefer an activity taken more slowly over something done in a frantic rush.  And I no longer own a Single-Six, mine having disappeared in the Great Gun Sell-Off Of 2015.

Which leads me to my final point.  I’m prepared to trade my new Ruger Mk IV 22/45 semi-auto (plus four magazines) for a Ruger Single-Six (and preferably a “convertible” with interchangeable .22 LR / .22 WMR cylinders).  I’m agnostic about blue- or stainless steel finishes and indifferent as to barrel length, just as long as the gun shoots accurately and the trigger is decent.

So if any of my Texas Readers is interested in getting a Mk IV and has a Single-Six gathering dust in the safe, let me know via email and let’s get together.

Update:  A Kind & Generous Reader has come forward.  We’ll be doing the swap sometime in the near future.