Possibly Awesome...

...or disastrously disgusting.

Well that's about as irritating...

...as a pair of 60 grit chamois...

Apparently you can't vote for multiple parties in the WI primary even if you don't just get lazy and simply check one.  The computer rejected my mix of Republicans and Libertarians, despite only voting one person per office.

Party line voting is retarded.

Coffee...

Delicious delicious coffee... I don't think I would be able to make it through this month without it.  The Basement Brewhouse on campus serves up various flavors of Stone Creek Coffee, right now I'm sipping the excellent Hazelnut blend.

There's some darn fine roasters in this state.

MOH Vid'ya Game

If'n you hadn't heard, apparently the powers that be are rather butt-hurt that you can play as a Taliban in the newest MOH title and pulled it from AAFES's shelves (er, won't be putting it on them... it's not actually out yet.) For you non-.mil folks AAFES is the Army/Air Force Exchange System, better known as the PX.  There's also talk around the intertubes about boycotting the game over it too, which is just silly.

Apparently there's thought that our service members can't handle the option of playing as the bad guy and killing a digital representation of the good guys.  Nevermind that anytime you do force on force training somebody needs to be OpFor... Nevermind that in MW2's multi-player settings half the time you're playing the bad guys... The people in charge simply don't think that the unwashed enlisted masses aren't grown up enough to realize it's just a video game.


In reality, guys are still going to buy it.  All AAFES has accomplished is driving sales for Amazon.  I know I'm still planning to buy it eventually.  I just hope the single player narrative is longer than MW2's.  I suck at the online stuff.

Old Story...

...but always a nice one.  Uncle mentions the FBI stats show crime is down, despite the huge upswing in gun sales in 2009.  Some more numbers over at ENDO.

Of course the anti's will cry out it's unrelated, despite the mentioned upswing in sales, the death of the DC ban, and the increase in the OC movement, all of which should have caused us to be swimming in a blood ocean (heh).  It should be real interesting to see what happens to Chicago's numbers when the 2010 numbers come out...

Absolutely Gorgeous.

I completely agree with Steve, this rifle is simply stunning.  I just wish there was a better sense of scale in those pictures...

Heh.

Usually "Pundit Kitchen" seems to be pretty one sided, but every now and then they sneak one through.

Vote

Wisconsin Primaries are tomorrow.

Sure is purdy...

$4k 1911 from Kimber.   Could use better grips though.

September

I didn't get much of anything posted this weekend, I was pretty busy with Army stuff and just didn't have time.  Yesterday kind of snuck up on me, otherwise I would have had something written up in advance.  I'll have to make a note to remind myself next year.

Anyways, as I was catching up with the blogosphere's weekend developments, I read one of the posts over at The Warrior Class from yesterday and thought it was too good not to link to, so go on over there and read it (don't be afraid to wander either, they've got some good stuff.)

It's a start...

...but I can think of some better methods.  I do not know the bank's feelings towards OC, but I'm sure it would have made the bad guy think twice.

It's about time.

That's really all I have to say about this at the moment.  To my knowledge this is the first time since Vietnam that the MOH will be awarded to a living recipient.

More on yesterday's Pirate Raid

Kit Up! has the inside info on how things went down.  Sounds as close to perfect as you could hope fore.

Complacency Kills

I was going to mention this last night, but I'm lacking in motivation as of late, so Tam beat me to it.


In the handful of places I've seen mention of this story, it never fails that one of the first comments is in regards to how dumb of an idea it is.

I completely agree.

I don't care how much you publicize the "virtual speed-bumps," there's still a percentage of people who won't have heard about it, and could conceivably swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid hitting little Suzie.

There's another percentage that will no doubt be driving that same route every day, and that's where the post's title comes from.  It's a long standing saying in the military.  Don't get used to things, or you'll wind up dead; don't let your guard down; etc...  In this case there's a chance that one of those regular commuters will become so accustom to "running over a little girl" on the way to work that if a kid did chase a ball onto the road in the area that driver's not going to think twice until the telltale "thump."

The forced perspective aspect is kind of cool, but the anthropomorphizing of the image is equal parts morbid, tasteless, and dangerous.  Why not just a giant 3-D "SLOW DOWN"?

I'm all for it.

US Marines free German ship from Pirates.  Good to see them getting back to their roots.

Meals Rejected by Everyone

In case you haven't seen it, the New York Times has a slightly interactive article about various field rations from the various forces in Afghanistan.  It's always interesting to see what's out there.

Nastolgic

Ruger's going old school.  Make it black, throw a flash hider on it, call it "tactical," and jack up the price! (Although there is a modern touch, it's got an optics rail...) The Mini-30 has gotten the same treatment.

Hand Sheaths

I've been running a pair of Mechanix Fastfit gloves through their paces the last couple months, and I've got to say, I'm more than pleased with these puppies.

We've seen pictures of guys in the big Sandbox and Rock Garden (Iraq/Afghanistan) wearing various Mechanix gloves for a while now(and despite earlier discussions, that's not why I got them), but this was the first pair I've used.  I've stuck to Hatch and other "Mil/LEO" brand gloves for most of my time, but I've heard good things about the Mechanix, and recently they've started offering more "subdued" colors, so I was more welcoming to the change.  Plus the $15ish (usually less) price doesn't hurt (looks like Amazon's got the black ones on sale too, might pick up a pair or two to stash away.)

The reason we wear gloves is to keep your hands from getting beat to snot doing stuff.  In the shooting world the most prevalent issue is heat.  Guns get hot.  Bullets create tons of friction zipping down those rifled barrels, gunpowder burns at pretty high temperatures, and black guns are fantastic at converting that solar energy into good old thermal.  Needless to say, gloves are up there with eye and ear pro if you're doing serious shooting.

Target shooters have used gloves for years, but they tend to be pretty thick, especially on the support hand.  Ideally the thickness and padding keeps your pulse from bouncing the rifle around.  However they are thick and pretty rigid.  High Power and Bullseye shooters aren't worried about fast magazine changes or switching from right to left to get around obstacles and whatnot.  Dynamic shooters need to have gloves that are flexible enough not to imped dexterity, yet still enough protection that you don't hear bacon frying whenever you handle your weapon.

The Mechanix Fastfit Gloves fill this need pretty well, and don't look half bad.  Yes, they're what the "cool guys" tend to use, but there's a reason for that.

As I said, the colors are pretty well subdued, the yellow isn't a bright yellow and those patches can  be easily removed if it bothers you.  Otherwise they're black and dark grey.

A really nice feature, at least to me, is that there's no velcro strap on the wrist, just a strip of elastic.  I find velcro closures on gloves tend to snag on pretty much everything and add unnecessary bulk to the wrist, and suck massively if you wear a watch.

The palms are Clarino (a synthetic leather) that's pretty common in gloves these days (all my biking gloves use it.)  It's pretty tough, and much more flexible than most leathers I've used.  They're also super-thin, so you can feel your weapon's controls and conduct low-light chamber checks to your heart's content.

There's also a re-enforced hole in the pull tab on the wrist, I keep meaning to tie a couple loops of 550 chord through there so I can clip them to my vest in the field.  This is an often overlooked feature on gloves, and it's much easier to just clip them to your vest than cram them in one of your pockets.

I tend to buy gloves on the smaller side, especially for shooting or rappelling.  I would rather get little red lines on my hand from the seams than get the fingertips stuck in a knot 40' off the ground or be able to reload a gun without chambering said fingertip.  That being said, the Fastfit's seams are very well made and very comfortable.  The gloves are also incredibly flexible-

And as far as the thinness, I can even use the touchscreen on my phone while wearing them-

Slidey!

The trade-off is, of course, that you wouldn't want to grab a hold barrel and hold on.  But they offer enough protection to keep you from sizzling before you realize said barrel is hot, and that's really all you need.  Plus if you take a digger on some wet gravel at your next carbine class, some scuffed up gloves beat the hell out of pulling granite chunks out of your hand for the next week.

Long story short, the Mechanix Fastfits are well worth it.  Go pick up a pair if you're looking for some decent range gloves.

I'm still around...

Just been busy as previously noted.  I'm hoping to write up a quick review of some gloves I've been using as soon as I get time and the weather cooperates for picture taking.  Plus I want to dive into my cheap vest and how to look good on a budget.

Speaking of which, there's some talks bouncing around the ol' sphere about what exactly looking cool might entail.  I still like the Coyote/FDE family for solids, and I'm warming to Multicam for the ultimate in coolness, although with that finally being adopted by the Army I may start leaning away. (I don't like wearing "Army" stuff when I'm not doing "Army Stuff".)  However the amount of stuff out there in MC and the limited scope of issue by the Big Army makes it a bit more bearable for the time being. (I'm still hoping they'll just ditch UCP and go Mulitcam across the board soonish though.)

Gun works

Ran about 300 rounds of Federal Bulk through the M&P15-22.  Only a handful of feed failures, but they were all due to me not loading the mags right.  (I tend to do it on purpose... failure drills!)  Looks like it's all good to go again.

Busy busy busy...

Between work and my last semester of college starting, things may be a bit spotty around here for a little bit.

That's all for now...

Makes too much sense!

For what it's worth, my tactical pants in the class were by Wrangler, and they come with two single 30-rd mag pouches, one right over each butt cheek. I can about guarantee that, should the balloon ever go up for real, those will be the pants in which I'll be fighting, so I reckoned I might as well practice fighting in them... 

More Zombies...

Osprey's doing a book.  Sweet.

It's available for pre-order at Amazon too:

Waiting for the food

Place mat doodle.
Blaming the earlier post for my scribblings... and the blogger app doesn't listen to the rotating command.

ETA: fixed orientation.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.5.8

Walking Dead

Bah. Almost forgot this one (thanks to Uncle for reminding me.)

Looks like AMC's doing a TV version of my very favorite zombie-based comic book series "Walking Dead."



The books are fantastic, and if you haven't read them yet, go buy them. (I need to catch up myself, I forget if I got through vol. 5 or 6...)(yes, I linked the crap out of it, I'm really saying you should buy it.)

The books follow a group of survivors doing the survival thing, and revolves around the group dynamics for the meat of the story.  Love affairs, offing bad group members, dealing with really young kids in the apocalypse, other not-so-friendly groups of survivors, etc...  And since it's not limited to a 90 minute run-time (well, the books anyway...) the writer really digs into the characters.  It's possibly the most realistic zombie book out there from a psychological standpoint.

If you like the zombie genre (and I'm sure 90+% off my reader demographic does...) you will love this series, even if you're not a huge comic nerd.

As for the show, like all things based on books I like, I hope it doesn't suck, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.  (The teaser looks pretty promising though.)

M&P15-22 MkII

They rebuilt him, they had the technology...

As mentioned, I got my gun back the other day (in case you missed, it blew up.)  I've been pretty busy (work and school started again today, so full credit load plus 20+ hours of work a week!)  Today I got the chance to pull it apart and see what they did to it.

After putting all my accessories back on-

Externally; not really much to see, but if you look close you can see a little nub that keeps the Extractor Spring Retainer from rotating.  Supposedly (at least from what a couple hours of scrounging the interwebs has found me,) this helps reduce the chances of an OOB det with sensitive ammo.  There's also an Extractor again.

As soon as you field strip it, you notice that the main recoil spring is the new style aptly named "blue" spring:

I can't feel any noticeable difference in the strength of the spring, but I guess they're supposedly a pound or two heavier to make sure the bolt gets home to prevent an OOB det.

There's also a new "blue" hammer spring:

Same thing, supposedly lighter to ease in cocking and reduce the likely hood of the rifle doubling.  It also reduces the trigger pull weight and smooths it out a little, which is nothing to complain about!

The sneaky one was the mag though.  I thought it was the same one I sent in with the gun, since my markings were still on the baseplate.  However I realized the one I had put on the body was gone and there was the telltale "25 ROUND" under the "22 LR" mark.

Seems they swapped out at least the body, and possibly the spring (follower and baseplate are from my old one though.)  I gather the newer style may have some improvements to smooth feeding, but they may just have the markings to denote they're not 10 rounders.

If anybody has more concrete evidence of why the changes are what they are, that would be fantastic.

Hopefully I'll get out to the range tomorrow or Saturday and see if it doesn't blow up or go full auto or something on me.

RIPR

Defense Review posted an article about the Reset RIPR (Rifle Integrated Power Rail), and SSD and The Firearm Blog both briefly touched on the subject.  So I though I'd toss up my first thoughts on the concept.

Right off the bat I'll just say it.  I'm not a fan.  At least not the current configuration. (Although I'm not really a huge fan of the concept in general either...)

The first problem in my mind, and the issue with the concept, is that you're putting all of your electronic eggs in one basket.  You loose your battery power, and you don't just loose your red-dot.  You loose your red-dot, flashlights, IR laser, iPod, and whatever else you have hooked on there.  I feel you're much better off simply keeping a common battery type for all your devices (that's one of the reasons I run an EoTech XPS on my carbine, 123A batteries just like my white light.)  It's nice to see DR agrees with that sentiment.

My other big issue is simply one with the current iteration of the system.  It's adding bulk to the weapon as a trade off for one single battery, and it's a pretty big battery.  The XPS is still the same size, just with an adapter plug jammed in the battery compartment (for all I know, can't see the other side to tell.)  Add to that the proprietary rail that clamps on to your rail... I doubt you're saving any weight by cutting the standard batteries from your electronics.

The way I have Sigtyr set up right now I have 6 spare 123A batteries on board (in the Magpul ACS,) enough to swap out all the batteries in my electronics twice.  I'm going to be out of ammo well before I'm out of power, and I don't have something the size and weight of a loaded 20 round mag leaching onto the side of my upper. I just have little sadle compartments on my stock that make for a kick-ass cheek weld.

Wow...

Not the kind of poster you'd expect to find in Cali.

Hooray!

The prodigal rifle has returned.  The very persistent FedEx guy pounded on the door long enough to get me up (been working weird shifts...) and had a nice long brown box for me.  The paperwork only says "updated to current specs," but most importantly there's an extractor once again and everything looks good to go.  That was a pretty quick turn around too, FedEx says they received it last Wednesday.

Hopefully I'll be able to get out to the range Thursday or Friday after classes, or failing that Saturday.  Hopefully it doesn't blow up again.

I can haz shorty?

So more and more I feel the desire for an AR in the 10.5-11.5 inch category, and I think the idea of an AR pistol is stupid.  The question is does the $200 and hassle seem worth it for the mere privilege of having a stubby gun? And how much of a hassle is it in Wisconsin?  Something to distract myself during classes this semester I suppose.