- Robb has a rather unique request for his 40th birthday: Do something nice for someone else and let him know about it. Challenge accepted!
- Lyle says what I’ve been saying about my Mosin for a long time: It doesn’t matter how much you paid for a rifle when it comes to what you want to add to it to make it do what you want. That’s why I put $200 worth of sites and trigger on an $89 rifle. Yeah, it’s a lot of money to sink into an antique rifle, but I shoot it better with it than I do without it, so I see it as money well spent.
- Stormdrane keeps coming up with some wonderful projects. I need to try my hand at a few of them.
- Julie takes another new shooter to the range, and fun ensues. She may be one of the best recruiters to the hobby in Australia. I just want to know where she got that target.
- Roberta X. gives a quick rundown of the universe of her Hidden Frontier. She’s right, a well laid out setting is at least as important as good dialogue and character development, at least to me.
- Defense Tech lists out some very cool new inventions that the Army is fielding.
Blogs Roundup
Posted by daddybear71 on October 5, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/05/blogs-roundup-18/
30 Days of Obama – Day 3
I’ve got two daughters, nine years old and six years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. — 2008
My Take – Mr. President, were your daughters mistakes when you and your wife had them? I assume by your statement that both of them were totally planned, or were you all ‘punished with a baby’? Were you yourself celebrated as a miracle by your mother and father, or were you a ‘punishment’ for their ‘mistake’?
An unplanned pregnancy is a consequence, not a punishment. No-one does it to you but you, assuming that the sex was consensual. Yes, a young girl who gets pregnant is going to have a hard life if she brings the baby to term and decides to raise it herself. But the child is not a punishment.
As the father of both boys and girls, I too am trying to bring them up with values and morals. One of those values will be respect for human life and knowledge that no child is unwelcome in this world. Maybe there is a rational reason for a young woman to terminate her pregnancy. I’m not going to debate that. What I will argue until my dying breath is that once a child is born, no matter what, that child should be loved and not seen as a burden or a ‘punishment’. If you don’t want your daughters ‘punished’ if they make a mistake, then I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to adopt, love, and nurture what you consider a ‘punishment’.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 5, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/05/30-days-of-obama-day-3/
News Roundup
- From the “Aw Crap” Department – Turkey’s parliament has voted to authorize military action against Syria if and when that countries civil war sloshes across the border again. Turkey is continuing to shell Syrian border areas today after Syria killed five people by shelling a Turkish village. Want to know how World War III might start in the same way that World War I did? How about a mutual defense pact that gets invoked when one of the parties gets drawn into the internal conflict of a third country? While we’re worrying about the antics of white trash on TV, the next major war may well be brewing.
- From the “Okey Dokey” Department – Former Vice-President Al Gore opined on his TV network today that President Obama didn’t do well in the debate last night because he wasn’t used to the thin air of Denver. He seems to think that since Governor Romney did his debate prep in Denver, then he was better prepared for the rigor of debating in the rarefied atmosphere of the Mile High City. My thoughts: First, Al Gore has a TV network? Seriously? Did someone need a tax shelter or something? Second, thank the Lord for the voters of Florida, who made sure that bloated sack of slaughterhouse waste didn’t become president. Friends and neighbors, we really dodged a bullet there. Last, if President Obama, a relatively young man in good physical condition, can’t handle a flight into Denver and then think clearly, do we really want his thumb on the nuclear button? He wasn’t being asked to run a marathon, he was asked to stand still and think and speak clearly. I guess when you’re watching the second coming of Jimmy Carter go down a well-worn primrose path to political oblivion, it’s easy to make excuses for why he’s skipping.
- From the “Only You Can Prevent Jihad” Department – The head of the FSB, the Russian follow-on agency to the KGB, is blaming a rash of forest fires in Europe on al Qaeda. Apparently now that their Yemeni/Saudi sugar daddy is on a new assignment as the favorite catamite in Beelzebub’s harem, they are mounting smaller operations to try to get the world’s attention. I’d suggest we burn down their countries in a show of reciprocal force, but to be honest, there probably isn’t much worth putting to the torch in the asscrack they seem to crawl out of. I look forward to the first time one of these firebugs shuffles off this mortal coil a tad early because his firebomb went off a tad early.
- From the “Free Range Luggage” Department – Two alligators were found recently in the parking lot of a grocery store in New York. No information on their origin has been given. My guess is that they were someone’s pet, since large reptiles don’t usually find their way to New York, unless you count Madonna. No word yet on whether the wayward gators actually made it to their Florida shelter, or if they are being used to re-surface the roof on Vinnie “The Shiv” Saltucci’s 1973 Lincoln.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 5, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/05/news-roundup-157/
Today’s Earworm
Posted by daddybear71 on October 4, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/04/todays-earworm-236/
Color Me Surprised
By all accounts, Mitt Romney took Barack Obama to the woodshed last night. Hey, anything that puts the staff at MSNBC on a suicide watch must have been good.
All indications are that Mr. Romney ‘won’ last night’s debate by a wide margin. You can put me in the “surprised” category on that one. President Obama is a talented orator, and he performed very well during the debates in 2008. I expected that the best Romney could accomplish would be to not lose badly. I’ve seen nothing in him that indicates that he’s a good debater, but I guess the preparation and practice really paid off. The football fan in me wonders if he didn’t watch tapes of the 2008, 1980, and 1984 debates to get an idea of how to handle his opponent.
Personally, I didn’t watch the debate. Sorry guys, but I’m not going to do that for blog fodder. I’ve already made up my mind that I’m not voting for Obama, and what Romney says in a carefully choreographed ‘debate’ with someone who’s already lost my vote isn’t going to convince me to vote for him.
I put debate in quotes because I don’t see this as a true debate. When you hold negotiations on what will be asked, it’s not a debate, it’s a joint press conference between two men who don’t care for each other. The two major parties stopped using a neutral third party like the League of Women Voters to run the debates while I was in high school, and for the most part, candidates without a (D) or an (R) aren’t welcome. This is especially true since Ross Perot stole the show in 1992. I’m not convinced that Gary Johnson is the best man for the job, but it would have been nice if he and the candidates from one or two of the other alternate parties could have participated in at least one debate. I guess when you plan the soire, you get to pick and choose who gets invited. Heaven forbid that someone who will actually make the candidates articulate and defend their positions on issues shows up and pisses in the punchbowl.
So anyway, congratulations to Mitt Romney on the victory. Coming up, we have the VP candidates debating in Danville, Kentucky, followed by a couple more presidential debates, where the guy in the blue suit and red tie will disagree with the other guy in the blue suit and the red tie. I’m off to make popcorn.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 4, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/04/color-me-surprised/
Thought for the Day
When you are inside your home and not paying strict attention to what goes on outside your window, a large load of old shingles falling off your roof looks and sounds a lot like a member of a roofing crew falling to his doom.
In other news, I now know that I can get out of my side door from the living room and into the front yard in less than three seconds if I’m properly motivated.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 4, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/04/thought-for-the-day-170/
Every Four Year Old’s Favorite Game Show
Hello America, and welcome to the favorite game show of four-year-old boys everywhere: WILL IT FLUSH? The show where a certain young boy tests common household items to see if they will make their way down a standard 1940’s vintage toilet.
Today’s contestant: A rubber ball with a plastic covering that has the earth printed on it. She is a beautiful blue and green hue, compresses when gripped in a hand, and is approximately five centimeters in diameter.
OK, let’s join the action already in progress. Boo has placed the ball in the commode and is pulling down on the handle now. The tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife. I haven’t been this excited about anything like this since he attempted to flush a 6 inch articulated toy soldier. We all remember that incident, don’t we folks? The toy made it almost all the way down the pipe before its hand got caught on the bottom of the bowl, causing a rather spectacular water flow across the bathroom floor.
The bowl is filling now, and as you can see, the ball is bobbing around at the surface and is beginning to swirl around with the water. OK, the water has reached its peak level and is starting to recede. Yes! He did it! He flushed a rubber ball down the toilet! The crowd is on its feet as our young hero runs off to tell his mother!
Remember, folks, WILL IT FLUSH? is brought to you by the Kentucky Bourbon Distillers Board, who urge all fathers to have a stiff drink before they investigate why there is a waterfall in the bathroom. Remember, plunge responsibly!
Tune in tomorrow when he will see if his father’s toothbrush will flush!
<hr>
OK, enough of that fooferah. Boo did indeed flush his rubber earth ball down the toilet a couple of weeks ago. When he told Irish Woman about it, he wasn’t exactly clear what he had done with it, and she thought he said he had thrown it away.
That is, she believed that until this morning, when the sink, commode, and bathtub in our onlyest bathroom all backed up at the same time. Bottles of drain cleaner, a drain snake, and seeming hours of plunging were no avail. I came home at lunchtime expecting to be able to work from home while I watched the roofers, but instead had to head to the basement with a pipe wrench.
I expected to find the usual gunky stuff you find in a clogged drain, and you can bet I did. But this particular mess had a surprise center: A rubber earth ball.
Now, did my talented young man get his ball stuck in the trap under the toilet? Not with the force of 1940’s waste disposal equipment pushing it around, he didn’t. No, this little blue marble found its way down the drain pipe, out the foundation of the house, and about six feet out into the yard on its way to the septic tank. It got stuck on a transition point between two pipes, and provided just enough obstruction for all of the other detritus to stick to.
On a plus side, my foreign language skills got a workout, because I was cussing in three languages as I tore into the problem. I fabricated a tool to get at it and break up the rest of the clog out of a length of lumber and some drywall screws, and got quite funky as I went elbow deep down the sewer pipe trying to fish the darn thing out. Eventually I was successful, and the biohazard problem in our basement is all cleaned up too.
I now know I love that little boy with all my heart. Because if I didn’t, I’d be on the national news tonight.
To quote Irish Woman, we knew the earth was going down the crapper; we just always figured that was a figure of speech. I swear, that boy makes me glad I’m done having kids.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 4, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/04/every-four-year-olds-favorite-game-show/
30 Days of Obama – Day 2
I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director. — 2007
My Take – When you are convinced that you are the smartest person in the room, you are probably wrong. When you insist that your talents outweigh those of the people you work with, you’re usually the least talented person in the group. Obama’s biggest goofs have happened when he goes off the script of his speeches, or tries to come up with his own policies, or tries to make political deals with people who spent more time in the Senate than they did in a madrassa. One final thought – Pride goes before the fall.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 4, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/04/30-days-of-obama-day-2/
Quote of the Day
So let me get this straight. This is a long sentence.
We are going to be gifted with a health care plan that we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don’t, which reportedly covers 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman doesn’t understand it, passed by Congress, that didn’t read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke.
So what the blank could possibly go wrong?
— Dr. Barbara Beller, former Benedictine nun, Major in the Army Reserves, physician, educator, lawyer, small business owner, and candidate for the 18th District of the Illinois State Senate, during a speech in support of Mitt Romney.
Heck, I’d vote for her just on that one sentence alone. That’s quite a resume. I dub her “Chicago Renaissance Woman”.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 3, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/03/quote-of-the-day-90/
30 Days of Obama – Day 1
You got these $10,000-a-plate dinners and Golden Circles Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they’re locked out of the process. They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast and they know that those who can are going to get the kind of access they can’t imagine — 1996
My Take – What a difference 16 years makes. When our consulate in Benghazi was burning and the blood of our ambassador was not yet dry on the street he was dragged down, Mr. Obama was off to Las Vegas to attend a fundraiser put on by rich entertainers. I’m sure the tickets to the event weren’t free. Mr. Obama, along with his frenemy Bill Clinton, are the most aggressive political fundraisers I have ever seen. The swag sold on his campaign’s website is breathtaking in both variety and price. Heck, he even tried to convince young brides to donate the money they would normally spend on their wedding to his campaign. Look up “chutzpah” in the dictionary, and the graphic he used in that ad campaign ought to be there.
What’s next? “Hey, there, young student! Don’t you think that money you borrowed to get your education would be put to a better use in the President Obama’s war chest? He’s the only thing standing between you and the gutter, you know.”? Or maybe “Hey there, senior citizen! That money you saved and all that Social Security cash you earned over the past few decades really isn’t yours, now is it? Just sign over that check to our dear leader, President Obama. He’s going to make sure those young people who make too much money don’t push you over a cliff onto an ice flow.”.
You know, I better stop before I start giving someone ideas.
Posted by daddybear71 on October 3, 2012
https://daddybearsden.com/2012/10/03/30-days-of-obama-day-1/
DaddyBear
DaddyBear’s Den 