Took Girlie Bear for a treat at Starbucks a few weeks ago.  While they made her a “Tall double chocolate extra whip hot cocoa with sprinkles of cinnamon powder and fairy dust”, I sipped my cup of hot, strong brewed coffee with cream and sugar while I browsed their sale rack of coffee stuff. I’ve been looking for a ceramic cup with a locking lid to use at work, and I found this one on clearance:

There,  I think that displays what I want in my coffee every morning.

Today, I drove over to the FedEx facility in Indiana and picked up two packages that my fairy gun-fathers at the CMP sent to me:

Two cans of 250 rounds each, all nicely linked up in cloth machine gun belts:

The website says it was manufactured during the late Truman / early Eisenhower administration:

M2 Ball, .30-06, belted in 250 rd Ammo web belts, in .30 cal cans. Manufactured by KYNOCH WORKS (British). Corrosive primers. Manufactured 50-53.

Considering its age, it appears to be in pretty good shape.  There’s some surface corrosion, but it doesn’t appear to be deep.

 I’ll unbelt it all one of these weekends and inspect each round before using it.  The price was right.  $75 a can, plus $9.95 for shipping.  That’s $170 total, or about $.35 a round.  I’m glad I got it when I did.  It sold out at the CMP a couple of days ago.  The cans can hold it until I shoot it up, then they can be used to store the brass or something else.  The cloth belts I’m not so sure of.  There’s a WWII reenactment outfit around here somewhere (they were at the Knob Creek machine gun shoot), so maybe I’ll just donate them.  If I can’t find them, then they might fetch something at a gun show or something.

A section of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona has been closed to the public because the government feels it’s too dangerous.

Is it too dangerous because of volcanoes?  Maybe unstable land formations that fall over in a stiff wind?  Or perhaps it’s full of old mines that kooky old men are using to hide their illicit activities from a group of teenagers and their dog who travel the country in a green van looking for mischief?

Nope, it’s been marked off as a denied area because of the violence brought to our territory by drug and human smugglers.

That’s right.  Our government has ceded access to a part of our country by citizens to foreigners who are entering the country illegally. They are either bringing poison into the country, or they are bringing in people who have not gotten permission from the American people to enter the country.  Either way, the government is letting go of its responsibility to protect not only the borders of our country, but to protect American citizens from foreigners who are doing them harm.

What is the definition of the “foreign” enemy in “enemies, foreign and domestic” in the oaths they take if it’s not a foreign citizen who comes across our border and causes so much grief that a section of our country is considered too dangerous for civilians to enter?

If the government does not want our citizens to be hurt by foreign criminals on American soil, it should remove those criminals who are on our soil, and prevent more from entering.  It should not just give up territory because it’s hard to provide the security that is one of its fundamental duties.

If the government won’t do it, then someone else in the country should.  I’m not for vigilantism, but if a group of armed Americans wants to stroll through this area and see if anyone threatens or takes a shot at them for being there, then I’m OK with that.  If the government doesn’t want that to happen, then they should substitute “U.S. Marshalls” for “armed Americans” and execute.

According to ITWire, an Italian study shows a correlation between the amount a person drinks and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis.

As some of you know, I have arthritis.  I go through some very costly and time intensive treatments to keep it under control, and so far, it’s working very well.

What this does for me is give me yet another avenue for possibly keeping arthritis at bay, and enhancing my life.  Heck, if I drink enough to keep the aches out of my fingers, I’ll also be a heck of a nice guy to live with.  I can now explain why I had no symptoms of Arthritis until I was 28.  I was partying and drinking like a fish until about 3 years prior to that.

But I have to run.  I need to go to the ‘pharmacy‘ for my ‘arthritis medicine‘. Maybe I could get some whole-grain supplements to go with it.  Got to have my vitamins!

I can’t give any details because I don’t talk about the job here, but this graphic will tell you how my day started:

This is how I wish it would end:

Get the picture?

Last night, we let BooBoo watch “Shrek” after he had read two books and colored.  There’s a scene in the movie where the titular character and his annoying sidekick enter the city of Duloc, which is a heavy handed allusion to DisneyLand.  There’s even an annoying song that is sung by puppets as they enter. 

I’ve had the following song running through my head all night and all day ever since, and I thought I’d share.

Enjoy

Welcome to Duloc, such a perfect town
Here we have some rules, let us lay them down
Don’t make waves, stay in line
And we’ll get along fine
Duloc is a perfect place
Please do not walk on the grass
Shine your shoes, wipe your… face.
Duloc is, Duloc is, Duloc is a perfect… place!

Am I a racist for being surprised that Martha Stewart had Al Roker making watermelon margaritas today?

Or do I just need coffee?

A crew of fishermen off the coast of Massachusetts caught more than they expected while dredging for clams.  The pulled up three canisters of what is believed to be mustard gas. When one of them was found to be leaking, they threw them overboard, but apparently not before they were exposed enough to have some respiratory distress and skin irritation.

They got lucky.   Those old agents are no joke.  People who complain about a little tear gas at the Up With People rally should try being exposed to a real chemical weapon.

When I was a Boy Scout, we met with a group of World War I and II veterans about the meaning of Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day.  They were explaining to us about Buddy Poppies, and what we as scouts could do to help disabled veterans.  One of the gentlemen wore long sleeves and gloves, even though it was extremely hot and muggy.  One of the younger scouts asked him about it, and he said he’d been wounded in the war, and didn’t want to scare anyone with the scars.  Seems his unit had been hit with mustard gas and he didn’t get covered up quickly enough.  He never did show us those scars, but if a grown man is cautious about covering up his battle scars because they’d scare children, they were probably pretty horrendous.

Later, when I was the assistant Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological NCO for my company, I got to watch a lot of training film about how different chemical weapons worked and what they did to test animals.  None of it was something I really want to think about again.  Suffice it to say that the threat of someone using chemical weapons against a city gives me a cold shiver down my back.

Those fishermen are extremely lucky that only got minimal exposure to agents that were old and probably very cold from being in the water.  Here’s hoping that they heal and that their boat gets de-conned properly so they can get back to their business.  By the way, someone should tell the local firechief that mustard gas is a blistering agent, not a nerve agent.  If that had been VX instead of mustard, none of those guys would have made it off the boat alive.