A Passing Is Noted

Frank W. James, retired farmer, blogger, and gun writer extraordinare, passed away on Tuesday evening. He was 69.

I only got the chance to meet Frank once. It was at an impromptu meeting of gun bloggers before the 2012 NRA Annual Meeting in St. Louis arranged by Jay G. I thought here was this legend sitting down to have a drink with us mere mortals. I honestly don’t remember what, if anything, we said to one another.

I’ll let those who know him much better take it from here.

Michael Bane has a remembrance here. Frank served as one of his experts on Gun Stories.

Tam, who knew him much better than me, has this to say.

Unfortunately, his earlier blog, Corn, Beans, Spent Brass, An Empty Page – And  A Deadline, is gone and the Wayback Machine archive doesn’t have it. I guess memories will just have to do.

UPDATE: Tom Gresham has posted an interview he did with Frank from 2010 as a remembrance of Frank.

Comment Of The Day

It is no surprise that the gun prohibitionists and their politician allies have gone into a feeding frenzy after the murders in Connecticut. With a new session of Congress only weeks away, politicians are already announcing their plans for new draconian gun control laws egged on by the President who is calling for “meaningful action”.

The comment of the day comes from Frank James in response to a post by Tam on her View from the Porch blog.

I think up till now we’ve all been operating under condition ‘Orange’ and now it’s gone to ‘Red’.

When Congress reconvenes next year I look for the situation to go to condition ‘Black’. (No pun intended!)…

I think the good Colonel would approve of this use of his color code with regard to the intentions of the hoplophobes.

A Disturbance In The Force

To paraphrase Darth Vader, “I detect a disturbance in the gun blogger force.”

That disturbance in the force is because Frank W. James – Farmer Frank – of Corn, Beans, Spent Brass, An Empty Page and A Deadline has decided to hang it up after four years. The frustrations he felt with the constraints of Blogger and some of their new “features” was too much for him. He made the announcement on Tuesday in his final post.

I’ve never made a dime off this blog, so by my father’s estimation it has had zero commercial value and my time was wasted……UNLESS I enjoyed it.

And I did for a long time, for over 4 years in fact, but due to the changes being made in the software that Blogger is now putting forth, I no longer enjoy it. In fact, this damn thing has become work.

Work that has zero value because Dad was right, I’m not getting paid anything for it, so it has had no value.

The alternatives in my view are worse because in just about all the acceptable (to me in terms of usage rules) cases I will have to spend money to do this nonsense which means by Dad’s reasoning my ‘work’ would have less than ‘zero’ value. It would have a negative value solely for ‘vanity’ purposes. That’s pretty lame and it’s not going to happen.

So, after approximately 480,000 visits and 626,000 page views over just 4 years of duration, this blog experiment has come to an end.

I’m glad I got to meet Frank at the recent NRA Annual Meeting. I know I will miss his blog. He promises to do guest blogging in the future for movie and book reviews. I plan to take him up on that offer as I am sure will a number of other bloggers.

It is a damn shame that in the effort to make things “better”, technology companies often ruin a decent product. I still can do more with MS Word 2003 than their 2007 version, I’m still not enamored with the Facebook timeline, and, like Frank, I don’t really care for the “new” version of Blogger. As my grandma used to muse, “Such as life.”