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Oh, The Things You Will Find

May 26, 2024 by 6 Comments

If you have ever misplaced a key for a padlock or gun case, you will relate to this next post. In my case it is a tubular key for my Tuffpak gun case which I bought at an auction a couple of years ago. I know it is somewhere but I don’t know where. I can even see the key that was tied to a piece of cord in my mind’s eye.

Somewhere along the line I must have untied it from the case and now I need it if I want to use this gun case to carry my rifles to Africa. The key was not in the case or any of the bags stuffed in the case. This led me to start looking in the obvious locations such as my desk drawer and my nightstand drawer. Nope, not there.

This led to searching elsewhere in other drawers which has turned into something of an adventure. It is an adventure as you never know what you will find or rediscover. The photo below illustrates just a fraction of the things found.

There are the things you’ve been looking for and then there are the things you didn’t realize you still had. In the former category is my Swiss Army Alox Pioneer knife in the center of the photo. Turns out it was in a tray on top of my chest of drawers. Also found there were the mini level, the Lansky Mini Dog Bone knife sharpener, the patriotic stickers, and the suction-cup mounted peep site for your shooting glasses. I think that means I need to clean up the top of that chest of drawers so I can find even more stuff!

Then in the category of things I didn’t realize I still had are multiple sets of corded ear buds that no longer work with my newer iPhone as it doesn’t have a headphone jack. I also didn’t remember buying that blue Master TSA lock nor the Energizer reading light. The latter actually still works!

Finally, there are the things you knew you had but you didn’t remember putting them in that drawer. First, was the school picture of my first girlfriend taken in 1973-74. I had met Pat who was from Ontario at a weeklong summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina. We did get together the next year in Canada after I had graduated high school and she was headed to Grade 13. Unfortunately, we lost track of one another when she went off to university in Ottawa. I do wonder what has become of her. Second, there are the Nikken magnets which are supposed to reduce pain or swelling by adjusting your magnetic polarity or something like that.

As to that missing key, I’m still looking and there are still more drawers to search!

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Stuff You Find When Looking For Something Else

June 18, 2020 by 1 Comment

I was reading a couple of articles about how an insignificant party attendee ended up getting doxxed in an article in the Washington Post. Her crime was to attend a party pretending to be Megyn Kelly in blackface – two years ago.

Now I’ve never worn blackface nor do I encourage it. That is, unless you are using black in conjunction with other colors for camo face paint in hunting. I still think a camo face mask is easier and certainly easier to remove.

Back to the subject at hand.

This got me to thinking of that old Southernism, “He needed killing.” It turns out that this was often called the “Texas Defense”. Despite that, there was no law in Texas or anywhere else I can find that allows the murder of someone because they were reprehensible human beings. Despite being called the Texas Defense, it actually originated with an 1870 Kentucky case dealing with self-defense. Dave Hardy covered that case in his Of Arms and the Law blog back in 2011.

All of this eventually led to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary on the entry on Homicide. Published in 1906, it is available for free on the Internet thanks to the Gutenberg Project. If you haven’t read entries in it, you should.

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

As the Complementary Spouse would assure you, my mind sometimes does work like that. I start at Point A, meander a bit here and there, dawdle for a while on something totally irrelevant but interesting, and eventually end up at Point Z. It is like following links on the Internet where you keep following link after link until you remember what you were originally trying to find and you go back there.

If you are of a certain age, you may remember a Chicago newspaper columnist by the name of Sydney J. Harris. Long before there was an Internet, he would write about “Things I Learned While Looking Up Other Things.” It was full of interesting trivia. I can only imagine what he’d come up with now thanks to the Internet.

And that is how I got from some Social Justice Warriors thinking it was their duty to dox an ordinary person who then lost her job to “he needed killing” to good old Ambrose Bierce (and Sydney J. Harris).

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Just What Miggy Needs!

March 21, 2015 by 4 Comments

I’m lying in bed watching one of the Saturday morning new shows and perusing Facebook on my iPad when I see a post by Miguel Gonzalez. Miggy has a post on the proper tools to kill a spider which is not, as he opines, the .45 ACP. It is a flamethrower.

Now WWII generation flamethrowers are getting harder and harder to find. Not only that, they are expensive. I see one currently on Gunbroker with an opening price of $11,900.

Fortunately, some enterprising young men are working on bringing the flamethrower to the masses. They are starting an IndieGoGo campaign which goes live on Monday. I’ve read elsewhere that the final purchase price should be in the $799 range.

So, unless you live in California where they are illegal (imagine that!), you, too, can be the owner of your very own XM42 flamethrower. Other than killing spiders and taking out ISIS/Russian/Nazi pillboxes, I’m not sure what you’d do with it but why not.