It's fun to make fun of gummint

Got this in my e-mail from my friend Nick. Pretty good for an e-mail joke.

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Armani suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, 'If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?'

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, 'Sure, Why not?'

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer,connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resoluti on photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany .

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-Tech Miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, 'You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.'

'That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,' says Bud..

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud says to the young man, 'Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?'

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, 'Okay, why not?'
This is hilarious, you gotta read it.

'You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government', says Bud.

'Wow! That's correct,' says the yuppie, 'but how did you guess that?'

'No guessing required.' answered the cowboy. 'You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew,to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a
herd of sheep. . .


Now give me back my dog.

Cool photo Men at Work

I love this pic. My friend Jim snapped this while his team was doing assault training at their bad ass facility in Flo'da. Its the moment before things get really exciting. He got a lot of great pics from that event, and some even better training, but this one's my favorite.

Interesting comment on Iran and the American military

One of my Facebook Homies posted a link to a short article about what's going on in Afghanistan of late, which was mostly a photographic essay. Typically, comments on such an article such as this are not worth reading, because the staggering ignorance does nothing but raise one's blood pressure. However, amongst the stupid comments and the attempts to set the stupid comments straight, there was one posted by Mohammad, which said,

"I wish that U.S.A send some of their troops in my country ( Iran ) too,beacase i think that we really need them too.same as Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran need those army too,Anshalh we going to have them im Iran too.God bless us."

Could it be that what we've been told about how the world hates America in the media isn't entirely accurate? I know this is one comment, from one single allegedly Iranian person, but it is interesting, and it does make one think, at least just a little bit.

My friend the Renaissance Chick

This poem was written by my friend the Renaissance Chick, Renee. Her blog, Random Thoughts from a Life in Progress, doesn't get updated as often as I'd like, so I thought I'd see if we can peer pressure her into writing more by allowing both readers of my blog to read it. I know there are some warrior types that read my screed occasionally, so this is of interest to them/you.

This poem is as yet untitled, but I dubbed it the Ballad of the Ass Kicker today. Perhaps The Embattled is better. I dunno; I'll keep working on it. Sometimes I come up with a winner. I'm the guy that can get you one or two, maybe three or as many as four words on a crossword puzzle.

Because I want a copy of it, and in case you didn't click the link above, here's the poem.

I am Romans, Vikings, Vandals
Mongolians on the plain
My march is long
My heart is strong
The tongue I speak is strange

I wear sandals, armor, helmet
Carry carbine, mace and shield
I’ve bayonet
Or Spectre’s threat
Upon the battlefield

I march for king and sovereign
For fiefdom and for pharaoh
Reap what’s sewn
I crack your bones
And feast upon your marrow

For age and age before me
And age after I’m gone
You’ll speak of me
My victory
And recount what I've done.

Bleh

It's been dull here for the past several weeks. Outside of the match I shot yesterday-and did poorly in-not much is going on. I'm in a real creative rut at the moment, at least in terms of writing. I haven't even seen a movie in a couple weeks, although Pandorum was fun. When the big excitement is that I got a haircut today, it's pretty easy to tell who's not out living life on the edge right now. LOL!

I have a couple ideas to explore, but I need to get them oriented correctly first. My typical stream of unconsciousness style of writing doesn't work very well for that.

Norv Turner needs to go.

The Luciousness

I gotta get this done real quick before my connection takes a dump again. It's been down more often than it's been up this week.

Just got this bad boy back from a little custom work by my friend Jimmy Adams. Jimmy's a hell of a good shot, and a supremely cool dude. Unfortunately, he PCS'd recently, so I can't get him to do more work on this thing unless I bring it to him. I do have some friends relatively close to where he is now...hmmmmm....

Somewhere along the line I was given a Wolff competition spring kit, which my bro Jonny threw in there for me, as well as installing the extended slide stop. The spring kit knocks about a pound off the pull weight. I added the Warren Sevigny FO Competition sights (Glocks are a piece of cake to swap sights on) and extended magazine release. I think the mag release is a bit on the long side, so I think I'll take a file to it and shorten it to the same length as the Tango Down Vickers release that's in my 19. It's just about the perfect length.

Jimmy did the grip texturing, and textured the underside of the trigger guard, while flattening "the hump" where the finger undercut was and rounding the front of it. This is my IDPA competition gun, and I may run it in some USPSA matches somewhere down the line. Currently, I'm only shooting matches at Rattlenake Ridge in Indian Mound, TN, but I may decide to do more of that in the future.

The rest of my competition stuff consists of an Aker leather gun belt that I've had for about five years, a Blade-Tech double magazine pouch, a Safariland 5188 Concealment holster, and the ever popular South Sea Rhythm and Blues Tiki Lounge Hawaiian-style button up shirt. Helpful hint: tape a couple quarters to each side of the shirt, to the inside of the placket, so when you sweep the cover garment out of the way, it'll actually go. You wanna put 'em on both sides, so you can reach both holster and reloads. To the photos!

Check your ammo!

Just about the time ya don't see anything weird happening with ammo, something really odd pops up. I found this round out of a hundred pack of Winchester White Box that I just got at our local Mega Mart. I've never seen this before, but if ya shoot long enough, pretty much everything will show up. The long and the short of it is: check your ammo!

Killer grub the bachelor way!

Man, dinner was GOOD tonight! And, it was simple to boot. I generally don't use a stove; I do the grill and microwave instead, because...I dunno. I guess if I don't use the stove, there's less stove to clean. We'll go with that.

I found a new product at the market yesterday: Dole has a bag of red skin new potatoes (I just call 'em newpas for short) that can be microwaved and steams right in the bag. I wanna shake the hand of the guy that came up with that idea. Takes about nine minutes to nuke 'em.

Newpas are best when they're salty and buttery, but I wanted a little bit more. So, while I nuked the newpas, I rough chopped some dill and rosemary. Then, I tossed that in a bowl, dumped some butter in it, and added some chopped garlic. That went into the micro to melt together, and I sea-salted and fresh ground peppered the potatoes, which I quartered. I put them in a big bowl, and then poured the mixed herby-butter conglomeration over 'em. I tossed em, and went to turn the chicken over on the grill.

The chicken I got from Wal Mart in the frozen stuff aisle. Its a boneless chicken breast stuffed with cheese and bacon. It's supposed to be baked, but I find that it cooks pretty darn fast on the grill, so that's how I do 'em. Get the grill hot, then turn it down to med-low. Then it's just a matter of not burning it to a crisp.

Add to this a VERY big glass of Arizona Sweet Tea, and...WAH LAH! (yes, I know)Easy, instant-ish mackin' bachelor food! I'm gonna bust out a piece of chocolate creme pie later, after COPS (AKA Boys on the Hood, or The Guy With No Shirt Goes To Jail).