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Keller recently adopted an ordinance banning outdoor watering between 10:00am and 6:00pm.  And except for the neighbor immediately behind me, it seems to be working.  I’ve recently noticed increased water pressure during the days.

In fact, the pressure is so high that I was treated to an unexpected shower yesterday when I went to get some water from my refrigerator’s water dispenser.  The water was shooting out so fast that it was deflected off the ice in the cup and splashed me and everything in a 3-4 ft. semicircle around the front of the refrigerator. 

I’m definitely going to have to be more careful from now on when I fill my cup.

I couldn’t help but notice a recent flare up in the long-running rancorous dispute between the adherents of the pistol design of Gaston Glock and that of John Moses Browning. 

As someone who has owned, shot, and carried both designs, I really don’t get where all the acrimony comes from.  Live and let live, I say, and let each carry what he or she feels most comfortable with.

Isn’t there room enough in our safes for both? 

I don’t know why this happens, but sometimes strange thoughts just seem to pop into my conscious mind seemingly from nowhere.  Just recently it occurred to me that while the Matrix was certainly interesting for its scary distopian view of a future where humans are used by machines to generate energy, I couldn’t see how the whole setup would generate more energy than it took in.

While humans are endothermic, they require energy in the form of food to produce heat energy.  Further, they require a climate-controlled environment (neither too warm nor too cold) to thrive.  It would seem to me that the process of growing the food and maintaining the human in a comfortable environment would use more energy than the human generated.  And that’s not even considering the amount of power required to run the stupid Matrix itself.  Or for that matter, the energy required just to monitor the human in its pod.

Or perhaps I’m over-thinking the whole thing.  Not that I spent a lot of time on it, but obviously some part of my brain thought it of sufficient importance to chew on it for a while before surfacing it.

As I’ve written about before, I’m a member of the Keller CERT.  While our primary mission is disaster preparedness, we also do community service.  Generally this service is in furtherance of the mission of preparedness, but we also do other things just to stay busy.  Which is why we are often called upon to help out by staffing barricades during parades.  Some of us have had some traffic control training (primary rule: never turn your back on traffic) and even those who haven’t can at least stand at a barricade and tell people to go elsewhere. 

Yesterday afternoon was the annual Lion’s Club parade, and I ended up on the barricade on Bear Creek at Pate Orr.  Which means that I got to inconvenience a whole lot of people who hadn’t gotten the message about the parade.  I know it was published in the paper on Friday, but I’m guessing a lot of people must not be reading the paper, given the number who were surprised to find the barricade.

Most people took it in stride, though, especially those who live in the area, since they already know alternate routes to get around the parade.  But I did have a few who tried to drive around the barricade and keep going West on Bear Creek.  Or they did so until I flagged them down and made them turn back. 

The problem was that from their vantage point it looks like nothing is going on and that the barricade shouldn’t be there.  Further, it was probably confusing because some East-bound traffic was being allowed through (mainly people departing the school or from neighborhoods after the parade had passed).  But what they can’t see from there is where the tail of the parade is once it’s left Bear Creek Intermediate.  That tail can take up to 30 minutes from its departure to make its way down to Elm.  We couldn’t take the barricades down on Bear Creek until the parade had completed its trip to Elm, so to a lot of people it just looked like the road was closed for no reason.

Fortunately, no one got too upset and no one degenerated into yelling (at least at my location), although I did get one exasperated eye-roll from a woman in a small SUV. 

For those who are interested (and for future reference), here’s the parade route:

As you can see from the map, there are various ways in and out of almost all the neighborhoods that were affected, it just required some thinking to work around the route.  And for those that may be annoyed by the road closures, just be glad that they’re no longer marching down Keller Parkway like they used to do a few years ago.  That would have been a real mess.

Back in May NASA put out a request for volunteers for a

90-day bed rest study.  In return for participation, the participants would be paid $5000/month (or about $17K for the whole study).  The purpose of the study is to allow scientists to examine some of the effects of prolonged exposure to microgravity on the human body.  The experiment is not for the faint of heart, though, as some of the side-effects include muscle atrophy and loss of bone density.  A rehab period will be required after the study to allow the participant to regain the ability to stand up and walk (!). 

However, the subjects are not quarantined or kept lying around doing nothing.  They have access to phones and the internet as well as support from the medical team.  One of the participants has started a blog about her experiences called Pillow Astronaut.  So far, she’s been blogging since the beginning of July as the process got under way.  Her actual period of bed rest* began on the 24th. 

*It turns out that the subjects aren’t just confined to bed, they are kept in a bed with a -6° incline, which keeps their heads lower than their bodies.  As you can imagine, that also leads to a variety of complications in everything from eating to bathing…

If she keeps up the blog, it should be interesting to watch how this thing progresses.  Provided she doesn’t succumb to madness from being confined to bed for 90 days. 

Via Slashdot.

I just received the most recent Cheaper Than Dirt catalog and couldn’t help but notice that they are carrying the ArmaLaser line of laser sights for Kel-Tec pistols.  Not to disparage Kel-Tec, but the idea of adding a $159 laser to a $300 pistol seems a little like overkill to me.  I have a P11 and it has a (DAO) trigger pull somewhere in the vicinity of 9 lbs.  I find that my hands start to shake just before the trigger breaks because of the force I have to apply.  It took a lot of practice for me to make peace with the trigger and get to the point where it was useful beyond 3-5 yards.  The last thing I want is to try to follow the laser as it does a jig on the target. 

I also saw that they were selling Lone Wolf Dist slide cover plate replacements in various colors.  In particular, though, I think the blue one is a bad idea.  Generally, blue is supposed to indicate a non-firing (or other “safe”) training replica (or at least that’s how I’ve always seen it used).  Now I realize that this is only one small part of the gun, but it seems to cross a line in my mind that shouldn’t be crossed.  It seems to me to that it could possibly lead to unnecessary confusion.

Sebastian’s entry today about Politically Incorrect Toys brought back some old memories:

Interestingly enough, my neighbor worked for this very toy company, and they made all manner of politically incorrect toys, which we got to play with.  One, which I got to take home with me, was an automatic firing water pistol in the shape of an IMI Uzi.  It took batteries, because the stream was propelled by motorized action.  But it would fire as long as you held the trigger down, or until the (detachable) magazine ran dry.

I had one of these, too.  I can also confirm that it will shoot beer, although it tends to gunk up the mechanism if you don’t clean it out right away…

This is the story of my mornings:

more graph humor and song chart memes

Don’t you just hate it when you’re *almost* there and all it will take is one tiny little adjustment but the stiction of the knob causes you to overshoot into one or other of the death zones?

Have no doubt, there are evil people doing evil things out there:

Members of a multi-agency task force and a Texas Ranger are trying to develop leads in the shooting Wednesday of an Alvarado store clerk who died late Thursday at a Fort Worth hospital.

Karen Burke died at 11:04 p.m. Thursday at John Peter Smith Hospital, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office.

Burke, 52, of Alvarado was shot early Wednesday while mopping the floor at the Shell Travel Center off Interstate 35W in Alavardo, police said.

The robber, whose features were concealed by a dark hooded sweatshirt, followed her through the door to the store after she had gone outside, possibly to empty the mop bucket. And then she was shot.

From the TV coverage I kept getting the feeling that this place was somehow familiar.  I finally realized that I had stopped there a couple of times on my way back from Austin. 

Anyhow, this case really brings home the idiocy of the advice to “just give them what they want and they’ll go away” that we often hear when there is a robbery.  In this case, there was absolutely no chance for the store clerk to give this guy anything.  Further, what he apparently wanted was for her to die.  Which also illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the idea that everyone can be reasoned with if we’d just have enough ‘empathy’ or ‘compassion.’  How do you reason with someone whose first act is to shoot you?

Or, as Cowtown Cop puts it:

There is, and all ways have been, a portion of the human race who will use whatever weapon comes to hand to further their selfish ambitions. These folks are evil. They don’t feel any empathy or compassion for their fellow humans. They just don’t care, and there are a lot of them.

Would the clerk having a gun have prevented this?  It’s impossible to say for certain.  However, owning one and carrying it promotes situational awareness and preparedness for these sorts of situations.  From what I saw on the video I would have pegged this guy as squirrelly from the get-go.  It’s late July and the temperature is still in the high 80’s at 1:00am and he’s wearing a long-sleeved hoodie with the hood up.  More than that, though, he appears to be wearing gloves, which would have set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head.  He’s also acting suspicious by trying to shield his face from the video cameras. 

Practicing good situational awareness is probably the most important part of all this, and even if one chooses not to carry a gun, it’s still important.  In this case there wasn’t a lot of time to react, but there were still warning signs in the suspect’s dress and behavior. 

It should be noted that I do not want this taken in any way as blaming the victim in this case.  All responsibility for this incident belongs with the shooter.  He’s an evil bastard and he deserves to be squashed like a bug.  But we can learn from the incident and remind ourselves that violent encounters are often unexpected and they progress extremely quickly (i.e. it’ll be over before you can even get to your phone, much less dial 911).  You have to always be on alert and prepared to react. 

I have over the past several months been experiencing a Writer’s Block of prodigious proportions.  Or perhaps it may best be described as a sort of blogger’s ennui.  Every time I saw something that might be of interest, some little part of my brain would pipe up with, “What’s the point?  Didn’t you write about that two years ago?” (an Imp of the Inert, perhaps?).

Regardless of whether it may be pointless, or repetitive, I fear I may go mad without an outlet for the anger and annoyance that I seem to live with daily, so you will being seeing more of me in the near future.  If for no other reason than for me to stop yelling out loud at the TV and the newspaper (thereby scaring the dogs). 

Have no fear, this blog has not been abandoned.