*
I thought of that between eps of anime this evening, and got a chuckle out of it: "The best part is, no one cares!"
The brats grilled up nicely. The store didn't have cole slaw. I had to toast the buns because they partly froze and turned mushy; toasting them on the grill for a bit restored them to crusty goodness.
*
I watched 10 eps of anime in August; those were the only two times I had the TV on. So far in September I have now watched half that much. No wonder it's taking me so long to get through everything.
*
On impulse I bought a can of Arizona's "Mucho Mango". It's not bad.
*
It's cool inside and I have no fans running at all. It's below sixty outside. If I'm going to do much of any outdoor stuff this week it had better be Tues and Wed, because the rest of the week has the possibility of rain in the forecast. *sigh*
* * *
My back was bothering me again today. I think it's because I helped Og and Partner push Exploder 1.0 into the garage; but it could easily be something else, too. That's just the most strenuous activity I engaged in over the past couple of weeks. Who knows? It could just as easily be the damn weather.
Anyway, with my back hurting I didn't really feel like doing anything, and since I was feeling tired and crummy I didn't bother trying to gut it up and get anything done in spite of the pain.
--not bad pain or anything, just enough to remind me, "Hey, I'm not 100%!" Argh etc.
* * *
Over at AoSHQ: "Basically they've gone into a pack-animal frenzy to suppress the science." The editor of a peer-reviewed journal allowed scientific fact to be published that hurts the cause of AGW/CC: proof that the computer models are wrong.
The computer models are never wrong. Reality is what's wrong!
*sigh*
* * *
Also at Ace, "Yassir Goddamn Arafat sent these monsters into Munich, to maim and kill. He got a Nobel Prize for it."
When Arafat got the Nobel Peace Prize, that was the end of the legitimacy of that award, if indeed it had any left at that point. Yassir Arafat was an evil man; and I shed no tears when he died. If there was anyone whose death I came close to celebrating, it was his.
* * *
When I was at Og's place on Saturday, I got to look over his new AR-15.
...the gun consists of one single piece of metal right now; the lower. The lower of an AR-15 is the only part that has a serial number on it; therefore to the government that is the firearm.
Let's say you--like me--have lost your FOID card and are not allowed to own firearms. You could have all the other pieces of an AR-15 laying on your kitchen counter; but even if they no-knocked you and searched your house, as long as they failed to find a lower there, you wouldn't have a gun in your house. You've got a shitton of gun parts but you don't have the gun, because the lower is the part with the serial number and you don't have that. You're not committing a crime.
It's their rule! That's the law! If you want to buy a lower you have to fill out all the paperwork, do the background check, etc, etc. Any other part for an AR-15 is cash-and-carry, and no questions asked. Barrel, trigger, magazine, WTF-ever, only the lower counts as a firearm.
Of course they would still arrest you, and lock you in a little room, and sweat you for hours to get you to tell them where you hid it. Why would you have all those parts and not have the lower? Where is it? WHERE IS IT? We're going to tear your house down stick by stick until we find it, so make it easy on yourself and tell us where it is!
...but they can't charge you with suspicion of illegally owning a firearm and they certainly can't put you in jail for it. If you simply did not own that lower--or if you left it in the hands of a friend who could legally possess it--they would have absolutely zero recourse and I suspect that you could find a good, money-hungry lawyer who would be perfectly willing to sue the shit out of them for false arrest, etc, etc, on contingency.
You'd come home to a house that was utterly destroyed, of course. The walls would be ripped out and probably the floors, too, and everything would be on the floor. It's interesting how cops don't have to put anything back after they've searched, and don't have to repair anything they've ruined. (Add that to your lawsuit.)
None of which is here or there. Og got his lower legally, and I don't have any gun parts in the house. All of this is an intellectual exercise to demonstrate how fuckin' stupid the gun laws are.
* * *
Oh, just for the record: if you make your own lower, and buy all the other parts, you've broken several laws and are looking at hard time in the federal pen if anyone finds out. The federal government takes a very, very dim view of anyone making their own guns without the right licenses and fees being paid, and they're especially not fond of the idea of people having guns without serial numbers.
Why? Well, the federal gun laws were originally written with a view to doing exactly the kind of thing the Europeans were doing at the time, which was ramping up from free ownership of firearms, to registration, to confiscation. You can't register a firearm unless it has some kind of unique identifier, you see, which is why federal law requires that all legal firearms made after a certain date have serial numbers.
Then Hitler happened; one of the first thing the Nazis did when they were securely in power was to give military squads the list of registered firearms, and have them go around collecting them. "Herr Müller, the Führer has ordered all firearms to be confiscated. It says here you have a shotgun, a rifle, and a pistol. These are the model and serial numbers. We're here to collect them; kindly hand them over. If you do not, we must arrest you, and if you resist arrest you will be shot."
...the bad example set the cause of gun control back decades, particularly in the United States. Not that it keeps people who are properly horrified at Hitler's subsequent actions (he seized the guns first) from advocating exactly the same thing here, of course.
* * *
I'm in a sour mood. Tomorrow promises to be a horrible day for the financial markets, and it's making me some combination of anxious and depressed.
A week from yesterday is the 10th anniversary of 9/11/01. I'm not going to be watching television, so I won't have to put up with all kinds of stupid crap from the media, but I am a bit worried about the islamic terrorists themselves. They love to commemorate their victories and the 10th anniversary is a big one; hopefully nothing will happen next Sunday but I'm not going to be able to breathe easy until a week from today.
* * *
Regardless, I'm going to be going to the bank tomorrow to move money into checking, to pay this month's bills; and I have a couple of other things to attend to that need doing ASAP, including some paperwork I have yet to fill out and mail. So tomorrow is going to be "errand day" again.
Oh well.