09:55 – I still need to build some science kits. As of this morning, after shipping today’s orders we’ll be down to two biology kits and one forensic kit in stock. I have everything I need to build another couple dozen of each, but I need to bag the chemicals before I can build the kits. So after I get the outstanding orders queued up to ship, that’s what I’ll be doing today.
I see that Mr. Obama has done what he himself said not long ago he was Constitutionally prohibited from doing. I’m sure he believes this is the right thing to do. That’s one clear difference between libertarians like me and progressives like Obama: libertarians try to do what they believe is the right thing, but only at their own expense; progressives try to do what they believe is the right thing, but only at other people’s expense.
Work on the prepping book continues. Right now, I’m writing about keeping insulin cool as a short-term solution and about isolating insulin from animal pancreata as a long-term solution. The latter is surprisingly easy. The hardest part is identifying the pancreata in animal corpses. Using animal insulin does raise allergy issues, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing. The thought just crossed my mind that if I were writing a post-apocalyptic novel, as I originally intended to do, I’d probably have characters isolating insulin from the corpses of people who’d attacked them. In fact, I might have them keeping prisoners and killing one as necessary to produce more insulin. But then I’m a bloodthirsty kind of guy, at least when it comes to writing fiction.
I fear that in a bad enough dystopian scenario, not many folks are gonna be running around and isolating insulin, diabetic or not. A lot of chronically ill people are just gonna die off, and pretty quickly, too. And most of the chronically sedentary population likewise. Plus the very elderly and the very young.
Strapping macho warrior types like me will rule the earth!
isolating insulin from animal pancreata as a long-term solution.
Wow, Dr. Bob, your book is going to be *the* prepping book. Keep going. I hope you still plan on an expanded version on your site for download.
What reliable domain registrar are people using these days?
Oh, yeah, we’ll be covering a lot of neat sciency stuff. For example, using the ABE (acetone-butanol-ethanol) bacteria Clostridium acetobutylicum or C. beijerinckii to do anaerobic fermentation of starches (such as from turnips or potatoes), which produces those three liquids in a 3:6:1 ratio. For every 10 gallons of product, you end up with 3 gallons of acetone, which can be burned as a fuel; 6 gallons of n-butanol, which is a drop-in replacement for gasoline; and one gallon of pure ethanol, which can be discarded. 😉
I’ll probably do the same thing we do with the bacterial cultures in our biology kits, which are very dilute suspensions of the bacteria in phosphate-buffered saline. The bacteria are in stasis (essentially, hibernating), but as soon as you give them a food supply they “wake up” and start reproducing like crazy. Or I may lyophilize (freeze-dry) them.
Comcast guy just left; about 90 minutes to hook up internet, tee-vee (oooo….cable!), and phone. Fairpoint never ported our number over to them so now we’re waiting on that and then we’ll have a new landline number; buh-bye Fairpoint!
Very fast net so fah, about 20 times faster than Fairpoint and countless cycles faster than the wireless we’ve been using.
Saw on the NECN nooz some nice vids of Buffalo digging out; jeezum crow, they got slammed! Seven feet! Even the locals were gobsmacked. A plow truck overturned. Snow walls along streets up to the second stories.
About 20 here today with sun and blue skies, not much wind, finally.
I heard that one of Obola’s aides said “Congratulations El Presidente” after the speech.
I went to grad school at RIT in Rochester, NY (well, actually, RIT is located in South Henrietta, NY, but that acronym apparently didn’t cut it.) When I first arrived on campus, I noticed street signs on poles that were 20 feet or so high. The signs warned that this was a no-parking zone during snow emergencies and that if you parked there the snow would drift over your car, which might be plowed away. They weren’t kidding. The whole campus was connected by tunnels, so you never had to go outside to get from one place to another.
Montreal’s downtown and university and shopping mall area is also connected by tunnels, for the same reason. Princess knows them full well. Here in Retroville, though, we just cowboy up and deal wid it.
Of course, all we’ve had are flurries so fah.
Man, this net is effin’ fast now!
I heard that one of Obola’s aides said “Congratulations El Presidente” after the speech.
Heh.
I find myself wanting to make a statement about the condition of our Republic by shipping a case of bananas to the White House every time Obola whips out his executive order pen.
Problem is then the hassle of dealing with SWAT teams, as they would determine that as a threat rather than a comment.
Regarding domain registrars, I’ve used GoDaddy for years. I know that some people have reported issues with them, and others don’t like them for other social issues, but I’ve had no problem with any of the domains I’ve registered. Of course, you get promotional email from them, but I ignore that.
I have also registered domains through my hosting companies (BlueHost and JustHost); no problems with those guys either. Costs are about the same, within a couple dollars, not enough to worry about. Having the domains at the same place as the hosting place is a bit more convenient for me. YMMV.
Man, this net is effin’ fast now!
Go to http://www.speedtest.net and see what your speeds are. You should be getting 50 down and 10 up. Comcast, maligned as they are, usually are fairly good at providing the promised speeds.
If everything gets configured correctly you should also have caller ID on your TV when you are watching TV.
and a hidden camera behind that dark window on the cable box. (NSA requirement)
Just as a point of comparison, I just got 15.93 mbps down and 1.11 mbps up with our TWC Roadrunner service.
I’m at 120-95 mbps down and 10 mbps up on Comcast.
Comcast here in Upper Alabama.
29.27 download
6.08 up
From reading about the speech by the President last night, it looks as if he did two main things:
1 – decide not to prosecute and deport those that haven’t broken any law besides immigration laws
2 – register those that have been here illegally for a few years and haven’t broken other laws
The first is probably within his powers. Prosecutorial discretion is part of our legal system, and within what the executive can do. It also recognizes the fact that we don’t have the resources to find, detain, and deport all the illegals here. It’s not physically possible in any reasonable timeframe.
The second is more problematic, as it creates a new status between illegal resident and temporary work visa not in the law. In addition, work will need to be done to create the database of these people, check their documents, issue cards, etc.
He also created a trap for the fire-breathers to fall into, of sounding extreme and anti-Hispanic. The attitude that the opposition should take is to say something along the lines of: “Mr. President, your party had control of Congress for several years and did nothing. Now you blame us for not passing a bill, and take unilateral action that is possibly, by your own admission, unconstitutional. That’s not how things are done in the US. The people’s representatives, all of them, deserve a chance to debate what is to be done. Our party did an amnesty back in 1980s, in a bipartisan fashion. So, we are open to regularizing the status of those who are here illegally and that have committed no other crime. But until the borders are secure, we can’t undertake sweeping action.”
I’m always torn on immigration. Mostly because I strongly believe these four things…
1) Our borders should be secure for National Defense reasons. I don’t know how you claim to have a US military and border patrol that’s worth a shit when millions of people are successfully sneaking across. If you want to let them across then that’s fine, but you should at least be aware of who is crossing and when/where/why/how they crossed. Don’t be ignorant of the people coming into the country.
2) We have laws and those laws should be obeyed and enforced, especially by elected officials. Don’t like the law? Change it, but don’t just chose to not enforce it. If individual citizens choose civil disobedience in protest of a law they see as unjust or inhumane, then that is fine. Presidents, Governors, Mayors, and State/Federal Legislators don’t have that luxury. They have a duty to uphold the law of the land.
3) The whole world should have open borders from an immigration perspective. Everyone should be allowed to live and work anywhere in the world they want assuming they pose no public health and safety risk to the country they are headed to (i.e. no communicable diseases and no violent criminal background).
4) No double standards. You can’t tell Cubans that if they successfully make it to US shores they can stay (wet foot dry foot policy) but tell, for example, Mexicans that they cannot.
Agreed. In an extended TEOTWAWKI scenario the world will descend into a “survival of the fittest” which will probably be tilted more toward the physically fittest rather than the mentally fittest.
The Supreme Court disagrees with you about prosecutorial discretion. I don’t recall the specific case, but they ruled that PD covers only situations where one individual or a small group is under consideration. That’s clearly not the case here. Simply because Obama cannot apprehend and prosecute every violator does not mean that he has the right to ignore violators wholesale.
As to immigration policy, I would prefer to get rid of the concepts of citizenship, passports, customs stations, etc. and have completely open borders. But the only way we can do that is if we eliminate government benefits entirely. Of course, I’m in favor of that, too.
I hope not. I’m counting on my wizard status to convince others to protect me and keep me fed.
And what was the last large-scale event where smart didn’t count for more than strong, at least on average?
” You should be getting 50 down and 10 up.”
Huh. 11.44 down and 12.16 up.
Of course we’re on the lake, which even the Comcast guy told me had been a problem for all the wireless cell service he’d seen with customers to our south alongshore. And we have that big pile of scrap metal a couple hundred yards away at the highway department. I’ll try this again later.
I use http://www.pairnic.com which is the domain registrar at my webhost http://www.pair.com . Pair does a really good job of running their web servers, most of which are FreeBSD boxes. I have a dedicated web server for my seven domains that I pay about $300/month for. Pair maintains all of their web servers themselves, both hardware and software, so you do not get root access. Some people do not like this at all.
The area where Pair excels is uptime. I have had my server up for over two years once without a reboot. Their reboots are normally to install security patches or hardware failure.
The area where Pair sucks is email support. I moved our main domain MX record to Google Apps several years and get the advantage of using Gmail for sending and receiving all of our corporate email. Works awesomely and we are grandfathered in for free for the time being. I would pay their $5/month/email address if I had to in a New York minute but, I am cheap XXXXX frugal.
For every 10 gallons of product, you end up with 3 gallons of acetone, which can be burned as a fuel; 6 gallons of n-butanol, which is a drop-in replacement for gasoline; and one gallon of pure ethanol, which can be discarded.
How temperature and pressure sensitive is the conversion process? Is the separation tricky at all?
In an extended TEOTWAWKI scenario the world will descend into a “survival of the fittest” which will probably be tilted more toward the physically fittest rather than the mentally fittest.
This somewhat depends on how many guns, ammo, food and friends that you have. And your willingness to use your guns. But, all very situationally dependent.
For every 10 gallons of product, you end up with 3 gallons of acetone, which can be burned as a fuel; 6 gallons of n-butanol, which is a drop-in replacement for gasoline; and one gallon of pure ethanol, which can be discarded.
How temperature and pressure sensitive is the conversion process? Is the separation tricky at all?
Especially the ethanol. Sir, you have n-butanol in my ethanol!
It’s pretty straightforward. The bacteria like it best around 20C to 35C. Much less and the fermentation slows a great deal. Much more, and the bacteria will start to die off. At one atmosphere, the three products boil at about 56C (acetone), 78C (ethanol), and 118C (n-butanol), so you could get away with simple distillation if you had to. A simple fractionating column makes the separation easier, and if you can rig up a simple vacuum distillation setup you save a ton on fuel.
The bacteria start to die off big time once the concentration of the products gets above (IIRC) 10% or so. Which is no big deal. You distill out the products, let the mother liquor cool, and reintroduce the bacteria to eat whatever starches are left over from the initial run.
On a small scale, using a 55-gallon drum as a fermentation vessel, you could run 50 gallons of the liquor. By the time fermentation tails off, you’d have roughly 5 gallons of product to be separated, 3 gallons of n-butanol, 1.5 gallons of acetone, and 0.5 gallons of ethanol.
I would say after a couple of years into a true TEOTWAWKI scenario there would be very little ammo left, most food would be consumed (prepper stockpiles depleted and grocery stores long since picked clean), and your list of friends would have gotten very very short.
one gallon of pure ethanol, which can be discarded. 😉
Yeah, you can discard it after filtering it through your kidneys.
You can also use it for your laboratory burner fuel, or bottle it for trade goods, keep rags near the bottles and you’ve got some pretty wicked molotovs (never throw away a potential incendiary defense device–at least until the fuse is lit) with a near-invisible flame…
I would say after a couple of years into a true TEOTWAWKI scenario there would be very little ammo left, most food would be consumed (prepper stockpiles depleted and grocery stores long since picked clean), and your list of friends would have gotten very very short.
I would change a couple of years to a couple of months. Maybe six months at most before societal pressures will tend to cause your little society to either break apart or build a new society with farming, hunters, livestock, etc to become self sustaining.
Most preppers have got 10,000 to 100,000 rounds of ammo. And yes, I know somebody with 50+ guns and 100,000+ rounds of ammo.
“I would say after a couple of years into a true TEOTWAWKI scenario…
Months or years; we have no idea what it would be like in a country of 330 million people, with most of them concentrated in the coastal metropoles, and not counting Canada or Mexico. With all borders and coasts wide open. Half a billion to a billion firearms, many hundreds of thousands of current active-duty military and cops, veterans, criminal gangs, etc. We have smaller historical examples to look at, but I don’t think they’re much help with our current situation; our Great Depression? Europe between the world wars?
Besides sedentary bubbas, the elderly, those with chronic illnesses, the very young, etc., I also don’t hold out much hope for most prepper types; they may have a zillion rounds of ammo and dozens of AR’s and AK’s. But have they ever been trained professionally? Ever in actual combat situations? Ever killed anybody or had someone with them killed? When the rubber hits the road, a lot of people are gonna be toast.
Leaving the pros and semi-pros, or former pros.
Here in Lower Alabama, at about 530 PM, I’m getting 12.98 upstream, and 2.12 down. My ISP, for those who care, is now called Wide Open West, f/k/a Knology.
And SteveB, I’m assuming that the bananas as protest are being sent by some poor soul three streets down, picked randomly out of a phone book / property listing, so that the SWAT folks never look towards you. 🙂
Not a protest.
Just a comment on the newest Banana Republic in this hemisphere…
At 6:35 PM I’m now getting 17.41 down and 12.27 up; both speeds far in excess of what we got from Fairpoint. However, it keeps dropping totally for some reason and each time I gotta re-set the modem. This, of course, is the hour when all the parents are home from work (those who still engage in such activity, on the day shift, that is…) and the kiddies are home from skool (unless they’re being raised by recalcitrant fascist/racist parents and are being home-brainwashed), reminiscent of ye wunnerful olden days of AO-Hell at this same hour. Everyone is logged in.
Time to go check the cable tee-vee and see what spiffy stuff is on nowadays; it’s been about nine years for Mr. and Mrs. OFD.
Oh, and Mrs. OFD, a noted Star Fleet Academy graduate, summa cum laude, who left her laptop at the work site the other day (thankfully locked up) has now left her pocketbook (with the phone and wallet in it) in her colleague’s car, who had since left for home at the end of the week (Harrisburg). Said colleague will Fed-X it to her but she won’t get it until noon tomorrow and thus won’t be home tomorrow afternoon after all. Maybe late tomorrow night or Sunday. You can’t make this stuff up.
I’ll be off to the VA Med Center down in lovely White River Junction tomorrow AM for a standard med checkup, a 2.5-hour drive each way. Back for the remaining daylight to try to do some yard work.
Am reading a new apocalyptic EMP book, “77 Days in September” about a dude walking from Houston to home in Montana. All he has is a cart of his stuff and a .22 LR Marlin rifle with two bricks of ammo (1000 rounds). He refuses to shoot a man who steals his cart in Colorado and in turn is shot by the man. Then he kills the man. About halfway through so far.
There seems to be a LOT of these apocalyptic EMP speculative fiction books.
Bought two double boxes (100 rounds each) of .22 LR CCI ammo in match grade the other day for $15 each at Academy. Academy still has two box purchase limits for .22 LR ammo. And, I like CCI ammo because it comes in plastic cases of 100 rounds instead of 50 rounds. Were solid bullets instead of JHP bullets. Not sure that matters for .22 LR.
BTW, I have not seen a brick of .22 LR ammo for sale in a long time.
Note to self, buy a couple more of the Ruger 10-22 rifles. Might be a good apocalyptic party favor.
And .22 LR nine shot revolver. Or two.
http://www.basspro.com/Taurus-94-Small-Frame-Revolver/product/10218173/
And SteveB, I’m assuming that the bananas as protest are being sent by some poor soul three streets down, picked randomly out of a phone book / property listing, so that the SWAT folks never look towards you.
Have you tried to mail anything weighing a pound or more lately? You need an photo ID. It is as bad as getting on a plane. Or a train.
“Note to self, buy a couple more of the Ruger 10-22 rifles.”
Try to grab one of the TakeDown models; they’re really cool. Packs up in its own bag when broken down, plenty of room for a scope and ammo. Easy to tote along in a backpack or in a vehicle.
I’ll have to see if that photo ID thang is the same here for mailing more than a pound.
I have DSL from Centurylink (local land line provider) which is supposed to be 40 meg down and 20 meg up. I get about 90 to 95% of that. Their customer service is far better than Comcast and they guaranteed my rate for 5 years without locking me into a contract.
Rick in Portland
“Note to self, buy a couple more of the Ruger 10-22 rifles.”
Try to grab one of the TakeDown models; they’re really cool. Packs up in its own bag when broken down, plenty of room for a scope and ammo. Easy to tote along in a backpack or in a vehicle.
I almost bought one of those while I was in Academy the other day, $349 in stainless:
http://www.ruger.com/products/1022Takedown/models.html
Watched some of the PBS News Hour; the political talking heads still profess to believe in the party system, elections and the ancient paradigms of Left and Right. What a hoot. And then I checked O’Reilly on Fox; what a blowhard cretin; he had some Latino anchor on who was whining how they didn’t get enough, and Billy Boy said well now the dreamers can come out of the shadows, etc. I almost puked up my pretzels.
Shitloads of college basketball channels and college hockey; crappy sitcoms and reruns of “dramas” that were on the air years ago. Jeez. Tuned into the BBC-America and watching Doctor Who and whatever’s on after that, maybe. Hit the sack early for early AM drive to WRJ VA Med Center.
Dave;
Your problems with the 3T My Book may be due to how it is partitioned. MBR drives have a maximum size of 2T. To see more than this the drive needs have a GPT partition table. XP and earlier can not access GPT discs. You may also have to install a SES driver. Just a thought. My 3T My Book was just plug and play with Linux but was aggravating to get to work with Win 7 (needed the SES driver) and will never work (as a 3T drive) with XP.
Thanks, Rolf; I think I’m gonna take up Dr. Bob’s suggestion and hook it up with two other partially defunct external drives in an e-SATA rack and to one of the Linux machines, probably either the Ubuntu Studio one or the one I’m converting from Mint to either CentOS 7 or RHEL 7. One of them is bound to work, eh?
Wow, the modern Doctor Who shows suck; I liked the earlier ones; Tom Baker was the best Doctor.
Pretty darn classy, Canada!
Yep. Canada is a classy country.
Oh, and Mrs. OFD, a noted Star Fleet Academy graduate, summa cum laude, who left her laptop at the work site the other day (thankfully locked up) has now left her pocketbook (with the phone and wallet in it) in her colleague’s car, who had since left for home at the end of the week (Harrisburg).
Does Mrs. OFD continually drop her cellphone in the toilet like MrsAtoz? It began a decade or more ago when she got her first Samsung clamshell up to her iPhone 5S. lol I kid you not! I have her “new” iPhone 5S in a waterproof, EMP hardened, shock proof, hermetically sealed case!
Don’t waste your money, not that I have anything against Ruger. I own several Rugers. The 10/22 is a nice little rifle, but it’s overpriced and its magazines even more so. That’s why I’m recommending the Marlin Model 60, which has a tube magazine. With a speed loader, you can reload it about as fast as changing 10/22 magazines and for a lot less money. The Model 60 is half the price of the 10/22, and a Spee-D-Loader that holds 8 tubes of 14 rounds each costs about $20.
And .22 LR nine shot revolver. Or two.
Why does that model continually get bad reviews? Anybody here have one?
That Canadian clip almost made me weep. Damn. Do any Murkan crowds know the Canadian national anthem? And it was a hockey crowd, too. Amazing.
“Does Mrs. OFD continually drop her cellphone in the toilet like MrsAtoz?”
No, but close. She’s dropped at least one in a pond while canoeing. Princess has lost I don’t know how many, plus chargers. And taken other peoples’ chargers without telling them and they’re never seen again. I keep all my phone stuff close to hand and away from them. Don’t get me started on laptops and netbooks.
Can you imagine me giving her a handgun to CCW with?
This almost sounds like OFD blogging under a pseudonym:
“But the vast number of central and South (and North — Mexico) Americans who are now celebrating and the number of Americans mourning the invasion are both being fooled by the man who never tells a truth if he can tell a lie. When they wake up and read the fine print, they’ll find none of this is was they think. It’s just President Goldman Sachs favoring his cronies again.
“There will be a clean up. There has to be a clean up because economics is a harsh and unforgiving mistress. Our job is to stay focused on what is real, not on the aristos’ sleight of hand. Because we’re going to have a heck of time preventing our government defaulting to historically probably “strong man” when the crash comes. Until then, keep your mind sharp, stop panicking and remember: In the end we win, they lose. It must be so for the sake of our children.”
“Right now, I’m writing about keeping insulin cool as a short-term solution and about isolating insulin from animal pancreata as a long-term solution.”
When did animal insulin first make it to end users? My mother’s mum acquired Type I Diabetes in about 1936, mum said animal insulin had just become available here…
“I went to grad school at RIT in Rochester, NY (well, actually, RIT is located in South Henrietta, NY, but that acronym apparently didn’t cut it.) ”
I don’t get it. Why not? 🙂
OFD scripsit:
“Montreal’s downtown and university and shopping mall area is also connected by tunnels, for the same reason. Princess knows them full well. Here in Retroville, though, we just cowboy up and deal wid it.”
How is the old girl? I just created a couple of new toons in World of Warcraft, and so had to deal with her again… 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RmjOCB17CY
My Speedtest result was
10 ms ping, 82.5 Mbps down, 2.4 Mbps up using the 800 pound gorilla of the Australian telecommunications market: Telstra (cable.)
OFD scripsit:
“Wow, the modern Doctor Who shows suck; I liked the earlier ones; Tom Baker was the best Doctor.”
I never got started on Dr Who. I loved Blakes 7 though. The BBC sure makes good television.
The funny (sad?) thing is, there are probably more Canadians that know the words to the US anthem than our own.
Speaking of acronyms that don’t work, I’m reminded that the First United Church of Kelowna wanted to use the obvious acronym for their website.
I like the US, French and old Soviet (Stalin era) national anthems better than my own. Can’t say I’ve ever heard the Canukistan national anthem… 🙂
Hockey Crowd in Pittsburgh Sings Along to ‘O Canada’ Following Shooting
Perhaps not as audible or spontaneous, but certainly as heartfelt.
bgrigg, would the Knights of Christianity United in Faith URL be better?
Just for anyone who hasn’t realised that the UN and its committees are a bunch of whackjobs…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-22/isolating-ebola-ridden-countries-act-of-discrimination-says-un/5911148
and two guys now in their forties who raped and murdered as teenagers should be allowed parole…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-22/teens-imprisonments-in-breach-of-human-rights/5911360
Yet another thing the world owes Canada for. Banting and Best in 1921/22.
Just in time. My maternal grandmother was kept alive for 28 years by insulin.
Maybe so, but Canada still has a long way to go to make up for Terrance and Phillip. Blame Canada!
Yes, blame Canada for cartoon characters created by Americans, when Celine Dion exists… 🙂
And Justin Bieber or however you spell it.
Celine is cute… 🙂
She isn’t, really. Makeup, lighting, good choice of camera angle, and maybe retouching afterward do what nature did not.
Not as attractive as Chelsea, I’d have to agree… 🙂
Bob, you shouldn’t have named He Who Should Not Be Named!
Note to self, buy a couple more of the Ruger 10-22 rifles. Might be a good apocalyptic party favor.
Don’t waste your money, not that I have anything against Ruger. I own several Rugers. The 10/22 is a nice little rifle, but it’s overpriced and its magazines even more so. That’s why I’m recommending the Marlin Model 60, which has a tube magazine. With a speed loader, you can reload it about as fast as changing 10/22 magazines and for a lot less money. The Model 60 is half the price of the 10/22, and a Spee-D-Loader that holds 8 tubes of 14 rounds each costs about $20.
Hi Bob, I love the magazine on that 10-22. I have about a dozen of them in 10, 25 and drum (100 if I remember correctly):
http://www.cheaperthandirt.com/product/7-MTEN22
That Marlin 60 does look very nice, $169 as Bass Pro. The Ruger 10-22 at Bass Pro is $249. But I have to admit that I like that Takedown model for $349, stainless and removable barrel.
http://www.basspro.com/Marlin-60-Rifle/product/10217878/
The Ruger 10-22 is an awesome plinker. I taught my son how to shoot using it when he was 6? 8? I’ve never shot the Marlin, is it as easy to use?
Yes, the Marlin Model 60 was introduced in 1960, and has been the best-selling .22 RF rifle ever since. I bought my first one when I was 14 years old, but it disappeared somewhere over the next 45+ years. Barbara and I just bought one more for each of us. I think we paid $160 each at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
As I said, I like Ruger guns (some of which are now made about 25 miles from here), and I do like the 10/22. If you already have plenty of magazines for it, great. I intend to buy one or two of their new AR-556 M16-pattern rifles as soon as I can actually find them in stock.
And .22 LR nine shot revolver. Or two.
http://www.basspro.com/Taurus-94-Small-Frame-Revolver/product/10218173/
Why does that model continually get bad reviews? Anybody here have one?
Ruger makes a eight shot .22 LR revolver that may be a better gun than the Taurus but is much more expensive:
http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.aspx?Item=454437515
I would like to get a 22 revolver for my 73 year old mother when my Dad travels. They are having problems with house breakins in their neighborhood in Port Lavaca. She is not very strong, walks with a cane, and needs something lightweight that she can just point and fire. Dad has been talking about getting her a 20 gauge shotgun but I maintain that even a 410 is too much for her.
I love Rugers and Smith & Wessons but they are all heavy. Maybe that is why they are so good?
My Charter bulldog .44 special is light and holds five .44 specials but kicks like a mule. It might be better to throw it at somebody.
A revolver for your mom; one that can fire .22 WMR, like this one:
http://www.taurususa.com/product-details.cfm?id=367&category=Revolver
AFTER decent training by you or whomever. And regular practice. Get a dog and alarms and put timers on lights and radios, etc. Don’t just rely on the firearm.
There’s always a tradeoff with firearms in terms of weight and recoil, just the way it is. .357 mags outta my snubby are kick-ass flamethrowers. I use .38 +P in that.
I will be beating you all on Net speed, as I just signed up for fiber to the house on Friday. It will be their slowest — 30 up and 300 down. Two weeks wait before the installation. AT&T has just tried again to more than double my rates. Bye, bye, AT&T — you slimebag bastards. I have spent more time fighting AT&T for the last 5 years than almost any other thing I do in life, including so much time on hold with them a few months ago, that I exceeded my 500 minutes/month allotment for landline calls. Just a sign to me that our so-called ‘service economy’ ain’t worth nothin’. Customer service in this country is the absolute pits in everything. Had to actually fight with Walmart on the last 2 returns with them — when one was a visibly broken device, right out of the box. I avoid Walmart whenever possible now, and have only been there once since July.
My new provider is an Indiana company, and a friend in another town, served by them, said the best thing about them, is that you will never, ever have a reason to call them after the installation is confirmed as up and running. My outages with AT&T have been frequent, and as long as 6 hours long.
Hey OFD, do you have one of those .22 LR Taurus’s with the nine shot cylinder? If so, does it fire ok with normal effort out of the box? The reviews at Bass Pro are disturbing. Whereas I have never seen a bad Ruger gun.
Mom and Dad’s house is very narrow with a central corridor. She normally stays at the far end of the house, about 50 ft away from the front door. She is very concerned that she will come out of the back of the house someday when Dad is gone and find someone in the central portion. She is a fanatic about keeping the front door locked but that seems to not be stopping people very much nowadays.
I maintain that a small .22 revolver is easy for her to carry in her pocket around the house. But too small has a lot of recoil.
Congrats, Mr. Chuck; we spent five weeks hassling with Fairpoint. So fah Comcast is OK but not at those speeds. Still, WAY bettuh than Fairpoint.
“Hey OFD, do you have one of those .22 LR Taurus’s with the nine shot cylinder?”
Nope. A Taurus 7-shot .357 4″ and a Taurus 5-shot .357 snubby.
You’ll have to bring your mom with you, I recommend, to try out some .22 revolvers; surely there are scads of gun shops and stores and ranges in the Great Lone Star State, amirite?
But it also sounds like you need to take a good look at her security situation in that residence, in re: doors and windows, for starters. And move on from there, to lights, timers; has she got a dog? Any dog will do, if it barks at suspicious noises, etc. Alarm the premises with connection to local security or PD?
Frankly, we intend to replace our front and rear doors with both steel doors and steel frames at some point. And deadbolt locks. Plus outside motion-detector floods, of which we have one already. Window locks on the ground-floor windows; there aren’t any on the cellar and no bulkhead entrance to it. If we’re gone for any length of time, the dog is there; if we take him with us, we fire up the timers for random on-off on lights and radios. Shades and curtains closed.
And we’re both pretty sizable and potentially intimidating peeps; your mom honestly needs better security there; dunno what the ‘hood is like, but bad guys is all around, and likely to multiply if things get bad in this country.