This a Velani in the Dublin shape, but is unusually large for a Dublin, and is one of my more pretentious pipes.  It has very thick bowl walls and smokes anything I put in it very well.  I just finished an experimental bowl in it and I have to claim a rousing success.

The "pretentious" thing is sort of a private joke.  The elderly penpal that I mentioned yesterday once wrote me that young men should smoke only straight pipes--bent pipes make a young man look pretentious.  I always thought that was kind of funny.  I've always preferred bents, and although I'm not such a young man anymore, I still look a lot younger than I am.

Anyway, the experiment that I've been wanting to try was to mix some of Cornell & Diehl's Gray Ghost with some straight Perique.  Earlier today I mixed up 4 grams, 3g Gray Ghost to one gram Perique.  I may try more variations of this, but so far this 3:1 mix has worked out very well.  I put it in a ziplock baggie and shook it up to mix it together, then squished it all into a clump, sealed the baggie, and put it aside for several hours.  I just finished a bowl in the above pipe and it was very good.

This mixture sets a whole new level of robustness for me.  The Ghost is already a very robust blend which I've mentioned before, a blend of Virginia and maduro cigar leaf.  The Perique has added a new dimension to it.  I'm no good at describing tobacco flavors/smells, but this one is dark, strong, and no-nonsense.  I might have to build up a new level of tolerance for this one.

I need to think up a good name for it.  A couple I'm considering are Nightgaunt or Rebel Rouser.  Although I at first had thought of "Nightgaunt," and I like the idea of a pipe tobacco with a Lovecraftian name, I think "Rebel Rouser" is more appropriate.


This is John Singleton Mosby, who attained the rank of Colonel in the Confederate Army by the end of the Civil War.  It is after him that C&D's Gray Ghost is named.

It was Lincoln himself who named Mosby "The Gray Ghost." The Union Army's biggest fear in Washington was that Mosby would kidnap Lincoln from right beneath their nose. Lincoln, upon hearing several of his generals discussing Mosby and their fears, loudly announced, "Listen to you men, you speak of Mosby as though he is a ghost, a gray ghost." It wasn't until after the war that Mosby learned of this and that the nickname stuck.

So you can see why I think "Rebel Rouser" might be a more appropriate name.

The first 4-ounce pack is now on eBay.

So far one free sample has been claimed and the other has been put on hold pending receipt of the smail-mail address.

My first attempt at GIMPing (because I don't have Photoshop).  Original at Cowboy Blob's.


It may not be an absolutely accurate use of the word "squamous," but it is a catchy rhyme.

Oh, and I meant to say "turbid miasma," not "torpid miasma."  I got my turbid prose mixed up.

UPDATE:  Fixed the torpid/turbid thing.

I usually post an old pipe ad on Sunday morning.  This is technically a tobacco ad, I guess for  either chewing tobacco or roll-your-own cigarettes (neither of which are definitely not my thing), but I still got a kick out of it.

UPDATE:  Where did that double negative come from?  I meant to say "both of which are definitely not my thing."

The 5-day forecast for my area.  Yesterday it hit 102 at my house at 2:30 in the afternoon.  Then some clouds boiled up and it spattered a little rain.  It was 74 when I woke up this morning at around 5:30, which is 4-5 degrees warmer (for the morning low) than it has been the past few days.  More cloud cover keeps the temperature up at night, so maybe we will get some rain.  It's at least 20 minutes past sunrise now, and it's still pretty gloomy outside.

I was planning on doing some shooting this week, so I'm hoping I get some relief from the heat.  I'm not worried about rain.  I can get around that.

The odd-looking critter found in Maine is just a dog, according to HealthGene Corp.

Noted in this report is that it had blue eyes, which I don't remember reading anywhere else before.  Possibly a Husky mix?  Or one of those other northern dogs?  I'm not very familiar with those.  I'm more of a hound and cowdog kind of guy.  Some cowdogs have blue eyes, but I don't think this dog in Maine had any cowdog in him.

NewsBusters has a Rebuttal to James Alan Fox by Howard Nemerov that's a good read:

Professor Fox’s maundering is based upon the unproven assumption that more gun control will lead to less violence. He believes that being a university professor entitles him to dictate public policy, and our request for supporting statistics is irrelevant because we are not part of his Ivory Tower clique. He uses his command of the English language to create subtle innuendos to label us gun-fetishists and paranoids, and to imply that we have taken the government hostage like so many terrorists.

The original article which is being rebutted is linked to from this page, but it has been archived and I can't find it.

It isn't a very long rebuttal, but it's full of good information and has a long list of endnotes to back it up.

Well, I thought it was funny.  I just deleted some trackback spam, but I also kind of got a kick out of it.  It didn't have anything to do with sexual performance, losing weight, hot stock tips, possibly illicit medications, or any of that stuff.

It went to the website of a yacht designer.  Yes, a guy who designs yachts.  I actually followed it a few links into his site to make sure that's what it really was.