I found a couple of new (to me) pix of the character Togusa wielding his Mateba 357 Magnum from Ghost in the Shell.


This one doesn't show any really good detail, but it's fairly clear that his revolver is different.


This one shows a great view of how different the Mateba is.

My favorite episode of GITS is called, I think, "One Angry Man."  The rest of Section 9 carry semi-auto handguns in 5.7mm.  Togusa is the only one who uses an archaic weapon:  the Mateba auto-revolver, which in the time frame of the story, is considered obsolete.  In "One Angry Man," Togusa comes across a full prosthetic man (basically a human brain in an android body) attacking a woman.  Togusa shoots the attacker six times, then reloads and shoots him again, trying to disable his prosthetic body without killing him.  Although the man is badly damaged, he still manages to shoot and kill the woman he was originally attacking.

Then a lawyer tries to show that Togusa was at fault for the woman's death--not her real attacker, but Togusa--because he was using an old, obsolete weapon instead of something more modern that was capable of more rapid fire and that could fire more rounds before requiring reloading.  I've always thought that that was exactly the kind of insane argument that could actually happen in today's screwed-up world.

Misty moon-clouds fly--
This is where coyotes sing,
Drawing down the night.

Created with this.

Thanks to One Monkey's Typewriter.

This looks like something I could have a lot more fun with.  Maybe also figure out a good way to clean up the background.

UPDATE:  Improved the graphic a little.

CafePress is ending their whatever-it's-called thing that I had in the left sidebar, so it's now gone.  Maybe I'll come up with something else to put there so the sidebars are balanced.

I've moved a few blogs from the "Other Worthy Blogs" list to the "Regular Reads" list, deleted a few that have gone silent for too long and two that I couldn't in good conscience provide links to anymore.

The post I was having trouble with was the one about Hogzilla.  For some reason it just wouldn't post.  I had to retype the whole thing manually instead of copying and pasting.  Very odd, but at least I finally got it to go through.

Been trying to think up some t-shirt ideas or something.  I have one, but am having trouble executing it.

It's still threatening to rain, but only threatening.

In all the furor over the most recent giant hog killing, most people seem to have overlooked the fact that there was already a feral hog bigger than the fabled Hogzilla.  I blogged about it last January.

No need to post the photo of the most recent specimen here, it's been all over the place already.  I want to talk about the person who shot this beast.

Jamison Stone is 11 years old.  He stands 5 feet, 5 inches high.  He took this huge hog with a 500 Smith & Wesson Magnum.  Jamison and his dad tracked this hog for more than three hours.  During this time, Jamison fired 16 rounds.

So the next time you hear someone complain about a 357 Magnum having "too much recoil," make sure they know about Jamison Stone and his 500 S&W Magnum.

Well, it seems there's something about a certain post that Eponym doesn't like.  I can't get it to post.  I'll try again later, and see if this one works.

We are waiting for the severe weather that is supposed to be heading this way, and the kids are outside playing in the mud from yesterday's rain.  Not really mud.  We don't get mud in the sandhills, we just get wet sand.  Although I suppose there might be some real mud on the patch of red clay in the driveway.

And I am enjoying some Don't Tread On Me from the recent tobacco shipment.


Smoking it in the old Kaywoodie author, which is a pipe that I have been bound and determined to figure out.  It has an unusually wide bowl mouth, which means it has to be smoked and lit a little more carefully than most of my pipes.  It has a good shape, though, very elegant bowl design and just enough bend to be comfortable without being pretentious.  It also took me a while to figure out what to smoke in it.  I've said before, but will say again, that not every pipe can smoke every tobacco.  Certain tobaccos just won't taste the same in certain pipes.  Some tobaccos will smoke hot in one pipe and not hot in another.  Estate pipes, like this one, are especially tricky because you don't have any idea what the previous owner used to smoke in it, and a pipe can become "seasoned" toward a particular flavor.  I learned pretty quickly that the author is not a Latakia pipe.  However, it most definitely can smoke this stuff.  Man, this is good.  Here's an old pic of the author that I took by laying the pipe on my scanner.


I heard on the news a few weeks ago, after that last rainy period, that we are seven inches above our normal average rainfall for this time of year.  My dad hasn't even had to water his garden this year, and as I mentioned before, he has a surplus of pinto beans.  The beans we picked a couple of weeks ago are so good, I am amazed (or perhaps, re-amazed) at how good garden fresh beans are.  They are so sweet, they are almost like eating candy.

Gardens are hard to grow in the sandhills.  The topsoil here has no nutrients at all.  When I was a kid, we spent several weekends one summer hauling pickup loads of chicken manure from my uncle's farm in Poth (long "o") and spreading it on what would be our future garden.  One of my summer chores, as a kid, was to shovel cow manure from our cow pens into a wheel barrow and roll it to the garden and spread it out.  It took years to get some decent garden-growing topsoil established there.  I might also mention that my dad's "garden" covers about two acres.  So that was a whole bunch of wheel barrows.

Quote from Christopher Buckley, as seen at John Lott's Website:

There are two political parties: the stupid party and the evil party. I am a member of the stupid party. Every once in a while we get bipartisan legislation where we are able to obtain legislation that is simultaneously stupid and evil.

I've been having trouble posting.  Some very short test posts were okay, but longer posts aren't going through.  We'll see if this one works.

As others have already mentioned, Texas handgun license records are now sealed:

The names of people licensed to carry concealed handguns in Texas are no longer available to the public.

Gov. Rick Perry announced Thursday that he signed into law House Bill 991, which seals state records showing who is allowed to carry a gun in public. Only law enforcement agencies will have access to the information.

The law took effect immediately upon its signing Wednesday.

Nothing like a little personal motivation to get a law changed.

So...up yours, Express-News.