Atomic Nerds

Busy/cranky as the End of Year Curse continues to frolic- and by the by, I’d like to locate whoever is apparently busing people into White Rock so that the grocery store has been like a Calcutta riot the last several consecutive times we’ve been there- but here, have a brief bitch.

Those people? We all know them, and many of them have jobs in the media? Who find every twitch, tic, movement, and minor appearance by Sarah Palin to be both absolutely riveting and hysterically funny in the god-she’s-so-awful way?

This cartoon. Particularly the third panel. You’ll see the one I mean.

Roberta sounds off on freedom of what and who should have it.

Sing it, sister.

Because of gizmos like this. That’s right, instead of the clunky interface of thinking where you want the cursor to go, sending a signal all the way through various motor control circuits, getting onto the spinal on-ramp, finding the right-arm exit, and navigating through the various finger suburbs to click on the n00b camping the spawn point, you just look and think about it now.

I’d heard about this thing a while ago, but until recently I honestly wasn’t sure it wasn’t a hoax. I mean, normally something like this comes with the warning that you have to think in Russian for it to work. From what I understand, the learning curve is damn steep, and the benefits for twitch gaming (the intended audience) are maybe not that spectacular, but that is beside the damn point. The damn point is using your brain directly to control the magic box, and for less than than the average bitter clinger spent on magazines or ammo after That One was elected. That means an extra hand free to drink coffee with. Two cups of coffee at once and still surfing! This is the promised land, people!

‘Course if they come out with a similar device for keyboards, this little blog will look even more like it’s written by a monkey with Tourette’s.

Since a goodly portion of our blogroll has noted with some disappointment the onset of colder weather and generally winter-like conditions, it seemed a good time offer some comfort food that’ll stick to your ribs through the most blustery of nights, even though we’ve only had a handful of days where the temps got below the 60s so far this season. Be forewarned, this recipe originally billed itself as serving four. I suspect this was a miscommunication as it is filling enough, and in quantity enough to serve four teenagers. Or Marines. It’s a lot of damn food, ok? Right, here we go.

4lbs country spareribs
1 cup chicken stock
3 medium carrots cut into 1/2″ chunks
2 cups coarsley chopped onions
1lb potatoes (yukon gold preferred, but reds work pretty well as well) peeled and diced large or quartered depending on the size of the spud
1/2 lb turnips, peeled and quartered
2 (or lots more to taste) large cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
Salt & Pepper to taste
Thyme (1 sprig fresh, eyeball to taste if using dried)

Fire up the broiler to hot and brown the pork on all sides - save any fat and grease that renders out. About 4″ from the heat does nicely. Preheat the oven to 350F. Combine all the veggies in a 5 1/2 qt Dutch oven with some salt and pepper. Put the pork on top of the plant matter, and drizzle in the fat from browning. Add 1/4 - 1/2 cup of the stock to keep things from burning, put the thyme on top of the pork, lid it up, and chuck it in the oven for 2-3 hours. Peek in every now and then, and if things are looking a bit dry, add more of the stock.

Serve with spicy mustard or horseradish, and note with wonderment how what looked like a pretty reasonably sized portion when you first sat down is suddenly multiplying of its own volition on your plate while you loosen your belt. Start looking for friends and family to pawn the leftovers off to. Sigh contentedly and park in front of a fire or heater, or under a blanket with a good book. Ignore any ghosts who may appear, they’re just a bit of underdone potato.

If you’re in a technical or hard-science field, chances are if you’ve not heard this joke in particular, you’ve heard several of its cousins. The engineer, the physicist, and the mathematician are as instrumental to science jokes as the priest, the rabbi, and the minister are to religious jokes. This is my favorite, and goes as follows (hat tip to the science jokes archive)….

An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist went to the races one Saturday and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the engineer says,

“I don’t understand why I lost all my money. I measured all the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and figured out how fast they could run…”

The physicist interrupted him: “…but you didn’t take individual variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous performances and bet on the horses with the highest
probability of winning…”

“…so if you’re so hot why are you broke?” asked the engineer. But before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his
secret.

“Well,” he says, between puffs on the pipe, “first I assumed all the horses were identical and spherical…”

We have a saying in our culture: “Numbers don’t lie.” While it is true that you can’t argue the results of two plus two into being six, or even “three and a bit”, math is merely an abstract logical structure- as long as you follow the rules, you will get the same result every time… depending on the inputs. If your inputs are incorrect, or if you left out a variable, you will get the same wrong answer every time. Programmers, who have to deal with this reality on a professional basis- feed a computer the wrong inputs and it will instantly cease to work- have a characteristic pithy acronym for this: GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Computers, however, are a very limited and simplified branch of reality. Most of the time when we use math, it’s in an attempt to describe some highly complex phenomenon; to give a simple and obvious example, there’s an equation that biology students learn, the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium. It describes the frequency with which you may expect to find a given allele in a population, and it looks like this: (p+q)² = p² + 2pq + q² The p variable is one allele, the q variable another; each squared term represents homozygotes, the 2pq the heterozygotes.

Of course, the catch is that in order for a population of creatures to be in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium as described by the equation, there has to be no mutation, no natural selection, no genetic flow or drift, and totally random mating- in other words, there is actually no such thing as a population of real organisms in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The equation is not useless- it’s a brief algebraic proof that genetic variability will be maintained with no selective pressures at all required, which was a big deal in the infancy of population genetics and still something students need to understand when they’re coming to grips with how evolution works. Hardy-Weinberg populations are spherical racehorses- abstract descriptors of a concept, simplified to make the math doable. If you tried to include all the variables that describe a real population, the math would rapidly become completely unworkable; even if you managed to put absolutely every single possible variable in your equation, the equation would become instantly useless the second something changed, which happens pretty much every second in a system as complex as a biological one. The more “macro” the biological system, the worse it gets, because all parts start to effect one another in major ways and become impossible to detangle.

Now, psychology comes into play. There’s a pernicious phenomenon in biology- and I suspect a lot of the other sciences perceived to be “softer”- called physics envy. Because so much of biology must be described and approximated, and cannot even remotely be represented with numbers and equations that elegantly predict with perfection, people have this way of thinking about it as though it were therefore less “real” than classical physics, in which, so long as you have all the required data (numbers), you can make completely confident predictions with ease. An astronomer can know exactly where Jupiter will be in a hundred years; an animal behaviorist can only predict what a blue jay is going to be doing ten minutes from now with about ninety percent accuracy. (Forget about an hour from now unless it’s the dead of night. Even then, complete surprises are possible.) Physics is the quest for definable variables in a system that can be agreeably reduced and expanded*; biology is the quest for patterns in apparent chaos, much of which simply can’t be reduced without destroying the system in the process. This is why you can take a clock apart and put it back together and still come up with a working clock, but you can’t do the same to a giraffe.

Still, though, numbers are comfortingly solid, and models unquestionably have their uses. Things like the Hardy-Weinberg model are transparently just abstract illustrations of concepts because it’s basically obvious that it assumes conditions that never exist, but it’s about the simplest example of a model I could come up with- most are much more complex, like optimal foraging models. The very best models identify the most influential variables in a given system, and can describe many different kinds of related systems- and the very best users of models recognize that the point at which the model is the most useful is when it fails, because then it becomes an effective way to discover previously unconsidered but highly influential factors.

This is where the psychology comes in: people get really, really attached to models, the same way they get attached to simple ideas that accurately describe most of their experiences. Models (or grand theories of society, if you like) are extremely useful and pleasant to deal with; they simplify phenomena that are simply too complex to think about, and present a clear range of options and optimal choices. Models are friendly and easy to work with; reality is messy and frequently comes with sharp edges. If the model was good or even halfway decent, then every experience that the model predicted and described accurately reinforces the model and rewards the individual using it. When the model fails in an unexpected fashion, it’s psychologically much easier to discard the data than it is to discard the model, or to go investigate intensively why it failed. The dog trainer who immediately assumes that any failure of his training methods has to do with “user error” (which, bear in mind, is in fact common- but if the model fails to take into account common patterns of user error, that’s still not a good model), the social theorist who explains every societal problem in terms of race or class or religion, the economist who ascribes all financial woes as either too much or too little regulation, or the psychologist who thinks all common marital problems amount to a misunderstanding of “male” or “female” nature… they are all victims of this kind of thinking.

Neo-neocon has a post up today explaining a specific aspect (hardly the only one) involved in our current economic problems- the question of just why people who deal with finances for a living, smart people with perfectly functional reasoning skills and access to history books, could possibly assume that they could continue to behave as though certain kinds of market values would rise indefinitely, and as though they could turn bad debt into good merely through “diversifying”. The answer boils down, once again, to models- computer-run mathematical models showing just that result, which were apparently irrefutable. The problem was that the models made a number of assumptions which were quite simply fatal to the model as a completely accurate descriptor of reality- for example, that all people have infinite market knowledge and always behave in a completely rational fashion**. The assumptions were built into the model to make the math doable, and the models worked amazingly well in that self-reinforcing fashion, until they quite simply didn’t.

The second reason this problem is so endemic, especially across fields in which the participants must trust numbers because there’s nothing else even remotely reliable TO trust, is that while numbers themselves may not lie, it’s really damn easy to manipulate them so that, in effect, that’s exactly what they will do, given the right audience. If the audience is not both suspicious and familiar enough with the kinds of number manipulations being performed, they can be firmly brought to a conclusion that is actually either completely unsupported by the data- or is actually OPPOSITE to the data. People are not basically inclined to question the numbers that “don’t lie”, and they don’t necessarily recognize a spherical racehorse when they see one- and therefore it is extremely easy for any motivated party to create a powerful persuasive tool out of a bad model and a bit of unfamiliar statistical manipulation.

If you have a strong interest or cause, you can probably bring up a dozen examples of how this is done on a regular basis. Maybe you’re an advocate for gun rights, and you know every deceptive, slimy study and report that’s ever done such things as including suicides in gun-violence statistics, or including all individuals up to the age of 21 in a study about gun deaths in “children”. Perhaps your crusade for individual liberties is against the nanny-state “for your health” agenda, and you know what was done with studies on second-hand smoke- in which the data (and the reporting) were essentially massaged until the desired conclusion was reached. I follow the creationist/”intelligent design” movement, and I can give you an earful of how blatantly they’ve exploited the faith in math- essentially creating a mathematical theorem that supposedly renders evolution impossible, but contains assumptions even its creator openly admits do not apply to life on Earth. Nonetheless, among the receptive, the notion that intelligent design has been proven mathematically (and is therefore now irrefutable) persists.

Keep these lessons firmly in mind whenever someone pushing something you’re NOT familiar with is making their case with models and statistics- they may not necessarily be wrong, but that doesn’t mean the horses really ARE spherical and identical, either.

*The historical (and in some quarters, ongoing) reaction of physicists to quantum mechanics has to give any “soft” scientist a warming glow of schadenfreude.

**Exercise for the reader: how many political theories also contain this assumption, tweaked a bit as appropriate?

First, a little bit of background biological trivia. There will not be a quiz later, but I promise it is relevant to the story.

Cats, unlike dogs, need to learn how to properly kill prey from another cat, which will almost certainly be their mother. While you can see puppies descended from generations of show-ring ancestors practicing their killing bite-and-shake on a soft toy just as a matter of natural play, cats need to learn this behavior specifically- the stalk, chase, and pounce are built-in instinct, but the mechanics of the actual kill are not. Cats are one of the few predators that makes any special effort to kill large prey before it settles down to a meal rather than merely hoping to impede or immobilize it; most of us are familiar with near-surgical bite to the back of the neck to sever the spinal cord, but fewer have watched and understood footage of a lion or leopard firmly clamped on a large ungulate’s throat; the cat is not trying to “go for the jugular”, which is actually quite difficult to do properly, but to cut off its trachea and suffocate it. Useful tactics for a short-winded but powerful ambush predator but less so for a high-stamina chase-and-slasher, these techniques are apparently sufficiently advanced that they require enough education of young that the more rudimentary final-kill skills have faded from the library of instinctual behavior. Suffice to say, a domestic cat born to non-hunting indoor parents will not know how to kill prey. Our Siamese, Zydeco, is one such cat- fantastic enthusiasm and stalk-and-pounce instincts, but no practical knowledge.

So it came to be last night that at some point well past a decent hour, Zydeco started up with his I-have-a-problem howl. Stingray and I were full of immediate dread- Zydeco’s range of potential problems is limited, and most often his problem turns out to be that he feels sick and is about to create a spectacular new carpet pattern. However, this time, he sounded oddly… muffled. We were still trying to figure out what in the seven hells was going on when it became apparent what his problem was: he had bolted into our bedroom carrying a mouse, which he didn’t know what to do with. Being a sociable and fairly clever cat, he’d brought his problem to us. Being very excited and very inexperienced, he promptly dropped and lost control of the mouse, which was now firmly OUR problem. A confused session of upending and shaking everything in the bedroom eventually failed to turn up a mouse, and we were thus forced to give up and go back to bed for some very uneasy rest. (The dogs, who were of the opinion that it was WAY past their bedtimes and certainly too late for this nonsense, refused to stir themselves for any of it.)

Fast forward to early this afternoon, and Stingray noticed that Zydeco seemed oddly interested in the fireplace. He loves the fireplace with all his heart and soul, but he’s not usually excited about it unless he sees someone loading wood in. Stingray correctly drew the conclusion that the mouse had found refuge somewhere inside the fireplace, and summoned me to get an appropriate capture device. After handing him a cardboard box (far too large) and a jug normally used for iced tea (opening far too narrow), Stingray settled on having me empty the ash bucket so he could use that. Eventually he applied his Leatherman to the task of disassembling the appropriate part of the fireplace insert, and the mouse made an immediate break for it. Zydeco, who had been ready for just this moment for the last ten minutes and possibly his entire life, immediately caught it and attempted to race off with it. Stingray, figuring he was clearly just going to drop it unharmed again, lunged for the cat and mouse and succeeded in dumping the rest of the ashes over the cat’s head while the mouse escaped behind the entertainment center. Zydeco’s mews of excitement turned into furious yowls of outrage. We, and the newly interested Kang, regrouped in front of the TV, bringing the pack up to four actively involved members with three species represented.

Eventually, we succeeded in harrying the mouse out from behind the TV and shelving, where it made a bold strike for the dining room with Kang in hot pursuit and the rest of us in slightly cooler pursuit. She probably would have caught it then and there if the entryway in between hadn’t been tile- she nearly spun out making the turn, and had to get her hind legs back under control. As it was, she succeeded in pinning it by the bookshelves in the dining room… and, because it was small enough to completely disappear beneath her big snowshoe paw, she became confused about where it had gone and managed to let it go in the process of figuring that out. The mouse found itself a new refuge under another set of shelves in the office, which fortunately for us has enough space underneath it to look under- and, with the help of tools, reach under. Kang and Zydeco covered each end while Stingray covered the middle. Some sorting-out followed while we determined where the mouse was and Zydeco established that no, Kang was NOT to muscle in on his position. (She apologized with lowered ears and a noselick, which he seemed to accept.) I prevented Kang from solving the problem by upending the bookshelf while we pondered how to proceed.

After a period that consisted mostly of cursing and furred members of the family circling like sharks, and also involved the amputation of the mouse’s tail at one point when Stingray was a fraction of a second too slow with the bucket, it was concluded that the dedicated household predators had failed and human tool use was necessary. After a fruitless search for Stingray’s air pistol, which we apparently have the box for but not the device itself, a certain amount of overkill was applied in the form of his air rifle. (It was less overkill than using the crossbow would have been, mind you.) While Kang and Zydeco enthusiastically covered for Stingray’s absence while he fetched the pellets, they were less enthusiastic about his return to the proceedings - alpha pack mate or not. Eventually he was able to get the muzzle threaded between wildly dancing paws of various sizes and line up a shot. Confirming a hit, he raked the mostly-dead mouse out from under the shelf with a fireplace poker, and stood triumphant, rifle and poker in hand while I put a plastic bucket over it to keep the animals off.

“HAH! BROKE INTO THE WRONG GOD DAMN REC ROOM DIDN’T YA?!*”

“Is it dead?”

“It was breathing.”

“What do we do with it?”

“Plastic bag?”

“It sounds like it’s gotten up again. We’ll need to figure out more than that.”

“What if we AAAAHHH NOOOOO ZYDECO NOT THE BUCKET GAH DAMMIT”

Zydeco, not to be denied his prize by mere humans at this late stage in the game, had used his paw to flip the bucket back over, grab the mouse, and bolt. Naturally, he dropped it again, where it attempted a very aborted scurry until Kang swooped in to intercept the dropped pass. At that point the question of the mouse’s final dispatch became moot; Kang definitely is not confused about how to kill prey. Since she surrendered it reasonably willingly, she was given several of the most prized sorts of dog cookies all at once while the plastic-bag plan was put into action. Zydeco was given a bit of cheese to mollify him while cleanup wrapped up.

If you’re wondering where Kodos was in all this, he was waiting by the back door for someone to notice him and let him out so he could go lie down in the cool breeze- he was almost completely distinterested in the whole affair, once he figured out what we were doing. While Akitas are supposed to be a hunting-and-guarding breed, our two have apparently split the tasks between them.

Matt and Steve have achieved cooperative three-species hunting parties in the form of raptors and dogs. While we may now technically claim the same honor, I somehow doubt that dog-and-Siamese hunting is going to catch on.

*Stingray has been waiting for ages to get a chance to use this line. Geek points for you if you recognize the source.

Because KB did it, that means I pretty much had to, right? Right.

Well, that’s what the site name says, right?

Yesterday’s post by my treacherous spouse was a work of pure and blatant revisionism.

First of all, while I may be a non-New-Mexican and an admitted spice wuss prior to moving here- and I admit I still do like things on the mild end of the spectrum even though I’ve come miles from where I was- I am not blind, and I am not illogical either.

He points to his father’s lifelong heavy smoking as evidence that the man is not to be trusted on matters spicy. Why he considers this evidence that his word is not to be trusted is an absolute mystery, given that heavy smoking- and age- deaden the palate, they don’t just “ruin” it. An older man who smokes becomes MORE heat-tolerant, not less- and he failed to mention that the parent in question IS a native to chile country, and has been eating the stuff since early childhood. He goes straight for the dishes labeled “for serious chile heads” in the favorite restaurant specializing in the local cuisine.

Speaking of said restaurant, the fact that Los Alamos itself is the most whitebread location in the state does not change the fact that where we go for serious local food is not IN Los Alamos- it’s in Espanola, a location where tourists rarely dare to set foot except in the pursuit of “real”, non-touristy New Mexican food. This restaurant is run, staffed by, and almost exclusively patronized by natives- and only ONCE have they ever served my husband a dish he classified as “hot”. (Meanwhile, it’s wiped out the rest of us repeatedly.) Not only that, but at at least two Thai restaurants, when ordering a “10” on the spicy scale, he has gone on to complain bitterly that the dishes in question had no bite at all- granted, this could be a phenomenon stemming from the assumption that the round-eyes don’t really want hot food, but no bite at all? Really?

As for the chili recipe he makes when catering to his own palate and not succumbing to the pleas for mercy for the rest of the family, yes, it involves one habanero… in addition to 2-3 Big Jims, a handful of jalapenos, and a half cup of locally produced chile powder.

Yes, he loves his breakfast burritos, and he doesn’t order them “Christmas”, but that’s a FLAVOR preference, not a heat preference issue, because I HAVE THE SAME DAMN THING and don’t find it overwhelmingly spicy. The locals like that place BECAUSE their chile is more about flavor than it is about Scoville units. Same for the Tabasco- I used to liberally flavor my pizza with garlic Tabasco BEFORE I moved here. This is normal-people spice tolerance.

I don’t know what the hell HE is, but “normal” ain’t it.

As with all marriages, there are points of disagreement in our house. Perhaps the single most divisive for us, is the small matter of spice.

The first thing to consider is that we reside, as oft mentioned, in New Mexico. Just as you can get beer anywhere in Germany, so too can you get green chile added to your cheeseburger with near ubiquity here. Including McDonald’s. I was born here, raised here, and generally fit the stereotype of having a Hatch green chile for a pacifier. LabRat, on the other hand, is an import from Phoenix by way of New Orleans - the former the source of the absolute blandest, worst Mexican food I have ever sampled (and don’t get me started on their take on “chili burgers”), the latter notorious for culinary excess of all stripes, including spice. I will grant I have a bit of a lead in development for spice tolerance and preference.

That said, I grow weary of the damn filthy lies spread by my supposedly beloved spouse in the realm of heat affinity. Were she to be believed, my recipe for chili would consist of four parts napalm, two parts magnesium flares. My mouth would be constructed of weapons grade asbestos, and fire would spring from my footprints in even the deepest snow. Clearly, these things are not so. While I do like things a tad hotter than average, I am simply a bit off center from the bell curve, not out on an extreme end of a tail.

LabRat points to those around me to shore up her flimsy position that I’m an outlier. She says my chili, prepared the way I like it, is too hot for my father, who she brands as having a tin palate. I say that for as much as he smokes, his opinion on matters of flavor are suspect. When discussing local purveyors of gastronomical heat, she once blurted words to the effect “It’s New Mexico! The local restaurants gauge their chile to local palates! NONE OF THEM serve anything you consider hot!” I counter that this is because the local cooks are good enough to know how much heat is required to make the dish into a good balance of flavor and heat, rather than just punishing the diner with an excess of scoville units, and that after all, this is Los Alamos, the whitest of the white-bread portions of this whole state, and generally not of an adventurous palate.

I will happily grant that I often start my day with a dose of red chile and chorizzo sausage in the form of a breakfast burrito (the ne plus ultra of breakfast foods, I might add) from a local hole-in-the-wall outfit, but given the size of the line usually to be found there, I’m not sure how that makes me unusual. A good many of the other patrons get their breakfast with red and green chile (a combination appropriately dubbed “Christmas”), so obviously I could be worse about what I like in the way of spicy food.

To play devil’s advocate, however, I must point out that even though I’m not that fond of Tabasco (though it is frequently tasty), I’m strangely drawn to this.

So remember, all you spice-weenies of the internet: Just because the sight of a pepper mill makes you reach for a big cold drink, the rest of us still probably dig a little heat.

Rumors of our slipped sanity leading to experiments with laser guided radioactive mutant monkeys are slightly exaggerated.

As LabRat mentioned in comments for yesterday, nothing particularly traumatic in and of itself happened, save one thing. Our tattoo artist went batshit and skipped the state. I don’t know all the details, and I don’t want to repeat things that may not be accurate, but what is known is that he walked off with a good size chunk of customer deposit money and left for what he apparently considers greener pastures. We were fortunate in that our long relationship with the shop meant that we didn’t have a deposit down, and Manny, the owner of Custom Tattoo was stand-up about the whole situation, preferring to break the news in person. After spending three or four years with Mark as our artist, with at least 60 hours of work between LabRat and I, this needless to say came as a bit of a shock. As Manny put it, it’s a kick in the dick. We suddenly feel like a neurotic person must when trying to pick out a new therapist. Again, we’re fortunate in that we already know both Manny and the other artist, Jason, to be highly skilled artists, so we didn’t have to look far to find someone to finish LabRat’s leg. Really, the worst part (to us) is just simply that he won’t be there anymore. Any time someone’s sense of humor and misanthropic outlook line up so neatly with our own, it sucks to have something like this happen, especially something this odd and out of character.

Moving on before this turns into a total drama laden tear fest, there is good news from the day as well. I mentioned that it looks like at least three more people are joining the pre-Obamaban gun rush, and three more armed citizens is always worth celebrating.

Some time back, a friend of mine started asking a few questions about firearms since he knew I was interested in the subject. His office wasn’t located in the most sterling part of Albuquerque (and his new office still isn’t exactly in a crime-free zone). We bantered back and forth a bit on the subject, and I answered his questions as they came up, and in general it was a pretty soft sell. He was one of those folks who support gun rights, but just wasn’t particularly interested in joining as a vested party. Yesterday, he and his wife joined us for a trip through a very well pecked over gun shop. We were along (aside from not turning away excuses to go to the gun store) to serve as someone with a bit of a clue to help out - sort of a walking bullshit detector and sounding board. The staff at Ron Peterson’s aren’t normally of the type to pull the oft-spotted “Whatchoo need h’yar is this Thunderblast 9000! Now don’t you mind that your hand cramped just from picking it up, you’ll only need to wave it around a’fore any bad guys crap themselves runnin!” schtick, and this visit was no exception, so we spent more time in the good info-dump capacity than in the bad.

The surprising part though was the unexpected third person tagging along. I’ve mentioned in the past that one of (well, more than one honestly) of my bosses have what I will euphemistically refer to as “leftward leanings.” Y’know. Of the Prius driving sort. I had a laptop for her for some work related stuff. She teased me by suggesting we meet at the Apple Store for the hand-off, so I countered back with an offer of the gun store since my day was full anyway, and promised that the bitter clingers wouldn’t give her any trouble. I figured we’d wind up with some neutral territory, but straight out of left field came her reply that not only would the gun store be fine, but by the way at some point maybe you could give me some advice on buying a gun.

LabRat swears my expression was priceless. I wouldn’t know, since I was too busy trying to keep dust bunnies from rolling into my mouth off the floor from where my jaw dropped.

So, lather, rinse, repeat. She amazingly wasn’t aware of Obama’s record on liberty restriction (or at least this aspect of it), but took it in stride, asked intelligent questions, and had two specific purposes (home defense, as she lives alone quite a way out in the boondocks, and the possibility of having to put a sheep, horse, or goat down in an emergency) in mind to make sorting through everything easier.

My friend and his wife, I know are going to buy something. I know this because his wife told me “Oh, I know how he gets. It was like this with his cigars and camera stuff. Pretty soon the house will be filled with every laser, light, holster, and other gadget and we’ll have two or three dozen guns and he’ll be asking you about a full-size safe.” I think that’s a good sign. As for my boss, I wouldn’t say she’s absolutely a sure thing, but I’ll note she certainly did like the Springfield XD she was checking out…

Oh, and whatever assholes on the road were responsible for the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe taking two fucking hours can choke on rancid whale blubber and water ski at Seal Island. Albuquerque to Santa Fe is normally about a half hour to 45 minutes, and those pricks kept me from getting to the homebrew store!