Tail Gunner

There Was a U-Boat From Nantucket...

So I'm watching Das Boot instead  of the Olympic crap and the Lovely Bride tells me that somebody just found a sunken U-Boat off Nantucket.

I haven't seen the movie since it came out over 30 years ago.  Kinda weird coincidence.


http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Explorers-find-sunken-German-U-boat-off-Mass-3741140.php

So True I Had To Steal It!

What's the difference between a Romney supporter and an Obama supporter?

 

 

The Romney supporter signs the front of the check

 and the Obama supporter signs the back of the check. 

Proudly stolen from  The Feral Irishman.

I only steal from the best

Unit 5 !

From a friend up in Kentucky.  The Wayne County Zombie Task Force.  I wonder if they bought it with stimulus money

This Should Get the Point Across

I'd really really really like one of these for my front yard

That would keep the Jehovah's Witnesses off the porch!

In the current "on-going economic recovery" I'll be lucky to be able to afford one of these

Give Me A Sign

The Lovely Bride took this picture this afternoon.  She thinks its a sign that Jeff Gordon will win this weekend.  Who knows?

I'm sure not gonna be the one to tell her that its the reflection of her phone in the windshield.

Gettin' Old Can Be Scary

My hearing ain't what it used to be and this evening when The Lovely Bride told me what we were having for supper I just couldn't believe it. I asked her to say it again. She did and I told her she had to be out of her freakin' mind. She asked why and I told her that either she was on some kind of femenazi trip or it was just a really sick joke and then she told me that she knew for a fact that my Mother served the exact same thing to me when I was a kid plenty of times. I told her she had lost her mind and that nobody even ate sushi back when I was a kid much less the crap she was talking about. Then she showed me the box.

Apparently she had said Fish Sticks

Maybe They'll Make This a New Major in College

The laws of physics, the laws of aerodynamics, the laws of economics and other such "laws" simply observe how matter, things that fly, groups of people participating in a market and so on behave.  We write them down and learn them because they allow us to predict what the future outcome will be when we need to move something, make a flying machine or fix a broken economy.

Politics is about as predictable and this is a really insightful set of observations that may someday be the foundation for a Theory of Political Bullshit and the Fundamental Laws of Bullshit:

http://tucsonoutpost.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-five-stages-of-bullst-repost.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ConservativeObserver+%28Conservative+Observer%29

The Other Aurora Shooting

On April 22 of this year a convicted felon, just out of jail, went to an Aurora, Colorado, church and shot and killed a member of the congregation before being killed himself by a congregant carrying a gun.

You won't hear about this one in the national news:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/12175-two-aurora-shootings-one-widely-known-the-other-ignored

There's More than One Way to Smoke a Mullet

That's what the caption said.

Stolen from "Jump Mullet's" facebook page.

Tractor Progress

Tractor is running great.  Needs a new battery and air filter now but runs like new.

Neat Idea

In  a first year Psychology course I once read that one of the indicators of intelligence was the ability to use things for purposes other than what their designers originally intended. 

This is so neat I wish I'd thought of it:

http://elmtreeforge.blogspot.com/2012/04/somewhat-laborious-way-to-avoid-fouling.html

More Tractor Troubles

Seems like I am just stumbling over myself trying to get the old tractor up and running.  The new fuel pump solved the problem last week but it suddenly started running rough, puffing black smoke and finally it shut off.  Removing the air filter cover, I found that it would crank up and run but would shut of when I put it back on.  Besides that, it puffed a geyser of air/fuel out the top of the carburetor on every other stroke.

Tractors don't get ventricular fibrillation.  Normal ones don't but something had to be holding the intake valve open.  The attack came on so suddenly that I convinced myself that the intake valve seat must have dislodged from the block.

Pulling the front head revealed the culpret.   I took the picture after I solved the problem so the intake valve is closed but the shiny metal on the block next to the intake valve at about 4:00 to 6:00 O'clock is where a small screw was rattling around on the valve seat.  It was big enough to get stuck between the valve and the seat but too big to fall completely through into the cylinder.

How'd it get there?  Well, when working on the fuel pump, I also checked the carburetor's float level and when I did that I dropped some nuts, washers and screws.  I thought they all fell onto the frame in front of the engine and that the little carburetor screw was just small enough to have fallen down into some crevasse where I couldn't see it.  In reality, it fell into the carburetor.

No harm, no foul and maybe I'll learn something from it.  As soon as the battery is charged we'll be back in business.

In the mean time, just to make Buckshot happy, here's one of those pictures of hot chicks working on a car.

Yep. An Empty Plate

A Nice Read on Dogs

When my camera was liberated from my Jeep by a couple of Bad Samaritans, I  lost (they stole) most of my "Dogs I Have Met" pictures.  In lieu of pictures, this will do for now:

So Tell Me Again. When Did the Recession End?

From a Friend's Facebook Page

Too True

This Ought to be Fun

 

The Mad Scientist  Buckshot bought a 10mm.

Situation Normal

All fouled up.

Started the tractor this morning to mow the back yard and it ran great for about 5 seconds.  The electric fuel pump was dead.

$51 later I was putting on a new low pressure electric fuel pump. Worked great until the geyser of gas shot up out of the fuel bowl vent.  Seems its not really a low pressure pump after all.  So much for my first ever trip to O'Reilly Auto Parts.  Still, after sitting a few hours for the flood to subside it started up in a cloud of black smoke and cleared itself out.  It was running but not very well.  Turning the fuel pump on and off didn't make any difference.  The vacume powered pump in the carburetor was supplying all it needed to run.   Finally it just quit.  Just like shutting off the ignition switch.  It has gas, electric power to the coil and clean spark plugs.  Waiting on the shadows to reach the spot where it died so I can check to see if there's spark to the plugs.  Too hard to see the spark in direct sunlight.

Spent pretty much the whole day fooling with it.  Still ain't mowed the yard.

Need to make a stand for my rimfire ammo measuring dial indicator but I'm just too danged disgusted with a whole day wasted and nothing gained.

I suppose tomorrow is another day.


Evening Update:  Intake valve problem.  She ain't gonna run for a few days.

Cemetery

Hey Buckshot.  Go read this & tell me what you think.  (If anybody else reads this blog feel free to follow the link too).

http://gunrights4usall.blogspot.com/2012/07/concerning-events-in-little-country.html

A Rainy Desert

I once worked with a fellow who insisted that if I'd get a globe, put my finger directly on Florida and spin the globe, Florida would be the only land in the entire world at its latitude that was not desert.  I've never tried it.  Haven't had a globe since high school.  I once read somewhere that Florida would be a desert except that its so narrow that moisture from the Atlantic and from the Gulf of Mexico moving back and forth across the State keeps it watered.  I think there's more to it than that but it ties inwith the finger on the globe thing so what the heck.   Whatever the causes, Florida is hot and humid.  You don't know hot until your sweat won't evaporate. 

Many of the old Tarzan movies were filmed not far from where I work.   They  imported monkeys for those films and their descendants are frequently encountered on game cameras in the swamps nearby. Its close enough to a jungle for them.

Florida  is, in fact, so hot and humid that it could not support the population, or at least the demographics of the population, that it does if not for air conditioning.  Most people wouldn't choose to live here without it.  Among those that did, the heat would run off or kill off all but the hardiest.  The Seminole Indians were never defeated because they could disappear deep into the swamps and let Florida fight the white men for them.   The Russians have Winter and the Seminoles had a land that wanted to kill everybody that walked on it.  It still does.

So our air conditioner quit last night.  The last time it died it was at the start of a 3 day weekend in the middle of summer.  The first night was tolerable.  The following days and nights were not.   If you've become accustomed to air conditioning it takes about 2 full weeks for your body to adjust to living without it.  Sure, you can work and function but you'll sweat all night long no matter how fast the ceiling fans are running or how still you are and that's no fun at all.

Fortunately this time, it gave out about nightfall on Sunday so the house remained cool enough through the night.  It was starting to get warm by the time I got home early from work to meet the A/C guy.  Turns out a couple of capacitors were cooked.  $320 later we are in the cooling down phase. Our little outpost supports life again.

Looks Like Good Food Here

Looks like there's a lot of good eatin' here.  I might even buy the cookbook.

http://georgiapellegrini.com/

For the wife, of course.

Sounds Reasonable

4th of July Dog

At daybreak the morning after his first 4th of July, he dug out under the fence and went to the house that had the most fireworks.  He was waiting on them to come out and shoot some more.

July 4

July 4, "Independence Day."  Also the day Vicksburg fell.  Independence? Subjugation?  Depends on which side of history you choose.

In honor of whichever you want to call it, I did some gainful work, jury-rigged the ignition switch on the tractor and sorted some rimfire ammo for rim thickness.  I'd never have thought that 22LR rims would vary in thickness by as much as '002" in the same brand, same lot and same box but the Pratt and Whitney dial indicator cannot tell a lie.


 What's funny is that I bought a Raven Eye Rimfire Rim Thickness Gauge last week.  When I went to install the dial indicator on it, there was a brand new Raven Eye Rimfire Thickness Gauge already in the box with the dial indicator.  The old Pratt and Whitney needed a bushing to fit the gauge and all I can figure is that I must have bought the first Raven Eye gauge some time ago and put it in the box when I saw that it didn't fit the indicator that I had.  Its my only dial indicator that reads to .0001" so I wanted to use it and I must have just forgotten to go get a bushing.  Eventually, that must have led to forgetting the whole thing only to remember the idea but not the tool in the box a couple of years later.  Didn't think I had gotten that old yet.