Friday, July 30, 2010

Puzzling...

Remember The Man with the Golden Gun? Scaramanga pops together his lighter, pen, cigarette case, and cufflink, et voila! Moviedom's nerdiest gun.

Nerd Approved brings us a guy who went better, or rather, tilted headlong to the extreme:

From General interwebs


That brick breaks down into all the parts necessary to assemble a pistol, including propellant pellets and primers:

From General interwebs


The resulting gun is a muzzleloader, making it exempt from US federal gun laws. The maker included a locking mechanism in the brick, but I somehow think the incomprehensible pile of parts is a bigger deterrent.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

I'm not dead yet!

No recent posting. We had the Maine trip (outstanding), which took almost two weeks out of my life. Now we're in a less ideal stretch. The vacation away from Jersey has put in very clear relief just how much is wrong with Jersey, and--apart from being close to friends and family--I'm getting increasingly dissatisfied with living here. We're that space between Father's Day and the anniversary of dad's death, which sucks. In the middle of that, Genevieve's grandmother passed away. I didn't know her, but it meant a funeral, mourning relatives, and my wife joining me in grieving land. I've been depressed and picking up little illnesses, and I'm turning thirty in two weeks. And we're planning a wedding (awesome) that requires me to make clothing decisions (less awesome) that we need to fund ourselves with whatever spare funds we can scrounge up (distinctly non-awesome). So all in all, ranting about politics on the internet has had limited appeal.

This funk won't last forever, and I'm sure I'll be back to foaming at the mouth over how the "financial reform" bill is one more step on our path into barbarism and howling madness*, but for now, if anything goes up here it's more likely to be personal than political. That's probably best for the time being.

[* - One upshot: with gun control rapidly disintegrating and losing support even in traditional liberal enclaves here in the US, the politics of big government at this precise instant in time are less personal for me. There's little to personally despair of when our highest courts are finally treating the right to keep and bear arms like a real right, lower courts are following their lead, state and local governments are self-reforming to avoid lawsuits, public opinion is increasingly reasonable, and we're forcibly reforming the worst of the worst gun laws--moving on from a successful overturning of Chicago's handgun ban to a fresh legal attack on NYC's discriminatory concealed carry law. Our creeping regulatory monster keeps demanding more power when its already excessive powers fail to fix problems, and that's a serious issue (as is the fact that so many Americans seem content to buy that logic), but day to day it does much less to bar me from living my life as I please than gun control does.]