Damned Cats
Tonight marks the fourth death of a Macbook power supply thanks to the cats chewing on it.
That’s about $320 in damage. Little bastards.
Frazzled
Well, that was a weekend to remember.
Friday: Leave work to make the 1 hour commute home and stop off at the jeweler’s to pick up my wedding band. After that hit Men’s Warehouse to pickup my suit.
Both are too big. With the ring I probably got sized on some freak fat-finger day or maybe the clerk screwed something up. I don’t know. They’ll exchange it though so that’s cool.
The suit… well they gave me my best man’s suit. I should have picked up on this at the store but I was in a hurry and didn’t want to 2nd guess them. That one should be easy to sort out, provided that the tailoring was done properly the 1st time around.
Saturday: Drove across the state for Theresa’s bridal shower. My attendance was required. It went well but didn’t start smoothly. The hostess was late for one. Odd, because it was at her house. At one point I was sent off to pick up Theresa’s father. That resulted in me knocking on the door for a while, entering uninvited, grabbing an air horn from the living room (seriously, I have no idea why that’s there) and blasting it. It didn’t wake him up. I actually had to stick my head into the bedroom and yell his name to get him out of bed. He works nights, so it’s normal for him to be sleeping at 3pm, BTW.
I feel a bit closer to my future father in law now. Thankfully he doesn’t sleep in the buff.
Sunday: Family reunion on Theresa’s side of the family. Oh boy! Nothing much happened there. I just donned a name tag letting everybody know my name and that I was marrying Theresa in short order. Below that I added another name tag with “I’m BATMAN!” on it.
It got a few laughs.
On the drive home my brother that we left in charge of the house and our pets called. Since we were running a bit late he offered to stop by again and feed the dog before we got there. That was nice. When we got home he was cleaning up a dog puke mess. Seems the critter decided to eat a chunk out of blanket. It didn’t agree with him.
Ugh.
I’m tired.
Scaring the Masses
Sebastian linked to this opinion piece by Mark Venderboegh wherein he says:
There are some of us “cold dead hands” types, perhaps 3 percent of gun owners, who would kill anyone who tried to further restrict our God-given liberty.
Uhm, OK. Could we please keep that kind of talk out of the public arena? That kind of talk will freak out about 99% of the population. It makes us all look like this guy:
Except with a gun.
And yes, I’m every bit as guilty as ‘ole Mike on this issue. Been there, done that, and watched the readership of this blog pretty much halve somewhere around 2005.
Overheard in the Kitchen
So, we’re filling out some form for the DJ that’ll be at the wedding. There’s a section on the back where they ask for some trivia about the bride and groom. One of them is ‘favorite Movie’
Theresa: Okay, favorite movie?
Me: Uh.. don’t really see why that’s important.
Theresa: Oh, ‘cmon. Pick one.
Me: Okay, 300.
T: You can’t pick that. You’ve only seen it twice.
Me: So?
T: You can’t pick that!
Me: I’m about 2 seconds away from standing up, yelling THIS! IS! SPARTA! and kicking you in the chest.
T: *rolls eyes*
Gas Powered Blender
This weekend I saw something pretty neat. A fellow I know, who’s quite inventive, had some folks over for a party, and he whipped out his gas powered blender.
Yes, he built it himself. I think he used a weed-whacker for the motor, and you can see he’s got some handlebars on it too with the throttle control.
Pretty neat, and I have no idea why there’s no sound on that video. I shot it with my cellphone.
Oh, he builds custom knives too.
The Dark Knight
Okay, we went and saw The Dark Knight this weekend.
Whoa! That was awesome! I went there with some really high expectations and it surpassed them. I remember thinking twice that it was about ready to end and both times I was OK with it, but the awesomeness just kept rolling.
There isn’t a single, solitary dull moment in the entire two and a half hours.
This isn’t one for children that are easily scared though. Heath Ledger, as the Joker, had me squirming in my seat at one point in the movie. Theresa closed her eyes for some of that scene. It wasn’t gory, but you couldn’t stop yourself from forming some really nasty images of what was coming next. I have absolutely no idea how they pulled off getting Two Face to look the way they did, and it was rather ghastly. The kind of stuff that’ll probably give kids nightmares.
Go see it.
You don’t say?
As Prof. Steven Levitt concluded in 2004, “Ultimately, there appears to be little basis for believing that concealed weapons laws have had an appreciable impact on crime.”
Well, that’s odd. A couple hours ago they were pushing stories that would lead one to believe that CCW holders were murdering sons of bitches laying in wait for their moment of rage.
Let’s Roll Those Numbers Around
Well, more blood dancing from the Brady Campaign
What struck me most about this report was how they closed it out:
By the way, this makes the third concealed carry permit-holder charged with murder since July 5.A fourth has recently pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Seriously? Okay, for one they’re making a big deal about just being charged with murder. There haven’t actually been convicted yet , but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re eventually all convicted. We’ll presume 4 murders by CCW holders from July 5 to July 17th.
Four. That’s not a huge number.
In 2006 there were 17,034 murder convictions in the US. That means we’re rolling about 1400 murders in this country every month. That’s about 700 every two weeks, roughly the same time frame that we’re dealing with from July 5 to 17. Of course, I’m totally ignoring the simple fact that homicides and murders increase during the summer months. It’d hunt those numbers down but that isn’t really needed right now.
Presuming that we’re working with an even distribution, which we aren’t, that would mean that CCW holders are responsible for about 0.5% of the murders in this time period.
So, in order for the “ZOMG!11 CCW HOLDERS ARE MURDERERS IN WAITING” argument to make sense CCW holders would have to make up less than 0.5% of the population. From what I gather it’s actually closer to 1% overall, which would indicate that even with the numbers stacked against us, ignoring the summer months, and cherry picking a time span where 4 CCW holders comitted a murder you’re still half as likely to commit a murder if you have a CCW permit than the population at large.
On the other hand, presuming my 1% CCW rate is correct, if there actually were an even distribution then we’d see about 170 muders by CCW holders a year. That’s about 14 a month. 3 a week. Constant.
Guess what? Ain’t happening.
So it’s safe to presume that the murder rate is lower amongst CCW holders when compared to the general population.
Think about that.
Folks that certainly own a gun, and that can legally carry it around town with them, very capable of committing murder within seconds… don’t. At least not with any regularity to make a significant impact on national figures.
Now, if I were a moron I’d proclaim from on high that issuance of CCW permits would dramatically lower the murder rate, but I’m not a moron, at least not in this instance. That’d be about as dumb as the Kellerman study that says just keeping a gun in the house makes you 43 17 12 times more likely to be killed by a gun. Ain’t the gun that changed the odds, just like it isn’t the permit that changes things.
It’s the people.
Brain Lock
Had a little bit of brain lock today while working. It happens to me when I try and work on two things at once. I hate that. The best way for me to get out of it is to take a short break and go back to work once I stop trying to solve both problems at the same time.
So, I took a 15 minute break and hit the range today around the time most folks would be eating lunch.
So, as a law-abiding gun owner I unlocked my gun room, unlocked the safe, removed a pistol, verified that it was unloaded, wiped up a little extra oil that I found on it, verified that it was unloaded again, cased it up, placed it in my vehicle in an area where I could not reach it while driving as per Michigan law, drove to the range, shot for about 10 minutes, and reversed the whole process when I got home.