Tragic Boating Accident

GregLedet.net

Am I goofy for wanting to buy an Airsoft SCAR-H to play with and see if I then want to go ahead and order a real SCAR-H?

that hurricanes can’t read; here’s a map of the state of the New Orleans levee system (.pdf link). As you might have guessed, things could be better…

Our friends in N.O. are headed north as I type. However, you’ll be happy to know that LSU hasn’t cancelled the football game for Saturday; it’s just going to be played earlier in the day. Doesn’t matter that they could be adding thousands of cars to the contraflow traffic mess; football uber alles! (Oh, and don’t forget - no CCW on campus! Too bad for you!)

From CNN’s iReport feature, “No Bread in Baton Rouge:”

I remember this scene very well before Andrew in ‘92; I went to the nearest big grocery store for my own amusement (I was very well prepared, I didn’t need to buy anything) and the panic was palpable; no bread or Pop-Tarts could be had for any price at a store, and unless you needed something like a CR2032*, there were no batteries either. The aisles didn’t look like the one in the picture, though; they were crammed with people - angry and frightened people - and this made quite an impression on me.

We were without power for at least a week after the thing blew through. One thing that I observed and was not really prepared for: a lot of the twenty-something people spent much of this week drunk, and a couple of them were armed. I was not amused.

After helping to clean up the damage in our immediate area, I mostly just stayed inside my place. In my neck of the woods, things were pretty quiet except for a couple of the aforementioned drunk idgits who shot up the apartment courtyard with a 10/22. (The apartment manager screamed at them to stop; they did, and the police never came.)

I was pretty cozy except for the oppressive Louisiana heat in August. To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, “You might be prepared if…”: I had a friend in the National Guard, and he asked me late in the week if I had any spare water he could have because he was out. I gave him 12 gallons, and I was his new best friend. To this day, it amuses me greatly to say that I handed out water to the National Guard… (They weren’t issued ammo, BTW.)

Other than the obvious food / water stuff, the next-most valuable thing I had was a a whole bunch of police scanners and a Sam’s-load of batteries for them. Those plus the ham radios were invaluable for getting info about what was really going on.

This time around, the government here is anxious to show that it is Better Than Blanco, and there’s a lot going on in front of and behind the scenes to get ready for this one should it prove to be a dangerous storm. Here’s hoping it just gives everyone an extra-long Labor Day weekend for nothing.

Gun content: My sidearm at the time was a S&W 1006, which I really liked and should not have traded for a Glock 20, which was hi-cap and reliable but… meh. The only rifle I had with me was a Colt AR-15 A2 HBAR (6600) which truly was, as Pat Rogers says, a fencepost, but which I should not have sold. Because the rifle was a fencepost, the inside-the-house gun was a Benelli M3, which I never warmed up to (870 FTW!) and did not miss after I sold it. Notably, I only saw other people with 1. a 10/22 (makes a distinctive sound when fired at you outside your door), 2. a J-frame or similar (many, many of these) or 3. (one guy) a pump shotgun. There were probably some hunting rifles around, but I never saw anybody with one. I was way ahead in the apartment complex arms race, but I never fired a shot.

Even more than the packed-but-empty grocery store, perhaps the most lasting lesson that I took from my hurricane experience was that a good holster and belt is essential for going armed. Those were the bad old days when getting a CCW was very difficult, but in the aftermath of Andrew when the phones weren’t on and the police were very much occupied elsewhere, nobody was asking to see anyone’s stinking badges. I quickly learned that an Uncle Mike’s $10 nylon cheapie mounted on my street-clothes belt was no good at all when I needed to be armed 24/7. One of the first 5 calls I made when the power came back on was to the nice folks at Milt Sparks, and I’ve been happy ever since.

* I am going to work hard to come up with a post where EVERY word is linked to a Wikipedia article.

Another headline:

Rage Against the Machine draws hundreds in Denver

From the article:

About 8,000 free tickets were handed out by lottery for the show, sponsored by Tent State University and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

(Emphasis mine.)

So what you’re saying is that more than 7,000 people chose not to go see RATM for free? There’s hope yet, people…

Headline in the local AP repeater fishwrapper:

Neil Diamond disappoints concertgoers

I mean, that’s like saying “John Schneider disappoints fans of orange cars with Confederate flags.” Syntax error in line 10 right there.

is the man.

(This is a video link; it takes a while to show up.)

$650 for new front rotors on the Boatmobile.

Here’s Michelle Malkin on the Obama campaign’s effort to silence the American Issues Project ads about ‘bama and William Ayres. Good stuff.

I cannot believe that I’m going to post about my electric bill. Pretty soon, I’m going to be “that guy;” you know, the mostly-bald 50-something guy at the Genesis concert who knows all the words to “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” and wears sensible shoes. Anyway, here goes…

I have almost never paid any attention to the electric bill at all. However, in June & July, at the Boathouse we used just barely under 5000 kilowatt hours of electricity each month, so after the July bill (”This is as much as a laptop!”), this got my attention.

After a combination of (1) appropriately reprogramming our fancy computer thermostats and (2) installing compact flourescent bulbs in the most used of our four kajillion lights, our August usage was just under 4000 kWh. That’s still a lot of power usage, but according to the power company, it’s our lowest August usage ever and it’s right at 1000 kWh less than the last two months - in the hottest month of the year.

Now I’m gonna go find a tree and hug it.