Random thoughts

How long before Tauras offers .350 Legend in The Judge?

After eating large amounts of winter squash over the past few weeks, I can verify that I now have X-Ray vision.

After sharing this information with Mrs ERJ, she suggested that I could increase my super powers by eating more hot chilies.

She also implied that the beams of molten lava would not come out of my eyes but would come out of an orifice somewhat lower on my body.

Bariatric Surgery

I was recently treated to a scathing review of bariatric surgery (aka Stomach Stapling, Belly Banding, etc.) with regard to long-term outcomes.

The person who shared the review was privy to patient historys and had observed that the reality of bariatric surgery is rarely as good as the click-bait ads put out by the clinic.

I decided to do some followup research.

According to one, long-term longitudinal study, the median patient had a BMI of 47 versus a target range of 21-to-24. In simple language, they were twice their "healthy" weight.

NOTE: I will be committing statistical sins as I use medians and averages as if they were the same thing.

The 74% who underwent RYGB (the more drastic procedure) were still 50% overweight seven years later. That suggests a BMI of 34.

The 26% who underwent LAGB were still 78% overweight seven years later. That suggests a BMI of 40.

Another thing that is troubling is that almost 20% of the participants in this study dropped out by the seventh year. My perception is that people who lost weight are like vegans...they want to tell EVERYBODY. Further, my perception is that people who relapsed are less likely to remain with a study. So would the 20% that dropped out make the numbers more favorable or less favorable?

Bariatric surgery is not a silver bullet.

The Shrewd King 18.3: Spackle

The argument had gone on for hours.

Rick Salazar had expected as much and had reserved a back-room at Gabby’s Pub.

Sides formed up quickly. One side, led by Wade Hawk, claimed that they owed Quinn Spackle nothing, that he knew the odds and his disability was due to bad luck.

The other side, led by Larry Tomanica and Chernovsky, claimed that they owed Quinn a future livelihood.

The linchpin of Hawk’s argument was that there was no money to provide a pension. Further, he was extremely leery of putting a taxing scheme into place.

The linchpin of Tomanica’s argument is that if they kicked Spackle to the curb then only the worst sort of people would volunteer for the defense force.

“Look, they got to sit on their asses the whole time we were rooting around trying to make a go of Capiche.” Hawk said. “I ain’t gonna hand them a life of sitting on a couch while I am busting my ass, barely making a go of things.”

Tomanica replied, hotly “The boys who did not join the defense force have been out there getting on with their lives. The MEN on the defense force put their lives on hold when they could have been out claiming a house, putting in a garden and dating girls.”

The crowd was about evenly divided.

John Wilder had listened in silence, only occasionally asking a question when something was not clear.

His first question involved the extent of Quinn Spackle’s injuries. The answer was not pretty.

Nyssa and Dysen assisted Doctor Fox in Eaton Rapids. The Doctor Fox was a D.O. and had done rotations through Emergency Rooms and Orthopedic reconstruction. He had none of the tools he really needed.

He cleaned out the wound and removed flesh that was so mangled that it was impossible to regain circulation. He pushed the larger chunks of bone into approximately the correct position.

The bones of the ankle are like a zipper. That allows the bones to move relative to each other but still able to bear load. Outside of a major hospital and multiple follow-up surgeries, there was no way to reconstruct the zipper. The best the doctor could hope for was to contain any secondary infections and to fuse the bones so Quinn’s left foot could bear his weight.

Quinn’s days of running for miles-and-miles were over.

It also severely impacted his ability to earn a living in a culture that had become supremely physical. Even in the best of times, Quinn was not a “thinker”. Quinn was a doer.

When Wilder asked why Dysen assisted, Rick told informed him that Quinn and Dysen were engaged and Dysen would be changing Quinn’s dressings and cleaning drainage tubes. Plus, it never hurt to have one more person with trauma skills in the community.

Wilder kept his counsel as the group argued their way around the topic. One thing led to another to another but little was resolved.

The third time they dipped their plow into soil that had already been churned to mud, Wilder spoke up.

“You know, this is not a new problem. Every society had to deal with it. Some societies failed. Some thrived, depending on how they treated their veterans.” Wilder said.

Hawk’s temper had not improved through the evening. He was hungry and he was used to getting his way. That, and he had an instinctive dislike of successful, educated men. “If you got something useful to add, just blurt it out. Ain’t got time for all this jibber-jabbin’.”

Wilder had his Bachelor’s degree in history and still enjoyed reading. “The Roman’s solution was probably the best” he said.

“When a career Centurion retired...if he lived long enough to retire, they gave him title to fertile land very close to the frontier. They required that he build a house and that he keep arms mounted beside the door.” Wilder said.

“That served several purposes” Wilder said. “It got potentially dangerous men out of Rome and provided a deep defense for when the barbarians broke through the Roman perimeter.”

“The other thing it did is it provided the equivalent of senior NCOs along the line. Training soldiers became more and more difficult as Rome recruited non-Romans as soldiers. It never hurt to have a half-dozen, grizzled vets to call up when a young upstart needed to be humbled or the line was wavering and needed to be stiffened.” Wilder said.

“So you are saying to just give Spackle a chunk of land? That is what I have been saying. There is unclaimed land all over the place” Hawk said. “We don’t owe him anything.”

“Not quite what I am saying” Wilder said. “It has to be choice land. Considering how small Capiche is, it should be within a quarter mile of our frontier. We need to give him a sovereign deed to the land. The other thing is that we have to sweeten the deal with seed money, livestock, free plowing for five years and maybe building a bunkhouse for help.”

“Bunkhouse?” Hawk looked mystified.

“He won’t be able to do all the physical work. That means he needs help. It also means he needs more than 40 acres because 40 acres won’t support several families.” Tomanica piped up. He could see where this was going.

“80 acres, minimum” Wilder said. “And he should get to choose it.”

“I commit to supplying bred ewes and a couple dairy heifers” Wilder said, putting his money where his mouth was.”

“I will supply the free tillage” Milo said.

Around the table the principles pledged various things. Wade Hawk pledged scrap iron and hand-tools.

The only person to not pledge anything was Denny Blastic. He pressed his lips firmly together when Salazar pointedly observed that the only thing Spackle lacked for a viable homestead was horses

Denny had crashed the meeting to complain about Capiche forces destroying La-Loyd's store. He demanded compensation. Instead, the group collectively told him to shut up or they would present him with a bill for throwing the invaders off HIS property.

Denny was thoroughly steamed and wasn't about to be helpful.

Waverly Road along east property line

Presented with the plan, Quinn had no problem choosing his 80 acres. He chose the plot south of the river and just west of Waverly Road. It had river frontage and the Skinner Extension drain had enough flow-and-drop to power a small sawmill in March and April when the fields were too wet to work. The drain also had a strong run of suckers.

Timber stood further back on the property. The bottomlands were thick with soft maple, cottonwood and a little bit of sycamore. The uplands had stands of sugar maple and red oak, beech and tulip poplars. Even now there was a shortage of planking for shelving as people dug root cellars and pantries for canned goods.

Quinn was also good with the idea of the bunkhouse. Miguel had visited him earlier and told him about “Uncle”. Sounded just like the kind of guy Quinn needed to hire.

Quinn hoped, that in time, Donnie would choose the 80 acres east of Waverly.

Next

Total life-cycle cost of buying a new firearm

When I was a kid, I rarely considered the total cost of purchasing something. For example, people buying a cheap, used snowmobile rarely consider the cost of maintenance, storage, a trailer, a truck to pull it up north and the cost of ten nights in a motel up in the snow-zone.

That $1200 snowmachine quickly morphs into $10k. It is different, in my mind, if it is a tool you will use once a week. Then you don't need the trailer, truck and lodging. That would be the difference between a snowmachine in southern Michigan and utility quad or tractor you can use to haul wood, spin seeds, drag deer, carry fencing tools.... through moch of the year.

The cost of a firearm includes buying secure storage like a safe. That presumes you don't already have a safe with room in it and that you might have visitors who are not trustworthy around firearms.

Let's look at the .350 Legend.

Suppose you have room for one more firearm in your safe space. Also assume you have a friend-of-a-friend who will let you borrow an AR lower.

.350 Uppers can be found for about $250. Add twenty bucks for shipping and you are looking at $270.

Budget another $200 for a scope and $50 for the rings. Rolling that into the $270 gives you $520.

A set of flip-up iron sights, aperture rear and post front, are going to run another hundred.  $620

Reloading consumables, bullets-and-cases, and a set of dies will run at least another hundred. $720.

Three hours of range time will run about $50. $770.

Can you do it cheaper? Heck yes. A scoped "package" gun from a major retailer might run $350 on sale. Buy a box of factory ammo. Don't sight it in and you can be hunting with a .350 Legend for half that price.

Or, I could buy the upper and install high quality iron sights on it for about $350. Iron sights are perfect for the finish-wounded-deer mission and very adequate out to 100 yards in any reasonable light. They give up something to the scope when shooting in heavy cover. With a scope, you are more likely to pick a window in the brush and hit the deer in the vitals.

So it comes down to a choice between buying that new freezer Mrs ERJ has been talking about or buying something to fill that freezer more elegantly than the Mausbert 5000 that has been filling it for the last twenty years.

The other dimension is the forlorn hope that Michigan will see the light and allow downstate hunters to use everything up to .30 caliber centerfires as long as they are in elevated stands. The point about the elevated stands is that the hunter is often shooting DOWN at the deer and have a dirt back-stop.

And I have a friend-of-a-friend who would loan me a nice .308 or ought-six.

The Shrewd King 18.2: Boom

People who are tired suffer from tunnel-vision.

If you are aware of it you can make adjustments. If sleep deprivation is not something you are familiar with, or if you have never been in a demanding environment when sleep deprived, then are likely to think you are operating at 90% efficiency when you are only functioning at 45% efficiency.

Sheldon remembered to enforce convoy security. One SAW forward, one in the middle of the convoy and two in the caboose position. It is easier to shoot forward than to shoot rearward.

The vehicles non-gunship vehicles were immediately in front of the gunships. Then there was a 200 yard space, then another block of vehicles.

Better to lose a flatbed than to lose two squads of fighters or a gunship.

The convoy made good time to the destination. They covered the twenty miles in about an hour.

Four buildings connected by 30' wide, underground drives. Corners of buildings 20' apart. Team One west of complex with ability to sweep exits to underground parking. Due to creek valley, only a few sandbags and barrel of SAW visible. Team Two set up to sweep interior of horse-shoe and also cover exits. Team Three includes Janelle and flash-bang grenade team. Team Three in shadow of building two WRT Team Two's automatic weapon.

Before pulling off M-43/Saginaw Hwy, Sheldon radioed in. “Confirming we are at 8646 West Saginaw Hwy. Confirming Fairhaven Apartments. Are you SURE this is the place?”

Wendy responded “Multiple prisoners verified info. Recon. Report.”

Shrugging, Sheldon made the universal signal for “Get on with it”. He raised his hand, extended his index finger vertically and rotated it. It never occurred to him that he could have just sent a scouting force.

The convoy entered the drive

A few sentries fired at the convoy but bursts from two of the SAWs made them flee.

Sheldon sent a full squad down the ramp into the underground parking.

Two guys popped out almost immediately. “Definitely barrels of oil here.”

A couple of minutes later, most of the squad popped out of the southeast entrance. The buildings were arranged in a horseshoe with one entrance in the southwest corner of the property and the exit in the southeast corner.

“Lots of good shit there, boss.” the squad leader confirmed.

Then Sheldon took a stroll.

The each of the four buildings had its own, brilliantly lit, underground parking garage. The first one he entered had HUNDREDS of barrels. The air was redolent with the smells of gasoline and diesel. “Did you check the barrels to see what was in them?” Sheldon asked.

As an answer, the squad leader unscrewed the plug in the top of one of the barrels and stuck his finger into the liquid. Pulling it out he said “Smell”

It was diesel.

"Shit!" Sheldon exclaimed in resigned disgust. "Tell the troops to dump all the bags of grain on the ground. We gotta make room for these barrels."

“Once they get the trucks cleared off, tell them to pull the flat-beds in here and start loading.” Sheldon said.

“Anybody find any weapons or ammo?” Sheldon asked.

“Lots of pallets.” the squad leader said, pointing behind the densely packed barrels. “Hard to know what is in them.”

The pallets were wrapped with layer-upon-layer of stretchy, shrink-wrap plastic.

“Is there cargo in each of the garages?” Sheldon asked.

“Yup.” the squad leader said.

“Tell the drivers of the flat-beds to space out, one to a building.” Sheldon said. The last thing he needed was to have tired, clumsy troops tripping over each other.

Almost miraculously, each garage had a set of ramps and a single appliance dolly. It was going to take a while to load.

Fifteen minutes later, Wendy pinged in.

“We have reports of Mr Heavy forces breaking off and heading north. We suspect that you were seen and they are coming to defend the warehouse.” Wendy said.

“You might want to pick up the pace. You will have company in less than an hour...maybe as soon as thirty minutes.”

Sheldon cursed.

“Get all the fighters in here. They can start muscling the barrels up to the flat-beds.

A minute later, the only red forces not in the underground garages were the four fighters manning the pintle-mounted Squad Automatic Weapons in the beds of the armored trucks.

That is when Janelle triggered the first set of charges.

*

Air-fuel bombs are fussy beasts.

Military has the advantage of being able to test, test, test and access to exotic chemicals.

Janelle had neither of those luxuries.

The ideal ratio of air-to-gasoline is between 10 pounds of air to 1 pound of gasoline and 15 pounds of air to each pound of gasoline.

Dispersing large volumes of fluid so that MOST of it mixes into the ideal ratio is very difficult.

Air is surprisingly dense. The amount of air in a medium sized refrigerator (13 cubic feet) is approximately a pound.

A gallon of gas weighs about 6 pounds. That means that a gallon of gas needs about 75 refrigerators worth of air.

By Janelle’s calculations, a five gallon bucket of gas needed a plug of air eight feet tall with a diameter of about thirty feet. It would take more than twenty-five, five gallon buckets to fully utilize the air beneath ONE of the apartment buildings.

Another complication was the mixing. Simply exploding a charge in the center of the bucket would atomize the fuel but would be inefficient at mixing it with the air and would likely result in much of the fuel painting the floor and ceiling rather than mixing with the air.

Janelle configured the dispersal charge to minimize the up-and-down pulse but there was no way to eliminate some of the fuel wetting concrete. It helped that the fuel-bombs were on top of 55 gallon drums, helpfully disguised in buckets that originally held motor oil and hydraulic fluid.

A third complication is that explosions first evacuates the air within the space followed by a massive air in-rush. The best time to detonate the air-fuel fog is when the maximum amount of air has in-rushed.

A forth complication is the difficulty of synchronizing the detonation of multiple charges.

Janelle threw up her hands. She reverted back to a ditty she learned when she first started hanging out in machine shops. “When in doubt, make it stout, of stuff you know a lot about.” When brute force does not work, it probably means you did not use enough of it.

Where two, five gallon buckets of gasoline might have been more than ample to create a pressure pulse that would incapacitate the hostiles, Janelle decided to use eight in each underground parking space.

She insisted that they be wired in parallel. She insisted on two car batteries wired in series to generate 24V which closed redundant relays which fired the airbag inflaters

The inflaters, shorn of everything but the electronics and explosive capsule were nested in the Tannerite and Janelle hoped they would be sufficient to detonate the four ounces of Tannerite.

Upon hearing that Benicio’s people had flash-bang grenades, she had two of them lined up near the emergency exit at the top of the horse-shoe, ready to dash down the ramp and lob grenades into the garages in the event the air-fuel bombs did not self-detonate.

Which they did not. Gasoline is formulated to be difficult to ignite. That is what "octane" means. Low octane causes engine knock, lost power and can destroy pistons.

The grenade launchers did succeed in lighting off the twenty million BTUs of gasoline-air fog.

Benicio was very grateful. He awarded the grenade launcher’s next-of-kin with two year’s worth of pay.

The peak pressure was less than the pressure at Kate’s store but, contained by the mass of the concrete structure, was of much longer duration. 45psi is fatal. 150psi leaves an ugly corpse. 600psi shot the men into concrete walls like 150 pound bumblebees hitting the windshield at 200 miles per hour.

SAW armed trucks liberated from the strike force that invaded Capiche and the mortar crews set-up beside them made short work of the shell-shocked trucks guarding the entrances to the underground parking. Having arrived early, they had the advantage of sighting in and were dialed into the range where guard trucks HAD to be.

Next

Jonesing for a new firearm

One of the hunters in our party brought a new firearm.

It was an AR platform weapon in .450 Bushmaster.

I was sharing a blind with my youngest brother. He was using a muzzle loader. He loves his muzzle loader. He is exceptionally accurate with it. It does, however, have limitations.

In our party, we are expected to "finish" wounded deer. Whether we wounded them or some other hunting party wounded them. It is a matter of respecting animals and not allowing them to face a lingering death. A muzzle loader with one shot and an extended reload time is not optimal for that task.

That got me to thinking.

Southern Michigan's deer hunting rules are Byzantine. I can hunt coyotes, woodchucks and red squirrels with a .300 Magnum or an elephant gun but I cannot hunt deer with a 30-30 Winchester.

To hunt deer, I am restricted to shotguns (which can have rifled barrels and launch 300gr, saboted bullets at 2200fps), muzzle loaders, revolvers or center-fire rifles with cartridges less than 1.8" and without shoulders.

There are at least two cartridges that meet southern Michigan requirements that fit in the AR platform: The .450 Bushmaster and the .350 Legend.

Speer 180gr, 0.358" bullet designed for impact velocities of the .35 Remington. Speer # 2435

I was leaning toward the .350 but as I read more I learned that the groove diameter is 0.355" while most of the bullets available for reloading are 0.357 or 0.358" diameter. It is possible to take 0.358" bullets and pass them through a resizing die but that is one more step I really don't want to do.

The .450 is similar. Most ".45" rifle bullets are 0.458" while the Bushmaster uses 0.452" bullets.

I will keep my eye on this. I just may end up buying a bolt action .350 Legend to replace the firearms I lost canoeing with Mr B. But I don't want to do it until one of the major bullet manufacturers (Hornady, Nosler, Sierra, Speer etc.) offers a slippery, 170gr or 180gr bullet designed specifically for .350 Legend groove diameters and impact velocities.

Planning ahead

American Persimmons (mix of K-6 and Lena)and Asian Pears

Korean Giant Asian pear nominally pollinated with Chojuro Asian pear

K-6, 90 Chromosome American Persimmon. Nominally pollinated with Szukis

I am heading out to where I hunt. I will step these into the ground where I want deer to show up fifteen years from now.

Pears on the high ground. Persimmons under the multi-stem, soft maple that need to be culled.

Planting this way is a low percentage operation. The seeds and my time are cheap. Even if I only net five trees, I will have a good time and it will be five more mast trees than I have now.