Our Server has been intermittently down today. The ISP changed the operating system and is still getting some of the bugs worked out. It’s not without impact to us, either, since some of our home-grown scripts need to be upgraded also.
Consequently, I have not had time to give due diligence to a post I’ve been contemplating.
Oh well . . . Please enjoy this nice photo that Damsel took of Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley NP. Click for larger size
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We took our usual suite of firearms to the range today. I took my two Glock pistols (G26 – 9mm and G30 – .45ACP), a S&W 908 9mm pistol, the S&W 686 .357 magnum revolver and my Remington 12 gauge 870 magnum shotgun. Damsel took her Para Warthog .45ACP pistol and her small 20 gauge Remington 870 shotgun.
There were no misfeeds on the Para this week again. It has been several weeks and about 300 rounds since even the last minor feed problem. There have been no stovepipes and no serious jams for a couple of months now. Following recommended maintenance and lubrication guidelines, the pistol has been performing just like it should.
I had one minor incident with the Rem 870 12 gauge. At one point when actuating the mechanism, an unspent round came out and the next round from the magazine did not go into the chamber. It was weird. Damsel picked it up right after that and promptly fired five rounds into the target with no problem. “It seems OK to me,” she said. We both laughed it off. At home, disassembly and inspection were completely normal.
After Damsel finished cleaning up the guns today, she loaded forty rounds into four Warthog magazines and posed them for a group photo (above). Very nice. Click 4 big.
Update: Thanks again to Liberty Sphere for including us in the Second Amendment Roundup.
I went into the garden this morning and took a picture of these jalapeño chili peppers. Our menu this weekend did not include anything that needs chili peppers, so they are still hanging there. We had barbecued chicken for dinner today and juiced some of our citrus (oranges and lemons) to add extra tang to the barbecue sauce.
Oh, and by the way, it was 75° here today, but before you decide to relocate here consider these things: insane gun laws, worst schools in America, highest taxes west of the Mississippi and last of all, EARTHQUAKES – we had one just the other evening.
The first day out on our recent winter cruise, we camped in the RV Resort in Twentynine Palms, California. When we woke up on Christmas Eve, we unhooked from the camp and headed into the Joshua Tree National Park north entrance.
It was a perfect day to see the park in wintertime. There were patches of snow here and there and the mountains surrounding the drive had a nice dusting of snow. At one point, we stopped at a scenic point where I took several images to later be stitched into a composite panorama.
Image: Looking South and Southwest toward the Coachella Valley. Click 4 big.
We’re thinking about heading back to Twentynine Palms and back through the park in the springtime when the flowers will all be in bloom. The park was almost named “Wildflower,” but “Joshua Tree” won in the end.
I was looking at the server statistics logs today and the browser type stat aroused my interest. I decided to take the figures and put them into a graphical format.
Even though our blog doesn’t get a very large number of hits, the Never Forget Tribute gets over 1500 hits per hour. When a browser is JavaScript enabled, it gets logged when it hits either the blog or the Tribute. Bottom line to this is I believe that the figures below are derived from a reasonably-sized sample. The figures were accumulated over the first week of 2009.
Clearly, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 have over half of the market. Firefox comes in second with over a quarter of the take. Last year, when I looked at this, there was more usage of IE 6 than 7 and more of Firefox 2 versus 3. That has changed as both Mozilla’s and Microsoft’s latest browsers have matured. Safari shows up better than Netscape and several other types which do not get named on the chart.
We appreciate all of our viewers regardless of their browser type.
Well, not a bud now, but very pretty. I got these and put them in the vase last Friday. Click for enlargement.
The science is in on the effects of temperature and hurricane intensity and it doesn’t implicate Global Warming, but rather just the opposite. It’s time for the perpetual victims of Katrina (not actually that strong of a storm Rita was much stronger) to stop whining about the non-existent connection between warm climate and hurricane intensity.
I read the article Tropical Cyclones (Atlantic Ocean – Global Warming Effects: Intensity) — Summary on the CO2 Science website and these paragraphs jumped out at me:
As a result of these efforts, the two researchers determined that “alternating periods of quiescent conditions and frequent hurricane landfall are recorded in the sedimentary record and likely indicate that climate conditions may have modulated hurricane activity on millennial timescales.” Of special interest in this regard, as they describe it, is the fact that “several major hurricanes occur in the western Long Island record during the latter part of the Little Ice Age (~1550-1850 AD) when sea surface temperatures were generally colder than present,” but that “no major hurricanes have impacted this area since 1893,” when the earth experienced the warming that took it from the Little Ice Age to the Current Warm Period.
Noting that Emanuel (2005) and Webster et al. (2005) had produced analyses that suggest that “cooler climate conditions in the past may have resulted in fewer strong hurricanes,” but that their own findings suggest just the opposite, Scileppe and Donnelly concluded that “other climate phenomena, such as atmospheric circulation, may have been favorable for intense hurricane development despite lower sea surface temperatures” prior to the development of the Current Warm Period. Perhaps, therefore, we have much-maligned global warming to thank for the complete absence of major hurricanes in the vicinity of New York City over the past 115 years.
Emphasis mine.
So the Little Ice Age (Maunder Minimum) brought havoc to the North Atlantic Region and since then the storm intensities have subsided. So it seems that the sunspots influence global temperatures in a manner that’s inversely proportional to the intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic.
This is one more scientific clue that the clueless will ignore.