Interesting discourse on guns and gun games between Tactical Death Ninja and his interlocutor.

Tactical Death Ninja: “They can’t adapt.  Only I can adapt.  This shit is proprietary and requires very special training that only I can provide, but it is also instinctive and anyone can learn it in 5 minutes.  That sounds like a contradiction until you realize just what kind of f-n’ badass instructor I am.  The bad guys don’t get it and as a result they must remain still in every way, and suffer a -4 to initiative and other modifications to both armor class and hit points.”

Read it all here.

h/t K. Hungus

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Getting passports for the whole family will cost $850. Escape will be expensive.

For those who thought there was no way that bagpipes could possibly be more irritating: you are wrong.  For those who think the opposite, you also are wrong:

Make sure you watch to the end for the big finish.

The Instapundit has been thrashing the higher education bubble meme for this little while, most recently lining to a longish piece in New York Magazine, The University Has No Clothes.  As you, Dear Reader, will be aware if you’ve been paying attention the Buckethead clan is homeschooling its youngins.  So the idea of college and education and assorted issues is important to us.  I have mixed feelings about college education.  It is in theory capable of providing the sort of knowledge that simply cannot be gotten any other way.  And we all like to think of it that way.  But the reality is something more akin to a four to seven year long, savagely, offensively expensive binger with a light frosting of vocational training and (for the lucky or skilled) a creamy filling of consequence- and moral-free sex.  At the end, you are tossed into the world with a credential of dubious and rapidly diminishing value and a mortgage for an expensive house you can’t live in or sell.

Now, I would be the last person on Earth to undervalue spending the better part of a decade drunk, high and nailing anything with a heart beat.  But I managed accomplish exactly that with a bare minimum of debt by the simple expedient of not actually attending college.  And of all the people I met in college, a fair number of them did graduate with debt ranging from inconvenient to crushing.  And only one is actually doing anything remotely related to his degree, and of the rest very few are doing work that actually requires a college degree in even the most tenuous way.  Did they get their, or their parent’s, worth of the money spent or borrowed?  I have no sheepskin, but I am doing better financially than a large number of graduates from the small Ohio liberal arts school I attended.  And I arguably had a lot more fun.  Because when I was doing my real drinking, I never had to worry about midterms.

If I’m willing to keep my kids out of public schools to give them a better education, college is certainly up for discussion.  Do I want to drop $200k (or more, hyperinflation depending) to allow my son, and equivalent or greater sums for three daughters to go on a four year bender in a world completely divorced from reality and end up unemployable?

I think I can think of better ways to spend the best part of a million dollars.

An update on progress in resolution world.

• Dieting.  Tragic fail.  Gained ten pounds.  There are lame excuses reasons for this one.  First was the baby. I’m starting off blaming young Anneliese for things beyond her control a little early, perhaps, but best get started now while she has no defenses.  The arrival of the baby was certainly the cause of chaos, and that made eating correctly more difficult.  Second was the diet plan itself.  Ferriss’ idea is that one day a week is a cheat day, eat whatever the hell you want and basically be paleo the rest of the time.  This does not work for me.  Sure, I can cheat like all get out on Saturday, but switching back to paleo is all the harder.  There’s usually leftover cheat food that I am sorely tempted to eat – after all, I picked it on the basis that it would be food I would really enjoy, but can’t normally enjoy on a paleo system.  Also, throwing carbs and wheat into my body just as its getting used to not having them makes me feel sick and fatigued and a bit depressed.  So, I’m ditching the 4-hr body plan and going back to the more straightforward paleo that lost me much wait last year.
• Blogging once a day.  Tragic fail.  Still want to go with this one – and now that the new baby is calming down, this may be more feasible.
• Time consuming hobby.  Started accumulating stuff, but haven’t had time to dive in.  I still want to carve out an evening for this, but this one’s on hold.  Incomplete, abandoned.
• Read thinky books.  Started all of the books I mentioned, but haven’t finished them.  Also started reading the Great Mortality, about the Black Death.  Fascinating.  Will have reviews soon.  Incomplete.
• Almost done with Volume I of the great books.  I hope to pick up the pace there.  Incomplete.
• Made progress on book catalog – all the history and military history books are catalogued.  I’ve found digital copies for some, but some of the books are rather obscure and I’m not finding digital copies easy to, uh, find.  If anyone’s interested, I’ll post the list.  Incomplete.
• Passports: tragic fail, no progress made.
• Made a budget, win!  Following budget, win!  I will be debt free, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise, on or about Friday, Jul 8.  Still need to rein in random spending a bit, but things are proceeding nicely on this front.
• I think I am definitely a better person than I was six weeks ago.  No closer to taking over the world.

New resolutions?  Well, I still have quite a list.  If I can wrap up the resolutions from last month by the end of this month – doable, certainly, then I will consider new ones for March.

I succeeded on the most important of my goals – the budget.  I consider the tragic fail on the diet to be a partial success, in that it was an experiment and I gained useful knowledge, which I can use going forward.  Three incompletes, but given time constraints and a newborn baby, not so bad – I did make some progress.

While down in Columbus, the wife conceived a need to go to Walmart.  On the way back, waiting at a light, she was looking through her purse.  And her foot lifted off the break pedal a bit.  Since it was an automatic, she drifted forward and touched the bumper of the car in front of her.  So slight was the impact that she wasn’t even aware that she’d touched the other car.

That is, until the woman got out and started screaming.

This Indian woman (dot) accused my wife of damaging her car.  Based on what I saw when of our car, there is no possibility that there was any damage whatsoever.  The woman called the police.  The officer, when he arrived, refused to right a citation to anyone since he couldn’t detect any damage to either car.  My wife gave the harridan our insurance info.

I thought (hoped, really) that that would be the end of it.

But the day after the whole house thing blew up (see my previous post) I get a call from Geico about the “accident.”  I had a hard time thinking of a .1mph impact as an accident – I’ve hit people’s cars harder than that on purpose and caused no damage.

The bonus, though, is that the car my wife was driving was my dad’s minivan, which we’d borrowed for the trip so we’d have more room.  So, I had to call Dad and explain that we’d been in an accident.  So while I was frantically trying to save my house, I had to deal with spending hours on the phone with insurance companies explaining the non-accident and making sure that the insurance adjustors when they get to look at the woman’s 97 Toyota Camry, they take a skeptical view of any of her claims of damage.

Trying to get my insurance to pay for a new paint job or something for her thirteen year old car – and making my rates go up – is basically theft.  And forcing me to have to explain all this to my dad is just annoying.

Bitch.

Admittedly, not a scientific study.

Well, not really a study at all.

More of an exposition.

Presented without comment:

hat tip: Clusterflock

Aretae started up a Google group for the purpose of monkeybrain solidarity in maintaining a paleo-style diet.  I’m not actually starting the diet until Monday, due to patriotic obligations, but the group has already yielded one great quote, used in the title.

If anyone is interested in joining, go over here for the details.  If you don’t know what a paleo diet is, well, google is your friend.  But in the meantime, you can see Aretae’s post.  I first got interested in this when I read Gary Taubes’ excellent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  The essential idea is that we are not evolutionarily prepared for the massive ingestion of refined carbohydrates.  The presence of these in the body disturbs the fat metabolism, causing energy to be sequestered in the body as fat, rather than used as fuel.  By restricting carbohydrate intake – moving toward protein and fat, you restore the balance, and all the fat will seep into your bloodstream as energy.

I did the diet last fall, with good results.  I lost ten pounds in little over a month, with absolutely no hunger.  And I cheated a bit even.  What killed the diet was the onset of Thanksgiving – and I didn’t jump back on the wagon after.  But while I was on it, I felt better, had higher energy levels, was less sleepy at work.  I’m looking forward to getting going again.

Two great resources on paleo diet are these blogs – Free the Animal, and PaNu.  Also of interest is this article from the November, 1935 issue of Harpers.  That article alone pretty much disproves (in a Karl Popper sense) most of what we’ve been told about nutrition for the last four decades.