Great or awesome?

I’m watching it for the second time, and it gives me fits. Maybe I should be an asshole lobbyist for a living.

ETA: The AdSense ads that are appearing on this post are ironic to the max.

“Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.” — James Madison

Yeah, I can totally see how people would think the Founding Fathers meant for the 2nd Amendment to mean the National Guard. Hurrrrrrrrr.

I’m a weirdo.

By that, I mean… I just had the following thought: If my last name were Wesson, I would only marry a guy with the last name Smith. How awesome would those wedding invitations be?

Scooter PR, Day 1:

I think it’s the spring fever bringing it on. Today was a beautiful day, and my first day of doing advertisement/PR for Palouse Scoots. I rode the scooter to Pullman for the first time, which was fun, but more tiring than I expected. It was a little windy, so trucking along on the scoot at 50 mph with a head and/or crosswind was pretty labor-intensive.

Girls With Guns 2008.

I heard back from the girls with guns folks, and sorry kids - I’m not going to be in the calendar this go-round. Never fear, though, because there’s never a shortage of Laurel with guns picspamming around here.

Laurel, the sales and advertising guru?

Now, the interesting thing about the calendar deal is while I was not asked to model, I was instead offered a fairly lucrative-sounding, flexible sales position. I’m going to hammer out the logistics with the RainyCrash folks, but it definitely sounds like something I’m interested in.

On that note, and on the heels of my college angst post, I keep winding up with these things falling in my lap. I mean, the Palouse Scoots position came out of the blue, and then the calendar thing. I’m starting to feel like I’m being cosmically shoved into the direction of PR/sales/advertising/something like that. I’m obviously good at it, and I obviously enjoy it, but I’m always wary of anything that might become a “career” lest it not be something I really like enough to do for 35+ years. Having said all this, I’m not tired of it yet, and it’s an option I’m very interested in exploring.

Income blogging.

Speaking of making money, I’m doing alright with the AdSense ads so far. Not like “buy a small island in the Bahamas” alright, but not too shabby for a fairly new blog with a fairly limited readership. I’ll tell you one thing - attempting to make my own blog lucrative has definitely made me stand up and take notice of advertising elsewhere. I’ve never clicked on ads before I had them myself… Now I kind of recognize it as a reciprocity thing when I visit other blogs/sites - kind of my way of “paying” the author for good content. The only bummer about the ads on my site is sometimes I see something I’m really interested in - and I can’t click my own ads! :)

And by the way… shooty weekend stuff.

Yes, I’m home on Friday night. Contrary to what I may lead you all to believe, I’m actually pretty anti-social sometimes, and I’m on one of those streaks. I am, however, itching to get out of town and shoot - which is on the slate for Sunday. I’m going to see if the pin from Daniel’s P32 fits my P3AT, since I’ve neglected to order another one from Kel-Tec yet.

On that note, I’m off to figure out what in the hell smells like a dryer sheet in here, because it’s giving me allergies.

ETA:

Almost forgot - it annoys the everliving piss out of me that my last name is Zimmer, because when AdSense can’t figure out what else to advertise, it winds up advertising rooms in German-speaking country. Yes, my last name means “room.” Exciting, no? I need to figure out some way to block that, because I highly doubt German rooming houses are going to bring in the big bucks around here.

I’ve recently begun hanging out with the indigents at AR15.com, and I feel like I’ve found my home on teh intarwebs. I love that place. The first in what I imagine to be a long series of “I’m blogging this” quotes comes from user AllserviceBilliards, on the subject of college:

It propagates delusional thinking. From the time we are children we are told that if we go to school, study, and get good grades, we will be “successful” (I like to say ‘cessful) and make lots of money and marry beautiful people and ride unicorns and live under a rainbow. Or, we can choose not to go to college and become garbage collecters, drifters, indigents, alcoholics, drug addicts, and rapists.

I LOL’ed, and then LOL’ed some more. The only issue I take with his statements is the obvious - he forgot strippers!

The gun stuff is on hiatus for a day, because frankly? I don’t feel like it.

As for college: I hate it. With a fiery, fiery passion. I don’t enjoy a single goddamn minute of anything related to my educational pursuits. To explain why, I present you with a World of Warcraft analogy:

When you start a new character, you pick a couple professions, and you practice and gather stuff to gain skill points. Different trainers teach you different things, and you have limits to how much you can learn before you’re a certain level (think “age.”)

Now, each trainer has a limit to how much they can teach you, and eventually they send you on to another trainer. So let’s say you’re like, level 12, and you’ve learned all the stuff you can learn from that trainer, and maxed out your skill points. Problem is, you can’t get a higher skill cap until you’re level 15. So for those three levels in between, you do the same shit, over and over again, and become very bored, and very annoyed.

That is where I’m at with college. In my chosen profession (major) I have maxed out all the skills I can learn at my level. But I can’t go anywhere. I’m like being stuck at level 12 and not being able to get the hell out of here until level 15. I’m not learning anything other than random pieces of information, and while I like information, there is no reason I should be paying somebody to teach it to me in a format I despise when I could get it for cheap or free elsewhere (internet, book, TV). All the actual skills I’m supposed to learn, like writing, critical thinking, etc., I’ve already maxed out. I know that shit. The only way I could learn anything of actual value to me at this point would be to pursue classes in another major (profession) but that would derail me from my original path, and then I’d never get out of here.

So the point of that convoluted analogy was to say I hate college, it sucks, I don’t want to be here, and somebody please tell me I can make decent money without going so I will feel justified in saying “Fuck this place” and not going anymore. The only reason I am still even attempting to pursue this shit is because I’ve been socially engineered to believe I’m going to live in a cardboard box if I don’t.

/pity party

I can’t believe I didn’t post an OMG WTF BSG post after Sunday’s episode.

So here it is: OMG WTF BSG!?

I can’t believe they’re leaving me hanging until 2008. This is all I’ll say here in the interest of being non-spoilery, but (to steal a line from JMPP) WARNING: COMMENTS CONTAIN SPOILERS.

Discuss at will.

However, I’m not yet over Googling it, and I just found this gem:

Lots of people have fetishes of one flavor or another, but they generally tend to be the kind of thing easily accommodated by like-minded sorts. Stealing 1500 female undergarments isn’t just a fetish. That’s a boutique.

Maybe Garth did it for the lulz.

There has been some interesting conversation in the comments on this post I made about an armed citizenry, so I thought I’d turn my thoughts into a new post. I enjoy the comment feature on blogs but would sometimes rather put my main points into new content, so readers who might not be following the other can see it. Anyway, feel free to continue the discussion here - I will actually be writing a multi-part series on related topics over the next couple of days.

First, let’s deal with a basic fact: there is always somebody better than you. You may think you’re the smartest, fastest, best-looking mofo in the world, but inevitably somebody else out there has you beat in at least one area. When it comes to physical condition, I’m not fat, I’m not weak. However, somebody who works out more than I do is almost certainly going to have the upper hand over me in hand-to-hand combat. A person my size who works out five days a week is still probably going to be dominated by a guy the size of Bill Romanowski.

Mike told me a story he heard once about a mixed martial arts fighter who was very good at what he did. One night, he saw a woman get carjacked right outside his gym. He took off after the carjacker, on foot. The carjacker got stuck in some traffic and the MMA guy caught up. In his adrenaline-fed fury, the MMA guy opened and kicked the driver-side door off the hinges. You’d think this story would end with him hauling the carjacker out of the car by his shirt, beating his ass, and calling the cops, right? Wrong. The carjacker pulled out a gun and shot the MMA guy, killing him. Moral of the story: somebody always has the potential for more force.

So yes, you can make a very good argument that even if a citizen is proficient with a firearm, somebody else will be more proficient, more skilled in tactics, a better long-range marksman, or whatever. I ask you this, though - does that mean the average person shouldn’t even try? Should we just roll over and expose our collective pink bellies, saying in an Eeyore voice, “Ooooh well. Somebody would probably SWAT team me anyway.”

I think not. I think that my odds are pretty good that, without making it a “personal obsession,” I can gain the level of skill necessary to defend against nine out of ten aggressors I’ll come up against. The home invader, the rapist, the carjacker, the convenience store thief. If I wind up facing the one out of ten who is better than me, then I guess it’ll be the day my card was drawn.

I heard another story during my brief stint at Domino’s. One of my co-workers had a friend at another Domino’s they’d worked at - this guy had been a Marine Corps martial arts instructor. One night, the store got a call for a delivery to a shady apartment complex. One of the drivers took the order, and as he passed a dark part of the complex, a guy stepped out of the shadows with a gun and demanded his cash bag. The driver handed it over and ran. The very next night, they got another call to the same complex. The former Marine said he’d take it, and lo and behold the exact same scenario happened. This time, the guy held the gun a little too close to the Marine’s head, and the next thing the thief new he was disarmed with a broken elbow. Moral of the story: guns don’t guarantee you win.

Since I’ve been involved in so-called activism about the right to keep and bear arms, the “bearing” part specifically, I’ve heard the idea repeatedly bandied about that carrying a gun makes people feel invincible. It makes people go where they shouldn’t, thinking they can handle it. It escalates confrontations because the gun-carrier thinks it’s okay to flash his weapon as a warning.

These behaviors are stupid, irresponsible, and NOT what I have encountered with the vast majority of gun enthusiasts. As I said in the comments on the other post, I know I, personally, have higher situational awareness when I carry than when I don’t. I recognize that I’m introducing a firearm into my surroundings and that there are inherent responsibilities associated with that action. The last thing I want to do is be overpowered by an attacker and arm him with my pistol. The kind of person who enters gun ownership and carry with the recognition of the solemn responsibility it entails is not the kind of person to think “Sweet, now I’ll put on a short skirt and walk down a dark alley!” or “Awesome - I’m going to go into the middle of south central and start talking about how much I hate black people.”

Furthermore, a person should never carry a gun unless they are willing to fire that gun at a living being if it becomes necessary. And a person should never, ever draw their firearm unless they are even more committed to firing. Drawing back one’s coat to expose a sidearm Clint Eastwood style and saying “I don’t think you want to do that” in the attempt to “diffuse” a situation is really, really stupid. If you brandish your firearm, it’s because you believe a) you or somebody around you is in imminent danger and b) you have the intestinal fortitude to pull the trigger. Of course, if you draw on somebody and they immediately drop their weapon and lay face down on the ground with arms and legs spread, I don’t endorse shooting them in the back of the head. This is where confidence and training come in. You have to be able to constantly evaluate the proper course of action - but that said, when your gun clears the holster it should be with the mental recognition that you will pull the trigger unless something major makes that action unacceptable.

Carrying a gun doesn’t make me invincible. It doesn’t make me bullet-proof or prone to dangerous behavior. What it does make me do is have a little less fear when I walk from a store to my car alone late at night. I’d still prefer to have somebody walk with me, sure - but those times when I can’t, I’m now a little more prepared to protect myself in the event something happens.

I’ve often been asked “Why do you need to carry a gun? It’s not like you’d ever need it in a place like this.” I can give a gazillion anecdotal examples of how that does happen here (or wherever your personal “here” happens to be), but I’ll stick with a couple basic ones. The recent Utah mall shooting - Salt Lake City. Nobody expected that to happen there. Lives were saved when an off-duty cop, who was carrying at the time, exchanged fire with the gunman until other officers arrived. “But he’s a cop!” you might say - yeah, and I know several shooting enthusiasts who could out-shoot many cops.

How about the string of “accostings” we had on the University of Idaho campus my first year here? That happened here. That wasn’t drunk frat guys date-raping drunk sorority girls - that was sober women, walking through campus in the evening, who were assaulted. Check out the local sex offender registry. They’re here too.

How about our football player who was shot and killed last year, or the football player who was just arrested for armed robbery and battery? That happened here, too. Keep in mind I live in a pretty friggin’ quiet town in northern Idaho, and yet I can come up with a list of legitimate concerns. Does this mean I live in constant fear of being attacked? No - but does putting on my seat belt mean I live in constant fear of being in an accident? Of course not. It’s just a safety precaution I’m accustomed to taking, one that allows me to live in less fear if anything. Same thing with gun ownership and carry.

And, of course, there’s the “oh, duh” part - I’m not always here. It would be kind of stupid if I never familiarized myself with my firearms until I really needed them. I do occasionally travel to higher-crime areas, and the fact that I’m familiar and confident with my guns means I can safely, responsibly carry them in places where the likelihood of a criminal encounter is higher than my usual level.

Next up, later today or tomorrow:
Point five: what the second amendment is all about
Point six: why an armed (and proficient) citizenry is a defense against totalitarian government
Point seven: how passive resistance may become your only option

DreamHost has been having some problems with my server, but they’re working on it. It’s annoying, but I won’t be upgrading to more reliable service until this blog is at least self-sufficient monetarily.

See? There’s something in it for you to help me make this beeyotch profitable. More Laurel blogging, faster! :)

By decree of Laura and myself:

The word “panty” and all variations thereof are hereby banned.

With that said, an update on the chonie snatcher:

I don’t think I fully recognized the fact that he’s that guy until earlier today. You know, the dude you say things like this about:

“Did you hear about that guy in like, Ohio, that had sheep pornography? How weird is that?!”

This time, it’s “Did you hear about that guy we know who now has 200+ articles out there on Google and hit the AP wires for stealing five trashbags full of women’s underpants?”

The picture I have of my first legal shot on my 21st birthday has him in it. Weird.

Ammoman.com…

…is getting a big thumbs-up from me. I ordered that .223 on Sunday, and it’s already en route via UPS. They’ll get my business again.

Wii

We got a second Wiimote. I’m not a big fan of playing Wii tennis with two people, because it really limits your view along the sidelines of the court. Oh well, maybe I’m just cranky because Mike beat me. On that note, I’m going to go play some more. :p