The Wandering Minstrel

I’m still having a vacation hangover, so I gotta show you some stuff I learned while traveling through the Indian Lands of Arizona and Utah. I learned that there are basically two kinds of rock art found in the Southwest: pictographs and petroglyphs. Pictographs are made from a variety of substances painted onto the rocks - they listed urine and blood among the substances the natives painted - weird, but whatever. Petroglyphs are etchings scratched or pounded into the patina deposited on the rocks.

In the Flash® animation above, you will notice a pictograph of the sun and a prominence. It fades into a petroglyph with images of animals, natives, stars, tools and an early cartoon of Bart Simpson in the lower right corner. Finally, the images will alternate until you put your mouse cursor over them, when you will see an amazing combination of both techniques that we discovered in Washington, UT. There is conjecture that this interesting combination may not have come from the early natives, but I’ll let you decide on that.

Now that Dick Heller is taking the next step in the process of bringing the Washington DC City Council and Mayor Adrian Fenty to their knees, it’s worth reading what Alan Gura, Heller’s principal attorney in the DC vs. Heller case, had to say about the meaning of the decision that SCOTUS rendered:

Clearing the Air

July 18th, 2008 by Alan Gura

There’s been some confusion about how the Supreme Court’s decision is to be implemented, and what it means for DC’s registration system, going forward. We’d like to clear the air.

The handgun that Mr. Heller tried to register in 2002, the registration of which was ordered by the courts, is a nine-shot revolver. It is fully registerable under D.C. law as it stands today, and Mr. Heller will have it registered to him. We are not expecting the city to resist the registration of this firearm. Once the gun is registered to Mr. Heller, he can use it to defend his home.

There are significant, practical limits on the number of arguments that can be put together in one lawsuit. In our case, we chose to focus on the handgun and functional firearms bans – and that was plenty work for the courts to consider. Litigants do not have unlimited space in the briefing, or unlimited time in argument, and there is a significant strategic advantage – as we have demonstrated – in keeping constitutional litigation focused and narrow.

Keep reading for Mr. Gura’s optimistic take on the future . . .

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Last week, I visited the Kingman Powerhouse, a visitor center (tourist trap, actually) and museum. I especially liked this neon sign hanging over the entrance to the museum.

There is also a model railroad that circles the main room and has loops at either end of the run to send it back in the opposite direction. A portion of the tracks goes outside of the building for a short run just over the main entrance. I’ll dig up a photo if I can find one.

You can click on the image above for a larger view.

A friend at work sent me this video. He said it reminded him of me. I had to set him straight, though. If I were to pull some stupid shit like this, the better half would slap a magazine in the pistol and just shoot me.

I then gave my friend the standard lecture about how responsible gun owners recognize that guns and horseplay don’t mix.

It’s also my personal opinion that this video was staged and everyone was acting. Regardless, it’s not good publicity for our side.

I saw this nice ‘56 Chev Pickup parked near the car wash while I was letting them remove the first layer of bugs from my truck after the vacation trip. The dude that owned this nice old vintage piece came and got into it and drove it away. He looked like he should have had a bumper sticker on this truck that said “My other car is a Harley” but then, maybe not. Most of us would assume it to be so . . .

Nice truck, Dude . . .