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 . . .

Personally, I would have wanted a town in Arizona, not California, named after me if I were to have been a famous gunfighter in Tombstone, AZ. At least you can see Parker, AZ. from Earp, CA. on the Colorado River. It was 103° as we passed through on our way to Twenty Nine Palms, CA. By the way, there are way more than 29 palm trees in that town - and a lot of Marines, too.

This bronze statue of a cowboy sits in front of the Prescott, Arizona manufacturing facility of Sturm Ruger. Yep, that’s right, Ruger, the “Arms makers for responsible citizens©.” I liked the inscription on the plaque at the base of the statue. It reads,

Just a little information about this facility: it is located adjacent to the Prescott Airport and does not conduct tours for visitors. A facility security agent informed me that tours are conducted for employees and that he believed that someday they would open them to the public. He gave me a catalog with lots of real purdy guns in it.

(Drool . . .)

Dollar exchange rates are currently favorable for foreign terrorists tourists visiting America. Good and Bad . . .

On this trip, I have seen a lot of Scandinavians visiting our National Parks - at least I think so - their undisciplined towheaded kids are a pain in the ass. Moreover, the parents are uniformly rude, which is an artifact of eons of going barefoot in the snow.

And the Eastern Europeans were there too . . . it sounded like they were speaking Hairball, commonly spoken in the region. They like to stand in front of the panels that explain the features of the viewpoint such that you can’t read it or take a picture.

None of the Europarents seemed to be interested in the least amount of discipline for their children. Witness the little Eurotard sitting on a wall that’s supposed to protect him from falling into the 1800 foot chasm inches away. I mean straight fucking down. ‘Mamachen’ is right there and must not be able to read the warning sign. I hope her ‘Knabechen’ didn’t fall in.

And then there was the Asian in the line in front of me, who couldn’t figure out how much money to give the clerk even though there were pictures of the currency with translations in seventeen fucking languages taped to the counter.

At least they rent red, white and blue cars.

Anyhow, it’s good that they are spending their money in our country - too bad that the company running the concessions in our National Parks is owned by a Red Chinese company.

EZ come EZ go.