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Friday, August 27, 2010


Foto Friday: Are You Looking at Me?


Between civilization in Kula and Haleakala National Park lies the deadly cattle range. Cattle guards keep the cows out of the park, and out of Kula, but in between they are free to wander onto the highway. It's a special thrill, on a foggy night, to come out of a hairpin turn and see a cow standing serenely in the road. A colleague of mine once saw a sports car breeze past him and two other vehicles, only to hit a calf amidships.


Cattle range on Haleakala, Oct 2009Cattle range on Haleakala, Oct 2009


This one is keeping a wary distance from the road, and from nosy photographers.

What? Oh, yes, Foto Friday has been AWOL for a while, hasn't it? I've just been too danged lazy to select and edit the photos. There have been complaints. Apparently now I have two whole readers -- a 100% increase!

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010


Hunting Nazi Polar Bear on Maui


Tommy and I went out to the gun range again last week, and we took along his "Arctic Panther", which he said was for hunting polar bears.


Sadly, polar bear have been hunted to extinction on Maui. Here's a picture of me, showing our target, sort of:


The cardboard things are our pistol targets. The rifle target is shown by the lighted circle, to the right of the pistol targets, waaaay back there. Again, with the scopes, it really wasn't very challenging to hit the target with the rifles.

Which is more than I can say for the pistols. I'm pretty sure the laws of physics were somehow violated. You'd think it would be impossible to miss the cardboard at that range, but I couldn't see much evidence that I was hitting anything. I suspect there was quantum tunneling involved: through some bizarre freak of nature, the bullets moved from the gun into the dirt on the other side, without traveling through the intervening space. There's a Nobel Prize in there somewhere, I'm sure.

Now, last time, Tommy brought only the .22s, and I thought, "Oh, how sweet! He thinks the recoil on the larger calibers will be too much for my delicate girly frame." So this time he brought his 9mm Walther P38, from WWII Germany. (He showed me some markings that allegedly contained a swastika, but I didn't have my reading glasses with me, so couldn't swear to it.)

That thing scared the snot out of me. I couldn't keep my hand from going up. It's a wonder I didn't put any holes in the roof. And the bullets were so big!


If you look carefully, you can see that the gun is open. That's because it's jammed. Here's a close-up:




I wore my silly Aunt Myrtle hat again because it protects my anonymity on teh internetz, but it affords other types of protection too -- as when Tommy was shooting the Walther next to me, causing a gentle rain of hot brass to fall upon my head. (I still have the scar from our last visit, when I set my elbow down on some. I refer to this as my "bullet wound".)

We went on a weekday morning and the placed was packed. I overheard several men crediting this to the "gun salesman of the year", Barack Obama.

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