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Gambling is alluring to most people and has gotten more popular than ever with high stakes poker shows on cable television and casinos sprouting up all over the place. But the biggest mecca for gambling isn’t Los Vegas. It is Wall Street.

Watching the markets claw their way to positive gains today, I’m struck by how addictive behaviors make their presence felt in even what should be the most sober of locations. There is no good economic news and only vague hopes of another stimulus or some such reassurance from the Fed. Speculation has lost what rationality it had at some point in the past and I’ll leave that to someone to pinpoint.

It eerily reminds me of partying before a disaster hits. Or in this case, during the opening stages of one.

Ah, well. One can’t live life without taking a few chances. I’ve made a few gambles in life that didn’t pay off, though for the most part they weren’t financial ones. My latest to go awry is an attempt to make my pistol accurate.

The Ruger P94 I have had since the late 90’s has never been accurate. At best, I could throw bullets with the same results. But through trial and much error, the problem has been narrowed down to sights that hit at least 6 inches too low.

I’d hoped adding Hogue grips would help. Today I finally got to test the modified pistol out with them. They did help in the horizontal, oddly. But the sights are still horrible. Even making a triangle with the dots only elevated shots to three inches low. Lining up the dots is supposed to be dead on at 7 yards but doing that took me completely off the paper 7 out of 10 shots.

Now I’m debating selling or trading in the gun and getting a different used pistol. With my friend’s Springfield XDM, I wasn’t just on paper on the first try but shot a nice fist sized group about two inches low. So my trigger technique does need work but it isn’t 6” plus bad.

I also broke the plastic head of my small crafting hammer while trying to remove the rear sights during an experiment to see if I could change them out myself. Insult to injury or injury to insult?

So $20 down the drain on the grips. It would be another $130 to get new adjustable sights and pay a gunsmith to put them on. I’m not enthused.

Things Fall Apart

One inescapable reality is that all things break down at some point. Some can be repaired, some can be replaced, some are lost forever, but this is what happens in life.

Yesterday our internet access went down and so did one phone line as we discovered this morning. Good thing we called in since it turned out to be a cabinet problem that affected others too. But repairs took awhile and service wasn’t restored until after 2PM. For which I’m grateful.

Timing wasn’t great since I had been hoping to see how world stock markets reacted to Friday’s downgrade of the U.S.A. by Standard & Poors. Not surprisingly, they didn’t take it well and the Dow Jones was down by over 500 at one point. As I type, a minor rally failed at it is down 500 again which is a loss of 4.4%. Nasdaq and the S&P 500 are being hit harder, both down more than 5%.

People can point politically motivated fingers all they want, but this is debt driven and can’t be fixed. An ineffectual, incompetent, and detached president doesn’t help, but this is the result of decades of financial folly. It can’t be easily fixed. Most likely it can’t be fixed and we’ll have to take our lumps

Such is life and the current generations have had it easy to this point. Many of our ancestors would shake their heads at our mistakes, but most of all at how spoiled we are. Time to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and stop looking to others to solve our problems.

Sad thing is we no longer have true leaders to get us out of this mess.

Updated

Mere moments after posting this, the Dow dived to a 632 point loss or 5.53% down.

Updated Again

London is burning. “Youths” are doing their best to destroy everything they can and beat as many people they can lay hands on. The citizens are defenseless against this and I can’t think of a better argument in favor of the 2nd Amendment.

It isn’t just finances that are falling apart in the world. Order is beginning to as well.

Dust in the Wind

Or more accurately, crop dusting on a hazy Saturday morning.

It was surprising to hear an airplane buzzing the house at very low level this morn. Normally, only the rare C-130 will buzz the place about once a year or so and the local light planes keep higher. So I went outside to check out what the racket was about and was very surprised to see a bright yellow crop dusting plane circling round.

An opportunity for photos, I thought! I rushed back into the house and grabbed the Canon S1IS that is for general use and ran out. Change batteries it said. No spare batteries charged at the moment, of course.

Back in I went and got the big Canon DSLR. Being in a hurry, I didn’t bother to put the big telephoto lens on it. Switched to sport mode as I’m beyond rusty and took a few shots. Results weren’t what I wanted and I knew I had to risk the plane departing to get the 55-250mm lens.

Fortunately for me, more passes were made and I got some better shots.

The spray bars which dispense the chemicals dropped are one of the most intriguing features on these specialty planes.

I assume the thick wings hold the chemical tanks, but can’t say for sure.

The profile reminds me of early racing planes, but with a much higher canopy. That’s needed for winding your way through the weeds.

Amazing how low they fly to spray.

Well that was fun. I never did get to an airshow after getting a decent camera and telephoto lens, so at least I know they work!

All Along the Watchtower

Time again to collect my thoughts for posterity since this blog was started to be a journal.

With the stock markets diving, it appears reality has finally caught up to investors. The new jobs report shows unemployment down slightly to 9.1% but is due to Americans leaving the employment game. Only 58.1% (or 63.9%, I’m running into varying figures) of the employable population are holding a job right now.

The attempt to decouple employment from economic health baffles me. It demonstrates just how out of touch the elites are. Apparently, they have no knowledge of history – if they did they’d be terrified right about now. The first warning sign is usually a populist political movements being born. If those fail to change things or are suppressed, structural failures in a society begin to be evident. That isn’t saying they weren’t already there, but that the masses begin to perceive them. Consider it noticing that the emperor is walking around stark naked.

I think we have entered that stage with “government” replacing “emperor.”

Should be an interesting day watching the stock markets again. 3% a day declines in US and Asian stock indexes have been the pattern the last few days. We’ll see if that changes.

At home, we now have much higher DSL speeds thanks to a change in modems and the new package from Ace. Speed tops out at 6.7M down, which is amazing after being used to 1M. Streaming is a new world, but tests of HD streams have been mixed. Since I don’t have many to compare, my conclusions are limited but it appears to be dependent on the technology used by the streaming services.

720P works just fine off of youTube, but an anime site I tried still stutters. Come to think of it, they don’t label as 720P, maybe they are trying to push 1080P. I should try out Hulu Plus for the free week and see how that works.

Will this skeptic of streaming movie services ever be fully converted? Time will tell.

Best thing about the increased speed is how software updates seem instantaneous now. There is also enough bandwidth to have two people browsing videos and music without stepping on each other’s virtual toes. VOIP is working better so far as well.

A Mormon Defense League? For all the talk of Latter-day Saints being so media savvy, the fact this only just launched demonstrates how questionable that assumption is. This organization is needed given the rampant bigotry and ignorance on display across the country.

I was checking the stats on the blog and noticed a lot of hits were on my Citizen Kane review. What is surprising is how many people have been looking for the No Trespassing sign still shot. Is there a meme out there I’m unaware of?

And by a lot of hits, I mean in double digits.

One of the nice things about having a small blog is seeing the strange intersections of what I post and what people are looking for. Part of it is nostalgia for when the Web was new and I’d surf to find whatever was out there. That feeling of finding the unexpected and different is no longer there for me. Maybe others aren’t as jaded and find something here to entertain or ponder. If so, I hope that feeling of discovery is aided a little by my meanderings.

Watched the new Clash of the Titans the other night. What a hollow experience that was. None of the charm or respect of the old myths in the original was present. The effects were decent and that is the only area in which it was superior. It simply isn’t a good movie.

Finally purchased and downloaded Planescape: Torment to play. It is a game I’d read about for years and had meant to get last year when it showed up at GOG.com. There are some issues of crashing, but I made sure to add the mod to allow quick saves. Sigil is one interesting place and the Planes always make for a good setting.

Hopefully, I can finish this game eventually. I haven’t gamed that much lately since writing has taken up more of my health induced down time. This is a good thing.

Health 8-4-2011

Since early July, a pain in my lower abdomen has been giving me grief. It felt like a muscle strain but never goes away for long. If it gets much worse, I’ll have to have it looked into. I’d rather wait it out.

Didn’t sleep well due to it. Crossword puzzle was way too easy today, so of no use gauging mental acuity. Audio surf wasn’t great, but it was all fast moving  steep downhill tracks today. So once again, not a good way of measuring things.

It is a Thursday. I never did get the hang of Thursdays.

Moody Minnesota

It had slipped my attention that the state of Minnesota was downgraded from AAA to AA+ by Moody’s last month. So it was somewhat surprising to find out that the financial outlook for Minnesota was revised to negative on Monday. This is not a good thing when looking for bonding in the future.

Strange how my state has become something of a predictor for political problems lately. What’s clear is that the public’s love of having divided government doesn’t work so well during a time of economic crisis.  Big governments are slow to react to anything and divided governments are even worse.

So we are seeing that stop gap measures aren’t effective in keeping good credit ratings, which should be a warning sign to the Federal government. There is a very high chance that there will be a downgrade there as well.

I should see how the stock markets are taking things now that the debt ceiling raise was signed by President Obama…

Well, the Dow has plunged below the 12,000 mark and the S&P has shed most of its gains for the year. Not surprising since there is no good economic news to be had. Gold just went higher with South Korea buying more, it is at $1644.50 an ounce. That’s absurdly high and a huge warning sign.

Interesting times.

Chicken Tracks

One thing I’ve noticed about when I get overtired is the tendency toward malapropos when speaking or writing. It is very irritating to realize that the wrong word was used well after the fact. So when I logged in today and saw that I’d titled the last post “Chicken Scratches” I was not amused.

When I wrote that title, in my head was the imagery of what my notes and print writing looks like. Those of us who print too quickly can be accused of putting “chicken tracks” on paper. How “scratches” got in there I do not know.

Now for some more randomness as I willfully go off topic.

While off in the big medium small city, I ran across a gun shop that was unknown to me. Curious to see what they have, one of the first things beheld upon entering is afflicting me with a bad case of the wants. It is a new DPMS Panther Oracle in .308/7.62 caliber. Think of an M-4 but with a much bigger punch.

For some time, I’ve wanted a .308 semi-auto to fill a true multirole capability. Something that can take deer or larger game down but also be something useful if the world decides to end while I wasn’t watching. But most of all, after getting an Enfield SMLE I fell in love with shooting bigger rounds. Which is not what I expected at all.

One thing saving me from getting too covetous of the rifle is the short barrel. I want something longer for hunting purposes, though I concede that my shaky hands probably render the extra range useless. It is also why I need the ability to put a second round downrange ASAP when I miss. Sigh.

Back to reality.