Good post from Chris Arnade... "Every few weeks Twitter gets caught up in a fight when someone proclaims that Europe is better than the US, or vice-versa1. I usually stay away from these dust ups because it’s an ignorant debate. The question is badly defined, subjective, and impossible to answer, so the fights devolve into two groups talking past each other, until someone eventually drags out a picture of Breezewood, and then for all effective purposes it’s over2. To the pro-Europe side, Europe is a cornucopia of crime-free, gothic-cathedral-having cities with great public transportation, qua ..read more

"Strip Mall Funeral Parlor" is the name of my next band ..read more

Spotted pulling into the SoBro Fresh Market on a Grey Poupon run was this Rolls-Royce Ghost in the disappointingly prosaically named "Silver" color. With a chassis derived from the then-current BMW 7 series and powered by a twin-turbo 6.6 litre BMW V12 rated at 563 SAE net horsepower, the Ghost's power is certainly "Adequate", even when dealing with a curb weight that's only about a case of Perrier short of five and three quarter tons. Photographed with the Nikon D700 and Nikkor 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G superzoom lens ..read more

"Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020. Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters." Basically, Tesla's challenge was to learn how to make a car company faster than established car companies ..read more

Speaking of unexpected sights, check out this absolutely pristine '84 or '85 Ford Tempo GL coupe in Medium Regatta Blue. The Tempo was the downsized front wheel drive replacement for the Ford Fairmont. It was the second FoMoCo car to feature the new curvy aero styling after the '83 Thunderbird and presaged the coming of the bombshell '85 Taurus. (If you weren't around then, it's hard to understand what a splash the original Taurus made after a decade of square-edged boxmobile sedans from Detroit.) The Tempo's platform was derived from the Escort and it was powered by Ford's 2.3L pushrod HS ..read more

Y'know, I wonder if the proliferation of relatively cheap CNC machinery is responsible for the overall rise in the quality floor of 1911s over the past couple decades? I mean, thirty years ago if you weren't spending a G on a 1911, it was basically understood that you were buying a pistol kit that might cycle ball reliably. Nowadays even the Turks will sell you a Government Model clone that will probably run adequately out of the box, at least with good magazines and bullet profiles that aren't too weird and are in the normal 185-230gr weight range ..read more

Photobucket has been sending me messages for literal years that my inactive account would be deleted and that if I didn’t respond, it’d be a goner. I’ve never responded, but those dudes still haven’t deleted my account (which I am hoping they will. I only had it because a couple forums on which I was active a decade or more ago didn’t have their own photo hosting.) Are you gonna bark all day, little Photobucket? Our are you gonna bite ..read more

I absolutely have to get some chrono testing done this morning so I can ship off a review this afternoon. I won't go to the outdoor range on the weekends... it'd be impossible to get any chrono testing done then anyway ...and today's the only dry weekday in a solid block of rainy weather stretching from last Tuesday to this coming Friday. We're on pace for one of the wettest Aprils on record here in Indy. Duty calls. More this afternoon ..read more

This one almost slipped past me before I realized what I'd just seen and jogged down to the corner to grab a photo of it at the traffic light. What we've got here is a right-hand drive JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) 1994-'96 Toyota Mark II in the Tourer-V trim level, meaning it's packing a 280bhp twin-turbo 1JZ-GTE 2.5 liter inline six. These midsize RWD sedans are popular tuner cars in Japan but were never imported here ..read more

It's been interesting noticing the trends at TacCon now that I've been there for seven years. The first one I attended, at DARC in Arkansas back in 2017, was largely after the "Caliber Wars" were over. I'm sure there were a few .40s and .45s in attendance, but 9mm was the overwhelmingly most common chambering and it wasn't even close. I obviously didn't get pictures of everybody shooting in every class, but I'd feel pretty comfortable stating that probably half everybody was shooting a Glock of one variant or another, with M&Ps being the second most common, and the remainder a mishmash ..read more