The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

ZCQOTD: "This man has built an impregnable stone house with lovely west-facing balconies on the summit of Mount Stupid."

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Automotif CDLXXXVIII...

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 HSC, for "High Swirl Combustion", inline four cylinder engine, driving the front wheels through either a 3-speed auto or 4-speed (in 1984) or 5-speed (for 1985) manual. For '84, the HSC had a 1-bbl Holley carb and was rated at 90bhp. In 1985, the carb was replaced with electronically controlled throttle body fuel injection, which actually dropped power to 86 SAE net horses. Performance was tepid, and 0-60 times could best be described as "eventually".

For '86, the Tempo received a facelift, getting flush headlamps that better complemented the aero styling. (NHTSA approval hadn't come through before the styling of the '84 models had been finalized.)

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Random 1911 Musing...

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.

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Do it, bro!

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?

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Sorry...

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...

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Automotif CDLXXXVII...

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.

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Totin' trends...

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 of Sig Sauers, HKs, and Berettas, mostly. I only got pictures of one guy using a red dot; an RMR mounted on an 9mm M&P.

Next year TacCon was at DARC again. Glocks were still the most common gun, but probably only a plurality at this point. Sig P320s were already vying with M&Ps as the second most commonly seen pistol. There were a handful of people using red dot optics in 2018, and John Johnston made it into the man-on-man shootoff with one.

At 2019, down in Louisiana at NOLATAC, there were more red dots, and Rick Remington won the shootoff with an RMR atop a 9mm Wilson. Glock alternatives continued to grow in popularity.

After a one-year hiatus during the Plague Year of 2020, TacCon was held at Dallas Pistol Club in 2021.

That's when I first started seeing significant numbers of the smaller pistols, like Glock 48s and Sig P365s. Red dots were commonly spotted in every class and were no longer limited to hardcore dot proponents who'd had pistol slides custom milled for RMRs.

2022 was back at DPC again. Red dots and smaller pistols were everywhere, even in the shootoffs.

2023? More of the same.

For 2024, the biggest difference I noticed was that there was a greater number of people who were willing to talk openly about living "the snubby lifestyle" à la Darryl Bolke. I spent the weekend at the the range, catching rides back to the hotel in the evenings; I'd get dinner and socialize in the lobby a bit and then head to my room to process photos. There weren't many potential scenarios I could visualize there that I didn't feel reasonably comfortable solving with a 3" .38 Special revolver, especially since I was surrounded most of the time by switched-on, like-minded individuals. 

Gear-wise, dots had become downright prevalent. Walthers had become more common. I don't know how Walther's doing in terms of overall market share, but they've certainly penetrated the serious training hobbyist demographic. The majority of optics were now Holosuns. Enclosed emitter optics were trending. If you added 365s and 320s and the few die-hards still shooting the hammer-fired classics together, there may have been as many Sigs as Glocks, if not actually more.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #253...

Hotel room nightstand shot from TacCon: Taurus 856 T.O.R.O. with a Holosun 507k in a PHLster City Special, six rounds of Hornady Critical Defense 110gr +P in an eight round Tuff Strip, my trusty POM spicy treats dispenser, 500 lumen Surefire EDCL1-T, and a waved Spyderco Dragonfly.

Click the links to steal this look!

(Do I think the Hornady 110gr +P Critical Defense is the bestest load for the .38? Probably not, but it's easy to get the dot sighted in with, and reloads are speedy with those pointy bullets. Its performance is certainly adequate, especially if you're not particularly worried about needing to defeat vehicular barriers.)

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Automotif CDLXXXVI...

Here's a 1987-1990 Pontiac Firebird Formula. If that's the factory paint, I think that's an '87, because that's the only year that solid (non 2-tone) Bright Blue Metallic was available as an option on the Formulas.

The third generation of the F-body, before its mid-cycle refresh for the 1991 model year, is a sort of historical record of the American performance car renaissance. 

When the third gen Firebirds debuted for the 1982 model year, the base Firebird came with a 151cid throttle-body injected 90bhp Iron Duke four cylinder and a 4-speed manual and the baddest Trans Am had an LU5 305 cubic inch V8 with "Crossfire fuel injection" rated at 165 SAE net horsepower.

For 1990, the last model year before they uglified the nose cone, the cheapest loss-leader Firebirds had a 140bhp 3.1L V6 with a 5-speed gearbox and the Trans Am could be had with a 245bhp L98 Tuned Port Injection 350 under the hood.

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Angry Manbaby

As you may know, Elon Musk has been nursing an incredible case of butthurt for something like twenty years because the rest of the board at PayPal wouldn't agree with him that "X" was a totally bitchin' name for an online finance company.

He's been so obsessively assmad about it that he inflicted "X" on one of his offspring as their legal moniker, thereby pretty much guaranteeing future estrangement issues when the kid becomes old enough to realize that daddy is a nerdy weirdo.

Most famously, as soon as he bought Twitter, he renamed it "X", which was the corporate equivalent of drunk-dialing the person who dumped you back in 2001 just to go "NEENER NEENER! I don't miss you at all!"

If you want an example of how petty and obsessive he is about this issue, check this shit out:

If a user typed in "Twitter.com," they would see "Twitter.com" as they typed it before hitting "Post." But, after submitting, the platform would show "X.com" in its place on the X for iOS app, without the user's permission, for everyone viewing the post.

They can't do anything about the hordes of ░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░ spambots, but they had coders diligently working to make sure you didn't hurt Elon's fee-fees by deadnaming his company.

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Oof.

Left Dallas yesterday morning slightly after 0800 CDT and got back to Roseholme Cottage sometime just before 11PM Eastern. That's a long day on the road and I am wiped out. (And I was just passengering. I find that, when I'm driving these days, something around six hours is nearing my limit.)

I'm hoping to muster the energy to deal with a suitcase full of dirty laundry sometime this evening, but I have a feeling that today's otherwise gonna be pretty much a write-off.

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