High old times...

Roberta got high and has the pictures to prove it, including some that actually make her city appear attractive. In the comments, various souls react to the concept of height, recalling an interesting March day in 2003.

On Inishmore, in the Aran Islands of Galway Bay, stands what is left of a huge Iron Age fort called Dun Aonghasa. As Wiki says:

Exploring Dún Aonghasa requires a bit of climbing, and there is no rail at the edge of the cliff, so it may not be a good place to visit with small children or people with mobility problems.

Translated, this means you walk across a large flat section of castle grounds with nothing between you and a a 330-foot sheer drop to rocks and wild water. It's windy. About six or eight feet back you flop prone and inch your way forward, just far enough to stick your head over the edgestone and see the maelstrom below. Your daughter and her husband then give you Hell for scaring them, so you have to avow it wasn't really dangerous and you weren't at all frightened, Not a bit.

Can you imagine a place like that in the hands of our safety nazis?

For the record, Caesar was rendered unto before the dreaded midnight hour. Rendering him down to something useful would have been more rewarding.

Gratuitous gun(smithing) porn

In truth, "gunsmithing" is a word too grand for what goes on around here. "Often successful tinkering" is more honest.

Unfortunately, even light tinkering ambitions sometimes require a vice -- a cursably in-the-way beast is when not in use. I put up with them permanently installed in the big shop, but the gun room bench is too small. Hence this morning's pre-sunrise project:

The nearly self-evident trick here is use of through bolts and wing nuts to attach a small machinists vice tightly but temporarily to the bench I use for reloading and small "clean" gun work. You can mount or dismount it in less than a minute.

The ploy won't amaze many of you, but it makes an excuse to post a picture of a neat old Saturday Night Special and one of St. Ackley's books.

The revolver is "The American Double Action," in .32. Others were made in .38 and .44. H &R built some 850,000 of them c. 1883 through 1941. This one needs a couple of parts, and we're scrabbling through the junk box.

Iceland Destroys World

As if that woebegone country didn't have enough problems, it is now responsible for continued global cooling of the kind that reduces job opportunities for Al Gore's otherwise unemployable acolytes.

You'd think a nation that could pass laws making everyone happy, womb to tomb, could manage to arrange some legislation forbidding its domestic volcanoes to erupt.