SHTFriday: Your Apocalypse Arsenal

I am talking about guns on the internet! Quick, someone needs to tell me that I'm wrong!

Also, my gun sucks and I'm not holding it properly. 

Salem phones it in

Per Salem, from Facebook:

On mobile. Either cannot comment or don't have permissions. Please comment that i have said the following: my ability toucan has flown away.

I've got nothing today, either... Thursday is my "Get annoying chores done" day, which is why I gave it to a guest poster. So apparently this entire week is full of suck and fail for the entire Lurking Rhythmically family. 

Come back tomorrow, and hopefully I'll have a SHTFriday post over at Blue Collar Prepping. 

Currently in allergy hell

These last few days have been miserable. If my nose hasn't been completely blocked, then it's been running like a case of Montezuma's Revenge...

... look, on the one hand I don't want to get all gross, but on the other, I have sort of made a career out of being Inappropriate Comment Girl, and so if I don't deliver on that promise of TMI then at least half of you are going to be disappointed. So if you're at all queasy, just skip to the funny video below.

Okay, so you know that Failure to Fire comic, where Mick is cleaning the cosmoline off a Mosin, and he's all "My entire world is cosmoline!" ?  Yeah, so, replace "cosmoline" with "snot" and you've got an excellent idea of how the past few days have been, and why I didn't post yesterday. I was finally able to get some relief today through a combination of double-dosing on antihistamine, DayQuil, and the rain coming in to clear out the pollen. 

On to the video. Apparently something has happened to Kapitan Von back in Old Blighty, as he's been rather good about posting regularly. Therefore it falls to me to provide you with something because I don't want to go 2 days in a row without a post.  However, because I feel like crap, I can't really be creative or entertaining... so enjoy this funny video (hat tip to Uncle Jay) and hopefully the ice cream machine will be working tomorrow.

I Bask in the Light of Forever

Dedicated to Brigid, upon the loss of her beloved Barkley, 

in the hope that this brings her peace. 

I Bask In The Light Of Forever

I know my owner misses me,
And I sure miss her, too.
I hope she knows I'm doing fine,
And I know I'll see her soon.

You made me feel so safe, mom,
You surrounded me with peace.
Going to sleep within your arms
Was the way I'd choose to leave.

I woke up in a lovely place,
And all my aches had fled.
Waiting there was a kind-faced man
Who scratched me on my head.

"Welcome to heaven, young pup," He said ,
I hope that you don't mind
Staying and playing with me for a while
Until it's your master's time."

Jesus is so good to me, mom,
He plays with me every day.
I run and I chase and I play ball and dig
And eternity just melts away.

I don't lack for playmates, mom,
There are so many friends for me here;
Doggies and kitties and children and birds,
And we romp, all love and no fear.

I bask in the light of forever,
Resting at Jesus' feet.
But every day I ask the Lord,
"When will my mom and I meet?"

He smiles and then pats me kindly
And He says "Oh, it won't be long now."
I know that He is telling the truth
Because time here flows different, somehow.

Heaven's a wonderful place, mom,
It's the perfect doggie resort.
So while I can't wait to see you,
Don't you dare cut your time on earth short!

When your time comes I will be waiting,
All wagging tail and kisses and love,
And together my joy will be complete:
I and my master, with the Master Above.

Pucker Factor: 10.0

This video is mildly NSFW due to some of the language. I'd be swearing up a storm, too, if I'd almost been hit by a 500 pound bomb:

From the "About" section:

Paktika Province, Afghanistan - After spotting Taliban forces on a distant ridge line, U.S. Army mortar teams engage with 60mm mortars. A simultaneous airstrike is called in which accidentally drops a 500 pound bomb on a U.S. Army infantry outpost, mistaking the position for Taliban fighters.

Luckily there were no friendly casualties in this rare incident, due to the First Sergeant's decision to bring everyone to "stand to" before the drop. It is still unclear what caused the pilot to target the wrong position.

"If it wasn't for the decision of our First Sergeant, three of our guys would have died in that wooden building which was shredded by shrapnel."

Click here for my full interview with the cameraman.

SHTFriday on Blue Collar Prepping

Over at BCP, I have completed my three part "Zones of Assessment" series with an entry about prepping with things that are in your environment yet outside your control. If you are interested in how this is possible, I encourage you all to go read more about it.

Humans, A Love Letter

     I often refer to the human species in the third person, instead of the collective pronoun of "we." This is partly due to extremists on either side of the socio-politio-religious (yes, I made up a word) spectrum that tend to be quite vocal about things that really shouldn't matter so much. Humans can do and say a lot of really disgusting things that make me ashamed to be included in their number.

     On the other hand, if I may borrow from one of the greatest audio shows of all time, the words of Spock, portrayed by Leonard Nimoy:

"Humans drafted the Magna Carta, invented the abacus, composed Injubulus Symphony, painted "Starry Night", danced the Dying Swan, built Stonehenge, the Empirial City, the pyramids of Giza, discovered radium, spun sugar into cotton candy, fashioned gutta-percha put into a boll, and cast it in dimpled white, hit it with a long stick five hundred yards into a tin cup and made the practitioners of this feat rich men."

     I'm really kind of a fan of humans. This translates into my gaming habits, as there's many games out there that let you pick not only male or female, but species as well. I always roll human. Sure, Dwarves might be stronger, Krogans might be more resilient, Asari might live a thousand years longer, and Elves might be bastards, but give me a human any day. Us humans, we can do anything. I can't, for the life of me, remember the source of the quote, nor can I the quote itself, but on Star Trek, probably Deep Space Nine, there was a quote about humans that's stuck with me. You take 10 Klingons, you've got 10 fierce warriors. 10 Ferengi, you've got 10 shrewd businessmen. 10 Romulans, 10 expert spies. But you take 10 humans, you don't know *what* you're dealing with. They could be anything. You can't plan for humans.

     We're so unpredictable that we even buck our own science sometimes. According to the food chain, we should be at the mercy of Lions and Tigers and Bears (oh, my), and on an individual level, there's very few humans that could survive an encounter with one of these higher-order predators unarmed. Only, we're so sneaky and unpredictable that we're more likely to, instead of facing one head-on, see the threat and do something like spend a few generations breeding a loyal pack of canine like a wolfhound or mastiff that will fight that predator for us, or build a tool that will propel bits of metal chemically at lethal velocity from a safe distance.

• Rule 1: Humans cheat.
• Rule 2: Humans cheat better than anything else that's ever existed within our environment.
• Rule 3: Humans cheat so well that we've established verbal and conceptual constructs to describe cheating, as well as a library of symbols with which we can communicate these constructs to other humans, and machines that can carry those communications anywhere in the world at the speed of thought.

     So yeah. Humans suck sometimes. But I think, given the choices, I'm really happy to be a human.

     Sometimes.