Sesame Street vs Communism

For the last week, Google has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the American children's television program Sesame Street. It's their usual thing where they have a special logo on their homepage to mark the occasion, but this is the only case I can remember where they kept it up for more than one day.

Yesterday, they had a link under the "Google Search" button. It linked to information about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The main logo featured a Sesame Street character named The Count, who teaches children to count. It is important to teach children to count. But maybe they could've celebrated counting today, or something? I mean, they could have done that if TV shows weren't more important than a few hundred million people being freed from slavery.

WTF? Heck, it's their site. They can do as they wish. But... WTF?

Translation

CNN headline: "Analysis: Elections not a referendum on Obama".

In English, that means "The Democrats lost". If the NJ race had been close enough for the Democrats to "find" a few thousand ballots behind the couch in the spare room, that would've been a referendum on Obama. If the gay marriage law had survived in Maine, that could've been an affirmation of the Dear Teleprompter's Inspiring Message of Hope and Change or something. But it didn't happen. As the immortal Jeff Greene would say, "you got nothing".

Another Maine ballot initiative was a bond issue: We'll be borrowing 70 million bucks with 20 million in interest. Mainers love that garbage. This one is for highway and bridge repairs that we're spending hundreds of federal "stimulus" millions on already. Half the state is under construction (the half that didn't really need it, naturally). But there you go: Borrowing money you don't need to borrow and can't afford to pay back, then wasting it? That is our Dear Leader's Hope and Change right there! But the quotidian grind of government greed, waste, and corruption is not the Change CNN wants to tell us we're getting.

In other news, we had seven ballot initiatives here in Maine, and most of them went the wrong damn way. Unbelievable. The only one they got unambiguously right was some dumb thing about giving Prius owners a tax break. That got defeated. But we got the stupid bond issue, we're screwing the schools, we screwed the gays, blah blah blah. Dumb. Well, Maine didn't get to be this poor by lousy climate and lack of natural resources alone. We have to work at it. And by God we do.

Detail-Stripping the Glock Pistol: Removing the Trigger Pin

Taking Glocks apart is not very difficult. There are good guides online, for example at Glock Parts and topglock.com. My experience begins and ends with my Glock 19, but it's my understanding that the other models are very similar. The Glock Parts guide claims that 9mm Glocks don't have a "locking block pin", and the topglock.com guide has photos of a Glock 17 which does not have that pin. Well, my (9mm) Glock 19 does have one; it's recent. I haven't looked up which "generation" they changed it at.

Anyhow. The only difficulty I've had is removing the trigger pin. A narrow part of that pin goes through a hole in the forward end of the slide stop lever. The slide stop spring pushes the edge of the hole downward against the pin, such that when you push the pin sideways, the edge of the narrow part of the pin catches against the edge of the hole. The directions I've linked talk about "jiggling" the catch, or "mov[ing] the slide stop lever up/down/back and forth", but that's all a bit vague. There's a wonderful variety of wrong ways you can move and jiggle, all while applying excessive force to the end of the pin and accomplishing exactly nothing.

The exact relationship in there becomes clear when you finally get the pin out: The forward end of the slide stop is pushed downward by its spring. What you need to do is hold that end of the slide stop up while you push the pin out. Given the way it's hinged and where the spring is, any kind of normal jiggling is likely to push the forward end down, not up.

So here's the trick to it: There's a tab in the middle of the slide stop lever. It extends inward. It's there so that when an empty magazine is in the pistol, the magazine follower pushes up against that tab, which engages the slide stop.

You need to get your left thumb on top of the external slide stop thing, and your left forefinger under the tab. Push down with your thumb while pulling up with your forefinger. While holding that pose, push the trigger pin out from frame left (the side the slide stop catch is on). If you've got the thumb-finger thing right, the pin will slide out like butter. If it won't budge, the slide stop is still catching on it.

Here's a look at the author's Thumb-Finger Technique:

This information is presented without warranty of any kind. The author is not your mother. Good luck. Don't lose small parts. Don't shoot yourself. Don't be an idiot. If you can't help being an idiot, don't handle firearms. DO NOT APPLY BUTTER TO FIREARMS, NOT EVEN IF IT'S UNSALTED. The butter thing was a figure of speech.

Jobs Created or Saved!

Holy Toledo, now USA Today's doing it too:

Twenty of the 47 fundraisers that Obama's campaign identified as collecting more than $500,000 have been named to government positions, the [USA Today] analysis found.

In fact, we've been seeing a smattering of actual journalism like this all along. The problem is that it's been freakishly rare compared to what you'd get in a Republican administration — or even a normal Democratic administration.

One thing I'd like to know is what percentage of top Bush II donors got jobs in his administration, ditto Clinton, Bush I, and so on back. Wouldn't surprise me too much if this is in line with standard practice. Come to think of it, why didn't the reporter check that? When anybody quotes you any number about anything, your first question should be what are you comparing it to? Sure, wrong is wrong, whether the other administrations did it or not; but is it unusually wrong, or conventionally wrong?

Still, give 'em credit where it's due. At least somebody did something resembling his job.

Via SayUncle.

Overstimulated

It's not news that the administration is overstating the number of jobs "created or saved" by the "stimulus"; the news is that somebody at the Associated Press accidentally committed an act of journalism, and by an oversight it saw the light of day:

The government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under the president's $787 billion recovery program, according to an Associated Press review of data released in the program's first progress report.

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released.

In other news, water continues to flow downhill. But it's nice to see it reported by somebody "respectable".

"It's not April"

This morning, it took a while to convince my girlfriend that they really did give Dear Teleprompter the Nobel Peace Prize. She supports the guy and she still thought it was a joke. Anyway, when she finally decided I wasn't pulling her leg, she said...

"It's not April."

What he got the prize for, of course, was having the right kind of fashionable good intentions. Everybody, including the Nobel committee, knows that those fashionable good intentions will amount to a net negative in the real world. So it's best to give him the prize now, because the more he does, the harder it will be to pretend he's not a disaster.

Update

What I love about this is that Obama will have to acknowledge it. Whether he plays it straight, or goes for false modesty, he's going to look like a clown. So will the media as they play along. Good.

Update

Well, fry me in gravy and call me a sasquatch: One of the Nobel people has claimed that they reasoned just as I joked above: "...it could be too late to respond three years from now. It is now that we have the opportunity to respond."

In plain English: He's done nothing. He will do nothing. Let's hurry up and give him a prize for pretending while it's still possible to pretend.

It's hard to parody yourself when you're beyond parody. You have to admire them for trying.

Blah blah blah

I just repseudonymed myself to Gordon Freece, which amuses me for obscure and moronic reasons. I think I'll keep this one. If I had a reader, I'm sure he or she would want to be in the loop on this one.

Transparency Meets Transparency

The Smartest President Ever just called out Iran on their having pursued their nuclear program in exactly the way that all the crazy delusional neocon hawks predicted and all the smart pragmatists just knew couldn't be so. Because they're so smart. But OOOH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY RACIST RACIST er... anyway!

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't like being told that his government is doing what it's doing. Not clear why. However, he informs us that TSMPE's remarks...

"...simply adds to the list of issues [over] which the United States owes the Iranian nation an apology.... Rest assured that this will be the case. We do everything transparently."

Emphasis mine. I liked the part about transparency. It sounded vaguely familiar, and he's even using the very same special meaning that the Lightworker does, the one where it means "keep you in the dark and feed you sh*t". Those two cheap crooks are made for each other.