Laura made a wonderful chicken dinner tonight. She had her family over to share the feast. She used a recipe that she adapted from one of Nigella Lawson's cookbooks. Lemon-Thyme Chicken and Hasselback Potatoes. Yum!
Sometimes when you look for reviews of online stores, you just can't seem to find what you are looking for. Well, in an attempt to counter that trend, I am going to put two brief reviews up here about Natchez Shooters Supplies and CheaperThanDirt.
First, Natchez. Well actually the only thing I've purchased from Natchez so far is ammo, so that is about all I can comment on. Good news, it was cheap. Like $2.50 per box cheap! (115 gr 9mm.) Shipping took about 5-7 days in both cases, which is fine. The ammunition was securely packed, and really there was nothing to complain about. So I reckon Natchez gets an A+.
Second, CheaperThanDirt. I placed an order about three days after I got their catalog, and two of the items I wanted to purchase were already out of stock. In fact, it seems as though a significant part of their inventory is perpetually out of stock. That is annoying.
I'm still waiting for that order to be delivered, (and it was a big order), so I expect that I'll have more to say about CheaperThanDirt after it arrives...
Update: The order has been delivered. The used gas tanks I bought were a total ripoff... they were practically rusted through. They were advertised as "used good condition". Bah! The rest of the order was mostly satisfactory, except that I ended up ordering the wrong magazine loader because their website didn't provide enough detail about compatibility. Bottom line: CheaperThanDirt gets a C-.
From The Age:
Police were pelted with bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails as officers in riot gear using high-pressure hoses struggled to contain the violent mob. At the height of the riots, a police officer was knocked unconscious by a brick to the head and had to be dragged from the frontline, while others suffered broken limbs. Redfern railway station was torched, its windows smashed, and cars were firebombed. Petrol bombs were hurled through the air and police reinforcements were called in from across Sydney.
The violence, sparked by the death of 17-year-old Thomas Hickey, known as TJ, has sunk relations between the local Aboriginal community and police. The teenager died in hospital yesterday after becoming impaled on a fence while riding his pushbike on Saturday.
Ken, you were kinda wrong: the rest of the civilized world does have race riots, after all.
I saw a fragment of a moveon.org commercial on television just now while I was channel surfing. It was a picture of a lie detector in motion, with excerpts from President Bush playing. Predictably, the lie decector was detecting lies that Bush had spoken. Since I only saw part of the commercial, I'm not sure which excerpts the creators of the ad chose. The only one I still remember is something about "Iraq and Al Qauda cooperating in terror" or words to that effect.
I'll have to see the entire commercial so I can respond to all the quotes, but at this point let me just say...
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."
PowerLine chooses to denigrate Charles Lindbergh because of his anti-war stance prior to Pearl Harbor. But the bottom line is that Lindbergh was entirely correct in his arguments. The war was about "the division of territory and wealth between nations". Lebensraum was the German rallying cry. The injustice of Versailles, (perceived or otherwise), was not lost on Hitler, who forced the French leaders to surrender in the same train car that the Germans had used in the Great War.
I've read Lindbergh's diary, and leading up to 1938 he used his celebrity to tour the Eurpoean nations including Russia, and report back to U.S. intelligence about their current condition. He found a German war machine that was almost completely rebuilt, well armed, and ready for action, while the forces of the rest of Europe including France, Poland, Russia, and Great Britian were woefully unprepared. Göring's Luftwaffe was churning out hundreds of modern aircraft, while the French Air Force consisted mostly of World War I biplanes.
In short, Lindbergh came to the reasonable conclusion that Germany was more than capable of defeating all of Europe. Is it any surprise that he wanted the United States to stay out of yet another bloody European conflict?
In the end, it was Hitler's madness that prevented total German victory. If not for the broken truce with Stalin and the deadly Eastern Front that followed, it is doubtful whether the United States and Great Britian would have been successful in recapturing Europe. Or, possibly, success would have come only after the cities of Europe had been reduced to radioactive fireballs instead of the traditional incendiary kind.
A while back I remember reading about a Supreme Court decision that said the Police can not use thermal imaging systems to look through walls and into people's houses. At least, not without a warrant first.
Right to privacy 4th Ammendment stuff and all that.
Anyway, I learned something worth knowing tonight. The prohibition does not apply to fire fighters.
When you live in a building with 300 other people, it is only a matter of time before the fire alarm is going to go off in the middle of the night. And, since this is Cleveland, there is a better than 50% chance that the weather outside is going to be something awful. (Freezing Rain.)
But it was worth the trouble to see the Fireman walking around in all his gear, carrying a thermal imager! And he used it to veryify that there was indeed a person hiding behind the door, refusing to answer the knock knock knocks. I guess Somebody was really embarassed that dinner turned into a smoke bomb.