This Is the First Day of...the Next Week?

Am Officially Over SHOT 2010 and ready to throw myself into our "aggressive" 2010 filming schedule for DRTV and all the series. This week I'll be at GUNSITE for a few days filming for DRTV, including our new exclusive web series, TIPS FROM GUNSITE.

Shot a Wild Bunch cowboy match yesterday with the Pawnee Station club in Ft. Collins, my first with the Retro-Para GI Expert. Pawnee Station always runs a great match...it was my first with the new improved eyeball, which mostly worked okay until a shotgun stage where I shouldered the '97 on my left shoulder, promptly closed my left eye and proceeded to miss the poppers a bunch of time. Hmmmmmmm...gonna have to work on that a bit! I ran into GUNSITE aces Ed Stock and Chris Weare at SHOT...they think, and I tend to agree, I should suck it up and take the GUNSITE 250/350 class with Ed or Chris, where they and the other instructors can watch me closely and help me make midcourse corrections on the old dominant eye front, with a goal of getting back to both eyes open.. I'm going to try and carve out the time late winter/early spring. To eliminate as many variables as possible, I'll probably shoot a plain old boring 5-inch 1911 .45 with ball ammo.

I note that KBI/Charles Daly has gone out of business, effective last Friday. From KBI President Michael Kassnar:

I don't want to go into each and every detail as to why this has occurred, except to say that there have been a multitude of events over the past five years that have contributed to our current situation.

Kassnar does say the Charles Daly brand, whiich has included a huge range of imported firearms, will be resurfacing soon.

Since it's the start of the new week, I thought I'd live up to my "most depressing man in America" moniker by posting this link on EMPs. There's been a bunch of EMP stuff around recently, much of it centering not on the "nukes over Kansas" scenario but rather on the now overdue major solar storm:

An extremely large solar storm, though, could induce geomagnetic currents that would destroy a substantial fraction of the large transformers on the power grid (possibly over much of the world). If this happened, electric power loss due to a large solar storm would be out for a period of years. Unlike nuclear EMP, such a solar storm is an eventual inevitability.

The last solar storm that could have caused this level of damage happened in 1859, before the power grid was in place (although in 1921 a large solar storm, of briefer duration than the 1859 event, occurred which affected only a small area of the planet). The power grid has only been in place for a tiny fraction of one percent of human history, and a really large solar storm (of the size and duration of the 1859 event) has not happened in that time. There is a general assumption that any solar event that is similar to, or larger than, the 1859 solar superstorm will simply never happen again, although there is no justification for such an assumption -- in fact, we know that this assumption is false. There is a good possibility that such a solar storm will happen in this century. If it happens in the current situation without spares for our large transformers, a large part of the power grid (including 70 to 100 percent of the United States power grid) will be down for years.

Interestingly enough, last year I talked to some, ahem, government types part of whose job it is to access major threats to Home Sweet Home. They were amazingly forthright and open on many topics, right until I got up to EMPs. The room got real quiet. "We're not going to talk about that," said Government Type A. "Won't, or can't," I asked. "What's the difference?" A replied. I asked whether the scenario presented in the novel ONE SECOND AFTER — nukes over Kansas — was viable. "What part of 'not talk about this' did you not understand, Mr. Bane?" Ah, well...remember, the Iranians have tested low-angle missile launches consistent with an EMP attack. Time to start working on the aluminum foil hat real seriously!