Murgatroy

How is it not?   It is no different than choosing a color for your car, or what you wear.    I understand that a lot of folks like to blend in with everyone else. I see the mentality of that. The comfort of sameness, the fear of being different. It is the same reason that left handed children were beat until they learned to do things the way the right handed kids did.   I am left handed. Maybe that is part of it, but I don't think it is. I think there are a distinct percentage of society that likes to march to the beat of their own drum. I am one of them.   I also think that it is a clear path of a leader, versus a follower.   It is easier to follow a leader if they look different from everyone else.        I am not trying to attack you, I am trying to help you see a different point of view. We can all believe different, but true diversity comes from understanding. 

Tattooing and piercing has been around for over a millennium, I find it a way of celebrating my individuality, not a form of mutilation.There are a multitude of beliefs and ideals behind body modifications, but very few voluntary modifications are considered mutilations in any culture. To be considered mutilation it is usually a mark done by someone else to represent a shame.    But again, we are all entitled to our own opinions, no matter how baseless and ignorant they are.   As for how I was raised, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. It made me who I am, I know how I got here, I know why I feel the way I feel and I know why I make the choices I make. I like who I am, and I am pleased with the life I lead.        The point that I am making is that it is dangerous to judge a person, much less an entire generation on a brief cut clip of a single moment. You might be seeing a person at their best, or their worst.

I firmly believe that if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

How?   Someone made a wrong decision and ended up dead over it.   I don't see anything newsworthy in this article.

Goodbye Cousin Johnny.

Mid Seventies.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punk_subculture   I understand that here in the south we stay a few years behind, but that is no reason to stick our heads in the sand.         For the record, I am a tattooed, pierced, educated, white collar, middle management redneck. I sit in an office all day dictating the days of several hundred folks all while saving my company hundreds of thousand dollars. I come home to my wife, my daughter, my dog and my cat. I listen to loud thrash metal at high volumes in my Mustang as I cruise along at 65MPH down the interstate using my indicators on my 70+ mile a day commute. I take my daughter to the shooting range, we are currently working on bringing her groups together at 100yds. In the spring and fall she is a member of the local soccer league, her team was undefeated last season. I didn't miss a game. She is a straight A student in the gifted program and reads a book a day. She wants to be a veterinarian or a writer. She is undecided.   My mother was a drug addict, my father was a deadbeat. They both came from strict military families and were raised in the 50s. My father was a Naval Officer and I have seen him twice since I was six years old. My mother beat me on a daily basis until I was removed from the home and placed in the foster system in my teens. I am the oldest of six. Two are in prison, one is dead for all I know and the other two are living a typical white trash life of government assistance.   When I was a wee lad I wore my hair in spikes, dyed all sorts of colors, I had more than a pound of metal in my 36 separate piercings, 30 of which were in my face.   To this day I have a sleeve, neck tattoos and 3/4" of an inch bone plugs in my ears.   Ask anyone that knows me in person, I am a hell of an American, and a Man.             I guess what I am saying is: Be careful with those stereotypes, and don't judge a book by it's cover.                          As for the OPs story, yeah, that crap sucks, it is a shame that it happens, but it can happen in the suburbs, the cities, to the white families, to the black families, and it has been happening since the begging of time. It is shame when it happens. However, because of the speed of the trade of information, it appears that it happens more today than it ever has before. It doesn't. We just hear about it more. When a mouse farts and a blogger posts a detailed run down of it on a blog halfway across the world that gets picked up by Reuters and broadcast all over the world via Facebook and Twitter, suddenly the Rampant Mouse Fart Epidemic of 2014 will cause Global Warming to kill a kitten an hour until the icebergs kill us all.       I would have told the kid's parents how their dog died.

That is a broad brush stroke, but that look has been going on since the late 70's from my experience.              I am certain that every generation looks at a few generations down the road and say similar, "Would you look at them kids with their hair slicked back, and their loud rock and roll music racing their V8s up and down the road, it is a shame, back in my day we only had a horse and buggy, and you were home by dark..."

"Trust me, I'm smart than you..."   That was awesome, even more awesome given that the scientist was wearing a mullet.

I think the sister died. The one sister was telling Glenn "All I saw was my sister in that field, they swarmed her, she had a pistol, but she wasn't supposed to be there..."

One afternoon while driving down the road with my daughter I had some fool attempt to run me off of the road. He sped up, got in front of me and pulled over, jumped out of his truck and started dancing, for lack of a better term, on the side of the road.   I kept going.   He followed me for a good ten miles, the whole time I was on the phone with LMPD giving them tag number and all other identifying factors. I told the dispatcher plain and simple, "I will be at my destination in less than five minutes, if he follows me there, I am armed, and I am in fear of mine and my daughter's life."   The police were waiting for us when we pulled in the parkinglot. For some reason he took off like a bat out of hell and didn't stop...

Do you feel it in the steering wheel, the floorboards or your seat?   If the wheel, it could be front end related.   If it is the floorboards or seat it will be drive train related.

My daughter has an Iver Johnson Li'l Champ, same concept. She has been shooting it since she was four. She loves it and gets upset when I suggest moving her to a new platform.   She is shooting the same rifle I learned to shoot on over thirty years ago.

I quit smoking cigarettes in August of last year. I had been rolling my own at a cost of $7 a carton for two years prior.    I used e-cig until November. Then I quit that too.     I know a lot of folks see the e-cig as a complete full time replacement for an analog, but it was just a stepping stone to quitting for me.

Never blindfolded no one on a snipe hunt before.

In my experience a paper sack works just as well.

I was pleased to see Carol again.

You mean Falling Skies?   Yeah, I wasn't digging that either.

Looks like a Possibility to me.     Or Opossum for folks that didn't grow up with the possibility they was for dinner.

http://www.bulkammo.com/rifle/bulk-.223-ammo#contest  

Before rimfire became as rare as hen's teeth, I shot more of it than anything. I still do, just less frequently.   I could see a dedicated rimfire section, but like OS mentions, the longarm and handgun forums aren't being flooded right now.

`63 was the only year for the split window, it was a huge flop and a fair percentage of the `63 model split windows were later modified.       This has been all over the news up here.   One of the stories I liked was about the only remaining 1983 Corvette, they went in and removed it from the building, against the advice of the structural crew there. Their reasoning? Well, it is the only 1983 Corvette in the world, of course they are going to save it.   Six of the cars were owned by the museum, the `90 and `09 ZR-1s were on loan from GM.

There is no excuse for this. None.               However, contrary to belief, I don't think that this thing is more common that it has been in the past. I think that the internet has made the the world smaller. We are now getting small local news we othewise wouldn't. I also think that investigation techniques have improved, where in the past this might have just been listed as a case of SIDs.

Well wishes brother.   My wife had a `96 Buick Regal with the 3.1. That car was horrible. After that she got a `99 Buick Regal GS, the 3800 Series II with the supercharger was the only good part of that car.

We come back from our break tonight.

My wife is a yankee, I am not.   Her family is Slovakian, she is only second generation American. I often tease her and call her Russian, making the stereotype that all of those Eastern European countries are the same. She doesn't like it, but she tolerates it.   She cooks food that there ain't no way on god'g green earth you are gonna get a country boy to eat. I haven't had soup beans in ten years. A month ago she tells me she is making me a mess of soup beans. Wish she would have told me that yankees make them with navy beans. And then they smash them all.   I cried.   On New Years, she cooks kielbasa and kraut, and expects me to eat them, because back in Russia, I mean the now nonexistant former Soviet Bloc country, that is what they ate on New Year. I don't know about you, but I eat collard greens, hog jowl and black eyed peas.         Now, the point I am making is a simple one, and something that a lot of folks are missing here, but I am pleased to see that just as many are getting it.   The United States of America is a nation that was founded by folks from everywhere. There are few distinctly 'American Traditions' because they are all heirlooms from nations that our ancestors left.   Demanding that all American's adhere to 'American Culture' is an ignorant statement. Please note I said ignorant, not stupid, please understand I am stating that one should do more research, not that one is foolish. American Culture, much like Americans are a mish mash of a million different flavors. Even our language and street slang is a mixture of languages. English itself is a blend of Germanic, Norse and French languages.      I am proud to be an American, and I am proud of my heritage. To think that because someone has different political or religious views, or speaks a different first language that they can't possibly love America as much as you is the most childish thing I have ever heard.                       I would like to end this and ask how many of you have attempted to pick up a second language? Why? Why not? I have a large working Spanish vocabulary, but I would hesitate to even say I could converse. It is hard, and I applaud ANYONE who is attempting to learn a second language.