ATF Changes It’s Mind

The ATF has never held a position it wasn’t willing to change.  Sadly, they have reneged on the deal they made with Ryan Horsley of Red’s Trading Post not to take their bogus claim of intimidation before the judge.

Ryan has some interesting peices for sale up on Gun Broker.   Go have a look!  There are some nice looking C&R pieces on there too.

I meant to get this up sooner, but I couldn’t get to my machine for half the day :)

Sorry ’bout the Outage

I think I might need to get Verizon out here to troubleshoot some link problems with the copper portion of my FiOS connection that runs into the house.  It seems that I’m having difficulty keeping the network link to the fiber hub up.  This is the second time I’ve seen it cut out during the day with a dead link.   Both on hot days… hmm.

Alcohol, Tobbaco, and… Not Firearms Yet

I mean taxes.  Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature have been mulling over taxes on cigarettes and booze.  In principle I have no problem with excise taxes on booze and tobacco provided that those taxes are meant to raise revenue.  The government runs a real risk, if these taxes are raised too high, that they’ll create a black market.  It’s safe to guess these black markets will not to be run by the Boy Scouts.

Of course, increased taxes on alcohol would have a nice effect on the home brewing market.

Homebrew Season

Summer is usually the off season for me in regards to home brewing. For one, I generally keep pretty busy doing other things I like, most of which involves being outside. For two, it’s just too friggin hot. Brewing is pretty BTU intensive when you mash your own grain. For three, I just don’t drink much beer in the summer during the week, because of the previous two reasons. I haven’t yet drank what I made this prior winter.

I’m thinking about getting one of these. It’s a plate chiller, called “The Therminator”. It would solve one of the big problems I have making beer in summer; the water coming out of the tap is too warm. Typically, in summer, my tap water is about 65 degrees, and it takes forever to chill 5 gallons of wort down with my self-made immersion chiller. In contrast, winter time tap water temperatures are typically about 50 degrees, which gets the job done much faster.

Counterflow chillers have their downsides, in that you have to work hard to keep them clean, and keep them sanitized. Immersion chillers can just be rinsed off, and that’s about it. Not so with counterflow chillers, which must be cleaned and sanitized. But being able to get my wort chilled and into the fermenter in just a few minutes would be a big help.

New Anti-Gun Blog

I hadn’t realized in my past linkage I was actually dealing with a blog, rather than just a one off editorial.  But yes folks, it appears that Bryan Miller, President of CeaseFire New Jersey and CeaseFire Pennsylvania has a blog over at New Jersey Voices.  I notice a few people over there who I recognize, and a few I don’t.   Peter Hamm, Brady’s Communication Director, has made an appearance.   Be sure to stop over and hi (polite, respectful, yada yada).  Tell Peter to say hi to Macca for us ;)

“Guilty of the worst kind of political posturing”

So says The Allentown Morning Call, in regards to Rep English and Peterson’s efforts to prevent tolling on I-80.   Political posturing?  I can’t help but notice that I-80 runs mostly through counties that didn’t vote all that heavily for Ed Rendell or the Democrats.