As Louis L' Amour said......................

 ..........................there is always a faster gun:

12. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. There will always be someone getting richer than you in life and the markets. And with the advent of social media, that means people throwing this fact in your face constantly.

This one is not easy but defining what a rich life means to you can help avoid unnecessary envy and regret.

-Ben Carlson, from this list at this post

Cartoon Saturday.........................

.....................................at Bilbo's aims at guns.  A single sample:

That one reminded me of this one:

Your basic buzzer beater.................

thanks craig

Not sure this fits the narrative..................

via

Soar to great heights...........................

You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.

You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you'll be best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don't.
Because, sometimes, you won't.

Can this really be true................................?

via maggie's farm

Opening paragraphs.................................

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century.  Buy one today and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City.  It is the oldest hand gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand gun ever made.  It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker's more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser:  but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you.
-Alistair MacLean,  When Eight Bells Toll (1966)

More than you.........................

..........wanted to know about the Colt Peacemaker - here.

At the speed of Dad....................

via

Why he was (is) the greatest..............

Who else would have even thought of doing this, much less do it?  Successfully, I might add.

An evening at the candy factory.....................

Bearing arms........................

These are interesting times for those who care, one way or the other, about the "right to bear arms."   The topic seems to generate lots of heat, but trust me when I say, I'm not here to add to it.  Having said that, I recommend a stroll through friend Bilbo's slide show of, and commentary on, "legal" weaponry.  There have been times in my life when one, or three, of these would have come in handy.  Full post with commentary is here. A few pictures here:

bear arms photo from here

Important things you should know...................

TASER is an acronym.   What do the letters stand for?

Answer is here (#25).  Back story is here.

Give yourself a gold star if you already knew the answer.

Ornery.............................

Tough duty..................

"Poor is the student who does not surpass his master."
-Leonardo Da Vinci

Pick your fights carefully...............

via

A sign.....................

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."
-Karl Popper

Be the first on your block to...................

..............sign up for Personal Brain Management.  The course of study is here.  The gushy background information, complete with potential risks, is here.   The money quote, which makes one think that the authors are late to the party, is here:
"A wealth of data now shows how some ancient contemplative practices (meditation, yoga, tai chi chih) change our brain function and also change the neural regulation of inflammation, with possible links to a broad array of other healthy outcomes. The amazing promise is that by embracing PBM we may achieve the holy grail of living longer, better, happier, illness free, and creative lives."
Meditate, people, meditate.

Have we lost our nerve?

The Right Stuff......................

Friend Jeff posted a clip, from the movie version of The Right Stuff, in which Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier for the first time......Inspired me to reach for my copy of Tom Wolfe's book.  Just happened to open it to this passage:
     "My God! - to be a part of Edwards in the late forties and early fifties! - even to be on the ground and hear one of those incredible explosions from 35,000 feet somewhere up there in the blue over the desert and know that some True Brother had commenced his rocket launch.......in the X-1, the X1A, the X-2, the D-558-1, the horrible XF-92A, the beautiful D-558-2....and to know that he would soon be at an altitude, in the thin air at the edge of space, where the stars and the moon came out at noon, in an atmosphere so thin that the ordinary laws of aerodynamics no longer applied and a plane could skid into a flat spin like a cereal bowl on a waxed Formica counter and then start tumbling, not spinning and not diving, but tumbling, end over end like a brick....In those planes, which were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be 'afraid to panic,' and that phrase was no joke.  In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was, truly, as Saint-Exupery had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about:  What do I do next?  Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop:  'I've tried A!  I've tried B! I've tried C!  I've tried D!  Tell me what else I can try!'  And then that truly spooky click on the machine.  What do I do next?  (In this moment when the Halusian Gulp is opening?)  And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was:  Too bad!  There was a man with the right stuff."