Tell us what’s happened to you recently (that’s interesting) Part Deux

Geez, that sounds frightening! Glad you survived it. Sounds like something to make a man pretty cautious in the future.

Yes. Lesson learned; I’m not nearly as tough as I thought I was.

And don’t trust whoever that was! Scary stuff, sorry if Nancy was too much, too early.

No, it was great, and made me smile and laugh… thanks.

I don’t know if we need to refresh this for 2023, but interestingly I had a long trip on Friday so I took a work vehicle to save wear and gas on mine, didn’t switch it out, so kept it over the weekend. The office is in a gentrifying part of town, so I had the delightful discovery that over the weekend my car had been robbed.

Fun part is that since the pandemic and the Breonna Taylor riots of 2020, the police around here have effectively stopped doing anything for a crime short of a murder. I called it in, noticed the shell casing on the ground, suggested they might want to look at it. Nothing of course. So somebody shot out my car window with a firearm and robbed me, the police treat it as, what, equivalent to graffiti?

Eh, whatever. Time to move back to the country.

The police don’t solve crimes. You call them so they file the report that helps you deal with your insurance company. I hope they did that for you at least.

For me, the police took the cake when someone caved in the back of my parked car and immediately drove off. I saw it while we were having dinner and immediately called in the fleeing car. Nothing, of course, and they told me they were pretty busy that night. But an hour later they sent someone out because my immobilized, smashed-in car was only pushed halfway into my yard instead of all the way and someone complained about it before the tow truck could arrive.

“This was the result of the hit-and-run I called about earlier.”

“Oh, really? Well, I won’t stay since the tow truck is on its way. Have a good night and stay safe!”

But to Mark’s point, insurance paid me for more than I paid for the car (2021 prices) plus the Ikea desk that was in the trunk, so I really can’t complain.

Next interesting thing to me, and it’s a very minor thing to everyone else in the universe, I brought up facebook and the current revolver champion asked me for a consult. No idea why, he’s probably at where I was ten years ago or three clicks better, I can’t judge since I quit when my arm came apart at the seams. If it turns out interesting I’ll update.

That’s kind of cool! Wonder what kind of consult they want.

I’ve heard the same with police stories around here too. They don’t want to do anything with traffic laws when people call in these days. It took something said to the city council before they would address ticketing people rolling through intersections during rush hour at a few spots.

It’s not like we fired police around here so I’m not sure what their beef is beyond, “we can do what we want.”

The pandemic seemed to change a lot of behavior. Here in St. Louis lots of people no longer bother to get license plates. They get the temporary tags and let them expire and continue to drive with them. I’ve seen temporary tags that expired in 2021. I believe what happened is the police were told to not worry about it during the pandemic and they are continuing to not ticket people.

That’s so wild. My parents can’t seem to believe the way I live life (although they are starting to accept it a bit more) but I’m like “well…”

There’s that saying ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ but we just run in different circles; although life moves in funny cycles

Early stages of anecdotal research, but my impression is that way, way more cars around here have headlights or taillights out now, I assume because the police quit policing.

So it turned out that we had an hour long conversation, he’s thinking about going for some world records in our particular game and, don’t want to sound like I’m blowing my horn, I was the guy who had approached it scientifically more than any other recent top level competitors. It was interesting because even though I barely have met this guy once in my life, once we started talking about our approach and thoughts on the subject we couldn’t stop. Probably because there just aren’t many folks that would or could care about fast and fancy revolver shooting.

He’s arrived at a lot of the same places I did ten years ago, I did manage to give him a couple of new ideas around arm nerve isolation and recoil sapping, which is a term I just made up but is pretty accurate for what we’re trying to figure out. The really interesting thing to me is that back then it was the Big Guy and me, arguably the best all-around shooter that’s ever lived and inarguably the best revolver shooter, and we were around 10-15% better than the field back then. I never beat him, though I will say that we were even, the two years we really got to bang against each other I lost the Nationals at 99.4% and 99.96% (IIRC) to his 100% as the scoring goes. He quit shooting revolver, my elbow came apart, blah blah blah.

The guy I was talking to is still beating the same crowd with a few new faces by that 10-15% margin. It’s really interesting to me that the field never really improved, or maybe everybody improved but this guy is that far ahead of them even again.

For every single task out there, there is someone that is far and away the best on earth at it. I don’t doubt that someone shooting on that level maintains both their record AND their margin of victory. Until, well like you mentioned, life intervenes. Perhaps it’ll be a physical issue.

Speaking of, how is your elbow doing now? Was it the case that it was exacerbated by the numerous small scale trauma of recoil for sure? Kind of crazy to think about but I’ve seen enough slow-mo shots to understand it’s probably inevitable. The body absorbs a lot of that.

It’s good now, took several years and serious surgery. Combo of weight lifting and shooting not letting it heal.

Unexpected hood entertainment is getting to see pick up games of cops and robbers go down every few months or so.

Yesterday I was involved in a minor accident, which is probably the most interesting thing that has happened to me in a while. Although I wouldn't have wanted it to happen, I was at fault for the accident, I miscalculated the size of my car and accidentally crashed into a bus, but only scratched it and left a small dent. I didn't have to pay much, but it was still frustrating. But also something good happened to me, I saw this article https://nbahoopsonline.com/Articles/2022-23/Blockchain.html , I think it will help me in the future since I am closely related to cryptocurrency. In general, nothing interesting happened to me anymore, my life is boring.

That sucks, but the fact that it was minor may make it a blessing in disguise, if it encourages you to more defensive driving in the future!

Reminds me of my first accident. I was driving my dad’s van. Taking a tight corner (you Americans have no idea how small our streets can get. Those big cars of yours are highly impractical here). On one side there was this gorgeous little old timer toy car. Drop top, long nose, very shiny. Other side, someone was remodelling and there was one of those big metal trash containers. So I’m veeeeery carefully avoiding any and all contact with the little sports car. screeeech goes the container as it bites deep into the van’s other side.

It did not buff out. Took a 85euro can of special paint and a long hard afternoon of work to get that remotely right again.

Small or not, glad you’re okay. Accidents are bound to happen to us all at some point. Speaking of, I’m knocking on wood, I haven’t had one in a while.