Lots of folks are having fun with the recently-released photo of Obama firing a shotgun (“just a sportsman like you, honest”). Many of them are promptly jumping to the conclusion that it’s faked or photoshopped, of course, mostly revealing their ignorance of shooting, photography, or both. The Swallowing For Obama activists are gleefully cheering their hero’s latest triumph over the unbelievers, based on their own ignorance of both (while still wishing he hadn’t sullied his hands with an evil gun).

The truth is simpler: it’s a staged publicity photo. He wasn’t shooting anything but air, with a camera perfectly positioned to capture a burst of images so they could pick the best shot. That’s why his stance is so static compared to photos of actual skeet shooters: he’s posing for a picture. That’s also why there’s no choke in the lower barrel: the handler didn’t install one because Obama was never going to fire a second shot.

The most likely reason the photo exists is that the manufacturer sent the gun as a gift, and the administration sent back a signed, framed photo showing him using it.

[Update: having now looked at the full-resolution image, with EXIF data intact, I have no doubt that the photo is real but has nothing to do with skeet or other sport shooting. His left sleeve is in crisp focus, but his left hand is slightly motion-blurred, with the motion increasing out toward the muzzle, precisely what you’d expect to see during the recoil from a shot. The escaping gas from both muzzle and porting is realistic for the lighting conditions and the 1/320 second exposure time. At the same time, his stance is an awkward attempt to shoot it like a rifle, he’s getting battered in both shoulder and cheek by the recoil, only the upper barrel has a choke in it (making it useless for skeet), and he’s shooting horizontally, something not commonly done in any shotgun sport. I say Browning sent him a Citori for his birthday, and got back a signed photo and a thank-you note.]

I really should make a version of this site that generates my naughty novel cover art.

I love the wording in the description of Korean Roasted Bamboo Salt:

"The cooking process is believed to burn off the bad elements of ordinary sea salt transforming it into a new mineral."

(apparently it’s graded by how many times it’s been roasted; also, it’s a folk remedy with the usual random list of curable ailments)

A) Feinstein isn’t stupid.

B) Pushing for significant increases in gun control is likely to push the Senate into the hands of the Republicans in 2014.

C) She’s too old to run for President in 2016.

D) She’s a big Hillary supporter.

E) The media quite fawningly accused the nasty evil extremist Republicans of picking on poor little Hillary after she finally lied through her teeth testified about Benghazi.

Is it all just a game to make Hillary the “persecuted underdog” for 2016?

PS: I like the suggestion that the way the House can defeat any gun-control proposal is to attach a budget to it; Harry Reid will never let it come to a vote.

If there were any functional difference between scary evil assault weapons and acceptable civilian firearms, her big press conference wouldn’t feature a laundry list of names and numbers:

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Hunting for interesting excursions in the general vicinity of Kyoto, a small marker on Google Maps caught my eye: ポンポン山. Now why, I thought, would a mountain, even a small one, have a katakana name? The Japanese Wikipedia entry says that the sound of footsteps is generally accepted as the answer, but also that the name only dates back to the Meiji era, and before that it had the more prosaic name Kamoseyama.

Note that searching for ポンポン山 will find many pictures of the sign at the summit announcing its height of 678.9 meters, but also pictures of large-breasted women (“pom-pom mountains”). Honestly, these days I’d be disappointed if a search in Japanese didn’t include pictures of large-breasted women, because Japan.

When, and more importantly why, did Russian spammers decide that “cune” was an English word relevant to the performance of sexual acts? Recently my spam folder has been filling up with messages of the form “Russian slang-for-woman want/are ready/wanna to sexual-act for/with you”, and one of the randomized values for sexual-act is “cune”.

It could be a simple typo, but I prefer to think that highly-educated Russian women are offering to write on clay tablets in Sumerian. Talking dirty, as it were.

The global warming social engineers have been pretty successful at marginalizing anyone who dares to question their ever-changing definition of The End Of The World, so I think it’s only fair that we adopt their methods and refer to gun-control supporters as Civil Rights Denialists.

The fact that warmologers and gun-grabbers tend to flock together just makes it all the more appropriate.