Perspective

When I was talking about that Rossi 851 feeling oddly familiar, I mentioned to one poster that no, it wasn't a particularly good fit, it just seemed like something I'd become accustomed to though it was actually new to me. I guess I've managed to prove the point.

The other day I stumbled upon an old Smith and Wesson model 10-6 at an auction. The old style of box places it in the 1960s or '70s - the box has a date of 1955 on the disclaimer, but this particular variant was introduced in 1962. Of course they stopped using boxes like that sometime in the 1970s, though I couldn't give an exact year.

Whoever the former owner was, they took extremely good care of it. Yes, it had been fired, but probably less than 100 rounds. Other than things associated with that (burnt powder on the front of the cylinder, "ringing" where the pawl drags on the cylinder - stuff like that) it could have passed for new. There's no rust, no holster marks, the bluing is 100% - it looks like it must have been in a museum for most of its life.

There's one thing it came with when I bought it that would not have been original ... for most people, the grip on pistols of this era is actually too small, it was common for people to buy either a grip adapter or larger grips so that it would fit their hands better - this one had such a grip adapter on it.

But I'm not most people, I have really small hands - which is why you no longer see the grip adapter, I removed it. And you know what? It now fits like it was made for me.

If you've ever seen a model 10 before (or if you look it up on Wikipedia), you will see one difference between this one and the standard version. This one has a heavier barrel. The barrel on a standard version tapers a bit from the cylinder to the muzzle - this barrel is the same size its whole length. Which brings me to one strange detail ...

I said that the Rossi actually felt a little too muzzle-heavy to me. With a heavy barrel, this gun certainly has even more weight in the muzzle - yet because of the grips I really don't feel it as much as with the Rossi.

A heavy barrel like that is more common in a target model, but this doesn't have adjustable sights one would hope for on a target gun. Also if you look closely at the box, you see that it doesn't have a target trigger or target hammer. Yet the trigger pull is about as nice as you'll ever find, and it shoots right where I aim it.

My friend Todd that I typically go target shooting with also prefers the grips as they are now, but he holds the gun a little differently and so has a bit more trouble with the aim. His comment was that obviously the gun was made for me and not him ...

As much as it could be said of anything, yes, this gun was made for me. Okay, not actually custom fitted or anything, but probably as close as you'd come short of that. The apparent familiarity of the Rossi is still an open question and probably always will be, but the issue of "just a particularly good fit" has been laid to rest. (No pun intended)

Ever heard that expression, "... like finding an old friend"? It refers to finding something which is new to you yet at the same time intimately familiar, as if you'd spent a lifetime with whatever it is.

There are a few topics I tend to steer clear of because of the controversies. Well ... not steer clear of, but I'll state my view and then leave it at that. Religion and politics are good examples. I have a right to my opinions, you have a right to yours - I can't do my job if I let my opinions get in the way. And it's probably not a good idea for you to get into a big argument with a moderator over his opinions anyway. So while a number of people in the forums could tell you my religious and political beliefs, you won't see them mentioned often - and when they are, I state my opinion and then drop the subject.

Well, another of those issues is firearms. I know for a lot of people firearms are something that only the government and "bad guys" (terrorists, mafia, gangs - whatever) has, well, that's not how things are here. In this country and state, as long as you're over 21 and don't have a criminal record you have the right to own a gun. Okay, there's a background check when you buy to be sure that you aren't a criminal, but other than that anyone can do so. And you can use that gun for target shooting or hunting or even self-defense, though in the latter case you may have to prove in court that it was self defense ...

So anyway, I am a gun collector, I actually have a pretty sizable collection by now (after all, I am 46), and I enjoy target shooting when I can get somewhere that it is safe to do so. Nothing even noteworthy for this area, but this is a little different ...

My latest acquisition is actually a fairly cheap revolver named a Rossi model 851. Rossi is a Brazilian company, not quite as well-known in the firearms business as the other Brazilian company Taurus though actually Taurus recently bought out Rossi (okay, like a couple of years ago - to me that's still pretty recent) ... but back to the subject at hand. You can see pictures of it here.

Generally speaking, it looks like any revolver might have 20 or 30 years ago. Rossi appears to have copied the older Smith and Wesson designs, the way the firing pin is actually attached to the hammer there isn't common any more. And you rarely see wood grips these days ... a few of the pictures feature a Taurus revolver of similar size for comparison, you'll notice that the Taurus has rubber grips. The full length underlug (the part under the barrel) is pretty much for looks, I can't see it serving any real purpose on a .38 Special caliber gun - likewise the ventilated rib. It does have adjustable sights, but I have my doubts that you'd really call it a "target model" ... (I enjoy target shooting for fun, I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars - if I had that kind of money - on a gun that is supposed to be a little more accurate. As long as it'll hit the target at a reasonable distance, I'm satisfied.) And so, ... this is just a nice looking, cheap, "plinker", nothing special.

Good theory, but somehow it's different. It's not particularly comfortable to hold - I have small hands, so the grips are just a little large for me. And that full underlug means it's a bit heavy, especially towards the muzzle. Yet somehow, it just feels familiar, as if I used to have one just like it for years. I didn't, that's the strange part. I had a few revolvers with wood grips over the years, my favorite would be an old Ruger Security Six that I sold years ago - but the grips were different, the weight was different, all in all nothing like this gun.

I try very hard to be a reasonable, rational person, though at the same time I tend to trust my feelings ... and usually I can find a reasonable explanation for them. This time, I really can't. If you believe in reincarnation, you might be tempted to say it must be something from another life ... but they wouldn't have had this style of gun that long ago, so that doesn't really fly either.

This is a work in progress, and probably will be for some time. How do you write about over 50 years of a person's life? Even though the life in question is complete, I can't say that what I say will ever truly capture it ...

We lost a good man ... well, almost a month ago now, though I only found out about it last week. He hadn't been in good health really for the last couple of years. He liked to imagine that he'd someday be like he always had been, but I guess time doesn't work like that.

He always aspired to be a "dirty old man", though Janet would have killed him if he tried. He imagined that he was the bogeyman used to keep little kids in line. "You better behave or Mikey will get you!" Since you've probably never heard of him, I guess he didn't succeed at that one - yet anyway. He probably does scare government agents - they probably believe this is all a cover for his latest nefarious scheme

I've never met Michael Shirley in person either. I first encountered him online maybe 15 years ago, back before the Internet was a big thing. There were a large number of local computer BBSs, where people would go to chat, play games, or download stuff - in that sense it wasn't all that different from today, except this wasn't broadband. If you were writing to someone on the other side of the world, it would take a few days to get there. Your local BBS contacted his hub at least once a day, that hub contacted other hubs - and everything was a 14.4K, so it just took time. But the BBSs were part of one or more networks, the biggest was called Fidonet. Their version of forums were called "echoes", and they had echoes for everything imaginable - flying, history, math, programming, ... you name it. Mikey was involved in several firearms and military echoes, and also history and who knows what else.

In real life, he was a security guard and later a computer consultant. Yeah, he used to carry around a shotgun while patrolling warehouses or apartment buildings, but that really doesn't give him the credit he deserves. Mikey was also a military genius, who could teach general Petreus (however that's spelled) a thing or two. He would design bombs or rockets on the back of napkins while on break - and he had enough training both from the military and studying on his own that they would probably work. Well, if he'd had the money and materials to build them, hydrogen bombs are not cheap.

For some unexplained reason, Mikey always seemed to have connection problems. He'd lose his connection for a couple of days, and then everything would be back to normal. It always seemed to be while he was in the middle of a "sensitive" topic, so he always blamed it on his "handlers". He liked to imagine that there was a group of government agents out there monitoring his communications, and that if he said something they didn't want getting out they'd pull the plug for a few days. Given what he knew, that's quite possible, though it must have been a rather tedious job most of the time. And yes, when I say he knew that stuff, I mean he proved it to me. I knew more science than he did (though I'm not a rocket scientist), I could verify most of what he said. Okay, he wasn't great as a rocket scientist either, that came later, but I believe that his bomb designs would work as intended.

We're not completely clear on what he died of, officially. Janet says he was on his way to the hospital, but ... well, you can understand if she has a hard time talking about it yet - or for that matter we have a hard time asking her. Oh yeah, "we" ... when the BBS netowrks finally shut down, a group of us who'd been in more of a chat echo took our conversations to an email list. Since the echo was named "GUNS" (all echo names were in caps those days), we named the list "Fidoguns". There's maybe a dozen of us at the moment, just sit around and talk about politics or target shooting or military affairs. Most of them are former military, all would fit the description of "radical right wing gun nut" ... though really they're all harmless, even Mikey. Mind you, if I did get in some sort of a fight, I'd gladly take any of them at my back (and they'd gladly do it, even Vern who isn't talking to me just now). It's amazing how a group like this will get all choked up when trying to talk to Janet to find out what happened ...

A few years ago Mikey found out that he had diabetes. No, he never even suspected, but he went to the hospital because he had a fever and found out he had "flesh eating bacteria" because his diabetes had weakened his immune system. Oh yes, they saved his legs, but he was pretty well bedridden for about 6 months. Yeah, of course we know he didn't really stay in bed as much as he should have, Janet did her best to keep him honest. Diabetes is not something to be taken lightly. Mikey still thought of himself as the security guard doing alarm response, or even as the kid he'd been in the military - but he wasn't up to it now and probably never would be again. So while we might never know what the doctors say he died of, I'm pretty sure that in the end it comes down to the diabetes and that he never really came to grips with it. (I ran into someone in town the other day who made a comment about wondering if he had "a touch of sugar", I told him there's no such thing - if you have any diabetes at all you have to take care of it constantly.)

Recently Mikey had been saying that this world is just too crowded, that we needed to build rockets and build habitats in the asteroids where people could live as they wanted instead of having the government tell them what they can and can't do. Having never seen him in person, I have to wonder if his own frailty wasn't making him wish for a place where gravity wasn't so much of a burden. I mean, he's right, government and all the other busybodies spend too much time trying to protect us from ourselves, telling you what to eat and what car to drive and even what to think, if we were out in space and the nearest government was millions of miles away then we could be free.

Well, Michael Shirley is free now, he no longer has to worry about busybodies or his handlers or even human frailty. I will probably write more later, but this seems like a pretty good place for now.

Oh, the title? "Sympathy" is rather obvious, and as I said he always wanted to be the bogeyman used to scare little children and government agents - a role which the devil has in many Christian circles.

We'll miss you, Mike.

Since I mentioned it in the forums ...

My graduate work in Mathematics was in a rather specialized discipline, called "ordered permutation groups" (though my disssertation was actually on a different topic). You have a set - typically the real numbers but any totally ordered set will do - and then you have this collection of functions acting on your set elements. There are three operations defined on these functions: supremum (at each point it uses the larger of the two functions' values), infimum (the smaller) and basic composition of functions.

That's the most general example, what are called "lattice-ordered groups" or "l-groups". My advisor had proved that any l-group could be considered as an ordered permutation group, and of course wrote the textbook we used ...

Anyway, there were 4 basic examples of ordered permutation groups. One was just all strictly increasing functions on the real numbers, another was basic addition (which was a totally-ordered group), the third was the set of all periodic functions (meaning there is a fixed number n for which f(x+n) = f(x)+n for all x), and the fourth example ...

The fourth example had a similar definition to the third example, except in reverse. Rather than saying there was one specific number n for which f(x+n) = f(x)+n, the definition was that each function f had such a number n (non-zero) but that the number depended on the function f.

Since the definitions were similar, the last two examples were given similar nicknames - the third example was "grandfather" and the fourth example was "grandmother. But "grandmother" had another name as well ...

What's so special about all this? Well, a lot of the theorems in lattice-ordered groups had one exception. Yeah, that's right, we had hundreds of theorems which applied to all l-groups except "grandmother", therefore "grandmother" was also referred to as "the pathological 2-transitive l-group".

You've all heard the expression "There's an exception to every rule"? Well, not only is there an exception, in the case of lattice-ordered groups we even knew exactly what that exception was. Makes things easy in that you know where to look for the exception, but is also disconcerting in that this one specific example is always the exception (hence the use of the term "pathological").

So ... what's your "grandmother" like?

I'm afraid this one is going to hurt. If you're looking for something to cheer you up, look elsewhere.

I don't really talk about my life that much. Well, it's not much of a life anyway - I mean, a guy with a Ph.D. in math who delivers newspapers for a living. Or did anyway ...

I actually lost that job almost a year ago. I've still been helping some other people deliver papers from time to time, but - well, things have been real quiet of late.

I really loved that job, even though part of me knew all along that it wouldn't last. In my case you could take that literally ... I've used the term before but it doesn't come up very often, I'm what's called schizoid. People talk about "professional detachment", in my case I'm so detached that usually I don't even know how I feel. There are exceptions of course - and losing that job was one of them.

When I say "part of me knew ... it wouldn't last" you may be wondering why. No, not magic, also not part of me working to sabotage my chances (or at least, not that I know of) - in this case it was simple mathematics. It is a very demanding job, especially the schedule. I'd been let go once before for having a couple of accidents in company vehicles, fatigue and inattention will do that to you, so I knew that as long as my responsibilities remained the same it was bound to happen again. They accommodated me as best they could, but it was only a matter of time ...

But really I'm getting away from my story. Another part of my personality is that I really need to feel needed - and that's why I loved that job so much, they regularly told me how much they needed me. And when it finally happened they really went to bat for me - but the problem there is the insurance company, not my actual employer.

So anyway ... well, I just couldn't deal with it. I just shut down. The only thing that kept me going was my online friends and my responsibilities here, even though I never discussed it.

Believe me, it isn't easy being unemployed and depressed. It helped that I was living in my parents' basement, but I provided all my own food all that time - and helping people out on their paper routes doesn't pay much let me tell you. So what's changed? Well ... obviously Dad thinks of me as a freeloader, I was supposed to be paying rent and such, so now he's planning to kick me out.

Don't take this wrong, he really is a great guy and all. But we never really talk. Not that I'm very good at talking anyway, I can handle "small talk" in any crowd but when we're done you really won't know anything more about me as a person. But you know, taking to Dad is about like talking to a brick wall. And sometimes he says the stupidest things - things you know aren't true but he sounds like he believes them. And even if I were one to try to argue with him, it wouldn't do any good. Add to that the fact that when I was working we never saw each other just due to the scheduling.

Dad says that I really need to get a job, which is true of course but it's not that easy. I need to talk with someone, to get some understanding and emotional support so that I don't have to face everything by myself ... if things were different maybe he could have done that, but I wonder if it's a hopeless cause at this point.

The other day he asked me if I'd made any plans for what I was going to do. I'm sure he doesn't realize that I answered his question when I made a comment about needing to feel useful ... the fact of the matter is I can't plan. If he kicks me out, then I have no emotional support at all because I won't be able to keep in touch with you guys or my other online friends. For someone like me - unemployed, depressed, homeless and with no emotional support ... I'll probably just curl up under a bridge somewhere and die.

I cried that night realizing he didn't understand my answer, something which doesn't happen very often when you're as detached as I am. And of course I'm going to cry again having to discuss it just now.

Sorry to end on such a down note, but that's what I'm dealing with. If I disappear from the forums in a couple of weeks, you know what happened. And yeah, I'm crying as much for him as for me. I do have a conscience, even in this state, and I know if he actually does follow through on his plan it'll just kill him.