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The shooting occurred around 2:45 p.m. Tuesday near 845 S. Figueroa St. when a suspect or suspects exited a vehicle and shot at a man standing behind a Smart & Final. The victim pulled out a gun and fired back at the suspects, the LAPD said.

The victim was injured and transported to a hospital in critical condition, police said.

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Divemedic has been geeking out about home network stuff which has been a bit of a walk down memory lane - I once had a supervisor who turned down my request for a 2400 baud modem "because you can't read that fast".  You see, at 1200 baud, a text file comes down at around one line per second, and a fast reader can read that fast.  Sorry, Borepatch, no speed for you.

And quite frankly, nobody in the late 1980s got much speed.  We had big VAX computers and the standard wisdom was that "You'll never get more than a megabit per second out of TCP/IP".  And it was standard wisdom because nobody did.

Enter a fellow named Van Jacobson.  He looked at the source code for popular TCP stacks and decided that it could be improved.  WAY improved.  TCP wasn't implemented in the operating system, as an OS service; rather, it was implemented in a user application.  The problem with this, thought Jacobson, was that every time you wanted to send a packet the OS had to do a context switch to let the (user-land) data structure containing the packet go to the OS kernel.

Jacobson thought this was stupid, and that networking should be the job of the OS.  He hacked IP into the Unix kernel and all of a sudden not only were you getting more than a megabit from TCP, a single Sun Workstation could saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet.

IBM basically said that this was because Ethernet was stupid and primitive, and IBM's Token Ring network enforced bandwidth sharing.

Enter Jacobson again.  He defined a mechanism called "Slow Start" which he added to his hacked TCP code. Basically, whenever you started to send data, you would start slowly and increase the speed gradually until you hit congestion.  What he found was that not only would his Sun workstation saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet, but 5 or 6 Sun workstations would saturate that same network while gracefully sharing the network between them.

So why do I say that he made the Internet possible?  Imagine a bandwidth-constrained Internet - constrained either because Internet Protocol was too slow or because more powerful computers hogged all the bandwidth.  There would be no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Netflix, no Zoom.

And it instantly made Sun Microsystems into the Ferrari of computers.  As Networking took off, Digital Equipment Corporation couldn't compete with lower cost workstations that were much, much faster.  That was it for VAXen, and for IBM's Token Ring, and for ISO's Open Systems Interconnect protocols, and for Asynchronous Transfer Mode.  The problems that these technologies were designed to solve were suddenly obsolete.

All because of Van Jacobson.

Not many people remember this time of massive upheaval, but we all owe Jacobson a huge thank you. 

 “Tis better people think you a fool, then open your mouth and erase all doubt.”

10/15/20 NBC San Diego:

Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, or on how late they turn in assignments. Those are just some of the major grading changes approved this week by California's second-largest school district.

The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is overhauling the way it grades students. Board members say the changes are part of a larger effort to combat racism.

“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” says SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”

According to data presented by the district, under the old grading system, teachers fail minority students more than White students – a lot more.

During the first semester of last year, 30% of all D or F grades were given to English learners. One in four, 25%, of failing marks went to students with disabilities.

By ethnicity, 23% went to Native Americans. Another 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics. And 20% of D or F grades went to Black students.

By comparison, just 7% of failing marks went to White students.

Because turning papers in on time is so white. 

 ROOT BEER IN GRANNY’S BATHTUB

 by Carolyn Cramer Goldwasser Oct. 1, 2026

 Yes, I got to help my Granny Annie Langley Naylor make and bottle root beer. I was 8 years old in 1950 and she was 65 years old. She did things in an old fashioned (even for then) kind of way. Her cook stove was a huge cast iron, woodburning stove, (meaning the heat to cook on the top and in the oven came from pieces of wood burning inside one end of it). Out of the top of the other end of it rose a curved shiny metal smokestack that fitted tightly into a hole in the actual brick chimney, thru the kitchen side of the wall. Next to the smokestack was a cast iron shelf on which a very big tea kettle sat, keeping water hot.

 On the living room side of the wall, there was a heater which burned “fuel-oil”.  It was about two feet away from the wall and it had a similar smoke- stack that fitted into a hole on the other side of the same chimney. All the smoke and fumes from both stoves went out of the brick chimney (which extended several feet above the top of the roof) up into the sky.

 I don’t think there was a separate water heater in that house. But there was plumbing, and cold water would flow into the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and bathtub. The water in the kettle above the cook stove was always hot, so granny would grab it and pour some hot water into the cold water in the tub to warm it up enough for us kids to take a bath. Only on Saturday nights we got baths. Other times we washed in the sink, with less water.

 So how did we make Root Beer? First, you save the glass soda bottles from last year. Then you gather or buy roots (from which the name root beer comes). Wintergreen is the only root I remember granny naming, but it seemed to me there were several different kinds of roots involved.  She roasted and boiled the roots to make a dark brown liquid in a giant pot. Then she added a big bag of sugar and boiled it some more.

 She did tell me how they had dug and roasted chicory roots to make “coffee” during the Depression – chicory is bitter, and so is dandelion root, which they may have used for the root beer as well as for the “coffee.”

 So, then the bathtub was scrubbed clean and rinsed well.  The stopper was securely put in place and several gallons of the dark brown, warm sweet liquid were poured into the tub to ferment for a week or so.  She stirred it every day watching for bubbles to form when it was ready. The root beer got the bathtub. It was summertime, warm weather, no school, no baths. Warm weather all day and all night was needed for the fermentation to proceed properly. So we made root beer in summer.

 Next step: last year’s glass bottles were put in the giant pot covered with water and slowly brought to a boil, to be sterilized.  They then cooled, in the water. A funnel and a ladlecargol helped us fill the sterile bottles, as we sat on thick towels on the bathroom floor.

 We moved to the kitchen table and the heavy steel bottle capping tool was brought out, as were the many thin discs of soft metal that would become lids for the bottles.

 The bottling tool worked with a handle on a lever, which we older kids could pull down, to exert force onto the top of the metal disc, which we had set on top of the full bottle; the bottle was held securely in place below the lever, by a clamp, which was a part of the boxy form of the tool.  The soft, thin metal disc was forced over the top of the bottle, bending into a bunch of evenly spaced little crimps around the edges, holding it securely onto the top of the bottle, keeping the liquid and the bubbles inside for many months. 

 Root beer has no alcohol content. It is bitter and sweet and fizzy and it was considered healthier than regular beer with alcohol in it. And kids could drink it!  My grandparents were members of the Salvation Army and were against alcohol. My mother was an officer in the Salvation Army before she married my father. There were no alcoholic beverages in our house, ever.

 I think it is not a coincidence that after I was grown and married with kids, I studied and learned to make several kinds of fermented foods: including Kosher dill pickles (lots of bubbles, sour but without vinegar – just salt, garlic, dill and cucumbers), sourdough bread, raising without yeast; and Amasake, a drink. 

 Amasake is made from whole grain glutinous rice cooked soft, with extra water, and then fermented with koji (a fermentation starter), in a warm oven, for a couple of days, just long enough to let the starches (carbohydrates) in the rice chemically change into sugars. It gets stirred from time to time. The fermentation breaks down the skin of the whole grain, and it gets mushy and sweet. It can have a similar taste and consistency to a milkshake if it is pureed and chilled. I helped some macrobiotic folks at the Grainaissance mochi factory, near Berkeley, make amazake to sell, flavored with cooked fruits and nut butters. Yes, a good substitute for milk shake.

 Quickly stopping the fermentation (by boiling it) prevents the sugars from progressing to become alcohols. “Amasake” means Sweet Sake. If you let it ferment past sugars, then you have regular Sake – the Japanese alcoholic drink. 

 Miso and soy sauce are made with soybeans and grain, fermented in the presence of salt, which controls the fermentation.  The soy proteins become more accessible, being already partially digested by the fermentation process. Not just a flavoring, but they are good high protein foods. And they are an important part of a vegan macrobiotic diet.

 Miso and soy sauce are dark brown, like root beer. And here I am, many decades later, still involved with dark brown fermented foods!  Yesterday, I cooked my breakfast soup with miso in it. Today I flavored my breakfast porridge with a splash of soy sauce.  Thanks, Granny for teaching me how to cook and how to grow food in your garden. And for saying grace before every meal: “Bless this food to our bodies and make us grateful, teach us how to be kind and to help each other. Amen.”

 As I have previously discussed, the core of all machine tools is a 20 threads/inch leadscrew. One turn of the screw is 0.50". If you can narrow that down to 100 divisions, you can easily move pieces on that lead screw .01". This is beginning to get accurate for mildly precise work. But how do divide a circles into 100 equal divisions. Think back to the suffering of high school geometry. Dividing a circle in half is just drawing a line across the center point. Another diameter that crosses the center point gets you 4 divisions of 90 degrees. How do you get to 100 divisions? Even more useful, 360 divisions? I often think about having to rebuild civilization even without a 20 threads/inch screw thread. (Okay, not on your list of concerns.)

How do you get this capability if you lack a starting reference for 360 degrees. This has been bugging me for years. This video explains how it was done.

 So I was watching this meme, asking how "country" this respondent might be.

Have you ever fired a shotgun?

Have you ever waded barefoot in a creek?

Have you ever used a slingshot?

Have you ever started a vehicle with a manual choke?

Have you ever taken ashes out of a wood stove?

Have you ever carved you initials in a tree?

Have you ever siphoned gas with a hose?

Have you ever split wood with an ax?

Have you ever eaten fried bologna?

Have you ever hanged laundry on a clothesline?

Nonsense.  Those questions don't determine "country".  I did all of that before I was age 12.  I wasn't reared in the country; I was reared in a subdivision. on the edge of town.  I raised my kids in the country, deep in the woods, and they also did all that before they were 12.

The post Lercker M53 Experimental .380 Italian SMG (or PDW?) first appeared on Forgotten Weapons.

Handguns have been shown to be extremely effective at stopping bear attacks. This correspondent and colleagues have documented over 200 cases in North America where handguns were fired in defense against bears.  Handguns have been effective in about 98% of the cases. 

One objection to these findings is often stated this way: If a person is killed before the handgun is fired, you will not include the incident in your statistics, because the handgun was not fired. Fair enough. It is a limitation worth exploring. 

Wikipedia and others maintain a database of all the people who have been recorded as having been killed by bears in North America. It cannot include those who were killed by bears in pre-history. There is no reason to look for handgun incidents before the availability of cartridge handguns, about 1870. 

All the fatal bear attacks in North America which could be documented from 1870 on were examined by this correspondent.  From 1870 to present, there were 204. There was a single case where a handgun was present at the scene when the person was killed by a bear. This was the terrible case of Mark Uptain. He had a Glock Model 20 in a holster by his pack, without a round in the chamber. He was a professional guide processing an elk. The Glock was never fired because his client, who was able to access the handgun, did not know how to chamber a round. Mark Uptain was not able to access the Glock pistol. He was able to access a can of bear spray and was able to empty it. He was killed by the bear. 

Only one case out of over 200, and the handgun was not available to the victim. It was a remarkable finding.  

Everyone who has access to the Internet is welcome to check the Wikipedia listings and or any other documentation. Please let us know if you find any incident where a handgun was present when a bear killed a person in North America. The Uptain case is not included in our database of incidents where a handgun was fired in defense against a bear or bears. No weapon can be effective if it is not deployed. The difficulties of deploying handguns, bear spray, or other weapons are relatively similar. They can all be deployed in under two seconds with a little instruction and practice.

If a person does not have their defensive weapon on their person when they are attacked by a bear, the odds of a successful defense are greatly reduced. If they have practiced accessing their weapon and deploying it quickly, their odds of a successful defense are enhanced. The most recent defensive use of a handgun against a bear, by Lori Price near Skilak lake in Alaska, illustrated the advantage of practice. 

Modern handguns are extremely effective as defensive arms against both animal and human attackers. They are not magic talismans. The capabilities of modern handguns are greatly enhanced with practice and training. A single afternoon's training increases the capability of a defender enormously. Spending time training after that increases a defender's capability, with most gains being in the early stages. 

In today's society, much capability can be gained by practice with a laser simulator, or simply by dry firing (practice without live ammunition), or by practice in drawing a handgun from a holster while the handgun is not loaded. We are fortunate that ammunition is relatively cheap compared to a hundred years ago. 

If you are going to carry a handgun for defense, spend some time and practice drawing the handgun from a holster without any ammunition in the firearm. It costs you very little. An afternoon's practice will pay extreme dividends in capability and confidence. Instruction (often offered for free at local gun clubs) can help increase your ability to shoot accurately, in just a few hours. The more you do, the better you will become. Those first few hours are the most beneficial and the most cost effective. It can be a pleasant and interesting afternoon, well worth the effort.

©2026 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch  

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A relative staying overnight at a North Harris County smoke shop shot one of two masked men he found looting the store, sending the wounded suspect stumbling across Ella Boulevard to a carwash begging for help while his accomplice vanished.

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Around 1 a.m., deputies were sent to the scene near Camelback and El Mirage roads for reports of a shooting. According to officials, the complainant said his wife tried to attack him with a knife, so he shot her.

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Coffee Negroni

1 oz Dry Gin 

¾ oz Mr. Black Coffee Liqueur

¾ oz Campari

¼ oz Sweet Vermouth

Stir the ingredients with ice and serve up or over a large rock.

Express orange oil over the cocktail and discard the peel.

The cocktail has a darker, more roasted dimension than a classic Negroni. The Campari’s orange bitterness remains prominent, while the coffee adds espresso-like notes of roasted beans, dark chocolate, and a slight char. The roasted bitterness is nicely offset by the dark sweetness of the sweet vermouth, with everything accented by a bright citrus note. I took a small sip before expressing the orange oil, and that seemingly small addition made a noticeable difference, adding a fresh citrus note that brightened the entire drink.

I was also planning to enjoy an Espinosa Knuckle Sandwich Chef Special 2025 Toro, which seemed like it would be a natural accompaniment. The cigar came from a box I purchased in June 2025. It’s been a while since I’ve grabbed a stick from that box, and I’d been thinking about lighting another one for some time.

The Knuckle Sandwich line is the result of a collaboration between chef Guy Fieri and Erik Espinosa. The Chef’s Special edition is released annually. The 2025 version features a Brazilian Mata Fina wrapper over Nicaraguan binder and fillers, presented as a 6 x 55 box-pressed Toro. The wrapper feels dry in the hand, but every one I’ve smoked has performed flawlessly.

The cigar is full-bodied, with earthy spice and espresso predominating. Layers of dark chocolate and dark fruit sweetness provide some balance to the bitter coffee notes.

The pairing offered a nice overlap of espresso and dark chocolate, along with some welcome contrast. The bitterness of the Campari stood up to the cigar’s richness, while the sweet vermouth and coffee notes seemed to amplify the chocolate and espresso flavors coming from the cigar. The flavors were familiar without being repetitive. The Knuckle Sandwich and Coffee Negroni didn’t simply duplicate each other, but instead seemed to lift and complement one another.

I’ve enjoyed cigars from the Knuckle Sandwich lineup with various bourbons, ryes, and ales. This Coffee Negroni and Knuckle Sandwich pairing has me excited to trying similar cocktails with other cigars as we move into the cooler — and eventually cold — weather of the coming months. 

Cheers!