Clovis Chitwood Heavy Industries

I’ve got five gigs, that’s all I got

I’ve got five gigs, my brain hurts a lot

Five gigs, no more YouTube

Five gigs, bye bye Hulu

Last night i found out Sprint will be following the likes of AT&T and Verizon and changing the meaning of Unlimited from “being with out limit” to “hmm, somewhere around 5GB give or take, no let’s make it 5GB” meaning that as of July 13 I will be limited to 5GB of data a month on my Sprint EVDO Data card. If I exceed that in two out of three months my service will be terminated and since my contract is not up until July of next year (wow that’s means I’ve been using it for a year already, that doesn’t sound right) I’ll get slapped with a $200 ETF. I checked my usage for the month so far. 11GB, I’m on course to use between 15to 20GB this month and I don’t think that is atypical. TThis, however, is not a bad thing.

In keeping with the theme of mediocrity that is our goal here at Clovis Chitwood Heavy Industries the EVDO service from Sprint has fit right in. But I want more. I want me some bandwidth, and I’m ready to deal with Satan (Comcast[not meaning to single them out all public utilities are evil {except for the Madison Suburban Water District they rock <no, I'm serious>}]). The problem was the contract with Sprint, but now they have made a substatial change to my contract, I can get out without paying the dreaded EFT. I’ve just got to do it by the 13th if I understand correctly.

Today’s the tenth, right?

http://cinegeek.com/?p=55#more-55

Not one of my greatest…

“but when I wind up in the hay it’s only hay, heh, heh”

Now back to your regulurlary scheduled program.

It’s not a Clovis Chitwood podcast so your days of insomnia are not over just yet, but check it out.

http://cinegeek.com/?feed=rss2

It’s the podcast for Cinegeek.com the site I do some movie reviews for. I promise you’ll be entertained or I’ll return your money.

Which may sound a little funny to those who know me because I often find myself playing devil’s advocate for no good reason. I don’t know why I do that. Just plain orneriness I guess. I don’t like being ornery though, it’s not pleasant and puts me and those around me in a foul mood so I try to check that behavior whenever I notice it. But I don’t like even arguing things I actually believe in, things I am passionate about. I guess it’s because I’m lazy. I can think deep if I need or want to but I’m not the exactly quick on my feet, literally or figuratively. In fact I’d much rather be sitting down.

Since I don’t like to debate or argue I don’t collect the little tidbits and factoids that come in handy during a spirited discussion. It doesn’t help that I am not really a detail person. I like to figure out how something works then I don’t have to worry about where all the little nuts and bolts go, I can figure it out later when I have to. That’s not how you persuade someone though. Like quarrying a chunk of marble you persuade someone by picking at one little point. Eventually you get a hole, then you make a bunch more holes. Then you slip in those little L shaped thingees and drop in your other thingee and pound away. Wedges and shims that’s what they’re called. Eventually you’ve separated the marble from the quarry and can get under it with your pry bar and nudge it on out to market. You can’t just grab hold of the chunk of marble and wrest it from the mountain, but that’s about all my skills at disposition allow me to do and just like someone who tries to tear down mountains with their bare hands I usually end up making an ass out of myself.

So I usually just let things pass, things that get in my craw, things that would make me scream if I were alone. But every now and then a conversation casually ends up heading in a cetain direction, I let my guard down, and before I know it I’m calling people commies and inviting people to kiss my fat ass. Not that I don’t actually believe those people are commies or that you really can kiss my fat ass, but that’s no way to win an argument. II know that but once I’m started down that road I can’t stop until I’ve made myself look like a total asshole.

I guess I can live with that, it beats being a commie.

I helped Billy do some upper assembly work on some of his AR’s this Sunday. Besides not being able to drive some pins out of a front sight base and chasing little steel balls all over a linoleum floor it was remarkably anticlimactic. All of the work I’ve ever done to AR’s has been anticlimactic. Everything has been so easy. Everything just goes together so well. I expected to have to fit pats and do machining and lapp things, but besides fiddling with taunt little springs and chasing even smaller detents there’s nothing to it.

Usually when your messing around with guns you have to be very careful with one critical measurement. Headspace. Too much and everything goes boom. Too little and the round won’t chamber. Or do I have it backwards. With the AR it doesn’t matter, unless your actually installing barrel extensions to the barrel and if your doing that then your hardcore. You do have to worry a little about keeping the bolt with the barrel and a cautious person will at least check things out with a field gauge but if it’s a new barrel and new bolt it’s not really necessary. On most guns the barrel fits into the receiver and then the bolt slides back and forth in and locks to the receiver. So you’ve got to be really careful how the barrel attaches to the receiver and how the bolt locks in the reciever. All of this is going to affect headspace. With the AR the barrel fits into a barrel extension. The barrel extsion has lugs that mesh with the lugs on the bolt. The upper receiver basically just clamps to the barrel extension. The fit of the barrel and barrell extension it the real critical determinant of headspace on the AR. The bolt and the barrel extension will wear together so you kind of want to keep them matched. Really the whole gun just kind of hangs off the barrel extension.

We did get to do a bit of machining yesterday though. One of Billy’s uppers had the M4 feed ramps machined into it but the barrell he was wanting to use did not have the enlarged notches to match. So out comes the dremel tool to touch up the barrel extension. Even doing this operation there was no real change of doing something that would make the gun dangerous, just hard to feed. Which I guess could be dangerous if you were actually having to use the thing in anger, but that’s why you go to the range and the test the things. Well that and the fact that they’re just fun to shoot.

I finally got to see his CAV-AID lower It’s basically a plastic lower. I liked it a lot. It is light. We slapped a twenty inch barrel on it and I swear I’ve held toy guns that weighed more. Of course with a loaded mag it would weigh a bit more but It was just unbelievably light. I want one I want one. I want one.

If i was any good at this I would back up and tell you how wonderful the last couple of weeks have been. They literally have just seemed to slip through my fingers. Of course if I’m being honest the bad weeks seem to go by at a pretty good clip as well. Hypericon was a blast and the weekend before it was as well, though the details are a little fuzzy, but for different reasons than Sunday morning at Hypericon. So I’ll just leave it at that except to say a late happy birthday to Stephen Zimmer and Roblyn.

This last weekend was pretty good as well. More time with family would have been nice but that was my own fault. Saw Mongol and the Animation Show on Saturday. Mongol was beautiful but flat, the Animation Show was as great as it always is. When we left the Belcourt people were lined up down to 21st waiting to see the midnight showing of Rocky Horror. I was glad to see it was going to be packed. I would have liked to see it but I was going over to Billy’s on Sunday to help him assemble some ARs.

The Belcourt finally announced what the16mm outdoor film for July was going to be. Which is good because I think it’s this weekend. I hope it is, because if it’s the weekend after next is RollerGirls. Anyway it’s Stagecoach the movie that made John Wayne a star. Okay that’s probably overstating it but it’s a wonderful John Ford movie. A Western in the old fashioned Western style. I really want to see it and watching it outside stitting in a lawn chair should be a blast, even if I’m by my self. I doubt I’ll get anybody else interested in going to see it with me, but ‘m going to try.

Anyway that’s all the catching up I’m going to do. I’ll see you later.

States I have not been to:

Oregon
Montana
Idaho
Nevada
North Dakota
South Dakota
Iowa
Maine
Vermont
New Hampshire
Rhode Island
Alaska
Hawaii

Possible trips:

Ontario Oregon, 28 hours would also knock Idaho off the list
Malad City, Idaho 24 hours
Busby, Montana 22 hours would also knock South Dakota off the list
Elko, Nevada, 26 hours
Hankinson, North Dakota, 16 hours would also knock South Dakota off the list
Sioux City South Dakota, 13hours
Kennebunk, Maine 20 hours
Warwick, Rhode Island, 17 hours
Bennington, Vermont, 17 hours
Winchester, New Hampshire, 17 hours

Google maps couldn’t come up with any thing to get me from Nashville to Alaska or Hawaii

That’s all well and good but I’m leaning more to one of these:

Here’s a route that would allow me to knock Oregon, Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota off the list, but it would take around forty hours going out there.

View Larger Map

Then I could do this to cross Nevada off the list coming back.

View Larger Map
Total driving time around 73 hours.

Something a bit more feasible would be this.

View Larger Map

It would be super easy to just swing down and hit Rhode Island on a little bit more direct route home. Total driving time would be around forty hours.

Something to think about on slow day.

Okay so that’s a bummer the maps don’t show the routes unless you click on the link.

Oh well what do I expect for free.

Well Friday was a nice relaxing night with friends. I like those nights. Which is good because I did the same thing on Saturday, except we broke it up with two movies. Up the Yangtze and Repo Man.

Up the Yangtze is a doc about the Three Gorges Dam project in China, watching the subtitles I realized I have been spelling dam, damn, for about the last month. More specifically it is about a young girl from an imporverished family going to work abroad one of the cruise ships that ply the river. It’s also about a young man from a more affluent family, there income is revealed to be around 3000 Yuan a month if I remember right, but how that relates to other families in China I have no idea. It’s also about the disappearance of old China, which is literally being torn down and flooded. To me it could have benefited from either tightening the focus or stepping back. Still well worth watching though.

Early Sunday morning around 2:05 Repo Man was invested into the Pantheon of “THE GREATEST MOVIES EVER according to Clovis Citwood.” It now resides in the same rarified atmosphere as Two Lane Blacktop, White Lightning, Thunder Road, and the sublime masterpiece Smokey and the Bandit III: Smokey is the Bandit. By the way not only motor movies are enshrined those are just the first three or four that popped into my skull. We went to the Midnight Screening at the Belcourt. I feel bad because I’ve missed half of them (uh, now that I’m thinking about it it’s probably more than half). I love what they’re doing but if people don’t show up why bother doing it. So I feel like I ought to be there for every one. It helps that they have all been movies I would like to see again. Back to Repo Man I sow this back in the early nineties. I don’t remember where or how, it may have been on TBS or something because I didn’t remember half of what was going on in the movie. I pretty much just remembered a weird movie with Emilo Estavez and Harry Dean Stanton, bout a bunch of down and out repo men, and there was some there weird stuff going on. I primarily remembered Harry and Emilo in that big green Impala blasting down the LA river. I don’t know if it would have made any difference if I remembered more or not, but I was blown away by what I saw Sunday morning.

Needless to say, I didn’t get into anything Sunday night. I barely got out of the house to make a quick run to Krystal’s, hmm chili cheese pups. Oh wait I did watch The Fellowship of the Ring for some reason I’m not quite sure of. I should have been watching the Comedy Central thing the I need to get reviewed. C’est la vie, okay that still looks super silly written out. Does it sound that pretentious when I say it?

I just noticed my shirt was on inside out.

Just thought you would want to know.

How ’bout another photo?

Taken below the damn at Standing Stone State Park in Overton County. In September I think.

Somewhere downtown, not sure which downtown, but I think it’s Nashville.