This year's Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, happens to fall on Labor Day. Labor Day, in all its Marxist glory, really does not interest me, but Jewish New Year is sort of a big deal.
The history of Labor Day and its meaning in the US is kinda murky, which is to say I have not spent a ton of time digging into it. To me, it has always looked frighteningly similar to the Marxist class warfare that was crammed into us back in the Soviet Union. Digging up any factual data on the origin of Labor Day is a little tricky, but everything I found so far suggests that socialists and communists had something to do with it (nearly every time there is a bad idea being promulgated in America you can be fairly certain they had something to do with it). I am not likely to be tilting at windmills, so I just ignore the whole thing the best I can. It was always just a long weekend when instead of focusing on my dayjob, I could focus on one of my sidejobs, and I have a few of those. Interestingly, I am pretty sure that no matter how hard I work, Labor Day organizers did not have me in mind when talking about the "holiday for the workers".
More importantly, this year it is the start of the High Holy Days that, for me, culminate in the Day of Atonement ten days from now. Usually, Rosh Hashanah is a very busy day, but this time around, somehow, thanks to the good graces of my ever suffering wife, I actually got a respite for a couple of hours to edit some photos and do a little writing.
Today marks the beginning of year 5872 according to Jewish tradition and Jews have been celebrating this holiday for close to three thousand years now. There is something about being a part of a tradition this ancient that always makes me contemplative. This year it is also different because we lost some elderly family members and it is not the same without them. As the last few of the generation of Holocaust survivors leave us, these ancient traditions take on a different meaning in many ways even to non-observant Jews like me.
Either way, Shana Tova to all of you and may the next year be better than the one before!
I gave it a couple of days and figured it is time to do a live show on intermediate magnifications in LPVOs and a couple of other updates.
I am budgeting 30-45 minutes for this, but it might go to a full hour depending on how it goes.
I'd like to do a quick overview of how the hog hunt went, the gear I was looking at and why I love doing this stuff.
Let's aim for tomorrow (Tuesday, October 12th) at noon Mountain Time.
Here is the wrap up of the Steiner M1050r LRF bincoulars that I have been playing with for a quite a while now.
Observation optics is a pretty involved subject as is, further complicated by the fact that most observation optics are not made for shooters. Here is a live show I did on observation optics that touches on this:
This binocular is decidedly not intended for birders. As the name implies, it is squarely aimed at military and law enforcement applications. It is a very competent overall design, but there is a feature that is sorely missing.
Let me know what you think once you watch the video. The binocular in question is the Steiner Military 10x50r LRF: https://bit.ly/2WA88hY
It is a solid design overall with excellent optics and good LRF performance. There is, however, one critical feature missing.
The registration for SHOT 2022 is finally open and I am in the process of making something resembling a schedule for it. The way it usually works, I make a detailed schedule and it goes to hell in a handbasket eight minutes after the show starts. Still, I have to make plans.
Interestingly, the Safari International event is in Las Vegas this year and overlapping with SHOT.
SHOT is Tuesday through Friday and SCI is Wednesday through Saturday.
I normally do not go to SCI given that it is more of a hunting oriented event. However, given that I am gearing up for my4th hunt this year (aoudad sheep in April, spring black bear in Alaska in June, hogs in Texas two weeks ago and New Mexico elk coming up in December), I can no longer say that I am not really a hunter with any sort of honesty.
I may not be a good hunter, but I am a hunter. Apparently.
With all that, I may be able to sneak over to the SCI show on Saturday. I always run out of time at SHOT, so I doubt I will be able to give up...
Folks, I am going to do another livecast tomorrow focusing on LPVOs and FIxed Power scopes when both are equipped with an offset RDS.
Matt of Everyday Marksman and Jacob of Pro-gun Millenial will join me tomorrow.
Yesterday's livecast, once we got done with the original topic of discussion veered a little bit toward other aspects of shooting quickly with conventional riflescopes and the topic of OEGs (Occluded Eye Gunsights) came up. I figured that I should probably write a short article on how they work when I realized that I already have and that Guns and Ammo makes this one available online.
It went into the 2019 Retro issue when they asked to write a little bit about OEGs since they were famously used in the Son-Tay raid.
https://www.gunsandammo.com/editorial/single-point-dot-sight/368936
It did make me want to re-visit the subject, so I pinged the good folks at Armson USA to see if I can borrow a modern OEG form them and go over the subject in more detail.
