That Was the Week that Was: 2014 Week 13

Ah, lucky Week 13. And posted on time on the last day of the week. Will wonders never cease? Not around here, they won’t.

This was a good week spent mostly in the home office. On the phone. Much was accomplished.

In the gun world, our AR prototype receivers came in and are at the FFL for pickup tomorrow. All is proceeding as we have foreseen.

The links to this week’s will all be live when the post goes live. Enjoy!

The Boring Statistics

Our article count was 28, a great rebound from last week’s weak 23. Word count likewise rebounded (or maybe regressed towards the mean), at 19,000 words up from a mere 13,000-odd. We had six posts that broke the long-post threshold of 1,000 words, but none of them were over 2,000. (That’s twice as many long posts as last week, though).

The mean and median post sizes were 679 and 610 respectively, suggesting that there were some unusually short posts. There is usually at least one sub-100-word post, but this time there were three; and 11 total sub-500-word posts. We widely exceeded our minimum desired post count of 19. So far this year we’ve almost 350 blog posts, and over 1800 comments.  

Comments are more or less normal at 118, as of press time; this is significantly higher than the previous week’s comment count, which was 96. This doesn’t include about 1,000 facebook-sourced spam comments. Don’t know why we got those, but they come in waves, and we shoot them down in waves.

Thanks for commenting! We always say this and we always mean it.

Most Commented Post of the Week

Our most commented post was the incredible Yee story: Gun-banning, murderer-releasing pol charged with gun trafficking, with 14 comments and runner-up was Tour d’Horizon — French for “too many links”,  with 9. These two posts represent only about 20% of the week’s comments; overall, this week, the comments were more evenly distributed across the posts.

The Week in Posts

Here’s the recap of our posts for this week:

• We kicked off the week on a Swamped Sunday
• While we imagined media reaction to Miles Standish’s gun collection, circa 1650, in Eeek! An Arsenal!
• We describe how a naive young women conned herself into becoming a cog Inside Putin’s Disinformation Machine.
• And even in bucolic New Hampshire, a Corrupt State Trooper back on payroll at Corrections.
• We follow up the most ridiculous hostage situation of all time in Vicious cat gets celebrity therapist.
• And tell the readers that Last Week’s TW3 finally posted tonight….
• While the world media’s been in the missing airliner frenzy… other things have been happening.
• This lame approach that sent an acquisitive lawyer to prison is exactly What an ATF set-up looks like.
• We share the Latest from GunLab: VG 1-5 repro parts, Jap 99 mag tooling.
• It’s not just a textbook, it’s Middle School Malpractice: 2nd Amendment Edition.
• Dannel Malloy creates 115 jobs — out of his state. Because that’s the kind of leader he is.
• We gloat a little bit about Rick Shinseki’s Bad Week. There is not enough misfortune in the world to repay him for the black beret.
• Because so many made it into the Tour d’Horizon post, we have fewer of these than usual this week, but this one makes a valuable comparison: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have trains.
• Here’s a little background on an Interesting RKBA case in Illinois
• Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: The Firearm Blog has been a daily or near-daily read for years.
• The Genesis of the Volkssturm Carbines. Why? is the first of two parts.
• Wearing clothes prisoners made? You Just Might be a Soldier. Meet UNICOR Federal Prison Industries — where it sucks to be a customer, but it’s worse to be an employee.
• Leland Y. Yee, come one down: Gun-banning, murderer-releasing pol charged with gun trafficking. The guy is a typical politician: all “ban the guns” in front of the cameras, all “sure I’ll deal surface-to-air missiles to Moslem terrorists” when he didn’t know the wire was on.
• BASE Jumping the Freedom Tower. Naturally they were arrested. Can’t have freedom on the Freedom Tower.
• Bradley Manning is Appealing. The verb describing what he’s doing with his case, not the adverb describing how the fans of Transsexual Prostitutes 236 feel about him, thank you very much.
• The British National Archives are releasing Unit War Diaries of the Great War. Unfortunately, finding the actual diaries is a bit of a brainteaser on their badly organized website.
• We continue to gloat about Yee: Yee-Haw. Haw-haw-haw-haw.
• We clear about half of the “gotta write about that” browser tabs in Tour d’Horizon — French for “too many links”.
• Rebels fire RPG-29 at tank. Tank Go Boom.
• Why the Army camo project failed, and is failing shows you the face of acquisition failure. Fortunately for him, there are no consequences for failure in the Acquisition Corps.
• America-hating Piers Morgan signs off with gun-control screed. Don’t go away mad, Piers.
• Saturday Matinee 2014 13: The Untouchables. You know, some day someone could tell the real story of Elliott Ness and Alphonse Capone on the big or small screen, and it would make one hell of a movie. But there’d be a lot less shooting.
• That was the week that was: 2014 Week 13 is, of course, this humble wrap-up.

We hope you enjoyed this week’s content. We enjoyed bringing it to you!

Here’s how we did on last week’s promises:

We had the same promises as usual, the same ones we make for next week.

1. We didn’t catch up on much, and we still owe the Bull and Greek posts.
2. We did make our minimum posting rules (and then some).
3. We could have had more tech posts.
4. We did get the WWWW up on time.
5. And we did get the Matinee and the TW3 up on time.

For Next Week

Our goals are unchanged:

1. to catch up the long-festering back posts mentioned above, now back up to just two features (Gerald Bull, and the Greek Insurgencies). We also have some other stuff that has sat way to long in the draft queue (there are 240-odd posts there right now, so we’re not curating it very well). We’re really serious about the two posts that finish the Greek series, and the second post of two on the Volkssturm Carbines.
2. to post three times a day, six days a week, of which:
3. one gun-tech or -industry post and one SOF, UW, or war-related post up daily.
4. a WWWW, on Wednesday.
5. a Saturday Matinee, and a TW3 before the week ends at midnight Saturday.

The draft queue is approaching 250, so it’s time to dynamite some of that stuff out and entertain you guys.

See you with a TW3 on Saturday! (Again!)