This is, according to the counter, post number 3002.

After the long dreary years of very little traffic - so little I had no compunctions about shutting down the original, spambot-overrun NitroForum - it's gratifying to have so much traffic, of such good quality, and on a steadily rising curve.

The good Doctor is responsible for kicking us over the mark, with 24 posts on his first day participating here. Pace yourself, RJ. This ain't no weekend. This ain't no one-shot. This ain't no foolin' around.

Hey, I had some catching up to do

Robert

...and you did it.

Oh, he hasn't even started yet. Stand back, everybody, give him room to work...

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jim....

Appreciate your stick-to-it-iveness, Jim ...

James, this forum is technically extremely functional and visually appealing. besides a brief hiccup when my username (which included a space) ceased to function, the NexusForum is the best place in the world, real or cyber, to discuss Heinlein and his works in a serious way. You should be proud to host a web forum on the man that doesn't include posts like "Starship Troopers Proves Heinlein was Fascist"....

Very seldom, only in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper insight into the world's nature and man's. And no sooner had this precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dared not look down the precipice of fact."
--Olaf Stapledon

Does this remind anyone of an entry in "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long?"

It's good to find a Heinlein forum with interesting folks again. The old forum I inhabited for years was crashed by the spammers and the owner never heard from again, though the non-forum part of the board still operates.

SailFree, Heinlein would have said the same thing in prose that read and sounded more like Ernest Hemingway and less like James Joyce. But IMHO he would have agreed completely with what Stapleton said.

Shotguns. I had shotguns protecting the old NitroForum and the sneaky Rooskies just walked right through 'em.

Now I use a pair of these:



...and it's MIGHTY quiet around here.

The place that SailFree is referencing was a nice little forum/chat room, but it was one of the last to use open posting. It was prone to garbage at any time and then was completely overrun. One day, it just wasn't there any more, although the shell site survives, inlcluding the link to the forum.

The proprietor was kind of odd - cared enough about Heinlein to set the place up and do a nice job of it, then was sort of never heard from again. I pinged him several times on various points and never received a reply. Neither, apparently, did any of the regular participants in the forum. I'm not sure why he's never touched up the site, taken it down, or answered any inquiries.

Is that a fully automatic rifle? Ni-ice.

I bashed up my shoulder and arm quite a bit a couple of weeks ago out in BLM land shooting our new Mossberg 500 at bottles of water and various sorts of non-formal targets. Darned thing has a stock too long for me; I think it was designed for 6' males. We're looking at getting an adjustable stock/recoil absorbing stock for it.

It's mostly for my husband; he likes his toys and I figure that this one can be justified as home defense too.

Hey, Jim, those the same guns you use to chase off the boys after your female offspring?

Hmmmm...like pizza?

Pizza, a good action movie, and a listening ear, I find. I've got two almost-godsons who are now 19 and 18, two goddaughters who are 18 going on 19, a godson who is sixteen, and a goddaughter who is 14. The boys aren't as verbal as the girls, but they respond just as well to a listening ear. So far, no unplanned pregnancies (for either group), no drug problems (that I know of) and only one of the six has had any significant other issues with family/home.

The main use for guns with the boys, IMHO, is so that we can invite them to go shooting with us, preferably on BLM land or in the desert with reactive targets. I think it's hardwired in a lot of boys (and not a few men) to think that it's just plain *cool* when things go BOOM! So I figure, let them learn about it in a good, safe way spending quality time with the adults in their lives.