The blog will be down briefly tonight for a minor overhaul. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. You’ll be alright; I’m not abandoning you.

Here’s the Colbert segment on Jim Zumbo.

Yeah, Colbert covered Zumbo last night. I’m sure someone else will have a video link by morning. I’d write more about it, but I made some extremely ill-advised choices for my midnight snack and feel the need to lie down for a little while.

… but as the Zumbo story slowly works its way out to the mainstream media, I’m continually annoyed (but not even mildly surprised) by the way it’s being willfully misrepresented.

Nearly every article I’ve read has spun things this way: the big, bad, evil NRA directed its brainwashed minions to ruin a reasonable man for daring to break from party dogma.

No. There is no way for an objective person to look at the actual facts and reach that conclusion. Does. Not. Compute.

Let’s see, Zumbogate broke in a big way on Sunday the 18th, due ENTIRELY to the actions of individual forum members and bloggers; it was pure grassroots. By the 21st, Remington, Cabela’s, and Gerber dumped him and his blog was pulled from the ‘net. It wasn’t until the 22nd, four days after the story broke and after everyone else in the industry had already distanced themselves, that the NRA took action.

And what did they do? They put out a press release announcing that Jim wouldn’t be writing for NRA Publications anymore. He wasn’t thrown out of the organization. They didn’t call for his head on a lance. NRA just followed the lead of everyone else in the industry and realized that continuing to employ him would be a PR disaster.

But, of course, reporters can’t be troubled with trifling inconveniences like facts when there’s an agenda that needs pushing.

(see Standard Mischief’s excellent timeline for more details on what happened and when)

The Venture Bros., the only bright spot on the wasteland that is cable television, has officially been picked up for a third season.

Also, the Season Two DVD comes out on April 17.

If you’re not familiar with the show, Wikipedia has a very thorough entry on it.

I just can’t fathom why the Adult Swim people are willing to pay for utter shit like Tim & Eric Awesome Show and Saul of the Mole Men when they could instead put more of their money and resources behind the Venture guys.

After sending out resumes by the gross and spending countless hours on all the job websites, I finally have a reasonable lead on an actual, paying job that doesn’t involve asking, “Would you like fries with that?”

Oddly enough, the job is essentially a proofreading position, though in a typical case of title inflation it’s billed as “Publishing Editor.” I say “oddly enough” because I have zero formal background in that area. What I DO have is a bachelor’s in economics and a few years’ experience in financial planning (which I wouldn’t do again even with a gun held to my head), along with a moderate dose of IT geekery on the side.

While you’d never know it from reading my blog, I actually do have a decent handle on the English language. My mom was an English teacher for about 8,000 years and made damn sure I learned the rules. Yes, I blatantly disregard those rules here, but that’s for reasons of style and laziness. And I do have an assburgers-like eye for detail. So we’ll see. I am, for the first time in quite a while, hopeful about finding a job within my state.

Oh, and after all that time spent on resumes and job hunting, the lead came to me from a friend who already works for the company. Networking FTW!

This afternoon my mother, who doesn’t know about my blog, asked me if I knew about “this Jim Zumbo thing.”

Err, yeah. I think I heard something about it.

She’s far left-wing, and read the WaPo piece via a link from Huffington. Small world.

According to the Zumbogate timeline at Standard Mischief, I was the first blogger to cover Zumbo’s now-infamous “terrorist rifles” career-suicide note. I was not aware of that. My post was short and, in light of what was to come, very mild. But it happened to catch the eye of Tam, who proceeded to fire off a truly magnificent broadside (Note to self: try not to piss her off).

So, since my obscure little outpost on Algore’s Internets played a part in The Great Internet Gunblogger Shitstorm of ‘07, and since we now have a few days’ distance from those events, and since there ain’t much else to do on a Sunday night, I’ll offer some thoughts on the whole thing…

Jim Zumbo is certainly not the first gunwriter to step on his dick in front of a national audience. As Tam pointed out in her An Army of Davids, illustrated post, back in the Good Old Days, if a magazine writer blew it, he was pretty well sheltered by the one-way nature of the medium. “Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon,” as Tommy LaSorda once said. And that cover got abused; back when Smith & Wesson signed The Agreement, more than one national gunrag ran condescending, insulting “shame on you” editorials chastising those of us who boycotted S&W. That kind of stunt wouldn’t fly today; the balance of power within the community has shifted rather dramatically. And as Zumbo learned the hard way, when you’re blogging out on the Untamed Intarwebs and you say something really dumb and offensive, thousands of people can call you out on it, tout de suite.

That’s an important lesson to learn, but it’s mostly aimed at The Sporting Press; bloggers already knew it. The bigger lesson, for everyone involved in the shooting community, is that the “black rifle” crowd is fed up with being seen as a sacrificial lamb and now has the might to make itself heard. I’m not going to say more on that point, as it’s been covered well, and at length, just about everywhere else.

I do have something to say about this “Fudd” bullshit, though: knock it off. It’s stupid and divisive and doesn’t help anyone except the antis. Look, the hardcore antis (the Brady Bunch, VPC, etc.) are set in their ways. We’re NEVER going to win them over by discussion and persuasion; call them whatever names you want. But a lot of hunters who CAN be won over are instead being alienated and driven away by this name-calling and stereotyping, so give it a rest. What we SHOULD be doing is exactly what Sebastian did in his outstanding post When Hunters Attack. That is, we should show them that we ARE on the same side, with the same interests, and with a common enemy. Win ‘em over, don’t drive ‘em away!

By the same token, we don’t need a witch hunt to bawl out every writer who ever turned up his nose at an AK or AR. What happened last week was huge; I’m sure that every gun/sporting/outdoors writer has gotten the message. Let’s move forward.

Oh, and Zumbo did teach us one other lesson: don’t blog drunk (… said the guy nursing his fifth White Russian).

This week we have hot redhead Isla Fisher:

Who is engaged to this man:

Life truly is not fair.

To the gentleman (?) in Waycross, Georgia:

1. Gross.
2. You probably have the clap. Go see a doctor.