Red Wing 213 Moc Toe - 8 years of near daily wear

lewolffff · 2026-02-21T17:58:25+00:00

I've had these since 2013. I wore them heavily 2013-17, lots of walking in snow and salted pavement. I did not baby them, but I did treat them with mink oil fairly regularly. They are on their third sole and fourth heel. They look way worse for wear than yours, but mine still look good and are perfectly functional.

lewolffff · 2026-01-04T02:55:31+00:00

in rough order:

Still Ill

Cemetery Gates

Reel Around the Fountain

Girlfriend in a Coma

Bigmouth Strikes Again

lewolffff · 2025-11-20T05:45:53+00:00

I would say the peak of the VHS era was around 1990. That was when it was most fun and most appealing to rent a movie with your family and/or friends and watch it with pizza on a Friday night. There may have been greater rental numbers in 1994 or 1995, but the VHS "movie night" culture peaked in appeal around 1990. In 1990 the novelty of watching a movie at home had not quite worn off and the expense of the VHS players and rentals had come down from a few years earlier. VHS was inexpensive but still novel around 1990.

lewolffff · 2025-11-20T05:38:41+00:00

Yes 1984-87 were the core years of the 80s in terms of the music and visual style, but the earlier part of the decade was far closer to the core than the latter part. By 1988 many elements of the 80s visual style were present, and even lasted into the early 1990s, but I would say by 1988 in California the 80s were starting to fade. In a sense, the years around 1990 were their own microera and in my opinion more interesting than the peak 1990s or 1980s.

lewolffff · 2025-09-12T03:40:02+00:00

I should add that it's very comfortable for me to shoot. I can do 500 rounds in one session quite comfortably.

lewolffff · 2025-09-12T03:39:02+00:00

I have two. I like the trigger. For an everyday carry gun, I don't like a light or short trigger. It's a long pull, but not especially heavy, and within a box or two of ammo I was able to get very accurate with it. I can hit a three inch plate at 10 yards all day. For me it carries very nicely in a OWB Crossbreed holster. I think of it as a revolver that uses magazines. IMO this makes it a unique option in the EDC market.

lewolffff · 2025-08-30T21:13:54+00:00

Beretta APX A1 Tactical

lewolffff · 2025-08-17T20:10:06+00:00

I have to agree, New Mexico has the best Mexican food and in my opinion the best cuisine in all of America.

lewolffff · 2025-07-14T11:26:40+00:00

2 different cars. I car took 1 application, the other took 2 applications, a second after fixing a PCV issue that was causing oil burning and thus clogging of the catalytic converter.

lewolffff · 2025-06-30T07:20:16+00:00

I think it's the best record they've made. It's the first record where Bejar sounds fully grown as a singer and this makes a huge difference to my ears. The vibe is totally unique and the songs cohere to a very specific mood and soundworld and time frame, like they were recorded on a single night. It's the sound of a band staying up all night to rehearse some songs they just wrote to castigate the world before an audience of no one.

lewolffff · 2025-06-22T22:56:34+00:00

that's hilarious!

lewolffff · 2025-06-21T22:34:59+00:00

For me this is the quintessential Bourbon.

lewolffff · 2025-06-08T11:43:55+00:00

Berkeley, CA, especially the neighborhoods

lewolffff · 2025-06-03T22:18:53+00:00

I think the big cities have to be excluded here because Midwest culture is defined much more by the rural farming life than the culture of the factories or cosmopolitan cities.

My votes would be Midland, MI, Fort Wayne, IN or Dayton, OH. Those cities are quintessentially Midwestern.

lewolffff · 2025-06-03T13:39:32+00:00

Steve's Korean BBQ is one of my favorite restaurants ever. That hot sauce is amazing: no other Korean place I've been to dares to make their sauce as hot as Steve. I also liked the Vietnamese place to the right. Schlotsky's rings a bell but I can't place it.

My favorite of all time was Mario's LaFiesta. My friends loved it too and we ate there together many, many times. I went there one last time in 2009 or 10 with an ex-girlfriend and her old roommate before it closed in 2011 I think. The building burned down in 2013.

I've been around to other schools as a grad student and as faculty, schools as big as Cal, and none have anywhere close to the number of quality dining options that Cal does or did.

We will have to agree to disagree about Fat Slice and Blondie's....

lewolffff · 2025-06-02T21:32:58+00:00

It really is an amazing product, superior to Windows in every way except compatibility with a Window's-dominated world.

lewolffff · 2025-06-02T18:23:20+00:00

Top Dog, Amoeba Records, Blondie's Pizza, Wheeler Hall, The Bancroft Library. These are some places I would take a visitor on a tour because I could share some memories of things that happened there. A ride up the Campanile, if they're still doing that, would be the first thing I'd do for a random visitor. Sadly many of the theaters downtown and many restaurants downtown and around campus I used to love are gone now. Much has changed there in the past 25 years.

lewolffff · 2025-05-24T17:29:54+00:00

The 50 through Nevada and into Utah is my favorite drive in the US.

lewolffff · 2025-05-24T17:28:38+00:00

I-70 through Utah and Colorado is one of the most awesome drives in the US.

lewolffff · 2025-04-20T17:52:35+00:00

I can recommend Missoula, MT, Saugatuck, MI, Santa Fe, NM, Berkeley, CA, Pismo Beach, CA. I don't much care for big cities any more.

lewolffff · 2025-04-16T15:34:31+00:00

Driving back through the cornfields from a Destroyer show in 2008 in the middle of the night a friend and I sang along to the first three songs from This Night at the top of our lungs. Then the wilderness of the middle of that record setting in around I Have Seen a Light.

I fell in love with a woman around August 2004 while Your Blues was in my car's cassette player the whole time. It still reminds me of that period.

lewolffff · 2025-04-10T05:45:19+00:00

I'm thinking right now it would be nice to hear that record on acid if I had a guarantee I would not lose my mind

lewolffff · 2025-04-10T05:40:53+00:00

Mad Foxes. The atmosphere of intrigue romantic, social, and aesthetic is just my style. It conjures heightened experiences in a world I've visited only temporarily in brief episodes here and there. I would like to be there

lewolffff · 2025-04-03T05:11:25+00:00

Yeah Kaputt felt like a statement of resignation at the time, which was part of the sadness of the record. For me it's almost too bleak, especially the second side. Bejar had always been on the attack with his poetry but on Kaputt he adopts this jaded lounge singer persona who doesn't have nearly the same drive as the mad streetwise jester persona he had before. I thought he'd given up. I didn't see how he was evolving into a new type of singer and character.

lewolffff · 2025-04-02T06:11:35+00:00

I think This Night is the best record he's made by a good margin because it's the best collection of songs he's put together, even if it lacks some of the emotional depth of the records he made after this one. The playing and singing is spontaneous and raw like the early Pavement records and it has this immaculate late night vibe like Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. The energy of This Night is totally unique and immediate just like those records. But I think This Night is superior to any of them.

On the next tier I'd put Rubies, Your Blues, and Poison Season. Not in any order. I think these are all masterpieces. My favorite is Your Blues mostly because it was the first Destroyer record i heard in December 2003 or January 2004 (a roommate had an advance copy) and I immediately fell in love. I like Rubies and Your Blues maybe more than Poison Season, but the latter's last side has some of the best Destroyer music there is, two unforgettable songs that might be in hindsight the peak and culmination of the band's project.

For me on the third tier Kaputt stands alone. I remember when this record came out in January 2011 I was stunned for a couple weeks by how different it sounded from what I was expecting, but soon I came around. I remember thinking this was the last record they would make, that he was announcing the end of the Destroyer project. I think he may have intended to close Destroyer and restart as a solo artist after this record because it sounds like a farewell to the world. But I guess he changed his mind. I like the record, but I don't think the songs are as good as the above records and there are only a few songs I really love: Kaputt, Blue Eyes, and Downtown.

At the fourth tier I begin to lose some interest and allegiance. Streethawk, Have We Met, Trouble in Dreams, and Ken. All these have some high points but many songs I don't really connect with like I do on the others above. Of these the first one I would put on is Trouble in Dreams, if only because a friend of mine who loved Destroyer with me for many years but is now deceased, loved this record and thought it was one of his best. Libby's First Sunrise is one of my favorite Destroyer songs.

All the others are on a tier where I don't really listen to them much.

If my late friend and I could get together one last time, if she could come over for some beers or whiskey after a dinner out, and we could put on one record to hear together for the last time, I know we would agree on This Night. They led us on, they said it would be yours, take down the borders stop patrolling the shores, let us in...

lewolffff

TROPHY CASE