Raffle results, and some blog news

 

I mentioned last week that a winner had been drawn for our AR-15 pistol raffle, but that I was waiting for him to indicate whether or not he wanted his name, location, etc. to be mentioned before publishing them.  I can tell you that 82 tickets were sold (out of a possible maximum of 100 tickets, as previously announced).

Sadly, it turns out that the winner, an elderly man, had died (of natural causes) in the interval between sending in his entry, and the close of the raffle.  That's why he hadn't replied to my e-mails or telephone messages.  His widow eventually got back to me, and explained the situation.  I told her I'd either send the pistol to her as part of the winner's estate, or give her its monetary value and re-raffle it here - her choice.

She doesn't want the pistol herself, but indicated that her eldest daughter, who lives in Oklahoma, would like to have it for her son, the original winner's grandson.  She was OK with this, and it seems fair enough to me;  therefore, I'm going to be sending it to that state for processing through the daughter's FFL.  The daughter would prefer not to be identified, and her mother feels the same way, because this is (obviously) a difficult time for the whole family.

There will be another raffle, this time for a Glock pistol with a slide-mounted reflex sight.  Look for details here later this week.  Drawing will be in mid-July.

On a different matter, yesterday morning I woke up to find two blog posts from 2009 (!) had been flagged by Google's automated "community standards" bot as not measuring up to requirements.  The precise reason wasn't specified, and both posts were innocuous in content, so I submitted them for an appeal.  In both cases, the appeal was upheld, and the posts were re-published;  but they appeared on this blog with yesterday's date, rather than their original dates of posting.  Those of you who were puzzled by their appearance, then disappearance (when I reset the date to the correct one) . . . well, now you know what happened.

I woke up this morning to find that exactly the same posts had been zapped again by the bot.  This is ridiculous, and I don't have time to waste on the matter;  so I simply deleted them.  I'll be writing to Google to ask what the heck is going on.  I've no idea why those posts tripped the bot, because there was nothing rude or salacious in them at all.  If it happens with more posts, I'll begin to suspect that an SJW employee at Google is playing silly tricks again, as has happened to more than one conservative blogger in the past.

Oh, well.  I have multiple full backups of this blog, and I've made preliminary arrangements to move it to a safer server if that should become necessary.  If ever you can't find it here, try bayou renaissance man (all one word) DOT com (although there's nothing there at present except a placeholder).

Peter