Month: September 2020

Lying Bastards

Elections, Politics, The Gun Thing

We all know that politicians lie like, well, Democrats;  so it should come as no surprise to anyone that wannabe-POTUS Joe Hidin’ is talking bullshit again, albeit through surrogates:

Attempts to conceal and lie about Biden and Harris’s gun control positions are a tacit admission that the public does not want the gun control these candidates pursue. If such measures have the popularity their backers often pretend they do, there would be no need to obscure their goals. Rather, gun control advocates and politicians understand that they cannot succeed if they are forthright with the electorate about their extreme positions.

We all know that Biden, Harris and all the other assholes blabbed their loathing for guns during their party’s primary elections, and tried to outdo each other when boasting about how much they were going to fuck over gun owners, take away their AR-15s and so on.

I know that after the primaries, which exist to rally the faithful, candidates usually “tack to the center” for the general elections.  Unfortunately (for these pricks), we all know what they have planned for us:  California- and Australia- style laws and regulations designed to make gun ownership difficult and cumbersome, and (probably) gun registration and -confiscation.   Are they promising all that?  No, of course not:  it’s all driven by “need”,

Simple replay to all this mendacity:  fuck off, Sparky.  No amount of reassurance from Biden and Harris are going to pull the wool over our eyes, so they might as well give it all up and run on the Gun Control & Confiscation ticket.

They’re going to get crushed whatever they do.

Discovery

Food & Drink

Yesterday afternoon was spent in the company of the Son&Heir. involving  diverse activities such as cataloguing the serial numbers of my paltry gun collection (“Dad, this is so sad —  you have got to buy some more guns!” );  beer and poutines at the local pub;  and finally, a little Scotch-tasting back at home.  I’d bought this particular single malt at Total Wine a while back, intrigued by the label, but held back tasting it until suitable company showed up:  ergo, the S&H.  And what a joy it was:

Glen Fohdry has a good pedigree — for me, anyway, as I love Speyside Scotches — and this  “double maturation” thing intrigued me.

Great googly-moogly:  what an excellent Scotch.  I’m not going to go all Scotch-snob on y’all;  I’ll leave that to the S&H, who detected a “strong port finish” (unsurprising, given the casks) but never mind the taste (which is wonderful), just the smell of the stuff puts it in the Top 3 on the Kim List of Desirable New Scotches.

Run, do not walk to your nearest Total Wine store (I think it’s a “proprietary” or “tied” Scotch, i.e. exclusive to Total Wine), and grab a bottle or two for yourself.  I think it’s a product of the Speyburn distillery, but I’ll have to check.  Whatever, it’s brilliant stuff.

No need to thank me;  it’s all part of the service.

Glen Fohdry makes different cask finishes, apparently, such as this one (matured in American casks):

And there’s the usual array of vintages (12-, 21- and 29-year-olds), all of which I plan to try soon.

But it’s going to take a lot to wean me away from the “French cask” stuff, I promise you.

Different Focus

Drive Time

Gentle Readers, I bring you the old:

2018 Maserati Gran Turismo

…and its replacement, the new:

2021 Maserati MC20

Now I know that they are, in essence, two different cars.  The older GT is a tourer (Gran Turismo) after all, and while it is very fast, it’s neither a racer nor a supercar — both of which are what the MC20 is going to be.  Indeed, the MC 20 heralds the (long-overdue) return of Maserati to racing, which means that they’ll be competing with the likes of Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and Corvette in Group B racing, maybe even at Le Mans (but in 2022 and not 2021, I suspect).

The MC20, therefore, is Maserati’s first real “supercar” since the Ghibli of the late 1960s and early 70s:

…although it too was strictly speaking a tourer — I don’t think it was ever raced — but at the time, there were only a few cars which compared to it.

(I know, there was the MC12, but that was never going to be a street car, really, no matter how hard they tried to make it so:

…and the $2 million-plus sticker didn’t help much.)

But it’s a new dawn, now.

I can’t wait to see the MC20 racing, and Maserati racing again.  Presto, ragazzi.

Although like all supercars, it’s going to be hell in the parking lot:

Don’t care.  Details are here.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Benelli R1 (.30-06 Springfield)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Once again, amidst my occasional ponderings about The Gun Thing, several factors have occurred to me, to whit:

  • There are an awful lot of people who think that the venerable (and venerated) .30-06 cartridge is God’s answer to the question “Are there too many deer in the world?” and/or “How best should I kill that Bad Person?”
  • Most rifles thus chambered are bolt-action, and found everywhere in these United States
  • The non-bolt-action .30-06 rifles are pretty much confined to the venerable (and venerated) WWII-era M1 Garand, and the modern Browning BAR.

Not one of these things is Bad.  The .30-06 is a monster when it comes to dealing death, at pretty much any range, as several thousand WWII-era Kraut- and Jap soldiers would attest (if they were still with us);  there are a jillion-odd bolt-action rifles thus chambered, and therefore cartridge availability passes the “Bubba’s Bait & Ammo Store” criterion;  most semi-auto .30-06 rifles owned are likely to be of the Garand genus — and considering that Gen. George S. Patton once called the M1 Garand “the greatest battle implement ever devised by Man” (or something like that), there are very few knocks you can make against the Garand, either.  Ditto the BAR.

Except for cost.  M1 Garands can be costly, simply because of their pedigree (and therefore collectability), so the cost of entry, so to speak, can be pretty daunting.  Here’s a typical example from Collectors:

…which runs at just under $1,700.  (And if you think that’s expensive, the “National Match” version costs nearly three times as much.)

So what else is out there, for someone who wants a semi-auto rifle chambered in .30-06?  Here’s the Benelli R1, for example, also at Collectors, for just under $1,300 (about the cost of a new unscoped BAR Mk3, incidentally):

and the R1 has a 10-round detachable magazine, to boot.  From the Benelli website:

(Note its current non-availability, but I suspect that this is a temporary situation.)  The price, of course, is nosebleed because Benelli (as anyone who’s ever contemplated buying one of their shotguns can attest);  but you could buy four extra mags for the R1, and still come out around the same cost of a single M1 Garand.

And yes of course, the R1 is a modern rifle, ergo saddled with a poxy (epoxy?) stock, which sets my teeth on edge;  but if you told me I’d have no choice but the R1 to take out into the field — for any purpose — I would not feel myself short-changed at all.   (“Gimme!”  comes to mind.)

Note too that this particular R1 comes with a very toothsome Leupold VX-3i 4.5-14x50mm scope — which alone sells for $700-$750 nowadays.

Other than my distaste for Technik durch Plastik  stocks, if I were in the market for a .30-06 rifle, I can’t think of a single reason not to consider this one.

New Kid In Town

The Gun Thing

Loyal Readers will have noted my increasing irritation about not having a Mauser (or at least a Mauser-type bolt action) in my niggardly collection (following the Great Canoeing Disaster On The Brazos or maybe it was the Colorado).  It was exacerbated by my inability to bring back the Mauser I had bought in Britishland without having to pay a boatload [sic]  of money to H.M Government.

So here I sat, Mauser-less — the first time in ages I’d been in that sad condition — and just snarled at people (such as Mr. Free Market and Doc Russia) who seem to have been trying to get rifle manufacturers to go to 24-hour shifts, so much have they been augmenting their own collections.  Were I a paranoid man (I’m not), I might have thought it was a conspiracy.

Anyway, all my human sacrifices to Vulcan (don’t ask) must finally have caught the old man’s attention, because in talking to a distributor’s sales rep at one of our local gun pushers’ establishments, I managed to snag a slightly-used demo CZ 550 American at a price which would make people start sticking pins into my effigy, were I ever to publish it.   It was severely discounted because… it’s chambered in 6.5x55mm Swedish, “And everybody wants to shoot 6.5 Creed nowadays, and not that old bullet.”

Well, not everybody.  And not everybody happens to love CZ 550 rifles as much as I do, either.  (Cliff Notes:  excellent out-of-the-box accuracy,  fabled quality and reliability, controlled-feed action and set trigger.)

So I paid the man, waited for it to arrive, took it home and ordered a scope (which will be the topic of another post once it arrives and I’ve mounted and zeroed it).

But in the meantime… Your Humble Narrator is no longer Mauser-less, and a huge gaping hole in his shooting capability and nearly-empty gun cabinet  has been filled.