Author: Kim du Toit

Snap Of The Fingers

Travels

Watching the Brit TV show “24 Hours In The A&E” the other night, one of the characters asked an intriguing question of another:

“If you could snap your fingers and be anywhere in the world, where would you choose?”

New Wife and I talked about it for ages.  Where to go?

  1. A place that you’ve been to before, and loved?
  2. A place you’ve never been to before?
  3. By yourself, or with a partner / wife / buddy etc.?
  4. For how long?  A day, weekend, week, or a month?

Here are mine:

  1. Never been to Lake Como, always wanted to, also a week.
  2. By myself: on a driven bird shoot, somewhere in southern England, for a day or two.
  3. With New Wife: somewhere scenic in the U.S., either where I’ve been before and she not, or where neither of us has been.  Whatever the choice, for two weeks.
  4. With my buddy Trevor: somewhere in Europe where neither of us has been to before, for a week.

(New Wife, by the way, chose only one locale:  any Indian Ocean island — Mauritius, Seychelles, Maldives — for two to three weeks.)

And now it’s your turn.  Feel free to work the conditions, any way you please.

Snap your fingers…

Requiem: Browning BPS

Gratuitous Gun Pics

I read with some melancholy that Browning has decided to discontinue their pump-action BPS.

I always loved the look and feel of the BPS, but as with so many Brownings (of all types), I could never quite get past the “Browning premium” price.

Which, as Phil Bourjailly explains, is largely the reason why it’s been discontinued:

So, what happened to the BPS? Times changed. Semiautos were still called “jam-a-matics” in 1977, and many hunters back then preferred to shoot pumps even if they could afford a semiauto. As semiautos got better, the reliability gap between pumps and autoloaders shrank. Costs rose. The real advantage between pump and semiauto shotguns became price. The pump market adjusted. Remington responded with the Express in the 1990s, a cheaper version of the Wingmaster. Benelli introduced the very affordable Nova around 2000. Mossberg kept cranking out the same humble, durable Model 500 it has always made.

The BPS wasn’t intended to be a cheap pump, and Browning stuck by its gun for a long time. While it’s too bad the BPS was discontinued, honestly, it stayed around a little too long. In the last years of the BPS, it was readily apparent that costs had to be cut to keep the price down, and the gun no longer looked like the glossy 20-gauge that I bought so many years ago.

One wonders what would have happened had Browning followed Remington’s lead (or even preceded them) with a budget version of the BPS, but that’s really not the Browning Way, is it?

So why am I melancholic about the BPS’s demise?  I hate to see ANY gun discontinued, is why.

Clarification

Gratuitous Chick Pics

As any fule know, I love the pneumatic Carol Vorderman for all sorts of reasons:

…but at the same time, I’m not that fooled when I see headlines like this one:

…because let’s be honest, if those bountiful 63-year-old curves were not shoehorned into and corralled by “figure-hugging outfits”, she’d probably resemble a half-filled baggie of Jello.

Not that there’s much wrong with that, of course.  I find Jello quite lovely to eat, and I’m pretty sure that this would also be true of la  Vorderman.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From where else?

“Judge Abena Darkeh told us, ‘Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.’ “

One assumes that none of the other Amendments in the Bill of Rights exists there either. (They probably don’t.)

Ordinarily, I’d have suggested:

…but:

…and as she’s a Darkeh, I don’t want to be accused of a hate crime (although “hate” is actually inadequate to describe how I feel about this foul bitch).

So instead, may I suggest:

Just tryin’ to be sensitive, here.