Hobby

I always knew there was a reason I liked this man:

He has long been known as a model railway enthusiast — even if at times he didn’t want to talk about it.
But now Sir Rod Stewart’s legendary layout — 26 years in the making — can be seen for the first time in all its finished glory.

…and it’s stunning.  Hie thee hence to see it.

I always wanted to do this, only my layout would have been an Alpine scene in Germany, circa 1900.  Back in the early 1990s, I even bought period-correct Fleischmann HO engines (three), half a dozen carriages, and built a couple of model houses (also period-correct).

Alas, life got in the way (i.e. divorce, lost the house and therefore the basement) and I never got to build it in.  But Rod did, and good for him.

Crossing America – 2019

Time to play this game again.

The Challenge:  You have the opportunity to go back in time, arriving on the east coast of North America circa  1650 in the early spring, and your goal is to cross the North American continent, taking as much time as you need.  When / if you reach the Pacific coastline, you’ll be transported back to the present day.  Your equipment for this journey will be as follows (taken back in the time capsule with you):

— enough provisions for the first five days’ travel
— a backpack containing some clothing essentials
— a winter coat, raincoat and boots
— waterproof sleeping bag
— an axe, and a small sharpening stone
— a box of 1,000 “strike anywhere” waterproof matches
— a portable water filtration system
— a topographic map of North America
— binoculars and a compass
— a current U.S. Army First Aid kit
ONE long gun (shotgun or rifle) and 800 rounds of ammo (but no scope;  and no interchangeable-barrel rifles like a Thompson Center Encore or Blaser;  drillings are acceptable, but you still only get 800 rounds of ammo, total)
ONE handgun (and 1,000 rounds)
— and THREE knives (which can include a multi-tool knife like a Leatherman).

Once there, you’ll be given a horse, a mule and a dog — but apart from that, you’re on your own.  Remember you’ll be traveling through deep woods, open prairie, desert and mountains.  You may encounter hostile Indian tribes and dangerous animals en route, which should be considered when you answer the following questions (and only these):

1.  What long gun would you take back in time with you?
2.  What handgun?
3.  What knives?

Unlike previous surveys, I’m not going to tabulate the answers;  just have at it in Comments.  Reasons need not be given, as the choices will pretty much speak for themselves.  If you must  justify your choices, keep it short (as I have with mine).


Kim’s choices:

Long:  Mauser M96 (Swedish) 6.5x55mm.  Flat-shooting, manageable recoil, super-reliable, and more accurate than I can shoot it, at any distance.

I’d probably add some kind of peep sight:

Handgun:  Ruger Redhawk Stainless in .357 Mag with a 5.5″ barrel and (new from Ruger!) 8-shot cylinder.  Indestructible, and in a pinch can be used for hunting.

Knives:  Fox 440 bush knife, Anza skinner and Swiss Army Champ (no explanations necessary):

Oh, and by the way, I’d take a sharpened roofing hammer instead of an actual axe:

All the above must assume that I would be forty years younger, and have better eyesight than I have now.  At my current age and rickety state, I might as well just give up and lie on the beach on the Atlantic shoreline, eating my provisions and waiting to die…

Over to you, in Comments.

Sans Blade

Because we flew up to New England and didn’t check any bags, I couldn’t bring a handgun or knife onto the flight because TSA [25,000-word rant deleted] and because they have some strange shitty laws about Texans carrying handguns around New England [250,000-word rant deleted].

Of course, our first full day of vacation was spent shopping in Kittery, Maine — home to a jillion outlet stores — so New Wife was well pleased to spend a morning shopping (as was I, you will see).  While she was shopping in the Ladies’ sections, I was off looking at guys’ stuff — and at Eddie Bauer, found a couple of beautiful white cotton shirts (my go-to everyday wear) at 50% off, which made them only a little more expensive than the Target / Wal-Mart equivalent, at much higher quality.  (And  made in Sri Lanka and not in China, for the win.)  Also a summer-lightweight cap from Barbour, at 70% off (making it merely expensive rather than Barbour-price i.e. nosebleed). Then it came time to remove all the price tags and such, which required cutting the little plastic loop thingy on the shirts, and a sturdy piece of string on the cap.

No knife.

Well, I wasn’t going to be put about like that, and because I’ve been to Kittery before, I went over to the giant Kittery Trading Post to buy a knife.

My original intention was really to buy a cheap $10-Made-In-China POS, then just throw it away before getting on the return flight.

Unfortunately, the Trading Post has an excellent selection of lovely knives… and you all know where this is going, right?  Here’s the rather old-fashioned Case two-blade pocket knife that followed me out of the store:

I have probably about three or four Case knives at home, and I love all of them:  they are the perfect “working” blades, and I have a soft spot for the “sheep’s foot” type (the upright one, for those unfamiliar with the term).  So for $35, I now have a(nother) decent pocket-knife, and  made in the U.S.A. withal.   And yes, it’s a fingernail-opener rather than the modern button-opener type;  don’t care.

And I’ll just have to check my bag when we fly back, because I’m not going to risk having this lovely little thing confiscated by the Airport Gestapo.


En passant:  KIttery Trading Post has an excellent selection of lightly-used second-hand rifles, so I did spend a little quite a long time browsing that aisle.  New Wife of course was shopping downstairs in the Ladies Department, so the trip ended up costing a little rather more than $35.  Don’t care about that either.  All worth it.

Strange Fascination

This pic at C.W.’s blog got me thinking.

It makes me smile, too.

I have written before that men like to be in control of machinery — that many men, very much including myself, prefer stick shifts to automatic gearboxes, bolt-action rifles over semi-automatic rifles, ditto revolvers over pistols and so on.

Where we do use the auto / semi-auto doodads, it’s for practical reasons only, like buying a car with an automatic gearbox when having to navigate stop-start traffic on a daily basis, or needing the greater firepower in a pistol’s fifteen-round magazine compared to a revolver cylinder’s six, to give but two examples.  But those are simply reasons of practicality, while our enduring fondness for being in control — i.e. working  the action of a thing — can be found in the fact that the auto/semi-auto versions haven’t replaced the manual versions completely.

When it comes to rifles, men of the manual-operation persuasion are blessed in that we have several types of operation to choose from:  bolt action, lever action and pump action are all there, and all are still popular, hence our reaction to the pic above.

As Longtime Readers will know, I have an abiding love for all three of the above, and have fired countless rounds through all of them.  Don’t ask me to pick my favorite type, but I have to say, when it comes to pure fun, it takes a lot to beat an open field filled with old tin cans, fruit and suchlike, a pump-action rimfire rifle and a couple thousand rounds of .22 ammo.  I know, it takes a while to reload the tube magazine, but that also allows the barrel to cool, which is no small thing.  So let’s look at a few choices among the latter.

Browning Model 90 / Winchester Model 62 are the originals, and are still available today.  The fact that these old guns (discontinued in 1959) in good condition can fetch well over a grand at gun shows today is testament to their popularity.

But are they that popular?  Recent events seem to prove otherwise.  Of all the gunmakers extant, Henry is the only one which continues to make old-style pump-action rimfire rifles:

It’s a beautiful little rifle — that octagonal barrel! — but I think Henry does us gunnies a real disservice by pricing them so high.  I mean, if Marlin and Ruger can make semi-auto rimfire rifles which retail for less than $150, why do Henry pump rimfires typically cost close to $500 for an action which is much less complex?

I would love to own one of these rifles, most of all because it shoots .22 WMR as well as .22 LR and I can think of few better varmint-whackers than a magnum pump action, but at that nearly-$500 sticker?  Sorry.

Actually, I do know why Henry pump rifles are priced so high:  they have no competition.  Which brings me to my next gripe.

I don’t understand why Taurus discontinued manufacture of their Model 62 knock-offs, either.  (I know, they’ll say “no demand”, but they continue to make other guns which hardly sell at all — the Judge revolver in .45-70 Govt comes to mind, for some reason — so I don’t buy the excuse.)

My Taurus stainless-steel carbine model is beyond beautiful, and as I’ve said before, when I take friends shooting with this little thing, I have to take at least  a brick of .22 ammo with me, so much do people enjoy shooting it.  (Hell, I always carry over a hundred rounds in its case, just to make sure I don’t commit the cardinal sin of .22 ammo shortage at the range.)

Finally, we have a sorta-pump (in that it has a pump action, but doesn’t have an exposed hammer), the sleek, beautiful (and expensive, at around $600!!! new) Remington 572 Fieldmaster:

Look, I’ve fired the 572 dozens of times and sent many a hundred rounds downrange through its 21″ barrel, and if someone gave me one I’d never sell it — but I’d trade  it in a heartbeat for a rifle with an exposed hammer.  Like the Taurus Mod 62 long-barreled model:

It all has to do with that “manual operation” thing — and the more parts you can control, the better. De-cocking is easy with an exposed hammer, impossible with the Remington’s hidden one.

Anyway, let me end by saying that if you don’t have a pump-action rimfire rifle, you’re missing out on a whole lot of fun.  You know what to do.

Alternative Path

I have often ruminated that young men need to evaluate their career choices very carefully before picking the one they think will work best for them.

Increasingly, it’s become apparent that going to college is not a worthwhile option for them — unless they want to be hounded, harassed and vilified just for the “crime” of being a man, that is.  (10,000 instances of false accusations, man-hating professors and the courses they teach have been omitted on grounds of brevity.)

Now, we’ve seen in other spheres what men do when they feel that the game rules are loaded against them, or that participation leads not only to inevitable failure, but even to a compromised future.  The dating game is one such activity, where men have either deliberately turned the rules of the game against women and used them to their own benefit — or have simply eschewed all participation in the face of assured failure (going their own way — MGTOW) and simply created a parallel life outside the game.

I’m suggesting an alternative to the career game.

Don’t go to college, at least until the rotten system has collapsed under the weight of its own prejudice and misogyny misandry, and been replaced with a better deal.  Ignore the vested interests of people and institutions who preach the lie that you can only be successful with a college degree.

If you’re super-smart and driven like Michael Dell or Bill Gates, of course, you don’t need to be told this.  But only a very few men, in any  activity, are in that rare 0.00001% of super-achievers.

But for the vast remainder, there is an option:  work in industries where the vast majority of women can’t or won’t participate.  I’m talking about the heavy, dirty and sometimes thankless jobs (Mike Rowe-type Dirty Jobs) which not only don’t require a college degree, but where a college degree might even be a hindrance and not a qualifier.

Just last week I came across a guy who was an oil field worker.  He’d fled from Venezuela right after that thug Hugo Chávez came to power, and in the eighteen years since had worked his way up the ladder, in oilfields all over the world.  Now, at age 45, he’d finally reached the point where he didn’t have to work  the oil rigs, just visit them and see how things were going.  Along the way he’d acquired a wife, two preteen kids, and a $750k house in Plano where I picked him up to take him to the airport.  He’d completely lost his Hispanic accent (when he left Venezuela he couldn’t speak a word of English) and was also fluent in Arabic and (ahem) German.  When I asked him if he had a university degree he just laughed and said, “What for?”

What for, indeed.

Here’s the point.  I know it’s going to be difficult for Millennials and their successors to handle this, but working dirty jobs is hard.  It requires dedication, stubbornness and of course a willingness to get one’s hands dirty, and sadly, because of the education industry’s indoctrination of kids, this choice is often dismissed or demeaned.

It shouldn’t be.  If you weigh the eventual benefits of dirty work — where, by the way, your exposure to militant feminism is going to be minimal to nonexistent — against a useless degree coupled with crippling debt, this should not be a difficult decision.

Is this risky?  Not as much as you’d think.  Just the other day, our local community college broke ground on a campus which apparently is going to be dedicated almost exclusively to the “hard” careers — automotive service and repair, construction, welding, plumbing, electrical work, manufacturing and so on — but I’m not going to suggest you look to such an institution for your education / training;  what’s important is simply to realize that for such an event to have taken place, there must be a crippling shortage of young men willing to get into those fields, and this is the Establishment’s attempt to address it.  (It’s complete bollocks, of course — you’d do better by getting an apprenticeship at a real place of work.)

So, in the paraphrased words of Ayn Rand, go “Galt” and make your own way in the world.  You may not succeed, of course, but remember that failure is equally (or, in these times, more) likely with a freshly-printed college diploma clutched in your hand.

Become a watchmaker, if you’re mechanically inclined.  Work in construction, if you’re strong in body.  Get an apprenticeship in a trade, preferably an ugly, dirty and tough one where just by virtue of being a man you face no competition from women.  I guarantee you, there’s a tough job out there for any man if he’s prepared to go for it.  And if your first one (or several) choices don’t work out, find another one that does.

Let women take over non-jobs like human resources, clerical jobs at the DMV, cubicle management, bank tellers or benefits administration at Global MegaCorp Inc., and laugh as the life force is drained from them.

Here’s the challenge:  be a man.  Not today’s version of “male” figures who argue over craft beers and fashion accessories.  I’m talking about real  men, who do things for themselves, push aside barriers with confidence and, eventually, end up with women (like my friend Raul, above) who appreciate them for their qualities and for the security and families they can provide.

When I asked Raul if his wife worked, he looked at me in puzzlement and said, “What for?”

If this guy taught a class, he’d create a generation of achievers.  He would never do such a thing, of course, although he would (and does) train other men to succeed as he has.

Now get out there and make something of your life that does not include words like “curriculum”, “term paper” and “Diversity Studies”.  You’ll be a world better for it.


Postscript:  there was a time when enlisting in our nation’s Armed Forces would have been a viable career choice for a young man.  Not today, unless you try out for Special Forces, SEALs or similar.

Every Day

Apparently, last Monday 19th was something called “International Men’s Day” — like National Ammo Day (NAD) wasn’t sufficient reason to celebrate the day (that, and it being my birthday).

As Loyal Readers know well, I can’t stand this custom of making up Hallmark Holidays (NAD notwithstanding) because it’s a load of old bollocks.

Besides, as has often been pointed out to me, every day is “International Men’s Day” on this website.  And just to underscore the point, here’s a completely gratuitous picture of a beautiful gun:

Also a beautiful car:

A lovely woman:

A pretty woman with a beautiful car:

And just to round it all off, here’s a beautiful woman shooting a gun:

“International Men’s Day”, my aching African-American ass.