Latest Posts

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Colt 1903 (.32 ACP)

Gratuitous Gun Pics, The Gun Thing

Of all the countless handguns I’ve ever fired, the Colt 1903 probably ranks in the top 3 in the “Most Pleasant To Shoot” category.

There are a couple of things that gunnies may sniff at:  the “European”-style mag release (which John Moses Browning, the 1903’s designer, would rectify with the 1911), and of course the poodleshooter .32 ACP cartridge it fired.  Here’s a close-up of the mag release mechanism:

None of this matters.  I’ve probably fired half a dozen of these beauties, in varying conditions of use / neglect, but each one was silky-smooth where it mattered:  in the action thereof.

I remember firing one in particular at one of Combat Controller’s schutzenfests  down in Austin many years ago.  The owner — whose name I’ve forgotten, sorry — had had it professionally reblued in Colt’s “Royal Blue” finish. The gun was so beautiful and shot so beautifully that I nearly fainted.  Had I not been a guest, and the owner not a fellow member of the Nation of Riflemen, I would have stolen it.  I offered to buy it from him on the spot at any price he cared to name, and he just laughed at me.  Can’t say I blame him, but I still pine for it like I pine for very few other guns.

It’s probably for the better.  I beat up my handguns pretty badly because I shoot them so often and for so long at each range session, and it would break my heart to destroy a 1903, even though the shooting, while it lasted, would be as fine as the caress of a pretty girl’s hand.

Which brings me to the next point.  I think that the 1903 — poodleshooter cartridge notwithstanding — would be a fine choice for a lady’s concealed piece:  it’s light, reliable, easy to conceal and gentle to shoot.

I’ve also fired the later-model 1908 which is chambered in .380 ACP, but as I recall, it wasn’t as much fun to shoot as the smaller chambering.  (The two models are to all extents and purposes identical but for the cartridge.)

Predictably, these fine guns are spendy, costing well over a thousand bucks (cheaper, and they’re probably not going to be reliable and/or beaten up.)  Magazines, when you can find them, cost more than Pirelli Cinturatos.

To my mind, though, if you have your existing shooting needs taken care of (e.g. with serious guns shooting manstopper cartridges), you could do far, far  worse than to add one of these lovely little guns to your collection.  Here’s an excellent write-up of its history.

(Pics courtesy of Collector’s Firearms, probably my favorite gun store of all.)

Thoughts On Flying Commercial

Travels

Until last week, the last time I’d flown domestically in the U.S. was close to two decades ago (international  is a different story, of course), and man, things have changed somewhat.

Nothing much has changed with the airlines, it seems:  the same plastic smiles and training-manual treatment from customer service, the same fucked-up delivery (late flights, canceled flights, overbooked flights etc.) and the same rip-off fares for those unfortunate souls (like me) who didn’t have the luxury of time to have booked their flight six months earlier.

TSA is also the same bunch of petty gauleiters  who are at best curt and dismissive and at worst malevolent bastards (male and  female, BTW;  equality at last!).

It’s the passengers who have changed the most, but I can’t put my finger on the exact cause.  For some reason, the treatment given to people at airports seems to have rubbed off on the people traveling.  For example:  on both the outbound and return flights I managed to book an aisle seat, and because of my long relationship with American (I guess), I managed to board fairly early in the process.  This meant that on both flights, the person in the middle seat walked up to me, pointed at their seat and just said, “That’s my seat.”  No “excuse me” or “hi there” or “sorry to bother you” or anything like that — not even a fucking smile.  (On the several-times-delayed return flight, let me tell you that I was extremely short on patience, and when the twentysomething hipster chickie laid that schtick on me, I was thisclose  to saying, “So?” and not budging from my seat.)  In passing, I was discussing this very issue with a regular customer of mine — someone who flies DFW-LGA (the poor girl) every Monday morning — and she has seen the same thing, on almost every flight she catches.  Her take, however, is that it’s a generational  thing:  rude snowflakes with an attitude of entitlement.

Another thing is that old bugbear, luggage.  As the airlines are insisting on still charging for checked luggage (even though fuel prices, the reason for the original decision to charge for baggage, are the lowest in recent history), people seem to have stopped checking luggage except in exceptional circumstances.  Which means that you’re restricted to a small carry-on bag (which has to be small enough to squeeze into the microscopic space under the seat in front of yours) and a larger one which has to fit into the overhead bins — which, I should admit, seem to have got bigger on domestic flights than I remember.  Needless to say, the airlines aren’t enforcing the size restriction, which means that the bins fill up quickly, and therefore latecomers have to gate-check their bags.  The most egregious offenders in the “oversized” issue are the backpackers, who take Himalayas-expedition-sized onto the aircraft and either expect to stuff them into the bins, or else don’t care that even if they can, they’ve taken up 1.5 passengers’ space in the bins.

As someone who takes serious care to ensure that my bags aren’t oversized, I’m angered by this attitude.  It used to be that the worst offenders were business execs who tried to take their overstuffed garment bags and stuff them into the overhead bins, but now it’s the occasionally-vacationing Backpack ‘n Sandals set who are the assholes.  (Business execs are now the most conscientious travelers, it seems to me — maybe because they just don’t want to deal with the baggage hassle every time they fly.)

Here’s another thing:  the cabin crew are rapidly getting to the “you packed it, you lift it” policy when it comes to getting your bag into the overheads, and I can see why.  Mostly, of course, it’s female passengers who are the most egregious offenders — all that hair-dryer stuff and makeup and what have you makes for a case that feels like it’s filled with lead piping — and on several occasions, even the female cabin crew have had to ask male passengers for help. (This nonsense doesn’t help either.)  That said, it’s not always the passengers who are at fault.  On my return flight last week I flew in one of the new 787 Dreamliners and even I was struggling to get my bag into the bins, which are really high above the seats.  Watching the five-foot-nothing girl in front of me trying to lift her bag was an exercise in frustration (for both of us) and thank goodness that the next passenger coming down the aisle was a) tall and b) well-mannered enough to offer to help, because the flight attendant wasn’t having any of it.

New Wife and I flew last month (using miles) to get to New England for our short vacation, and for all sorts of reasons I didn’t want to write about flying commercial then.  But after what I saw last week… let’s just say that it will be a long  time before I take a domestic flight again.

What a horrorshow.

Working Class Food

Food & Drink

I was reminded of this the other day.

Back in Sith Efrika, city streets are full of little snack bars, fish ‘n chip shops and cafés (called “caffies” by the locals, and these places bear absolutely no relation to the French establishment).  All serve the usual stuff:  hot dogs (“horrogs”), burgers, and of course fish ‘n chips.

Most of them, especially in working-class areas, serve something else.  It’s called (inexplicably) “bunny chow”, and it’s the simplest of all dishes:  a half-loaf of regular white- or brown bread, hollowed out and filled with either chicken/beef/lamb curry, or else beef/mutton stew.  It’s a budget-prized take on the “soup-in-a-French-boule” thing beloved of snooty Californian and Midwestern restaurants.

Here are a couple pics of bunny chow, to give you an idea:

 

You can eat it with your bare hands:  scoop the top part out with your fingers until there’s enough crust to break off and use as a scoop;  or if you’re feeling flush, order a side of fries and use those in twos as your delivery device.  (I said  it was a working-class food.)  Or, if you’re squeamish, use a fork for the stew, and when it’s all gone, eat the saturated bread up afterwards.  Either way, you have to eat it quickly or else the loaf will collapse — literally, it’s a portable meal to be eaten on the run.

You can go upscale with it:

…but that’s like putting caviar on a hot dog.  “Bunny chow” means cheap bread, cheap meat, a cheap meal.

Served properly, it’s delicious.  Sadly, bunny chow is often used for yesterday’s leftover stew (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or else last week’s  leftover stew (not so good).  Rule of thumb:  never order bunny chow early on a Monday morning.

When I was a starving student back in the early 1970s, I lived on bunny chow.  There was a greasy snack bar just around the corner from campus which served both curried chicken or -lamb chow, but you had to be careful eating either because there were often pieces of bone left in the stew — let’s just say that the food prep tended towards the hasty side in these establishments.

Later, as a starving musician, my tastes had become more sophisticated, and I’d moved on to shawarmas, that spicy and tasty Mediterranean dish of lamb, chicken or beef carved off a rotating vertical skewer:and served inside a soft, thin pita-bread pocket.

After almost every gig, I’d head off to Paradise Foods in Hillbrow (greasy spoons, greasy floor, greasy walls  FFS), get two shawarmas (meat and sauce only, none of that veg crap), and somehow I’d manage to eat both of them on the run before I got back to my car.  Man, it was a highlight of the week.

But if I was on the road to or from a gig and feeling hungry, there was always a roadside “caffie” somewhere to sell me bunny chow.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the kitchen.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From the inimitable Joe Bob Briggs, trying to explain the LGBTOSTFU phenomenon:

I have a friend who defines herself as trans—actually I should say hirself, not herself, but I’m not exactly sure why—a friend who defines hirself as trans but also lesbian, therefore a biological male who presents as female and dates females and has relationships with females. So a lesbian with a penis, which, if you think about it, is a penis that becomes, in this situation, basically a built-in sex toy—but then again, let’s not go to places known only to the two LGBTQ lovebirds.

If your head is spinning after reading that, then don’t even try to read the rest of his article.  Great Caesar’s bleeding hemorrhoids, the world is getting more fucked up by the day.  (And don’t try to suggest where  the world is getting fucked either, you cisgender heterofascist.)

Blind Drunk, Blindingly Obvious

Numbers & Statistics, Science!

From the annals of modern-day !SCIENCE! comes a conclusion from this (undoubtedly taxpayer-funded) scientific study which finds that:

[H]igher levels of drinking impair brain function and memory.

In other words, the more booze you drink, the more your brain gets scrambled.

If anyone aged higher than 10 did not  know this, they ought to be euthanized as a public service, because such stupidity can only come from (and yes, there may be some overlap) Democrat voters, socialist policymakers and (apparently) Australian scientists.

Sheesh… reading stuff like this makes me want to go back to pouring Scotch over my breakfast cereal.  Now I’ll have to wait until after the Monday range session.

Third World Adventure

Behind Enemy Lines, Gummint

I once knew a German professional photographer (let’s call him Georg) who, along with a fellow German photographer (“Klaus”), decided to do one of those photo safaris — driving from Cairo to Cape Town, snapping pics along the way — that sounds so good back in Hamburg, but is completely foolish in reality.  Anyway, driving a mil-surp G-Wagen (not a bad choice, BTW), they set off and made it through Egypt without incident.  At the border, they had to get a “passing through” visa to get across the Sudan, which essentially allowed them to be in the country for three days.  When they got to Sudan’s southern border, however, the sole guard at the border post (just a hut) wouldn’t let them leave the country because they had the “wrong visa” — and they’d have to drive back to Khartoum (a two-day drive) to get the right one.  When Georg pointed out that their existing visa would expire en route and they would, in essence, be in the country illegally and imprisoned if caught, the guard just shrugged.  Not his problem.

I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  Last week, faced with a looming legal deadline, I had to fly up to Chicago to get a legal document out of the Cook County Court archives.  (Why I was unable to access the document online, or even manage to talk to someone in the County Clerk’s office to send me the document is a story all by itself.)  Anyway, after having had my 5am flight canceled (thank you, American), I made the 7am flight only by dint of paying the full fare (don’t ask) and arrived at the Cook County courthouse (2nd District in Skokie) at about 11am, with all the data needed for the request on my trusty laptop..

Of course, there’s TSA-type security at all these places these days, which is where I had a Sudan-type encounter of my own.  Reason?  No laptops allowed in the courthouse by members of the public.  I know, it’s inexplicable but hey, Cook County.  I looked around for any storage lockers:  none.

“So where can I store my laptop?”
“You’ll just have to take it back to your car.”
“I don’t have a car;  I just flew in from Dallas.  So what can I do?”
Like the Sudanese border guard, the fucking security guard just shrugged.  “Not my problem.”

At this juncture, I should point out that every single glass window and door at the courthouse has one of those idiotic little “No Handgun” stickers displayed.

I’m not saying that I would have shot someone — in fact, I absolutely would not have, even if I’d been able to bring the 1911 with me — but let me tell you, after a day which had begun at 3am, experienced a canceled flight and a massive fare surcharge along with all the other hassles of modern-day travel (full flight, idiots with too-large bags, crowded train from the airport into the city etc.), only to be faced with indifferent bovine officialdom at the end of it, I can quite believe that some other guy  might  have dropped the hammer.

Which, by the way, is what Klaus did at the Sudanese border.  He told the guard that he had the correct visa back in the car, fetched his gun instead and shot the guard dead.  Then he and Georg got in their G-Wagen and raced off into Uganda.  A real African tale, that one.

And now, the rest of my  story. Read more