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Too Smart

The Gun Thing

We’re all familiar with the assholes who work behind the counter at gun shops — you know the ones I mean, those who want to show off how much more they know about guns and shooting than the Idiot Customer who simply wants to know whether a revolver or pistol would best suit his purpose, and who gets for an answer a supercilious blizzard of inside jokes and buzzwords which makes him or her feel like, well, an idiot.

This post is not quite about that.

As Longtime Readers know, I stand firmly opposed to the use of jargon and acronyms (although there are times when I fall into the trap myself).  In the past, I’ve written about Mystics at length so I’m not going to expound on it further, but I did notice its manifestation in an article on self-defense drills linked by Insty.

As a rule, I enjoy Ed Head’s articles, but this one falls into Trap #1:  obscure, unexplained terms and descriptions, and it falls during the very first paragraph of instruction, to whit:

The El Pres[idente] has become a competitive shooting standard, a drill practiced incessantly by top competitors. From the standpoint of an armed citizen, its best used sparingly as a test of your skill level, carry pistol and gear. To set it up, you’ll need three Option targets set 1 yard apart.

And for those people who don’t spend hours at the range, or weekends at competitions, “Option targets” are…?  these things:

One picture, and it all becomes crystal clear to someone unfamiliar with the arcana of shooting geekery.  Then Head spends a couple dozen words trying to describe the El Presidente drill, when all he needed was one of these:

And again, this time with explaining “Dot Torture*”:

Requiring 50 rounds and fired at a seemingly easy 3 yards with no time limit, Dot Torture requires total concentration, perfect sight alignment and a perfect trigger press for every one of the 50 shots. The targets are printed on a single 8.5×11-inch piece of paper and consist of circles measuring a little less than 2 inches.

And all becomes clear with:

(Actually, I prefer this one, but nemmind…)

Back to the main topic:  instruction should always — always — be delivered in a manner designed to impart the content with a maximum degree of clarity and a minimum amount of explanation.  (By “minimum”, I mean not wordy or obscure.  If a picture imparts the knowledge better than fifty words, and more quickly withal, use a damn picture.)

Shooting Times (or rather, their editors) should know better.  Ed is a very knowledgeable shooter and I agree with just about everything he says about shooting.  But he’s not well served by sloppy editing.  As this pic shows:

*As an aside, I absolutely love the dot torture drill, but I usually save it for .22 practice, whether with a handgun at 25 feet, a non-scoped rifle at 50 feet, and a scoped rifle at 75 feet.  And always, regardless of type of gun, a maximum of two seconds per shot allowed.  In a future post, I’ll show a modified version from my last trip to the range.

Gratuitous Gun Pic — Browning Buck Mark (.22 LR)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

I think the Buck Mark .22 pistol is one of the best modern rimfire semi-autos to be had.  It’s certainly one of the prettiest.  Here’s a Buck Mark Plus from Collectors Firearms, for example:

…and no serious shooter is going to argue with me that much.  Perhaps you can get a more accurate .22 pistol than the Buck Mark, but you’d have to spend a whole lot more money, because it’s more accurate than almost anyone who shoots it — and other than the high-end competition .22 guns like Pardini and so on, I certainly don’t think you can get a pistol with a better trigger  than the Buck Mark’s.

Best of all, Browning makes a dizzying number of variants to suit absolutely everyone.  I’ve either owned or at least fired most of the major types — typically, the Campers have a lightweight carbon bull barrel, and the Standards have a slab-sided heavy steel barrel, viz.:

My favorite, though, is the Plus Stainless:

I don’t have one of these brilliant little plinkers anymore — not after handing off various models to friends, my children etc.  But it’s on my shortlist, simply because I miss shooting it so much.

All that said:  field-stripping the Buck Mark should never be done in the field, as such, because unless you love scrabbling on hands and knees looking for the recoil spring and / or recoil buffer, you need to be really familiar with the Buck Mark’s innards.  Ask me how I know this.  Actually, your first attempts at cleaning it should preferably be done in a clean white room with a smooth cement floor just to make retrieval of said parts a little easier.  A Ruger MkIV it ain’t, folks.  (Here’s the back story on all the above.)

Still, I miss shooting the Buck Mark — one of the reasons I traded my MkIV for a Single Six revolver was that the MkIV wasn’t as much fun to shoot as the Browning.  (And oh baby… do I love shooting the revolver.)

And on and on it goes… if I didn’t love shooting guns so much, I’d have beaten myself to death long ago over all the stupid decisions I’ve made in the selling of them.  I need a Buck Mark, badly.

Friday Night Music: The Hogwash Interlude

Entertainment, Military, Music

As I may have mentioned before, the vast preponderance of my Army time was spent as a draftee in the South African Defence Force, as a musician in the Entertainment Group, actually a small unit of some sixty personnel in the Permanent Force (PF), but augmented by the addition of a few draftee National Servicemen (NSMs) usually, like myself, having been professional musicians before being drafted — Trevor Rabin of Yes  was an alum, a couple years before I arrived.

There was a Big Band, managed by the unit’s Commanding Officer Maj. George Hayden and staffed almost exclusively by PF musicians, and was of astonishing virtuosity and quality — mostly older men, many of them recording stars of an earlier era, they performed Glenn Miller-type material and played concerts all over the country.  Sometimes the concerts would feature solo artists, singers, violinists and classical guitarists, most of these being NSMs who’d been sent there after completing their basic training (boot camp).

Then there also were a few dance bands which played mostly popular music of all kinds, whether Top Ten hits, country music or Afrikaans Boeremusiek, “sakkie-sakkie”  as we irreverently called it (here’s an example).

And then there was Hogwash.

(yes, that’s Yer Humble Narrator on the left, age 24)

We were thrown together one Friday night because some Army unit was having a dance and all the Entertainment Group steady bands were already booked — I mean, we found out at 3pm that we would be playing at 8pm, and a two-hour drive to the venue lay between.  A frantic scramble followed, to get some band equipment together  — only I had brought my own gear into camp, so everyone else had to content themselves with equipment that none of the other bands wanted.  At least it all functioned, more or less.

We were saved by the fact that we were all good musicians — the others, to be frank, quite a lot better than I — and fortunately, our keyboard player Boze knew the lyrics and music to a jillion popular songs, so the rest of us just followed him along.  I knew a bunch more, of the Creedence Clearwater- and early rock ‘n roll genres, so we busked our way through five hours of music — and enjoyed the experience so much that we decided to make the band a permanent one (or at least for the remaining time of our draft).  We found an empty practice room, and set about putting together a repertoire that was astonishing in its variety (as you will see below).  And because our whole job was to play music, we played all day and every day, five days a week — sometimes taking two or more days to master a complex song.  We played gigs at military bases all over South Africa and, to our great joy, at forward combat bases in the “Operational Area” of South West Africa (later Namibia).  And we rocked.  We were better than a lot of professional club house bands, all but the drummer could sing, and harmonies became our stock-in-trade:  nobody  could sing with us, not even the pros.  As we already had a good list of oldies and party songs, we could concentrate on playing stuff that we wanted to play, and which made us all better musicians.

Hogwash was together for just under eighteen months, but it was quite honestly one of the happiest times of my life.  We had no responsibilities and nothing else to do but play, and play, and play — and when we weren’t playing music, it was like being in Monty Python, with wicked humor, outrageous behavior and general mischief in abundance.  (We discovered, for example, that “gronsk” was not a word, but a letter  — the first letter of a magic word.)

Here’s some of the music.

The Fez (Steely Dan) — played note-perfect, as we did a couple other Dan songs

Who Loves You (4 Seasons) — ooooh those harmonies

Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (Alan Parsons Project) — we played several Alan Parsons songs, and loved them all

Lazy (Deep Purple) — we played this version, not the indulgent live one

Breezin’ (George Benson) — smooth jazz, baby

Fantasy (Earth Wind & Fire) — funky (well, the way we played it, anyway)

China Grove (Doobie Brothers) — and a whole bunch of other Doobies

One Chain (Santana) — and a couple others by Carlos

I Wish (Stevie Wonder) — tough bass part and complicated backup vocals… I sweated bricks playing this one;  thanks a bunch, Stevie

Jive Talkin’ (Bee Gees) — and all their other disco songs;  hey, it was 1978

I Just Wanna Make Love To You (Foghat) — hair band music, even though we had no hair

…and the song which we played in our very first impromptu gig, and never stopped playing thereafter because we loved it, and because Boze sang it better than Garfunkel:

I only Have Eyes For You (Art Garfunkel) — best version of this song ever recorded

Here we are playing at some dismal Army camp or other:

Sadly, although we’d planned on staying together and playing professionally after the Army service was complete, Boze decided that he didn’t want to play pro.  Without him, the whole thing fell apart.  “Grundelstein” the vocalist quit music altogether and went into the hotel management business.  I rejoined Atlantic Showband (believe me, it was no hardship) and played with them from 1979 until I emigrated in 1986.  “Bee” the guitarist and Franco the drummer went on to play for two of the most well-known club bands in South Africa (Circus and Ballyhoo, respectively, for those who might know what I’m talking about).

Not playing pro with these guys is one of my greatest disappointments in my musical career.  I miss them all still.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD, The Gun Thing

From Stephen Green at PJM:

My AR-15 weighs about 7.5 pounds unloaded, and a bit more with a 10- or 30-round magazine filled with common .223 rounds. Or rather I should say it did, before I lost it and my banned 30-round magazines in a tragic fishing accident shortly before Colorado’s 30-round magazine ban went into effect.

Seems that people need to exercise more caution with their guns when going fishing, O My Readers, because Stephen’s isn’t the first time I’ve come across this sad story.  In fact, my own beloved Hungarian-made AMD 65 (with the doubleplusungood folding stock) met a similar fate on the Brazos (or maybe it was the Trinity) River some time ago — I’m a forgetful old man, and I don’t remember exactly when it happened;  a week ago?  last year?  sometime during the spring, and if so, which  spring?  When you get to my advanced age, the days, weeks, months and years tend to all blur together into one messy soup of half-remembered events… hell, maybe it wasn’t even an AMD-65 at all, but a Romanian SAR-1, something like this one:

Terrible thing, this forgetfulness.

Feel free to share your own tragic tales, in Comments.  If you can remember them.

So Much For That Freedom

Mocking Furriners, Modernism

I know that this travesty happened in Britishland and not Over Here, but I can foresee such a thing happening should the Socialists ever get their hands on the levers of power:

Anti-Semitic blogger who sang songs on YouTube comparing the Holocaust to a ‘theme park’ is JAILED after publishing 50 new posts in breach of a ban on social media use

Given the subject matter of this foul woman’s blog, I’m just surprised that she wasn’t offered a senior position in Britain’s Labour Party.

Now Longtime Readers will know full well that I have no time — none — for anti-Semites:  I think they’re nasty little fuckers, without exception.  But as with all things pertaining to freedom, I look at the bigger picture, see the intolerance being shown towards viewpoints that do not adhere to the modern ideals of political correctness —  such as, for example, every other post on my  blog —  and the only difference Over Here is that while the politically-incorrect can be “de-platformed” by host providers such as FaecesBook, WeirdPress or YooChube, that’s a whoooole ‘nother animal from being chucked in jail  for the same “offences”.

And yet I wonder:  if the Loony Left [redundancy alert] are ever given complete control over our society, can anyone persuade me that it could never  become a crime, for example, to be a “climate change denier”, “sexual harasser” or a “Nazi” (by their definition of the terms)?

Given that these tits want to abolish the Second Amendment altogether, adding a few asterisks to the First would be a simple task.

Delenda est Sinistrae  (if I may be so “intolerant”).