Art, music, whatever
In alphabetical order:
Ahrweil, Germany
Heidelberg, Germany
Ludgate, London
Pie Town, NM (near the Continental Divide, temperature: -2F)
Silverton, CO
Trastevere, Rome
Zwettl, Austria
As with all these pics, right-click to enlarge, and feel free to use as wallpaper etc.
Looking over the posts for the past week or so, it occurs to me that there are far too few entries which conform to the original premise of the GGP series, namely, providing pics of guns that we gun-lovers can drool over, for whatever reason. Allow me to remedy the situation forthwith.
Here’s one being offered by Collectors Firearms: a pre-WWII Mauser 98K Sporter in one of my favorite calibers, the venerable 7x57mm.
Good grief… this gun rings just about every single one of my rifleman bells: Mannlicher-style full stock, “butterknife” bolt lever, and a double set trigger?
The only way this rifle could be more beautiful is if it had breasts.
I know that modern-day shooters look askance at the old-style scope front claw mount (which grips the bell rather than the barrel), but there’s nothing wrong with the concept — having two barrel grips just simplifies the production process and therefore the cost thereof.
Okay, it’s expensive, because a) rare and b) Collectors. But like I said about the Colt 1903 pistol, this is not a “first gun”, at least if you wanted to go hunting: other more modern guns might be a tad better. But in a pinch, this gun could be your go-to hunting rifle, and I very much doubt that it would let you down, whether in its operation, accuracy, reliability or chambering. And for a hunting rifle, that’s pretty much all you can ask for, isn’t it? The fact that it is more beautiful than 90% of modern hunting rifles is just a bonus.
Speaking for myself: if I won the lottery, I’d buy this gun in a heartbeat.
Indulge me for a moment, O Gentle Readers (like you don’t all the time) while I invite you all to take a stroll down Memory Lane with me, and re-visit some of my favorite places in the world. It’s by no means comprehensive, nor are the pics ranked by anything other than alphabetical order. (Some are quite large — right-click to embiggen. And feel free to copy or use them as wallpaper etc.)
All Cannings, Wiltshire, England
Amsterdam
The village green, Bishops Cannings, Wiltshire
Bodensee, Meersburg, Germany
Grand Place, Brussels
Back home
Hurley, Berkshire, England
Jean Talon Market, Montreal
Luxemburg Gardens, Paris
Salzburg
Vienna
Vina Del Mar, Chile
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.)
Pop Quiz: Name This Granny (answer at the end of this post). Bonus point for guessing her current age, and no cheating with Internets.
Never one to shy away from the tough topics, La Paltrow has weighed in on what happens when a woman ages and loses her desirability (or, as she so charmingly puts it, “fuckability”).
‘To get wrinkles and, like, get closer to menopause, and all these things… what happens to your identity as a woman if you’re not f**kable and beautiful?’
Gwyneth firmly believes self-acceptance is key and that as you get older, your inner beauty radiates outwards.
‘Luckily, what’s happening at the same time in parallel… is you just start to like yourself’, she continued.
‘I think you get to a point where it’s almost like your sort of pulchritude is waning in a way and your inner beauty is, like, really coming out, and so it’s this funny shift that’s happening.’
This is what happens when you work in an industry that a.) has no problem with (literally) fucking children and b.) enforces impossible standards of beauty upon its workers: of course you begin to think that only the young can be desirable and that women lose their desirability when they age.
As with so much of what Paltrow spouts, it’s mostly bullshit. I can think of several older women who have aged and become wrinkled, and who could get practically any heterosexual man to bed them. And I’m not just talking about actresses, either.
Where Paltrow, as always, misses the point is that she confuses “desirability” with universal desirability. I’m not au fait with the current crop of young women who are deemed “hot” by the poplar culture, but let’s just take Scarlett Johansson as someone I know was once (and may still be) considered the ultimate in female desirability.
She’s heading for her 35th birthday as we speak, and I think it’s safe to say that in twenty-five years’ time, she will still be quite desirable, just not universally so.
Here’s one-time paragon of beauty Sharon Stone, at age 60:
…and still-gorgeous Jane Seymour (at age 65):
But let’s ignore for the moment the fact that among actresses, skillful surgery can play a part in prolonging youth (or at least hiding the effects of age) — I have no idea whether any of the above has resorted to same, but we can play the odds — and acknowledge that while stupid men and callow youths (some overlap) are forever in thrall to the “perfect body” (as defined by, say, Playboy magazine), many men (myself included) find that women get more interesting as they get older.
And in my case, anyway, that’s not just a function of my getting older; at age 30, for example, I thought that Sophia Loren (then aged 50) was the sexiest woman alive:
…and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in that thought, either. Now she’s nearer 85, and I’ll bet that for her age she’s still as sexy as hell, unless of course all the wheels have fallen off, so to speak.
And even then, some randy old goat would… let me not go there.
I said it earlier, but it bears paraphrasing: for a woman to be desirable to all men regardless of her age is never going to happen. What we do know is that very few older women (with some notable exceptions) are going to be undesirable to all men.
If Paltrow and her aging ilk are going to go all “Boo-hoo-hoo nobody wants to fuck me”, I would suggest they relocate from Hollywood (and from Southern Cal in general) and try living in a retirement community. They’ll get more pricks than a pincushion, from all accounts.
Frankly, if Paltrow really is having a problem (and it’s not just some new PR ploy to sell more vaginal marble eggs), it’s probably because as she’s got older, she’s become increasingly more batshit crazy. I would suggest that that, and not her wrinkled body, is the passion strangler. Read more
I am often accused of being an old-fashioned man. This, despite the fact that I’m using a keyboard to enter my thoughts into a digital medium via a thing called the Internet. And hey, I prefer brass cartridges over muzzle-loading, so I’m not that old-fashioned (unlike some of my Readers, who believe that this brass thing is just a passing fad).
If you want to know what gets me going, however, consider the following pics, and guess why I tend to prefer tradition over modernity. We’ll open with the modern ones:
Interior design:
Cars: 
Handguns:
Women:
Men’s appearance:
Foods:
And you all know about my preferences in architecture: 
So yeah, I guess I am old-fashioned. Feel free to envy me.