Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

You dry-docked my battleship!

Monday, January 23rd, 2023

You don’t really realize how big these things are until you’re standing right next to them.

You also don’t realize just how large the infrastructure supporting these things is until you see it.

(If you live in Texas, or want to make a trip, the Battleship Texas Foundation is doing these tours through April 30th, only on Sundays. You can find details here if you’re interested.)

(This was a Christmas present from my beloved and indulgent brother and his family. Thanks, folks!)

Obit watch: January 10, 2023.

Tuesday, January 10th, 2023

Quinn Redeker, actor.

He did a fair number of cop and PI shows, among other credits, including “The Rockford Files”, “Harry O”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Falling Star“, season 1, episode 15. He was “Jim Dancy”.)

Mike Hill, film editor. He won an Oscar for “Apollo 13”.

Diamond Lynnette Hardaway, of “Diamond and Silk”.

Timothy Vanderweert. He ran the “Leicaphilia” blog, which has been on the sidebar for a while now.

Adolfo Kaminsky. I swear I have written something about him before, but I can’t find it now.

He was a forger. Specifically, he forged documents to get people out of the hands of the Nazis.

The forged documents allowed Jewish children, their parents and others to escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and in many cases to flee Nazi-occupied territory for safe havens.
At one point, Mr. Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.
He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.”

Using the pseudonym Julien Keller, Mr. Kaminsky was a key operative in a Paris underground laboratory whose members — all working for no pay and risking a quick death if discovered — adopted aliases like Water Lily, Penguin and Otter, and often contrived documents from scratch.
Mr. Kaminsky learned to fashion various typefaces, a skill he had picked up in elementary school while editing a school newspaper, and was able to imitate those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it, too, resembled the kind used on official documents, and photoengraved his own rubber stamps, letterheads and watermarks.
Word of the cell spread to other resistance groups, and soon it was producing 500 documents a week, receiving orders from partisans in several European countries. Mr. Kaminsky estimated that the underground network he was part of helped save 10,000 people, most of them children.

Obit watch: October 10, 2022.

Monday, October 10th, 2022

Anton Fier, noted drummer.

His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”
By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.

Peter Robinson, crime writer. (“…DCI Alan Banks, hero of a series of Yorkshire-set novels that spanned 35 years and sold more than 10 million copies.”)

Douglas Kirkland, celebrity photographer.

(Hattip on the previous two to Lawrence.)

Nikki Finke, founder of Deadline.com.

At L.A. Weekly, Finke headed its Deadline Hollywood Daily column from 2002-09. In 2006, she launched Deadline Hollywood Daily, an around-the-clock online version, and became a key source of news surrounding the 2007 WGA strike.
That year, The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter wrote that Finke’s blog had “become a critical forum for Hollywood news and gossip, known for analyzing (in sometimes insulting terms) the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of moguls,” with her reporting on the strike ultimately solidifying “her position as a Hollywood power broker.”

She went on to sell the site to Penske Media for $100 million in 2009.

Speaking to her legacy and that of Deadline‘s in a 10-year anniversary post for the publication, she wrote that the concept behind her original blog — using a URL purchased for “14 bucks and change” — was to get breaking news out faster than she could with her column.
“I didn’t set out to be a disruptor,” she wrote. “Or an internet journalist who created something out of nothing that put the Hollywood trades back on their heels, and today, under Penske Media ownership, is a website worth $100+ million. Or a woman with brass balls, attitude and ruthless hustle who told hard truths about the moguls and who accurately reported scoops first.”

Obit from Deadline.com.

Obit watch: August 24, 2022.

Wednesday, August 24th, 2022

Len Dawson, one of the greats. NYT.

Known as “Lenny the Cool” for his composure and guile on the field, Dawson was the Chiefs’ starter for 14 seasons, including their appearances in Super Bowl I and Super Bowl IV.

Dawson, a strapping 6-footer with wavy hair and a killer smile, began working as a sports anchor for KMBC-TV (Ch. 9) during his playing days in 1966, not stepping down until 2009. He also served as an NFL color commentator for NBC Sports for six years; was co-host for HBO’s “Inside the NFL” for 24 years; and was the Chiefs’ radio analyst from 1984 to 2017.

In 1987, Dawson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just 20 miles from his childhood home of Alliance, Ohio. Dawson, inducted into the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 1979, also was selected 1972 NFL Man of the Year, an award that honors a player’s contributions both on the field and in the community.
Dawson’s work as a broadcaster was recognized in 2012, when he received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, 25 years after he was enshrined as a player. Dawson, Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf and John Madden are the only members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who also received the Rozelle Award, which recognizes “longtime exceptional contributions to radio and television in professional football.”

In his 19-year professional career, Dawson completed 2,136 passes in 3,741 attempts for 28,711 yards, 239 touchdowns and 183 interceptions. His 183 games played for the Chiefs ranks third among non-kickers to only Will Shields’ 224 and Tony Gonzalez’ 190. And Dawson completed more passes (2,115) for more yards (28,507) and more touchdowns (237) than any quarterback in Chiefs history.

More important to Dawson was the contribution he and the Chiefs played in Kansas City, a town searching for its major-league identity.
“The games themselves don’t mean that much,” he said. “You tend to forget the details. But our success was important to Kansas City. I like to think our football team played a part in changing the minds of people about Kansas City. That is the most significant thing to me.”

Tim Page, Vietnam war photographer. (Alt link.)

A freelancer and a free spirit whose Vietnam pictures appeared in publications around the world during the 1960s, he was seriously wounded four times, most severely when a piece of shrapnel took a chunk out of his brain and sent him into months of recovery and rehabilitation.
Mr. Page was one of the most vivid personalities among a corps of Vietnam photographers whose images helped shape the course of the war — and was a model for the crazed, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.”
Michael Herr, in his 1977 book “Dispatches,” called him the most extravagant of the “wigged-out crazies” in Vietnam, who “liked to augment his field gear with freak paraphernalia, scarves and beads.”

He published a dozen books, including two memoirs, and most notably “Requiem” a collection of pictures by photographers on all sides who had been killed in the various Indochina wars.
Issued in 1997 and co-authored by his fellow photographer Horst Faas, it was a memorial that he considered one of his most important contributions. The collection was put on permanent display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (affiliate link to used copies on Amazon). I’ve mentioned it before, but I think this is a great book.

His closest encounter with death came in April 1969 when he stepped out of a helicopter to help offload wounded soldiers and was hit with shrapnel when a soldier near him stepped on a mine.
He was pronounced dead at a military hospital, then was revived, then died and was revived again, finally recovering enough to be transferred to the United States, where he endured months of rehabilitation and therapy before picking up his cameras and heading back to work.
During this time, in an event that consumed much of his later life, two fellow photographers headed on motorcycles down an empty road in Cambodia in search of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and never returned.
Over the following decades, Mr. Page made repeated forays into the Cambodian countryside in a futile search for the remains of the two men, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone.

This goes unmentioned in the obit, and isn’t strictly relevant, but I find it an interesting historical footnote: Sean Flynn was Errol Flynn’s son (by his first wife, Lili Damita). To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Flynn and Mr. Stone have never been found: “In 1984, Flynn’s mother had him declared dead in absentia.

Personal indulgence: Doris Emily Bedford Gerlat. She was the mother of my beloved and indulgent Uncle Allan (who is married to my beloved and indulgent Aunt Cheryl: the two of them are responsible for the Major Award among other things).

Obit watch: July 27, 2022.

Thursday, July 28th, 2022

Tony Dow is really most sincerely dead. NYT again. My thanks to the many people (including Borepatch) who tipped me off to this.

Faye Marlowe. She had a short career: “Hangover Square” seems to be her best known film.

Jered Barclay. He did a fair number of Westerns, “Hawaiian Eye”, “Surfside 6”, “Coronet Blue”, and other credits. He was also in vaudeville and theater, and did a lot of voiceovers.

Bernard Cribbins. Credits other than “Doctor Who” include “Frenzy”, the 1967 “Casino Royale”, “Space: 1999”, and “Coronation Street”. (Edited to add: NYT.)

Lourdes Grobet, photographer. One of her specialties was photographing luchadores, and some of those photos are reproduced in the obit (including one of her dancing with El Santo).

U Phyo Zeya Thaw, Burmese rapper. He was 41.

His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the junta-controlled news media on Monday. His mother, Daw Khin Win May, confirmed his death.
The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions, including that of the veteran democracy activist U Kyaw Min Yu, popularly known as Ko Jimmy, were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.

Obit watch: May 3, 2022.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

I know this sounds like the setup to a joke, but it isn’t: Ric Parnell has passed away.

Mr. Parnell was perhaps best known as “Mick Shrimpton”, one of Spinal Tap’s many drummers.

Parnell played in multiple bands, including Horse, Atomic Rooster, Nova and Stars. He claimed he declined invitations to play in Journey and Whitesnake, but is credited with playing drums on Toni Basil’s song “Hey Mickey” in 1981.

David Birney.

Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”
Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.

Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.

He also did a lot of TV work, including a recurring role on the first season of “St. Elsewhere”. Credits other than “Bridget Loves Bernie” include one of the spin-offs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “FBI: The Untold Stories”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, Serpico on the “Serpico” TV series, “McMillan & Wife”, and “The F.B.I.”

Ron Galella, photographer and historical footnote. He was one of the early “paparazzi” – indeed, it seems to me that he was one before the term came into common use.

He was perhaps most famous for relentlessly photographing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Mrs. Onassis waged a running court battle with him throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, testifying in one court hearing that he had made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable, with his constant surveillance.” Mr. Galella in turn claimed the right to earn a living by taking pictures of famous people in public places.
In 1972, a judge ordered him to keep 25 feet away from Mrs. Onassis and 30 feet away from her children. A decade later, facing jail time for violating the order — hundreds of times — Mr. Galella agreed never to take another picture of them. And he never did.

Reviewing “Smash His Camera,” a 2010 documentary about Mr. Galella, the critic Roger Ebert articulated the ambivalence many felt toward him, whether or not they knew the name of the photographer behind the memorable pictures he took. “I disapproved of him,” Mr. Ebert said, “and enjoyed his work.”

Historical note, NOT suitable for use in schools.

Monday, April 4th, 2022

This post is strictly in the interest of history. I am not posting this for any prurient reasons: it just seems like an appropriate bit of history, especially since I recently mentioned Leslie Van Houten.

Never-before-seen photos of murdered blond bombshell Sharon Tate have been found in a California garage.

To be clear, these are not post mortem photos: they were taken when Ms. Tate was 21. She was 26 when the Manson family murdered her.

Cabrejas, 46, had been searching for camera equipment to photograph a solar eclipse when she came across the pics.
“They had been sitting in our garage for years until I came across them cleaning his stuff,” the West Los Angeles native told SWNS.
She added that the photos were “totally a casual thing, from before she was even famous.” Tate was just starting to build her career at the time and was going to a plethora of auditions.

I am, of course, in the interest of respecting copyright and intellectual property, not reproducing the photos here. You can click through to the linked NY Post article if you wish to view a selection of them.

Obit watch: January 27, 2022.

Thursday, January 27th, 2022

Don Wilson, of the Ventures.

In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.
“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”

We’re talking about the Ventures, so you know what that means, right?

Jim Drake, one of the old time Sports Illustrated photographers. I wanted to mention this here because there’s a lot of classic Drake photos reproduced in the obit, including the one of Broadway Joe in Times Square.

Morgan Stevens, actor. He was “Nick Diamond” on “Melrose Place”. He was also “David Reardon” in “Fame” and did other TV guest spots.

Kevin Ward, the mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, which is a DC suburb. He was found dead in a park: his death is suspected to have been a suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Obit watch: November 22, 2021.

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Bob Bondurant, legendary racer and founder of The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

Mr. Bondurant began attracting attention in the racing world in 1959, when he won 18 of the 20 races he entered behind the wheel of a Corvette.
“I am an original California hot rodder turned white hot when I started winning everything in my Corvettes,” he was quoted as saying by the National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016.
He continued to win races regularly in Corvettes in the 1960s, but he also began to race successfully in other sports cars and open-wheeled Formula 1 machines, including for the elite Ferrari team from 1965 to 1966.
“He was top of the line,” said Peter Brock, who designed the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe that Mr. Bondurant raced with Dan Gurney to first place in the GT, or Grand Touring, class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in 1964.

Even before opening the school, Mr. Bondurant had some well-known students. He had coached James Garner and Yves Montand in driving Formula 1 cars for John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, “Grand Prix.” Mr. Bondurant, who was a stunt man and technical adviser to the film, wore 16-millimeter cameras on the sides of his helmet to record racing action on the track while moving at 150 miles per hour.
Soon after Mr. Bondurant opened the school, Mr. Newman and Robert Wagner signed up as students. They had been cast as racecar drivers in the film “Winning” (1969), in which Mr. Newman’s character dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500.
“Paul has a knack of knowing how to learn,” Mr. Bondurant told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1988. “He’s like most actors — they know how to listen. He would move at his own pace, and wouldn’t go too quick. He took it step by step, and it came naturally to him.”

One of my lifetime ambitions has been to attend the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, though apparently it went bankrupt in 2018 and is now known as the Radford Racing School.

Robert Bly, the Iron John guy. Anyone else remember when Iron John was a thing? I do, though I never actually read it: I just remember a time when people talked about books, instead of what the Kardasians were doing yesterday.

Carolyn Watjen, aka “Caroline Todd“. You wouldn’t know her under that name: she and her son, David Watjen, write (wrote?) mystery novels under the pseudonym “Charles Todd”. I haven’t read any of them yet, but the Ian Rutledge novels sound interesting.

Jay Last. He was an early semi-conductor pioneer: specifically, he was one of the “traitorous eight” who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. His death leaves Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore) as the last surviving member of the group.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Mick Rock, photographer of musicians.

Peter Aykroyd, Dan’s brother and “Saturday Night Live” cast member.

Art LaFleur, actor. Other than “The Sandlot”, his credits include episodes of “The John Larroquette Show”, two different remakes of television series that should never have been remade and which failed miserably (not due to Mr. LaFleur, they were just bad ideas), “Matlock”, “Field of Dreams”, and “Wizards and Warriors”.

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Thursday, September 9th, 2021

Two things that I have absolutely no use for but find oddly appealing. Both of these are kind of old, but I just discovered them in the past couple of days:

1. Lone Wolf shows them as “low stock”, but they do apparently still have 9×18 Makarov barrels for the Glock 42.

I actually learned about this by way of Lucky Gunner’s ammo tests, which I am familiar with, but was reviewing to find data about a specific caliber. I don’t know what advantage this would give me over .380 (ballistically, I think very little), and if I wanted something in 9×18, why wouldn’t I just go out and get a surplus gun? But the idea is just weird enough to turn my crank a little bit. And it is threaded for a suppressor

2. Speaking of guns in .380 Auto…the Cimarron 1862 Pocket Navy. This is a newly manufactured gun, designed to emulate the look and feel of a 1862 Colt Pocket Navy, but set up as a cartridge-fired gun (instead of a black powder one), and chambered in .380 Auto.

Again, I have no use for this, and why would I carry one over my Glock 42? But it is another one of those things that’s so freaking weird, it turns the crank again. If I saw one turn up used at a good price, it would be tempting.

In other news, I am back from my vacation, as of Tuesday. The original plan was to attend the NRA Annual Meeting in Houston…but that was not to be. So instead, Mike the Musicologist and I spent a few days bumming around looking at gun shops, some in the area around Abilene.

I’ll probably write more about our adventures later, but since this is “random gun crankery”, I’ll mention Caroline Colt Company, which is a nice shop with a lot of quality guns, and a surprisingly good (for the times we are in) selection of ammo.

Thanks to great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl for introducing me to the work of the Snub Gun Study Group. As a confirmed snubby guy, I like this idea and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

My snubbies. Let me show them to you.
Top: S&W 19-3 in .357 Magnum with Tyler T-grip.
Bottom: S&W Model 36 (no dash?) fitted with an Apex Tactical spring kit

(And yes, I consider the 2 1/2″ Model 19 to be a snub gun. As I recall, so did Ed Lovette in his book, The Snubby Revolver. No Amazon link because this was an old Paladin Press volume and prices are through the roof.)

In a rare combination of Smith and Wesson crankery and movie crankery, you can buy Indiana Jones’s S&W. On GunBroker. The “buy it now” price, though, is $5,000,000.00. Which is also the minimum bid. Just for comparison, the gun that killed Billy the Kid went for $6,030,312 not too long ago. (Hattip: The Firearm Blog.)

Lawrence sent over a note earlier this morning: David Chipman’s nomination to head BATFE is being withdrawn. I’d like to believe this is a good thing: maybe it is, but I’m worried the Biden administration is going to nominate someone who is even worse.

Obit watch: July 21, 2021.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

Rick Laird, noted musician.

The guitarist John McLaughlin called Mr. Laird in 1971 with an invitation to join a group he was forming with the goal of uniting the jazz-rock aesthetic — which Mr. McLaughlin had helped establish as a member of Miles Davis and Tony Williams’s earliest electric bands — with Indian classical music and European experimentalism.
The new ensemble, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which also featured the drummer Billy Cobham, the keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Goodman, became one of the most popular instrumental bands of its time. It released a pair of studio albums now regarded as classics for Columbia Records, “The Inner Mounting Flame” (1971) and “Birds of Fire” (1973), and one live album, “Between Nothingness & Eternity” (1973).

After leaving Mahavishnu, he went on to tour with other artists and did one solo album. But he decided in 1982 that he needed a backup career path. So he became a professional photographer. (The NYT says that he did continue to write and perform music, but none of it has been “officially released”.)

My feelings about baseball are well known, but I did want to highlight the passing of Marjorie Adams. She spent a lot of time researching and lobbying for her great-grandfather’s (Daniel Adams) place as a founding father of baseball.

Making the case for her great-grandfather, who was known as Doc (he came by his nickname legitimately, having received a medical degree from Harvard in 1838), became Ms. Adams’s consuming passion. She advocated for him on a website, at conferences, at meetings of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and at vintage baseball festivals, where fans play and celebrate the sport, as if it were the 19th century. She nicknamed herself Cranky, for “cranks,” a period term for fans.
“Baseball is the national pastime,” she said in an interview in 2014 with SABR’s Smoky Joe Wood chapter. “It’s important that the historical record is correct.”
That record was a lie for a long time, according to John Thorn, baseball’s official historian. Abner Doubleday was for many years falsely cited as baseball’s inventor. And Alexander Cartwright, who played a role in the sport’s evolution, was credited on his plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., with some of the innovations that, it turned out, were actually conceived by Adams.

Doc Adams began playing for the pioneering New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club in 1845. While with the team, he created the shortstop position — as a relay man from the outfield, not a fielder of ground balls and pop flies. He made his most critical contributions to the game in 1857 at a rule-making convention of which he was chairman.
There he codified some of the fundamentals of the modern game, setting the distance between bases at 90 feet, the length of a game at nine innings and the number of men per side at nine.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 286

Monday, January 11th, 2021

I have another doctor’s appointment today (actually, two) so I’m serving up a variety platter based on some recent events.

It snowed here yesterday. Seriously, snowed. For several hours. In Texas.

It is supposed to be pretty cold today, too, so how about a refreshing cold weather drink recipe?

This recipe is different from the one given in How To Archer, specifically the addition of Creme de Cacao and Crème de menthe. (Also, eight ounces of peppermint schnapps to 12 ounces of hot chocolate sounds like a really good way to get messed up. So I’d recommend drinking these when you don’t have to go anywhere.) I should have picked up some schnapps, Creme de Cacao, and Crème de menthe when I was out…

We watched “Tombstone” Saturday night. Spoiler: I think we all rather liked it. However, me being who I am and the rest of us being who we are (the kind of people who have the Internet Movie Firearms Database open on their phones while we watch), of course I ended up discoursing on the Buntline Special during breaks.

This is a pretty good short video hitting some of the main points on the Buntline Special and Wyatt Earp.

Bonus: I don’t usually link to hickok45 since you should already be watching him. But I’m making an exception here because: “Cimarron Wyatt Earp Buntline Special” which is (as I understand it) an exact replica of the movie gun. And hickok45 also discourses some more on Buntline history.

Cimarron lists them in their 2020 catalog. Bud’s lists them as out of stock, but says they are a special order item.

It is kind of a good looking gun. And I want something in the Colt Single Action Army style. But:

  • I have the same problem hickock45 has with the 10″ barrel length: it just doesn’t seem handy.
  • I’m really not sure how well these guns are made (though hickock45 seems to think they’re okay).
  • What I really want in the SAA style is…an actual Colt Single Action Army in .45 Colt, not a substitute.

(I do have a New Frontier in .22 LR, but I’m thinking of trading that off. It seems surplus to needs, now that I have a Ruger Single-Six with both .22 LR and .22 Magnum cylinders.)

Side note: “Wyatt Earp and the Buntline Special Myth” from the Kansas Historical Quarterly.

…the late Raymond Thorp told a story about Wyatt Earp showing him a revolver in the late fall of 1914. At that time, he said, Wyatt carried a Colt S.A.A. with a 5-1/2-inch barrel. Thorp claimed Earp told him, “I don’t like a gun with a longer barrel. Sometimes an inch or two makes a difference when you want to jerk it quickly.”

Side note #2: Josephine Earp, which I also find interesting: especially the part about “I Married Wyatt Earp“.

I’ve written before about “The Devil At Your Heels”, the Canadian documentary about Ken Carter and his five-year attempt to do a one-mile jump over the St. Lawrence River.

For those of you who might have been wondering and didn’t check Wikipedia: “Ken Carter – Stuntman To The End”. Or: the rest of the story after the jump attempt.