From the NYPost:
(Previously. Please note that my linking this is more for my own amusement, and should not be taken as an endorsement of the article; while I think it makes a good point or two, I also think it comes close to suffocating itself in the usual entitled whining that seems to characterize far too many (but not all) New Yorkers.)
There’s an interesting obit in today’s NYT for Michael Brown, who passed away on June 11th at 93.
Brown (no relation, AFAIK) was one of the major figures in the “industrial musical”, which I have touched on previously.
More:
If that was all Brown had done, this would still be a pretty interesting obit. But there’s another story: Brown and his wife had a good pot of money, and knew an aspiring writer who was living in New York and having trouble balancing her writing and her job.
So for Christmas of 1956, they gave their friend a present:
…an envelope with her name on it in the branches of their tree.
“I opened it and read: ‘You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.'”
That writer was Harper Lee. And now you know…the rest of the story.
Geoffrey Hawk, 44, the owner of a gun business called “In Case of Emergency,” was showing a semiautomatic .380 handgun and accessories to Krysta Gearhart, local TV station WNEP reported.
But there was a round left in the weapon and during the demonstration the would-be customer took a slug in the thigh, raising the question, are gun shows safe?
Another article quotes the vendor as suggesting that someone chambered a live round while his back was turned, running background checks. Which raises some questions:
But it gets better.
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This took place in the parking lot, not inside the show itself, and took place late in the day. My guess is that Redacted #2 unloaded his gun before going into the show, and was reloading it as they were leaving. Count the Four Rules violations here.
(And a tip of the Hatlo hat to Guffaw.)
Some advice for those of you who choose to celebrate today:
I didn’t just buy guns at the S&W Collectors Association convention. I also bought some old paper, which I’ve slowly been scanning in.
I thought I’d upload this one, since it touches on two of this blog’s fairly recent obsessions. This dates from 1944: I am not a lawyer, but based on my understanding of copyright law, it is in the public domain unless S&W renewed the copyright in 1972. I am doubtful that they did, but if I receive evidence to the contrary I will remove this.
I have some more in this series if this proves popular, and if I don’t get a DMCA challenge.
(And I apologize for the bleed-through; these were done on fairly thin newsprint. I did try putting some black construction paper behind the pages to see if that would cut the bleed, but it didn’t help as much as I thought it would.)
One of my cow orkers sent me this link. As far as I know, it isn’t proprietary.
Warning note: this site seems to be optimized for Chrome.
Even though it has been widely reported (and I had a busy morning), I can’t let Eli Wallach pass without notice.
This brought a smile to my face:
Edited to add: According to (I know, I know) Wikipedia, he graduated in 1936 with a history degree. Assuming he started in 1932, $30 then is about $520 now. If I’m reading this chart right, a history major today would be paying $4,673 a semester if they were a Texas resident.
Not that I’m grinding an axe or anything…
Headline in the LAT:
Elliot Rodger used knife, hammer, machete in killings, attorney says
But of course what we need are more gun control laws.
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For reasons I can’t fully explain, I’ve wanted a revolver chambered in .45 ACP.
When I went to my first S&WCA convention in Sturbridge, I was able to shoot one at the Smith and Wesson Shooting Sports Center. The gun I rented was a Model 625 JM. (The “JM” is for “Jerry Miculek”, who shoots for the Smith and Wesson factory team. The 625 is the gun he used to fire 12 shots in under three seconds, including a reload.) Model 625 revolvers show up used fairly frequently, and I’ve been tempted by them. But either I’ve not had the ready cash, or haven’t quite been able to overcome my bias against shiny guns. (Also, many of the used ones I’ve seen have these kind of pastel grips, for want of a better description, and those also turn me off.)
I think my affection for the .45 ACP revolver has something to do with being drawn to the oddball and unusual. With most revolver cartridges – your .38 Special, .357 Magnum, .44 Special/Magnum, etc. – the cartridge has a rim around the bottom. When you go to unload your revolver, there’s a little metal piece (“extractor star”) that catches the rim and pushes the cartridge out of the cylinder. With most automatic pistol cartridges – 9mm, .40 S&W, .45 ACP – the cartridge doesn’t have a rim, so there’s nothing for that bit to catch on, and the cartridge remains stuck in the chamber until you push it out with something like a pencil or cleaning rod.
This wasn’t a big deal until World War I. The military couldn’t get 1911 automatic pistols fast enough to supply everyone who needed a sidearm. Their other choice was to issue revolvers, but they didn’t want to deal with the logistics of having both an automatic pistol and a revolver caliber. They wanted revolvers that could easily use the same .45 ACP cartridge that the 1911 used. One of S&W’s engineers invented something called the “moon clip”, which comes in “half” and “full” moon variants. Cartridges snap into cutouts in the clip (a half-moon clip has three cutouts, a full moon clip has six), and then the clip is loaded into the gun. When you go to unload, the extractor star catches the moon clip and pushes it, and the fired cases, out of the gun. Moon clips are basically a primitive form of speedloader. Not that it matters that much in a defensive gun, but they are also a lot cheaper than a speedloader. (Amazon will sell you an eight pack of full moon clips
(Side note: you can also get revolvers and moon clips in 9mm and .40 S&W. There’s also been a trend towards moon clips in some of S&W’s .357 Magnum revolvers.)
Here’s a video from YouTube that explains how moon clips work. And no, I’m not just dropping this here for my own reference.
Model 34-1 with 2″ barrel, next to pre-Model 34 Kit Gun for comparison purposes.
The first trial of Malcolm A. Smith has ended in a mistrial.
Strippers. Always with the strippers. What happened?
Stanley Marsh 3, “legendary West Texas eccentric“.
This is Marsh’s most famous creation:
And Marsh spent the last years of his life entangled in civil suits and criminal accusations involving his alleged abuse of young men.
Texas Monthly has the best coverage I’ve been able to find so far. Nothing in the papers of record yet, and the DFW papers are just running the AP obit.
Daniel Keyes has also passed away at the age of 86. Keyes was most famous for the novella “Flowers for Algernon”, later expanded into a novel, turned into the movie “Charly”, and the subject of countless popular culture parodies.
Before last week, I had not purchased a gun since July of 2012*.
There are reasons for that. One was that I went through a period of unemployment, where I wasn’t purchasing anything but essential items.
A second reason is that it has been hard to find things I’ve been interested in purchasing. My local gun shops have had very few used guns that I was interested in; it seems that people are mostly holding on to guns rather than trading them in. When Mike the Musicologist and I went down to San Antonio, I did find a few interesting used guns, but either the prices were out of line (in my opinion) or (at Nagel‘s) I didn’t have the ready cash available to make the purchase.
When I decided I was going to the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association symposium in Columbus, I thought there was a good chance that I’d break the drought. I don’t buy guns just for the sake of buying guns, but I generally have a mental list of “grail” guns at any given time. The S&WCA annual meetings are a good place to find at least some of those guns, since many of my “grail” guns are Smiths.
I was lucky enough to find two guns that I fell in love with, both at the table of noted dealer David Carroll. I was even luckier in that they were within price ranges I felt I could afford, and that Mr. Carroll was willing to work with me on payment and shipping. (Mr. Carroll is a swell guy. Go buy things from him. Please.)
(As a side note, it isn’t as easy to buy guns over the Internet or out of state as lying liars who lie would have you believe. The S&WCA meeting was in Ohio. I live in Texas. As a non-resident of Ohio who doesn’t have any type of Federal Firearms License (FFL), I couldn’t legally buy a gun in the state. Private sale or dealer, it wouldn’t make any difference; I’d be breaking the law, as would the person who sold it to me. I had to have my dealer in Texas send Mr. Carroll (who is a licensed dealer) a copy of his FFL, Mr. Carroll had to ship the guns to my FFL dealer, and then I had to go to my dealer, fill out a BATFE Form 4473, and provide my Texas concealed carry permit to my FFL dealer before I could take possession of the guns. If I didn’t have a Texas concealed carry permit, I still could have gone through with the purchase, but my dealer would have had to phone in a NICS check. The only thing my Texas concealed carry permit gets me is bypassing the phone call, since I’ve already been through a background check.)
(If I had a limited collectors license, what BATFE calls a “Curios and Relics” (or “C&R”) license, I probably could have brought one of the guns home with me. The “C&R” license is less expensive and less invasive than a full FFL, but it limits you (generally) to guns more than 50 years old. So I still would have had to have the second gun shipped to my FFL, plus there’s the whole “traveling with a gun on an airline” thing, which is kind of complicated.)
(And I’ll admit, it gave me more than a little thrill when I went to my FFL to pick up the guns, and the guy behind the counter said, “Oh, yeah. I saw those earlier. Those are pretty.” They especially admired the one I’m about to write about.)
(I’m sure many of my readers already know these things. The above is for the benefit of new readers, and people who may not be aware of the process. Remember: lying liars who lie, will lie.)
After the jump, photos and words and things.
Teaser photo for the two longer posts I said I was working on.
I used the iPhone for this one, but I plan to use the Nikon for the real posts. There’s something about the juxtaposition here that I like.
By way of Lawrence: Chuck Noll, legendary coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Huh. History is a funny thing, isn’t it?
Edited to add: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obit.
I beg you to give money to people, and then stop writing. I know, I suck.
There just hasn’t been anything I wanted to write about in the past couple of days. I am working on what I thought would be a major post, but looks like it will actually turn into two major posts; however, those need to wait for me to do more research and take some photos, which probably won’t be before Sunday.
If I have a chance tomorrow, I may put up the Columbus after-action report, and possibly a list of some books I’ve read and enjoyed recently. We’ll see how things go. Watch this space.
Yeah. I’m going to ask you to give money to a cause again. Actually, two causes.
I can’t say that I know Erik, who blogs at Live From the Alamo City, that well. That is mostly my fault. We’ve had several friendly exchanges on my blog and on his blog, and we’ve been talking about getting a group of bloggers together for barbecue. (San Antonio isn’t that far.) But life events keep getting in the way.
Anyway, Erik and his wife are going through a whole bunch of shit that nobody should have to go through. Car troubles, having to find a new place to live…
But the biggest thing is that Erik’s wife is pregnant, and their child is not going to survive. This sucks so horribly that I have trouble coming up with words for it without getting all choked up, so I’ll direct you over to this post at the great and good Erin Palette’s site. I’m pretty sure Erin got choked up as well, but since she’s already written a post, I can be lazy leverage her choke-up-ness.
There’s a YouCaring page set up for donations to help Erik and his wife with expenses. I’d like to ask you to consider donating if you can. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I hadn’t already done so; I just wish I could donate more.
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You’ll notice that Erin’s post is a twofer. I don’t know TinCan Assassin at all, either, but he’s going through a messy personal situation right now, and could also use help with lawyers and money to pay for lawyers. If you can spare some funds for him as well, I’d really appreciate it. Again, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I had not already done so.
In retrospect, it would have been better if I had uploaded these on Friday, but I’ve been busier than the proverbial one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest since Friday night. This is the first chance I’ve had to settle down and post photos.
Peace statue, Ohio Statehouse, Columbus, Ohio.
Ohio Veterans Plaza, Ohio Statehouse, Columbus, Ohio.
The Veterans Plaza does something I haven’t seen before, and that I kind of like. The writing on that wall isn’t names; those are excerpts from letters by veterans. You can read the complete text here.
Charles Myers was my mother’s uncle, which would make him my grand-uncle. Not mentioned in his obituary, but told to me by my mother: he was on the beach at Normandy.
Remember…
The NYT obit for Chester Nez clarifies a point I was confused on:
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This should not be taken as an attempt to diminish the accomplishments of Mr. Nez, the other 28 original code talkers, or the ones who followed the first 29; I’m just trying to make sure the historical record is clear. (I felt some of the other media coverage confused this point.)
This goes out to our great and good friend RoadRich: Whiskey 7 made it back to Normandy. Briefly: Whiskey 7 is a restored C-47 transport that originally dropped troops over Normandy. It was in a museum in New York, but was invited back to Normandy for the 70th anniversary. So a crew from the museum flew it across the Atlantic…
(One of these days, I want to ride in a C-47. Or a DC-3. I’m not picky.)
Fun feature piece by John Marchese in the NYT:
Things I didn’t know:
Lady Mary Soames passed away last Saturday. Mrs. Soames was the last surviving child of Winston Churchill, and wrote extensively (and, by all the accounts I’ve seen, well) about her family.
And we are obligated to note the passing of Chester Nez, Navajo code talker.
Nez, a painter, earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University in Kansas in 2012.
…but yes, today is the day.
What day is it? The 40th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.
Also coming up this year: the 35th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.
I’ve previously made note of the strange career of Rusty Torres, who was on the field for three forfeited games. What I did not know, until I stumbled across it in Wikipedia, is that Nestor Chylak was also involved in both Ten Cent Beer Night (as crew chief of the umpires that night) and Disco Demolition Night (as “assistant league supervisor of umpires”; he was in the umpires’ dressing room at Comiskey Park that night, and ordered the forfeit).
Here’s a couple of links to coverage from the paper of record: Link one. Link two. Please leave a comment if those don’t work for you.
And here’s your obligatory 40th anniversary interview from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, complete with a reprint of the original coverage from 1974.
Indicted California Democratic State Senator Leland “Uncle” Yee finished third out of a field of eight candidates for the post of California secretary of state, collecting “more than a quarter-million votes“.