Author: Kim du Toit

No More Gun Lists

The Gun Thing

Yeah, I was pulled deep into the magazine wells of Teh Intarwebz, and ended up watching the Outlaw listing his Top 10 Guns You Can Bet Your Life On.

And I don’t disagree with any of his choices, to any degree of difference other than choice — as he puts it, guns that you like and are familiar with, as opposed to an equally good option but in a different platform (AR vs. AK, for instance; he prefers the AR, I prefer the AK, but I have almost no experience with the AR because I served in a different country’s .dotmil).

Also, given how much he shoots and how many more guns he plays with, I’m going to state with the utmost conviction that his opinions are going to be much more worthwhile than mine.

And given that I’m a cantankerous Old Phartte with way too many prejudices (fuck off, Glock), Chris’s opinions are even more reliable than mine.  So whereas his recommendations for a gun are more likely to be based on solid testing and experience, mine are going to be the same five guns, every single time, because a lifetime’s shooting of those five has imprinted them deep in my psyche and I’m not likely to change them.

What guns?  Oh, come on:

  • 1911, Browning P35, CZ 75, SIG 210 and Beretta 92FS for centerfire semi-auto handguns
  • Python, S&W 65 and 686, Ruger GP100 and Ruger Blackhawk  for revolvers
  • Mauser 98, Mauser Mod 12, Mauser 1896, Winchester 1894, and AK-47 for centerfire rifles
  • and so on.

If you couldn’t guess at least four out of my five in each category, you haven’t been paying attention.

So I’m not going to be doing any more gun lists because my opinions are no longer that relevant.  Let the young gunslingers have their day on EeewChoob.

Not Our Game

Sports

As Longtime Readers know, I’m a huge fan of football (“soccer”) so I was quite distraught that Team U.S.A. was booted out of the World Cup last week.  This, however, got up my nose, big time:

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte trolled President Joe Biden on Twitter, poking fun at the U.S. men’s soccer team’s loss to the Netherlands in the World Cup during the first round of the tournament’s knockout stage on Saturday.

In a promotional video posted Saturday morning, Biden had wished the U.S. team luck as the players prepared for their match against the Netherlands. Holding a ball in front of the White House, Biden said that “it’s called soccer” before reassuring the team, “You’re going to do it!”

Following America’s 3-1 loss on Saturday, Rutte responded to Biden’s tweet, saying, “Sorry Joe, football won.”

No, Dutchie… soccer won.  Had your little nation of Heinekenners fielded a team of NFL-type footballers and played us at, oh, Lambeau Field in late December, you would have lost by a lot more than 3-1.

We’re not that good at soccer because we just don’t care about it.  It’s pretty much the same as Formula 1 — we have perfectly-good alternatives right here.

Oh, and now that the Germans have been eliminated, you may actually have a chance of winning the Cup, instead of being beaten like a drum by them since, errrr, 1939.

And speaking of the disturbances in the early 1940s… you’re welcome.

I Like This

Business, Lifestyle

I remember back when Wal-Mart and their ilk were building stores everywhere, and small-town businesses everywhere were being put out of business by their erstwhile customers falling prey to the fallacy that Price Is King, and lured into the soulless caverns that were Wal-Mart, Home Depot and so on, all for the chance to save a couple bucks on nails and screwdrivers.

I was heartened when I visited Britishland for the first time, back in 1997, and found that there were still plenty of ironmongers (hardware stores) dotted in the main streets of British towns.  Invariably, I’d drift into one, and wish that I lived somewhere nearby because of all the cool stuff they sold, stuff which I hadn’t seen in over decade of walking through Lowes or Home Depot, let alone Wal-Mart.

Let me be clear here:  to men of my generation, hardware stores are to us like drugstores are to women.  Yet while you can find a CVS, Walgreens or Osco drugstore within spitting distance of your house in any town, you will not find a hardware store which caters to men.  Oh sure, drive a few miles and get drawn into a Wal-Mart, only to find that if you want a couple of #2 self-tapping screws for that project on the honey-do list, sorry but they’re only available in the 50-pack, $5.99 instead of a buck for the two you needed.  (And yes, I know all about economies of scale and bulk savings — but at the end of the day, you end up spending six bucks instead of two, and are saddled with four dozen screws that you may or may not need in the future.)

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Here’s a story from, of all places, Wales, where the local ironmongery was about to close its doors after years of serving the town, but the locals, realizing what they might miss if the place disappeared, did something about it.

Note how carefully they structured the financing, so that GlobalMegaCorp Inc. couldn’t sink their ravenous fangs into the place and turn it into something other than what they wanted to keep.

I wish we’d done something like this in small towns Over Here, but that bullet’s gone through the church and we’re stuck with megastores, damn it.

There are about three or four posts that burst the banks of this stream of consciousness, but they can wait for another time.

Monday Funnies

Funny Stuff

Ah yes, Mondays;  when you need to get to work, but there are just a few things you have to fix first…

So to help the process along, here are a few things that might make you feel better… or not.

Mystery solved:

And there you have it.

Oh, I almost forgot:

I was going to say something witty in conclusion, but BOOBS.

Diddly Squat

Business, Gummint

Ben Ainslie and his wife Georgia Thompson are probably not known to many Murkins, although in the yachting world he’s very well known as the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, not to mention the head of Britain’s America’s Cup team.

So during the Covid Lockdown Silliness they created a podcast / TV show called Performance People in which they talk to various successful people such as F1 Mercedes AMG team principal Toto Wolff and his equally-accomplished wife Susie — surely the absolute exemplars of the “power couple”.

The show that got me, however, was their interview with The Greatest Living Englishman and his man Kaleb, on the Diddly Squat Farm.  Funny as always, the pair are wonderfully entertaining, right up until the discussion moves to farming, and what farmers have to deal with.

I have no idea whether our farmers have to put up with the same degree of red tape as the Brits do, but when Jeremy Clarkson points out that the suicide rate for British farmers is the highest of any profession in the U.K., things get really serious.

If you do nothing else today, watch this show.