Month: February 2021

Fruitless & Pointless

The Gun Thing

Follow me on this one.

Let’s assume that all your life you’ve been a plinker-and-handgun kinda guy, whereby you own a handgun for protection, and inherited a .22 rifle from yer Dad… and that’s pretty much it.  (Don’t laugh, I know they’re out there.)

But with all the crap that’s been going down recently, you decide that you should get a centerfire rifle… just because.  Or maybe one of your old classmates invited you to join him on a pig- or deer hunting trip somewhere, you get my drift.  Whatever the reason, you need a rifle.

The problem is that you are a little broke [insert Biden reason here]  and your budget will not stretch to anything that costs more than a grand — and much lower would be even better.

Forget any of those AR-15 “assault rifle” things — they’re so far out of reach you may as well look for a ray-gun.  In fact, most rifles now cost so much that the job seems impossible.  Unless you lower your sights [sic]  and get a second-hand rifle.

You discover a place that sells many second-hand rifles — some even quite affordable.  It’s called Collector’s Firearms, and even though all your buddies warn you about their “collector’s prices”, you’re still able to find a few that will suit your needs.

Here’s one:

You ask around among your gun buddies, and yeah, that’s a decent rifle and a fine cartridge.

But you remember reading something about ammo scarcity, so you visit places like AmmoSeek to see whether you can get say, 100 rounds for practice and the hunt.  Sorry.  Only a couple of places have .300 Savage available, it’s expensive and all of them have “Limit: 1” in their conditions of sale.

So you try another rifle in a different chambering:

Once again, lovely rifle (plus a scope!) for an okay price, and the cartridge is excellent.

Except AmmoSeek shows that nobody has .257 Weatherby Mag ammo in stock.  Damn.  Oh well, on to the next choice:

Oh yeah baby, now we’re talking.  Inexpensive, highly-regarded rifle, scope included, and a hard-hitting cartridge…

…but although AmmoSeek shows quite a few people actually have the cartridge in stock, it’ll cost you about $3 / trigger-pull.  Ouch.  Maybe another gun…?

Okay, this rifle is something of an unknown quantity, and there’s no scope;  but at least it’s chambered for a common and popular cartridge, right?

…and you’re greeted with peals of mocking laughter, so to speak, as you discover that .308 Win is so popular that it’s no longer common — at almost any price.  More distressing still is that the stuff that’s remotely available and affordable is full metal jacket — not yer optimal hunting cartridge — and a typical hunting cartridge purchase situation looks like this:

I could go on and on, but I think everyone gets the point, here.

I remember writing about buying guns and ammo during the G.W. Bush presidency, and saying that “these are the good times for gunnies”… and boy, was I ever right:  guns were cheap and readily available, and you could buy ammo of any caliber by the (multiple) case load from a choice of sellers.

We live in different times now, and as much as I love the fact that more and more people are becoming first-time gun owners — the goal of the Nation of Riflemen, remember? — the result is that even I have to count the rounds when I go to the range (every other week, now, instead of weekly and even twice-weekly before).

Hell, my buddies and I used to give each other Christmas presents of 200-round bulk packs of .45 ACP;  now, you can’t afford to do that not just because of the outrageous cost, but because you need the damn ammo for your own dwindling supplies.  Without being sarky about the thing, I discovered over the past weekend that Ye Olde Ammoe Locquere  is down to about 1,800 rounds of .45 ACP FMJ, and 200 rounds of self-defense stuff.  Never mind holding off the Chinese Army (as someone once taunted me);  I couldn’t hold off a piddly Antifa riot.

Aaaargh.

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Mauser 98 Sporter (8x57mm)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

It seems like forever since I last did a piece bordering on idolatry about Mauser rifles, so here we go.

This one’s a pre-WWII ’98 Sporter in 8x57mm, and can be had at Collector’s for an obscene amount of money.  Why “obscene”?  Allow me to explain.

When I arrived in the U.S. after the Great Wetback Episode Of ’86, I was of course gun-less, having had to leave them all back in the old Racist Republic.

It took me few months before I managed to get my first gun Over Here, and it was identical to the one above except that mine had a single trigger and was, as the saying goes, very well-used.  It was also quite accurate (especially as this was thirty-odd years ago, back when I still had young eyes and could use iron sights).

The seller was a work colleague — a bit of a dick, actually — who was based in South Carolina, and when on a business trip there I went over to his house for dinner and to flirt with his very pretty wife, he took me into his workshop and showed this wondrous thing to me, whereupon I was overcome with gun lust and made him an offer.  He counter-offered, and we settled on $150.

Now the problem came about getting the thing back to Chicago.

Because I was stupid and knew nothing, I simply popped the thing into my garment bag, and when I got to the airport, checked the bag and was asked to fold it in two, I replied that I couldn’t because there was a camera tripod inside which was already folded up to its fullest extent.  The airline check-in clerk just shrugged, found me a large cardboard box and taped it shut before sending it on its way.

Those were the good old days.  Imagine trying to do that now.

Of course, I only found out a few days later that to own a gun legally, I had to have an Illinois Firearm Owner ID (FOID).  This I learned when I went to Ye Olde Gunne Shoppe to buy ammo.  Oops.  That’s me:  Oblivious Kim, breaking a stupid law again.

Anyway, I held onto the rifle for years, eventually selling it only in a time of great financial duress — I believe it was the very last gun I sold, back then — and I have to tell you, I still feel the wrench.

By the way:  the guy’s wife and I had a bit of a fling not long after, so I got him for a twofer:  his rifle and his wife, both very enjoyable to play with.

Pull Back A Little?

Men & Women, Movies

Here’s a quote from some young actor who is currently appearing in a TV show about homosexuals (which I’ll never watch):

“It is awkward, but the thing was, on the show we had people called intimacy coordinators and their jobs, they’re amazing, they’re jobs are to help with the sex scenes and everyone doing the sex scenes to feel safe and fine and not awkward.”

Here’s a thought:  if your actors are requiring what is essentially psychological counseling just to get through a sex scene, perhaps you might just want to dial back the sexuality a tad?

Look, I love me a decent sex scene:  Body Heat, Impulse, Zefferelli’s Romeo & Juliet, Don’t Look Now,  Unfaithful and the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (not the rape scene, though) — all those and more have been fun as hell to watch, and even now are still quite titillating.

The problem is that as the sexual boundaries have been pushed back on screen, the sex scenes have become not only more explicit, but more intense — and along the way, more harrowing.  Erica Jong once described porno movies as (paraphrasing) after the first ten minutes, you want to fuck somebody, and after the next twenty minutes, you never want to fuck again for the rest of your life.

Modern mainstream movies about sex are like that.  I defy anyone to be anything but depressed after watching Gaspar Noé’s Love, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac , 9 Songs or Anatomie de l’enfer (to name the most extreme examples).  In some of the modern French movies (e.g. Anatomie), I start to feel depressed during the first sex scene, which must be some kind of record.

I’m not suggesting we go back to the Hays Code era, where the husband and wife had to sleep in separate beds, and extra- or non-marital sex had to result in the death of one of the participants (which is downright sick, sicker than the taboo sex).  But seriously:  let’s just leave a little to the imagination, shall we?

Here’s a thought:  if a sex scene means that the actors have written into their contracts that the acts must be performed by a body double,  then dial it back and ditch the sexual stand-ins.  And any sex scene which lasts longer than one (1) minute should be edited until it doesn’t.

Let’s keep it sexy, but also keep it subtle, and short.  Sex doesn’t have to be spelled out — we all know what it’s about.  Here’s an example, from Hitchcock’s North By Northwest :

Anyone remember what this scene cut to?   Yup:  here it is.  Thirty-five seconds.

Snapping Point

Immigration

Let’s hear it again for that wonderful thing called “diversity”:

Racist Aldi customer yells in female worker’s face that ‘everywhere I move there are fucking Eastern Europeans’ in xenophobic rant.

Okay, a couple of points.  A British man shouting at an Eastern European woman isn’t “racist”, any more than an Israeli shouting abuse at an Arab is racist — both groups are genetically identical, the Brit to the European, the Israeli to the Arab.

That being out of the way, let’s look at the larger issue.

The only thing the newspaper headline got right is that the tirade was xenophobic.

And what, I ask, is that wrong with xenophobia (literally, a fear of strangers, now magically transformed into a hatred towards strangers)?

Here’s the thing.  When you grow up in an ethnically-homogenous society, it is an inherent human trait to be suspicious of strangers, for all sorts of historical reasons which go back so far they’ve become genetic — countless millennia of social conditioning have seen to that.  It’s precisely the same impulse which gets parents to teach their children not to get into the red van with a stranger.  Outsiders, as any respectable anthropologist or Old Western sheriff will tell you, are potentially dangerous because they have no roots in the community, and often have values and morals which are completely different from (and in some cases are hostile towards) a settled community’s values.  (And for a reality check:  immigrants all over the world engage in criminal behavior out of all proportion to their actual numbers.)

Oh I know, in these modern oh-so tolerant and accepting (ha!) times, we should seek to deny our human nature because it’s eeeevil and diversity is wonderful and all that.  The “melting pot theory” fantasists are completely wedded to that concept, even though both history and the human condition have proven that it is complete bullshit.  The plain fact of the matter is that if foreigners are to come into a settled community which is ethnically and socially different to theirs, they are the ones who need to assimilate, to make the effort to submerge themselves into the dominant culture — it’s not up to the locals to accommodate them, even though you’re still going to find those irritating “Habla Español” signs everywhere.  (That, by the way, is a courtesy and not an obligation, although many would say it’s the latter.)

I’m acutely aware of this, of course, because I myself am an immigrant and still speak with something of a South African accent after nearly forty years’ residence in my beloved adopted country.  (Blame my vocal cords, which had stiffened beyond adaptability by the time I got here in my early 30s.)  But culturally, I defy anyone, native-born or naturalized, to be more American than I am because when I came here, I was determined to become an American and not remain some malcontent foreigner forever rooted in my home country.

This is not always the case with immigrants, though, and that is why people like that Brit in the article let loose:  he had reached the limits of his xeno-tolerance.  Race had nothing at all to do with it.

Here’s the final word.  In one of those little exquisite twists of irony, the Aldi supermarket chain is actually of German origin.  But when you step into an Aldi store here and in Britain, all the signs are in English, not German;  and the currency is local and not euros.  And while Aldi often hires non-locals, that’s an economic rationale because immigrants are prepared to work for lower wages than locals, and Aldi’s marketing policy is to be the low-price retailer in town.  But even this approach is fraught with hazard:

“You can ban me from every Aldi in the fucking world, the sooner this fucking store is shut down and kicked out the fucking UK the better.”

I bet he’s not the only bloke in town who feels that way.

News Roundup

Bad News

As always, commentary tasting like battery acid.  And speaking of which:


…maybe not oral sex, though.  Just sayin’.  And on that topic:


…for women, it’s the impact crater in the back of the throat.


…maybe if they went still further down and took two knees, then assumed the Muslim prayer position… naah, they’d still get it in the ass.


…or, Busted For Telling The Truth #265.  Also:


…to be fair, they aren’t like Nazis;  they’re like radical Islamist killers.

Too harsh?


…Q.E.D.


…guess it just wasn’t his day.  Africa Wins Again.


…I wish.  Then at least they’d be about something.


…so he did.  Bet it wasn’t the first time she’d cut his nuts off, though.


…and Russia Wins Again.


…not mentioned:  nobody speaks English.  Even when they’re speaking English, you won’t understand a word.

That said, comedienne Aisling Bea is Irish:

Of course,  she lives in London, not Ireland — which makes her all the more desirable.

No

Politics, Resistance, RINO/GOPe

…or, as George H.W. Bush used to say:  “Nah gunna do it.”

Once again, we are being implored to stop fighting among ourselves, with words such as:

There is much talk today about the splits in the Republican Party, though similar rifts plague the Democrats. But the sharpest, deepest divide remains between the two parties. Rarely in recent memory has it been so clear. Rarely has there been less of a center. Republicans must focus all their energy on regaining the majority in Congress.

Tell you what:  I’ll stop fighting with the GOPe / “centrist” Republicans when they stop acting as facilitators to the Socialists by “compromising” — i.e. yielding to the Socialists’ demands — when the Socialists seldom if ever make any concessions away from their Marxist agenda.

The Republicans’ most stunning success in recent years has been when conservatives act like, well, conservatives — ask Hillary Clinton — so the real concessions that the GOPe should be making are to us, the so-called “Trumpists*”, and not to the Marxists.

*The very next time a Republican refers derisively to a conservative as a “Trumpist”, I’m gonna give them a ball-kicking (or cunt-punt, depending on circumstances).  Leave the name-calling to the Marxists.