Author: Kim du Toit

Let’s Get Real

Education, The Gun Thing

Apparently this group of schoolkids was on a school-sponsored walk, when a rather unwelcome companion joined them:

A grizzly bear attacked a group of elementary school students and teachers in Canada, leaving 11 people injured.  Two were critically injured and two seriously hurt following the attack while a class was out on a walk in Bella Coola, northwest of Vancouver. 

Veronica Schooner said her ten-year-old son Alvarez, who was in the Year 4-5 group, was so close to the animal ‘he even felt its fur.  He was running for his life,’ she told local media.  Ms Schooner said several people attempted to halt the attack but one male teacher ‘got the whole brunt of it’ and was among the people taken by helicopter from the scene.

Guess that school-issued bear spray didn’t work too well, huh?

Some time ago I watched one of TV shows where realtors took people to find their dream off-the-grid cabins in Alaska.  This generally involved a long trek by road, a trip upriver in a boat, or even getting ferried in by float plane.

Here’s the interesting part:  every single realtor, male or female, was packing what looked like a serious gun — mostly large-framed revolvers, but on at least two occasions, the realtors had a rifle slung over their shoulder.

This is what used to be known as “common sense”:  when you’re in bear country, take a frigging gun with you so that when Ol’ Smokey Tha Bahr is looking for a meal item, you can either disabuse him of the urge or else make it his last trip to the human buffet table.

And if realtors can do it, why not the teachers who are nominally responsible for the safety of pupils under their charge?

Oooh I know, guns are icky and you’re twice as likely to be shot by someone you know (Gun Wussies Bible, Chapter One Verses #3 and #4), but ignoring that lunacy, let’s at least acknowledge that pretty much the whole of northwestern America has a decent population of bears of the several varieties, all of which have no problem with munching on the occasional human if sufficiently hungry.

But lest we forget:  we humans and not the bears are at the top of the food chain — unless, that is, we don’t avail ourselves of the implements that put us there.

And as long as we indulge ourselves in this foolishness, there will be more casualties because bears are not like Baloo in the Jungle Book, no matter how much we tell ourselves they are.

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice

“Dear Dr Kim,

“When my hands are deep in the turkey gizzard and relatives come brightly into my kitchen, without bringing me a drink, and offer to help:  what playlist can you suggest I ask the smart speaker to play to get them to fuck off?

“Suicidal Christmas Country Songs  worked well, actually a bit too well, last year, and Siri claimed not to recognise “Music to invade Poland to”. Your erudite musical knowledge is needed.

— Some English Farmer

Dear Farmer:

There are so many things wrong with this request that I barely know where to begin.

Let’s start with the “hands in the turkey gizzard” thing.  Where is your wife?  Why is she not performing her uxorial duties, whilst you are outside shooting at crows, neighbors etc.?  Small wonder that relatives come into the kitchen drinkless — they’re expecting to find her in there and not some male interloper.

Secondly:  WTF is this “smart speaker” gadget?  To me this bespeaks idleness or at least inattentiveness on your part, caused no doubt by your being in the kitchen instead of doing worthwhile things like browsing through your collection of gramophone records, wherein I have every expectation that you will find all sorts of music guaranteed to drive foul, unwanted people such as relatives screaming from the room.  Just off the top of my head, I would suggest Adge Cutler and the Wurzels’ debut album, but if said relatives are from your part of the world then this may be a dangerous choice as they would start singing along and even — perish the thought — dancing on your threadbare Axminster.  A better choice might be the musical efforts of Jimmy Shand and his Orchestra:  if that horrible ur-Scottish music fails to send them screaming not just from the room but from your farm altogether, you may as well give up and reach for the budget-priced Spanish plonk that your wife rejected for cooking.

And speaking of cooking, a reminder:  a man’s place to cook is at the barbecue or spit-roast, and not in the kitchen.

Finally, I have no idea what this “Siri” creature is.  It sounds like some ghoul, or an invention of Satan’s minions.  Best stay far away from it, lest you be corrupted and start doing things like leaving the parish and encountering strangers.

—

Classic Beauty: Hildegard Knef

Classic Beauty

I can’t believe that I’ve never featured German hottie Hildegard Knef before.  Some salient facts about her:  in the dying days of WWII she disguised herself as a man and joined the German Wehrmacht  so she could fight the Russians alongside her lover;  she was the first woman to appear nude in a German-made film;  and after her acting career ended in the 1960s, at age 40 she went on to become a singer-songwriter and sold over 3 million records.

Just to backtrack a little:  her nude scene in Die Sünderin (The Sinner) caused all sorts of rumpus in Germany, to which she responded that considering that Germany had been responsible for Auschwitz, they shouldn’t get all upset about a nude scene (okay, stop laughing now:  she had a point).  Then there was the fact of her romance with a Nazi, which caused her all sorts of problems with the wokisti of the time, and which she explained away with the comment that she was only eighteen, and sometimes girls do stupid things.

Oh, and did I mention that she survived imprisonment in a Russian POW camp, back in 1945?

I wish I’d met her.

Here she’s singing Ich habe’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin, and in English, In This Old Town (both of which she wrote herself).  What a voice.

And what a woman.

Those Missing Four Grains

Gun/Ammo Tests, The Gun Thing

You might assume that since I first started shooting .22 ammo at age 7 or 8, over the following 60-odd years I have sent quite a few rounds thereof downrange — “range” being our backyard, any open piece of land I happened upon, and so on all the way to indoor ranges here in northwest Texas.

And your assumption would be correct.  The other day I was organizing Ye Olde Ammoe Locquere, and at a rough count I had on hand about 30,000 rounds of the lovely stuff*.

When I broke it out and tried to sort it out by type, I discovered that about two-thirds of that was 40-grain bullets, and the rest 36-grain.  And that puzzles me because for some reason, I’ve only ever had consistent accuracy with the heavier bullets, regardless of the gun used;  so why do I have so much of the lighter stuff?

I think it has mostly to do with price, as exemplified by the latest offering to arrive in my emailbox from Lucky Gunner:

It is rather tempting, I will admit:  that five cents per pull is very alluring, but for the fact that over time I’ve found the 555 brand rather spotty in terms of consistency, in terms of both accuracy and ignition.  (If there’s anything more irritating than hearing a click rather than a bang after squeezing the trigger, I’m not aware of it.  And my go-to CCI Mini-Mag ammo is astoundingly reliable:  I cannot remember a non-fire with that brand, ever.)

As far as I can recall, however, I don’t believe I’ve ever shot anything with a pulse using the lighter bullet, so I can’t testify as to its effectiveness.  For some reason, I’ve always preferred to use 40-grain ammo out in the bush, for reasons I just can’t explain;  “bigger is better”, maybe?  And what price those extra four grains?

Given that the likely target is going to be small game of the rodent variety, I’m not sure that the hollow-pointed 36-grain stuff is that much more effective than the solid 40-grainers.

But I’m willing to entertain war stories from others on this topic because as the Krauts say, immer werder lernen.

Anyway, all this talk of rimfire has got my digit tingling, so if you’ll excuse me…

…this may take a while.

 

*I later discovered another thousand or so rounds (all 40-grain solids) in the hall closet and range bag, not to mention a few dozen secreted in the gun bags I typically carry the rimfire guns in.  There may also be a box or two hidden away in the car, I dunno;  it wouldn’t be the first time.