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Warning

Entertainment

Do not, under any circumstances, watch the movie Marauders  on Netflix.  Barely three weeks into 2021, we already have a hot favorite for Totally Shit Movie Of The Year.

An unbelievable premise, a terrible plot with more holes than ten golf resorts combined, a mailed-in performance by Bruce Willis, and because the main storyline is so weak, half a dozen sub-plots of absolutely no relevance are added to pad the thing out — all made even worse by editing that wouldn’t have passed a high school film class exam, and lighting that looks as though the movie was shot during a California brownout.  And when the thing finally ends, there are more loose ends than on the back side of a pre-schooler’s sewing assignment.

Some movies are so bad they are fun to watch.  This is not one of those.  Absolutely every single person involved with the making of this movie needs to be flogged, right down to the guy who washed the dishes in the studio cafeteria during filming.

Kim’s Rating:  not only zero stars, but a black hole.

Investment Grade

Drive Time

Here are ten cars which fetched ridiculous prices at auction last year — most of which are unlikely ever to leave the garage for longer than a few minutes because of their now-rarified [sic]  prices.

Ignoring the prices, though, I have to say that I like most of them — we all know of my fondness for the Dino 246 GT, especially — but the Merc 300 SL and Porsche 928 are also quite toothsome.

The sky-high prices, of course, are largely owing to the low mileage of each car — the Dino was calculated to have done an average of 289 miles per annum over the past 48 years — which, as I said earlier is why they’ll all be wrapped in silk and stored in a climate-controlled room somewhere.

Feel free to offer up your top 3 picks of the ten listed — ignoring the silly auction prices thereof, of course — in Comments.

Fuzzy Thinking

The Gun Thing

Oy, here we go again with an article written with no clear purpose in mind.  Entitled “8 Best Charge-Stopping Bear Cartridges “, it represents unclear thought and worse, unclear direction.  Really, it should be two articles:  best long gun cartridges and best handgun cartridges, but they’re lumped together, with hilarious results.  Here are his top 8:

  1. .45-70 Government
  2. .454 Casull
  3. .44 Remington Magnum
  4. .375 H&H Magnum
  5. .50 Alaskan
  6. 12-Gauge Slug
  7. .338 Winchester Magnum
  8. .357 S&W Magnum

Let me do the low-hanging fruit first:  as much as I love the thing, forget the .357 Mag as a bear-stopper.  Seriously.  Considering that the .454 Casull has been included, there’s no reason to ignore the .500 S&W or for that matter the .460 either.  And I may be out of touch — it’s been known to happen — but I’ve never heard of the .50 Alaskan.

I’ve never hunted bear, but having hunted in Africa I know a little about dangerous game.  Understand one thing:  there’s a difference between hunting dangerous game — where your shot hits a body which isn’t expecting it — and stopping dangerous game, where you have to stop something weighing at least half a ton running at you with a quart of adrenaline pumping through its veins and homicide in its heart.   If you want to stop that beast, there needs to be a “.4” in the cartridge nomenclature, and “.5” is better, but not many people can handle the recoil of the latter, me included.  Also, a quick follow-up shot is more difficult when your rifle barrel is pointing at 12 o’clock after the first one.  Don’t as me how I know this (hello, .505 Gibbs and .500 Nitro).  Bullet weight should be in the 400gr-500gr range.  Dave Petzal has the truth of it, here.)

Here are the cartridges I would consider as bear-stoppers, divided into rifle and handgun (and handgun only because you can’t always carry a rifle).  I’ve left off the Nitro Express and exotic cartridges from Dakota, STW and Lazzeroni simply because you’re less likely to find them at Bubba’s Bait ‘N Bullets out in Nowhere WY

Rifle:

  • .458 Win Mag
  • .460 Weatherby Mag
  • .416 Rem Mag
  • Honorable mentions for the .460 Dakota, .404 Jeffrey and .458 Lott, which are excellent, but not freely available.

And now the marginal stoppers:

  • .375 H&H Mag (see here, on a black bear)
  • .338 Win Mag (not many African PHs use this — “too much kick, too much noise, not enough stopping”, as one once said to me)
  • .45-70 Gov (Buffalo Bore loads only, none of that Cowboy Action stuff)
  • And an honorable mention for the 12ga slug, of suitable mass and velocity, at close ranges only.

Now for the handgun cartridges (the list is much shorter):

  • .500 S&W Mag
  • .454 Casull
  • .460 S&W Mag (XVR)
  • Honorable mention for the .480 Ruger.

…and the marginal choices:

  • .44 Rem Mag
  • .41 Rem Mag

Don’t even think about the Magnum Research BFR in .45-70 Govt, because shooting the heavy and fast Buffalo Bore loads will end in wrist reconstruction surgery.

Speaking of the XVR:

I would respectfully suggest that if you’re going to carry that beast around, you may as well carry a rifle.

Ummm No

The Gun Thing

It appears that there’s a new kid in town:

New Cartridge for 2021: 6.8 Western

Forgive me, but I thought that one of the teaching points we got from all the “short magnum” cartridges of a couple decades ago was that these squashed little cartridge cases can cause feeding problems?  Or have there been developments in feeding ramps which I missed and that take these problems away?

Regardless, I can confidently predict that this new thing is doomed to failure, because if serious shooters like me can’t get their hands on their favorite .260 Rem, 6.5x55mm, .270 Win or even 6.5mm Grendel and 7x57mm — actually, cartridges of any description — what makes the Brains Trust [sic]  at Winchester think that we’re going to run out and buy a new rifle for a new cartridge that has an uncertain heritage?

Pro tip for the ammo guys:  get more existing ammo types into the pipeline first — yeah, I’ve heard your excuses for the shortages, and I only half-buy them — before you start fucking around with exotic new ones.

And frankly, I fail to see how much better the 6.8 Western is going to be than any of the cartridges I listed above — and Chuck Hawks would probably agree with me.

Gloom

Drive Time, Gratuitous Chick Pics, Gratuitous Gun Pics

Blogging has always been fun.  It’s fairly easy for me to write about, well, anything, and when all else fails, there’s always this:

…this:

…or this:

In these times, however — the times that try men’s souls (to coin a phrase) — there seems little incentive to pass comment about what just happened to us, and what is likely to happen to us.  All I feel is sullen rage, resentment and a burning desire to bite the head off a rattlesnake.

I wish sometimes that I could be a Lefty, and take to the streets, burn shit down and in general act like a 10-year-old child;  but I can’t do that.  The very thought of causing destruction to innocent people’s property, or beating people up in the streets, or doing any of that crap that the Left are so fond of doing when they feel aggrieved — well, I’m not going to do any of it.  Futile gestures are not my thing.

But at the same time, I feel like I’m living in some kind of hellish limbo.  I know, this is no doubt how the Left felt after Hillary Clinton lost;  but the difference is that while Trump was never going to put homosexuals into concentration camps, or overturn Roe v. Wade, or start deporting people en masse, there is every reason to suspect that the new crop of Lefties really are going to raise our taxes, try to confiscate our guns, muzzle our voices and fuck up our economy under the guise of “saving the planet” or some such bullshit.

So please forgive me if over the next few days or so the quality of this blog seems to head downhill, wherein I seem to be just mailing it in instead of giving it the gas.

Normal service will resume shortly, probably with even more invective and loathing than before.  Right now, however, I just feel like tying George Soros to a chair and beating him to death with a baseball bat.

And I may just reconfigure this blog somewhat, with a new, less self-pitying name.  Watch this space, and content yourself with this thought: