The Final Countdown

So take December 7th, 1941. Add a Japanese attack force and use a freak time storm to insert a 1980's aircraft carrier between it and Pearl Harbor. What do you get? Some pretty good aviation scenes.



Then of course you have the great debate: Sit idly by and let history run it's course, or use the full power of a nuclear-powered carrier and it's compliment of aircraft to stop the Japanese attack. The commander's ultimate decision? Hey, he's Kirk Douglas! Green Light! Launch aircraft!
Oh yeah... The Final Countdown(1980). Would have been even better without Martin Sheen in it.

Saturday Guy Movie

You all know the story by now. Just out of prison, Jake Blues goes for a ride with his brother, Elwood. As fans of this classic will recall, they return to the orphanage where they were raised and they get their mission from Kathleen Freeman, aka "The Penguin". (NSFW language)


On the way home, they spin by the mall.

OK, actually they spun through the mall. And they actually used a real closed mall for this scene--the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois. It's been vacant ever since and demolition actually just began in February of this year.


The bridge scene. And even today, who doesn't hate Illinois Nazis?
Poor Henry Gibson.

They eventually do their thing in the Palace Hotel Ballroom and get enough money to pay off the note on the orphanage.

Then they just have to get downtown Chicago to pay it. In the way: The Chicago Police Department.

No problem--they're on a mission from God.

The first full day with The Spud

Saturday was another shooting day. A couple of months ago I'd volunteered to take a group of novice shooters out to the local range. This bunch was from a local Tea Party chapter and none had much shooting experience but they wanted to get together and try it so one of the organizers, a former student of mine, called me up and asked me to take them. For the record, I'm not a Tea Party member myself, but as any reader of this blog well knows, we share the same views on most things. I'm just not a joiner. As luck would have it, the selected day fell on Spud's first full day here, so I took him along.

Here's the Spud, posing with the Ruger 10-22 that I entrusted him with. He did a great job of aiming every shot and demonstrating good muzzle awareness. The boy's learning to be a good shooter and we'll make a rifleman of him yet.









After we shot, a couple of the shooters offered to treat Spud and I to lunch. So we stopped at the Golden Corral, an excellent buffet-style restaurant. It was here that I learned a lesson about letting kids--or at least The Spud--work a buffet line without supervision.
On his first foray, he bypassed all of the quality meats and vegetables and returned with a plate just heaping with macaroni and cheese, pasta in tomato sauce, and that crappy all-dough pizza that places like this put out. I just sighed, because I'd told him up front that he was going to east healthy here and that we were going to try to get him off of his regular all-carb diet that his mom and grandmother seem to keep him on. So after he'd finished that mess, I accompanied him back up for the second round. After stopping him from heaping his plate with a massive scoop of mashed potatoes, I "suggested" a few healthy alternatives--broccoli, roast, shrimp and some catfish. (This place had some excellent lightly-breaded catfish.) He kind of screwed up his face a bit because he'd never had catfish (yes...he's a yankee boy all the way) but as soon as he sat down and tried a piece, he announced that he LOVES catfish.

Hey...it's a start.

So after eating that balanced, sensibly-portioned plate, he said that he wanted some more catfish. So I goofed again and let him return to the buffet counter for plate #3, figuring that just he'd get a couple more pieces and call it a day.

He returned with about 15 fillets on his plate...and more pasta. Cue the face-palm.

The rest of the day was spent swimming--I took him and Lagniappe down to the river--reading (I've started him on my old Hardy Boys books and he's loving the first one) and watching a movie. Do you believe that he's never seen Smokey and the Bandit and had no idea who Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason and Jerry Reed were? I will give this boy a sense of culture yet.

He loved it. Now I gotta find another movie that instills positive "guy values" for tonight. Anyone think that eleven is too young for Full Metal Jacket? Any other recommendations?

Oh, and just as an aside, to anyone with kids...do they all have this programming that makes them turn on every light in a house--even lights in rooms that they are just passing through in broad daylight--and then leaving them on? I mean, WTF?

Another post about a time when movies were great...and machine guns

And speaking of television, and the good old days when Hollywood was patriotic and made great movies, I happened to catch the 1970 classic Kelly's Heroes yesterday.

Aside from the fact that the movie features Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Caroll O'Connor, Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Jeff Morris and Don Rickles all in the same movie, it's got lots of machine guns and tanks--tanks that run lots of stuff over and blow a ton of stuff up. How do you not like that? And adding to the cool factor, Don Rickles--one of my favorite comedians--spends a fair deal of time toting around a Browning 1919A4 machine gun and using it to whack about a score of Germans.

And looking for a clip to post up here, I found this fantastic one that even shows Rickles with the Browning.
How cool is that?


Now after watching Kelly's Heroes and seeing Don Rickles toting that Browning 1919A4, I felt the desire to blog about mine again. I own this wonderful piece of military history, the Browning 1919A4 .30 machine gun. It's an air-cooled, belt-fed gun that weighs about 28lbs by itself and about 41lbs with it's tripod and T&E mechanism, both of which are pretty well required.

It fires 550 rounds per minute of either .30-06, .308 or 8mm ammunition (very versatile guns, these Brownings) and the ammo feeds from either cloth belts or metallic links. Here's a can holding 250 rounds of .30-06 ammunition, and this can weighs about 20lbs all by itself.



So what does 250 rounds linked together really look like?



Well here's a linked belt taken out of the can and laid out straight. It's about twelve feet long and the gun can burn through this in about 30 seconds if necessary, but it's much easier on the gun to just fire 5-6 round bursts and keep the rate of fire down to about 120 rounds a minute so as not to burn the rifling out of the barrel. So at that rate, this belt lasts about two minutes. Obviously, more than one can is going to be needed for any practical employment of this gun.

In actual military use, a gun team would have one or two ammo bearers--soldiers whose main job is just to carry extra cans of ammo for this gun. That's in addition to any ammo carried by the gunner and assistant gunner and that assigned to other soldiers in the squad to carry. Many soldiers would lessen the weight by removing the belts from the can and draping them around their shoulders. This wasn't always good, because it allowed the links to get dirty and sometimes knocked rounds out of alignment--both of which could cause the gun to jam--but it was often done nonetheless, and it's still even done today by our troops as they field the Browning's successor guns, the M60 and M240.

I, of course, am always in the market for ammo bearers. In a perfect world, I would have ammo bearers who looked like these two patriotic ladies, each of whom seems to have exactly what this machine gunner needs:




















Sadly, I just get this guy:


Life can be so unfair.

Anyway, here's a nice clip of my Browning 1919A4 in operation. I just found this clip on Youtube, and apparently this guy filmed me and a couple of my cop pals, one of whom is fellow blogger Roanoake Cop, while we were shooting it at the state range near his place a couple years ago.

I thought that set-up looked familiar!

Oh--Well-deserved credit to The Sniper for the ammo bearer babes.

Bad Influence

So this week-end, I did much good gun stuff.

I know... I do much gun stuff every week-end. It's what I do. Either gun stuff or airplane stuff of dog stuff comprises most of my free time.

Well this time, Nicki was along. We went shooting and I gave her carte blanche to try anything in the gun room that struck her fancy. She's now decided that she absolutely must have a Model 1911 .45, hopefully as a replacement for those effective but dull Glocks of hers. She also took a liking to the M1 Carbine and the SKS.
Here she is, killing targets downrange with my ex-Yugoslavian M59 SKS. ----->




For my part, I took along an old World War two-vintage M1 Garand--one that I've had for several years but never actually shot before.This particular Garand came from the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) back in the day, and while I was quite pleased to see that it was a Winchester rifle with what was probably the original bolt and barrel and the nice green parkerized finish, a check with the bore gauges indicated that the throat and muzzle were both heavily worn to the point where I simply relegated it to the display rack without even bothering to see how it shot. It sat there for probably eight or nine year until Friday, when on an impulse, I grabbed it and took it out to the range, basically just to play with it and pot-shot at whatever targets of opportunity presented themselves. However I was shocked to find that despite it's badly worn barrel, it was dead-bang accurate and almost invariably put round after round into some old plastic laundry detergent jugs and small boxes at both one hundred and two hundred meters. That just goes to show that you can't always judge a rifle just by the amount of indicated wear in the barrel--this one still shoots good enough to use in the local CMP matches. Nicki shot it too but she seems to think that the M1 Garand is a mite too much rifle for her. I can understand that. The M1 is a man's rifle and she is, after all, just a girl.

After the shooting, we took in a classic guy movie that Nicki had never seen before: The Wild Geese, with Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore and Hardy Kruger. She actually got teary-eyed when Richard Harris died on the airport runway, screaming his son's name as Richard Burton emptied an Uzi into him. It was cute.

Saturday we went to the gun show in Chantilly. Neither of us bought anything because the prices were high and the selection on things that I needed was poor. There were very little in the way of ammunition and even less when it came to reloading supplies. One dealer had a few boxes of Winchester small rifle primers on his table and I had to ask the price because I was sure that I was reading the sticker wrong. But he confirmed that he was charging $135.00 for a thousand primers. As the normal price is about twenty to thirty dollars per thousand, I let the profiteer know what he could do with his primers and anything else on his table. Pity, because he did have several other things that I might have bought in a package deal with a box or two of reasonably-priced primers. His loss, but that's what happens when you get greedy.
Bridget and her guy were supposed to join us there but bailed on us, allegedly "sick". (insert rolling eyes emoticon here.)

And after spending all this time with Nicki and giving her some good shooting tips, does she thank me or tell me how great I am?

Uh, yeah. As if. But she gets points for the attitude.

Later that evening, a nice Thai dinner settled her down a bit and served to put a nice cap on the evening.

Now it's Sunday and I have to spend most of the day doing household and yard work and giving Lagniappe some attention since he was badly neglected this weekend, but I figured that I could spare a few minutes to blog about the past couple of pretty nice days.

Fun-filled Friday

Today started out with a trip to the gym and a nice six and a half mile run.

Now I really hadn't planned on doing six and a half miles, but when I flipped on the TV by the treadmill, I saw that one of the greatest war movies of all time, The Longest Day, was playing.

Of course I couldn't quit while that was playing, so I had to keep running for the next hour and a quarter. But it was worth it to watch John Wayne, Dean Martin, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Eddie Albert, Paul Anka, Robert Mitchum, George Stewart, Rod Steiger and a young (and uncredited) Richard Dawson defeat the Germans and take that first costly but crucial step towards freeing Europe.

This movie was an epic in it's day, with over 42 big name stars from four countries, including many people who were actually part of the real battle for Normandy. It was worth the long run and it's worth you renting it. They really don't make them like this one any more.

After the run and a few errands, I came home to...a cold house. Was ist los, I asked Lagniappe. I know that it was well below freezing today, but I also knew that I'd left the pellet stove on. A quick look revealed that it was not on, however. It was cold and dark. And during the worst cold snap of the winter. Joy.

So using an operator's manual that I found on line, I began to trouble shoot the stove.
When I tried to power it up, I could hear one of the two auger motors trying to turn. Obviously one of the augers was jammed. The remedy, per the manual, is to remove the auger and clear the blockage. OK. Sounds simple enough. (HA!)

First I emptied the pellet bin, scooping out nearly forty pounds of pellets by hand. Then I pulled the first auger's motor (there are two). I hooked up the power to that motor and it ran fine. But the auger that it powered was definitely jammed. Worse, the other motor for the other auger--the one that feeds the fire box--was the one that wasn't turning. So it turned out that both augers were clogged. Not exactly rocket science here. The bottom one obviously jammed first, and with no outlet for the pellets that the upper auger was trying to feed to the lower one, the upper one jammed too. That meant that they both had to come out.

Oh--and did I mention that the stove is in a corner? There's not much room to work back there, and what room there is is full of ash and soot and pellets.

Then it got really fun when I discovered that in order to remove the bottom auger motor, I had to loosen one set screw so that I could detach the motor from the shaft. Of course the auger had frozen in place with that set screw blocked by other pieces of the stove, so I couldn't get a damned tool on it. That meant that I had to take the whole auger housing out--a more involved job by far. And as luck would have it--the bolts securing that housing were blocked by...the motor!

I won't go into the details or the drama that followed, but by the time I got the whole damned thing apart nearly an hour later, I'd lost count of the number of times that I'd smashed or cut my hands on other pieces of the stove, and Lagniappe had learned several new words and phrases, most of which referred to the ham-fisted alcoholic crotch monkeys at the stove factory who's assembled this nightmare and torqued all of the essential bolts down to about eight hundred foot/pounds, clearly savoring the thought of someone like me trying to reach those bolts with a box wrench (because socket tools won't fit in there) and get enough leverage to enable me to turn each bolt about 1/32 of a turn at a time. To say the least, I was way beyond angry by the time I got it apart. And thanks to all of the soot and ash, I don't think that I've gotten so dirty in recent memory.

But I finally got it all cleaned out, then I carefully re-aligned the augers as I put them back in, and re-assembled the whole mess. In fairness, it went back together quickly and easily. And when I turned it back on...it worked! It even worked better than before, as apparently my re-alignment of the augers eliminated a persistent and annoying squeaking noise that the stove's made since day #1. Still...two hours blown on that stove today...and for what?

Oh yeah...
Without the nice warm stove, Lagniappe and his little buddy would have to lie on a cold rug all day.

Can't have that now, can we?

When movies were fun

Today I had pause to reflect back on a great, great movie from 1981--Cannonball Run.

This movie had it all--cars, speed, action, hot chicks...and good clean comedy. It did lack a few things--nudity, violence, profanity--that are these days apparently required in a movie before anyone wants to buy a ticket, but it was a different time 27 years ago when this movie came out and I went to see it with my family. (Damn...27 year ago. I suddenly feel old.)

The movie had an all-star cast: Burt Reynolds (back when he was funny and had hair), Farrah Fawcett (back when she was smoking hot) Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Jamie Farr, Dom DeLuise, Roger Moore (parodying himself), Terry Bradshaw, Adrienne Barbeau, Jack Elam, and a young Jackie Chan among others. That was some major star power back in the early 80's, and the only thing flashier than the cast was the array of fast cars that they drove across country in a winner-take-all race. Yeah, it's a bit silly compared to today's movies, but it was made to be fun and it was. I'd even go so far as to call it a "family film" and Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to make those these days. Here's the opening sequence to the movie. Either a great memory for you if you've seen it or a reason to go out and rent it if you haven't.


Anyway, what made me remember this classic was a discussion that I was having on another blog site with some cop friends. The topic was women traffic violators who accidentally or otherwise manage to show off their cleavage when the officers approach to talk to them. (For the record, the general consensus is that it's deliberate and meant to persuade the officer to let them slide on the ticket. And it doesn't work.) One of the officers, Liz, said "I'd like to see one try that with me."
(Yeah, I'd pay to see that, too!) ;-)

But it brought to mind this great scene from Cannonball Run:


Classic!

And I recall watching this movie with Liz a couple of years ago up in Seward, Alaska. She'd never seen it before and her opinion was that the movie was sexist.
Yeah, it was. But that was acceptable back in the 70's and early 80's. In fact it was part of what made it all fun!

I respond to a feminist movie critic.

OK, so I just got this e-mail stating that my movie collection is "representative of the worst aspects of macho male supremacy" and that it explains my "worship of weapons of death and mass destruction." The author suggests that I take in a few "chick flicks" to give me some "balance." She signed the e-mail "a proud feminist."

So now that I'm done chuckling, I'll respond.

First, my weapons are not "weapons of mass destruction." They are weapons of individual destruction. A good rifleman with a good rifle is a much more versatile and efficient thing than any cold, impersonal and nondiscriminatory bomb is. And my weapons are not about "death". Rather thay are either history (most are military firearms that were used in one or more conflicts around the globe in the past century) or they are working tools designed to protect and preserve my own life and the lives of those that I care about. They are actually weapons of life and I care enough about life that I practice with them frequently. I also suggest that women buy firearms and learn to use them, as women are victimized by violent criminals in this country at a much higher rate then men are.


Now as to the suggestion that I need to watch more chick flicks...

Actually I watch quite a few of them. Film maker Andy Sidaris has for years made some of the finest chick flicks in cinema history and I have forced myself to watch each and every one of them out of a sense of admiration and respect for these women. These films should be viewed by every real man, preferably in the company of other real men and quantities of good beer. So you see, my feminist pet, I don't just watch movies about tough guys shooting guns. I also watch plenty of movies about bikini-clad women shooting guns.

But I did want to thank my critic for taking the time to write. I want to make it clear that I respect all views and I'm especially glad that a feminist wrote me because I think that it's really cute when girls try to stand up for themselves like that.