A page from the Canadian War Museum. The caption reads, in part, ….
“Lieutenant Goodwin Otter Kemp of the 38th Battalion was carrying this revolver when it was hit by a German bullet.”
Worth a look, if only to see when a man uses up all the good luck he will ever have for the rest of his life.
No, I can’t describe it. You all will just have to go here and see for yourselves.
(Click on the picture for the largest version.)
Why does he have the action on his rifle covered like that? Is he a sniper?
(Please click on any picture to see the largest version.)
Interesting new book which examines the food that was available to the British soldier during WWI, as well as revealing some of the recipes used on the battlefield. It is titled “Feeding Tommy“.
I find this sort of thing very interesting as long as it contains the smaller details. Such as the fact that the officers and men ate the same foods, and the enlisted ranks were always fed first. Or that extra spices had to be included in order to supply troops from India.
I’ve just purchased the book for my E-reader. I’ll let you know if it is any good.
The above is a computer image of the new Spanish Navy submarine, the S-80. It is billed as the most advanced submarine on the planet, due in large part to the innovative Air Independent Propulsion system incorporated in the design.
Now it appears that Spain’s newest additions will all too readily sink, which is what submarines do. The problem is that they might not be able to come back up again.
Somehow, in some mysterious fashion, an extra 75 to 100 tons of unexpected weight was added to the design. The submarine will have to be lengthened in order to displace enough seawater to support the increased mass. This will increase the costs per unit considerably, as well as push the delivery date farther in the future.
The S-80 project has already proven to be problematic. The original cost estimate was for $550 million USD per boat, but this has ballooned to a bit more than $700 million USD. The first boat was to be delivered in 2011, but political delays pushed that to this year. The redesign to lengthen the hull will probably mean that the first S-80 to face sea trials will get wet in 2017.
This might seem to be a poorly run project, but problems like these are actually par for the course when new weapon systems are first introduced.
Defense contractors routinely “front end” their cost estimates when pitching new projects to the politicians. This means that they initially request a budget that will work only if everything goes perfectly smoothly and there are no snags, setbacks, or surprises during design and construction. Everyone knows that there are always surprises, but they count on the fact that politicians are reluctant to cancel a project after a great deal of money has already been spent in the fear that the waste would be used against them at the next election.
And don’t forget that we are talking about highly complex systems put together in novel ways. No matter how good the engineers are, no matter how much time they spend crunching numbers and peering at the computer screen, no one knows what will happen until they get down to the shipyard and start building the thing.
Bottom line is that cost overruns and last minute design additions are business as usual. It certainly doesn’t mean that Spain has a lemon on their hands.
An online article discusses how wine tasting is bogus. (Warning: Language isn’t safe for work!) Blind taste tests have shown that even professional wine tasters cannot distinguish between basic types of wine, such as red and white. In fact, the very same wine in different bottles will get very different scores based on the taster’s prejudices. The wine from bottles with the fancy and expensive labels will get better scores than the same wine decanted from a bottle with a cheaper price tag.
This subject really didn’t get my heart racing, as I never drink …. wine! But what did grab my attention was the following sentence in the rather long rant…
“A 2006 study, published by the American Association of Wine Economists, found that most people can’t distinguish between pate and dog food.”
This caused me to wonder. How many people taste the food they give their pets, anyway?
Maybe I’m a breed apart. One of my mottos is “I’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat me first!” So far, it is a behavior guideline which has done well by me.
I’ve never owned a cat for any length of time, but it seems I have always kept dogs. Although I don’t regularly snack on food sold in the pet aisle of the grocery store, I have given it a taste once or twice. For the purposes of this review, we can divide dog food into two basic categories: wet and dry.
Dry dog food, also known as kibble, has never thrilled me much. It tastes pretty much as it smells, so if you can detect an odor that is very close to what you will experience if you pop a kernel in your mouth and crunch away. Texture seems to depend on price, with the cheaper stuff hard as rock candy and the more expensive food moist like a chocolate chip cookie. My dogs seem to like it well enough, though.
Wet dog food is the stuff that comes in cans. Some varieties are merely ground up meat with a texture much like pate, while others resemble the very same stews sold in cans a few aisles over, yet intended for human consumption.
This news item relates how a man shot himself in the leg while bowling.
How in the world is that even possible?
According to what I read in the article, eyewitnesses report that the man was swinging a bowling ball past his thigh when the shot rang out. Looks to me as if he was carrying a small revolver in his pocket, one with an exposed hammer. When the ball came by on the backswing, it must have hit the hammer in such a way to drive the firing pin into the primer.
There are revolver designs that feature shrouded hammers, which just means that the frame is extended a little bit to keep the hammer out of sight and unexposed.
As you can see, this design is intended to be carried in odd places, such as a pocket. All the edges are smoothed, to keep from snagging on clothing when being drawn. The design also lends itself to avoiding idiotic discharges like the one being discussed.
Although I cannot say for sure, it would appear that the wounded bowler was also carrying his handgun without a holster. This might seem a strange statement, as it seems obvious that a gun in the pocket would necessarily be sans holster.
There are, however, such things as pocket holsters.
(Picture source.)
Note how the gunleather covers the trigger and hammer. The odds of a negligent discharge is reduced, while the finish and mechanical parts of the firearm are protected.
Why does it look like the two holsters pictured immediately above have a shark fin shape directly below the grip? Is that so the owner can brag about how cool he is?
Actually, those are there so the holster itself can be hooked on the edge of the pocket during the draw. This allows the holster to be left behind, so only the gun comes out in the open air during an emergency.
Like I said before, I am not certain that the hapless bowler was carrying his gun without a holster. That just seems incredible to me, that someone would actually do something like that! Firearms are extremely expensive precision instruments. The gun in that man’s pocket could very probably cost as much as a washer/dryer set.
So he is okay with the idea that a device with a price tag in the hundreds of dollars would just knock around in his pocket, banging against door frames and being constantly worn by scraping against the fabric with every step? Besides the obvious safety benefits, holsters also protect your investment. I don’t know why this wasn’t painfully obvious at the start.
Well, I suppose it is painfully obvious by now. Particularly the pain part.
A few days ago I marked the 49th anniversary of arriving on this planet. A milestone!
Why would I say that? Nothing particularly distinguishes 49. Fifty is the big half century mark. Most people make a big deal out of that, but let most of the forties slide so far as importance.
The best way I can describe it is that every birthday is, to me, a huge event. This is mainly due to the many, many times I was utterly convinced I was about to die, but was wrong.
So every click of the clock is a victory! Every birthday a parade! I’m putting my thumb in the eye of the Grim Reaper, and enjoying every second!
In fact, I fully intend to become decrepit and feeble from the weight of years that fall like rain upon my head.
I don’t think I’ll be eating too much corn on the cob by then, though.
I’ve been considering the two graphics that can be viewed at this site. For many countries in the world, low gun ownership seems to correlate with higher murder rates. North America, South America, and sub-Saharan Africa all strongly support the notion that the fewer people who own firearms, the more people are murdered.
But I find Great Britain to be particularly interesting, as it seems to be an outlier. Low gun ownership, and yet the people living there also enjoy low homicide rates.
There is, in fact, large swathes of the globe where the same thing can be found. And that is throughout most of Asia. It seems to me that a link can be drawn between Confucius and the trend of the people in some Asian countries to avoid murder.
Although Confucius is generally regarded in the United States to be the source of pithy sayings that find their way into fortune cookies, his teachings were widely and enthusiastically embraced by many cultures. It could be argued that the man was one of the most influential figures in all of human history, with the philosophy he authored shaping the very destiny of mankind.
The main reason for this, the single most significant factor which ensured that Confucius would be so strongly intertwined with the fate of most of humanity, is that his writings are full of admonitions to obey authority. People rise to their social positions due to their inherent quality, those who are above you on the social ladder should be obeyed because they are better than you are, and strict obedience to civil authority is an expression of the highest virtue.
As you can imagine, kings and emperors grabbed at this philosophy with both hands. The man on the throne was there because he was closer to perfection than anyone below his station, and was deserving to rule. Revolution, rebellion, or even disagreement with the edicts handed down from on high was not only morally wrong, but extremely foolish as well. Since the guy in charge was best suited for the job, the next person to fill his shoes would naturally be inferior.
So we can attribute, at least in part, the tendency for most Asian countries to have low homicide rates to a brutal indoctrination program that has lasted for more than two millennium.
This isn’t true of all the places that have low firearm ownership as well as low homicide rates, of course. For one thing, the teachings of Confucius have not been embraced and incorporated into all of the cultures found in Asia. But I think the same Pavlovian conditioning to follow the law can be found in many.
So how does that explain Great Britain? Do the people living in the UK have a greater regard for a strict adherence to the law than those in the US?
These are questions that I cannot answer, as I have never even visited the UK. But I do think that the map very clearly shows that the culture and society found in the United States are very different than that which is prevalent in the United Kingdom. This should be considered by those who insist that Americans should adopt the gun control laws which hold sway across the Pond.